Theatermania in Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Interdisciplinary and Contextual Approach to the History of Theater 9783110759266, 9783110759235

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Theatermania – The construction of the individual
‘Theatrical manias’. Karl Philipp Moritz and late eighteenth-century Theatermania
Sacrificial manias. Imagination, theatrum mundi and renunciation in Anton Reiser
From comédie larmoyante to lacrymanie. Metamorphosis of sensibility in late eighteenth-century French theater
Is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? J.M.R. Lenz’s theatrical aesthetics
Theatermania and investigation of the Self
Transgression and moralism. Lessing and the vain seduction of sin
Identity construction and Theatermania in Richard Cumberland
Part II: Theatermania – The construction of society
Voltaire and the théâtres de société
La Théâtromanie, a comedy by Pierre de La Montagne. Theater, mimesis and contagion
Revolutionary Theatermania
Goethe and Theater as “das zusammenbrennende, zusammentreffende Ganze”
The novel of theater and the theater of the novel. Towards a definition of Theatermania in England from the age of Shakespeare to that of the Revolutions
Venetian Theatermanias
Theater and the arts in the treatises on political economy of eighteenth-century Italian reformers: population, public, spectator
Index of names

Citation preview

Theatermania in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Theatermania in EighteenthCentury Europe An Interdisciplinary and Contextual Approach to the History of Theater Edited by Sonia Bellavia

This publication has received funding from Sapienza University of Rome, Dipartimento di Lettere e Culture Moderne.

ISBN 978-3-11-075923-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075926-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075936-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950674 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Marc’Antonio Dal Re, “Prospetto del Gran Teatro di Milano” (1747); this work belongs to © Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, Castello Sforzesco, Milano. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Sonia Bellavia Introduction

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Part I: Theatermania – The construction of the individual Helmut Pfotenhauer ‘Theatrical manias’. Karl Philipp Moritz and late eighteenth-century 9 Theatermania Gabriele Guerra Sacrificial manias. Imagination, theatrum mundi and renunciation in Anton Reiser 21 Marco Menin From comédie larmoyante to lacrymanie. Metamorphosis of sensibility in late eighteenth-century French theater 31 Micaela Latini Is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? J.M.R. Lenz’s theatrical aesthetics Sonia Bellavia Theatermania and investigation of the Self

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Roberta Ascarelli Transgression and moralism. Lessing and the vain seduction of sin Fiorella Gabizon Identity construction and Theatermania in Richard Cumberland

Part II: Theatermania – The construction of society Mara Fazio Voltaire and the théâtres de société

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Ilaria Lepore La Théâtromanie, a comedy by Pierre de La Montagne. Theater, mimesis and 113 contagion Pierre Frantz Revolutionary Theatermania

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Hansmichael Hohenegger Goethe and Theater as “das zusammenbrennende, zusammentreffende Ganze” 137 Alessandro Gebbia The novel of theater and the theater of the novel. Towards a definition of Theatermania in England from the age of Shakespeare to that of the 157 Revolutions Anna Scannapieco Venetian Theatermanias

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Stefano Locatelli Theater and the arts in the treatises on political economy of eighteenth-century Italian reformers: population, public, spectator Index of names

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Sonia Bellavia

Introduction Theatermania: Presentation In the second half of the eighteenth-century, the new relationships that the thought began to establish between the body and the soul triggered a discourse that would have a significant impact on how the value and function of theater art was conceived. So much of Pre-Romanticism began to see theater as the possible, privileged medium for uniting the conscious and the unconscious, matter and spirit, the particular and the universal – as in Schiller’s Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man or Schelling’s Philosophy of Art – as an instrument for expressing the most hidden abysses, a means for externalizing a truer and more vital reality (Randi 2016). It was in the context of this change, which Marion Schmaus (2009) dates back to 1778 – the year of publication of Herder’s Plastik –, that the Theatermania phenomenon came to life, of which leading literary expressions give contemporaneous evidence – such as, to limit ourselves to the German context, Goethe’s Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister (1795–1796) or Karl Philipp Moritz’s lesser known but absolutely emblematic Anton Reiser (1785–1786). Theatermania was not just, as is often generically thought, synonymous with an inordinate passion for theater, but an authentic disease. Though rarer than Melancholia, it was considered, along with the latter, the pathology par excellence of the age, caused by a hyperactivity of the imaginative faculty, the main faculty of art, since it is not detached from the intellect, but is also not entirely logical, at the same time unconscious and rational, and therefore a privileged means for achieving a conjunctio oppositorum, considered the ultimate goal of human experience. Art, insofar as it is essentially the result of the imaginative faculty, is able by virtue of this tool to blend the material plane with the immaterial, the visible with the invisible, giving the latter concreteness and thus making it experiential. At the dawn of modern psychology – in the passage between the first and second half of the eighteenth-century – when the different fields of knowledge began to converge on That invisible thing called soul (Obermeit 1980), the eminently human art of theater began to acquire value as a privileged tool for investigating the inner human being, giving substance to the phenomenon of Theatermania: an incessant desire to change clothes, to experience the most diverse emotions, to interpret roles

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and parts, to feel and exhibit oneself as other than oneself, in a process that ultimately led to the discovery of one’s very own I (Ruppert 1995). The probing of the discourse on Theatermania, carried out not only within Germany’s borders, but seen in its relative European variations, is the subject of this volume, whose ultimate purpose is to add a non-secondary element to the profile of the late eighteenth-century concept of theater: a century that redefined the role, value and importance of theater, leading to its full revaluation in the Romantic age. It is of special interest to compare Germany with France, for in French-speaking Europe, too, the eighteenth-century is universally recognized as the century of Theatermania (Frantz and Sajous d’Oria 1999). In France, too, the term refers not only to an obsession with everything related to theater, from playgoing, just when the bourgeoisie was entering the nation’s cultural life, to writing for the stage; from the increase in the number of playhouses and performances in the Parisian perimeter, to the birth of the théâtres de société, improvised theaters in the homes of aristocrats given over to parties and worldly pleasures, of which Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), the famed the fête galante painter, left a definitive iconography. But to a much greater extent, Theatermania is to be considered the first manifestation in the modern age of a real society of spectacle (Poirson and Spielmann 2017), in which intellectuals and men of theater began to question the notions of spectatoriality, performativity, staging and role, discovering that social life intrinsically thrives on theatricality, no longer understood in the ordinary sense of illusion, imitation and simulacrum, but as a founding element of sociability. The phenomenon was so vast that even the theater chronicles – a genre, not surprisingly, born in France at the start of the century – became a sort of ongoing metaphor that described both the spectacular event in itself and the history of the shared social practices and uses that surrounded it. As the Mercure de France noted, “the taste for theatrical performances has never been so strong, nor so widespread, not only in France, but also abroad” (Anon. 1732, 775). From Paris, in the luxurious Maison de campagne, by way of Vienna’s Imperial Court, to as far as the Duchess of Holstein’s palace in Dresden, aristocratic theater lovers staged the most important Italian and French comedies, duplicating in their private rooms the great urban theaters and thus theatricalizing the life of the small society gathered for a worldly, dramatic exercise. Jean Baptiste Rousseau (1671–1741) analyzed this game of mirrors and cross-references between social life and theater, perhaps borrowing Shakespeare’s metaphor of “all the world’s a stage” (As you like it, II, 7), and long before the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–1982) made his definitive theorization. Rousseau comments in his Épigrammes:

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Ce monde ci n’est qu’une œuvre comique / Où chacun fait ses rôles différents. / Là, sur la scène, en habit dramatique, / Brillent prélats, ministres, conquérants. / Pour nous, vil peuple, assis aux derniers rangs, / Troupe futile et des grands rebutée, / Par nous d’en bas la pièce est écoutée. / Mais nous payons, utiles spectateurs; / Et quand la farce est mal représentée, / Pour notre argent nous sifflons les acteurs.¹ (Rousseau 1743, t. II, 146)

This immoderate passion for theater, which Pierre de la Montagne (1755–1825 c.), in his Théâtromanie of 1782 defined as a mal épidémique, also testified to the centrality of theater in the process of human formation and education, which had commenced in the Siècle des Lumières. For Voltaire, theater was “the only way to unite people and make them sociable”, and the philosophes went so far as to substitute it for the Church as a sanctuary of secular eloquence and the new ideas about libertinage. In an era in which no public space was available to give expression to the tastes and tendencies of the emerging classes, theater became the privileged place for the political and cultural formation of the masses. At the dawn of the French Revolution, the public sphere was structured by theatrical life (Balme 2014), considered as a social fact and an omnipresent aesthetic and ideological mechanism (Chaouche 2010). This volume covers these two aspects of Theatermania: as a means of self-investigation and as a vehicle for social construction, gathering viewpoints from different areas of the humanities – German, Italian, English, French and the history of ideas. The first section opens with essays by the Germanists Helmut Pfotenhauer (Emeritus of the University of Würzburg) and Gabriele Guerra (University of Rome Sapienza), both focusing on the work of Karl Philipp Moritz, who with his review of empirical psychology and his ground-breaking psychological novel Anton Reiser undoubtedly acted as one of the cornerstones of the subject’s entire architecture. In both cases, theater revealed its ability to dialogue with the new human sciences, such as the dawn of anthropology and psychology, while as a historian of ideas, Marco Menin (University of Turin) reflects, through the emblematic study of the metamorphosis of the concept of sensibility, on how in late eighteenth-century France theater became a privileged testing ground for expounding ethical and aesthetic thought. The conflict between emotions – sentiments, passions, aspirations – and the rigid moral setting of a Germany caught between Pietism, Enlightenment and pre-Romantic surgings was at the center of Jakob M.R. Lenz’s dramaturgy, which

 [“This world is but a comic opera / where everyone plays different roles / There on the stage, in costume / prelates, ministers, conquerors shine / For us, vile mob, seated in the back rows, / futile company and disdained by the great / the show is heard from below. / But, as useful spectators, we pay; / And when the farce is badly acted, / For our money, we boo the actors”].

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Micaela Latini (University of Ferrara) interprets as the paradigm of a lacerating relationship between the individual and society, which ultimately led to the individual’s withdrawal into his private dimension. Theater not only written and tasted, but also participated in, with the ability it offered to immerse oneself in the most diverse roles, situations and emotions, often becoming for many the only escape from social restrictions. This is the aspect that Sonia Bellavia (University of Rome Sapienza) focuses on, as a theater historian dissecting the phenomenon of Theatermania from the actor’s privileged viewpoint. Roberta Ascarelli (University of Siena) focuses on the German-speaking world through Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, interpreted as an open work that deals with a more or less explicit multitude of themes demonstrating the infinite political, ethical, critical and pedagogical expansion of theater, at the onset of Germany’s season of Theatermania. The first section of the volume closes on the English-speaking context, with Fiorella Gabizon’s essay (University of Rome Sapienza), which again reflects – but in a different way – on the relationship between Theatermania and the construction of identity based on the works of Richard Cumberland (especially his comedies The West Indian and The Jew), in order to spotlight the geographically distant echoes of the phenomenon: when the identity of the other who takes the stage is also that of inhabitants of distant lands. The second section of the volume, focused on Theatermania and Construction of Society, opens significantly in the French context, on Voltaire’s théâtres de société, which Mara Fazio (University of Rome Sapienza) analyzes, along a path that goes from Paris to Ferney, where in 1776 Voltaire’s theater of society became a public theater hall. Fazio’s essay focuses on the first manifestation in pre-revolutionary France – the period that Ilaria Lepore (University of Rome Sapienza) also treats in Pierre de la Montagne’s Théâtromanie – of Theatermania as a true society of spectacle and constitutes the perfect premise for the essay by Pierre Frantz (Emeritus of the University of Paris Sorbonne), which focuses on the period of the Revolution, when, unequivocally, the issue of theater was ushered onto the political and institutional scene. Journalists and men of power appropriated it, identifying the stage as a substitute for the pulpit – its didactic and sacralizing role – and a true didactic tool of social and cultural formation. Goethe certainly could not be overlooked in this panorama, if only for the fundamental importance that theater had in his life. The essay by Hansmichael Hohenegger (IISG – Italian Institute of Germanic Studies, Rome) tackles the centrality of theater, in the context of Goethe’s aesthetic concept, through an analysis of one of his brief dialogues: On the truth and verisimilitude of works of art. Alessandro Gebbia (Expert of High Qualification, University of Rome Sapienza) counterbalances the German context with his essay showing how Theatermania in

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the English-speaking world was far from being as well-defined and well-tempered as – albeit in different accents – it was in France and Germany. Yet, the very centrality of the novel as “the most faithful mirror to the ethos of the time” – to quote Gabizon – can only be explained in the interchange between literature and theater; so that, paradoxically, theater, though apparently obscured by the predominance of narrative, became a primary source of the material that informed early English literary fiction. Anna Scannapieco (University of Padua) and Stefano Locatelli (University of Rome Sapienza) complete this section by shifting their gaze to the Italian context. Scannapieco’s essay focuses on eighteenth-century Venice, which the author sees as a city whose intrinsic theatrical nature – with a society “daily putting on a spectacle of itself against the urban backdrop, and every day loving to reflect itself in the second spectacle of the theater stage” – dovetailed into a welcoming place for the multitude of theatrical events and performances. Locatelli’s essay shifts from the practical and material life of theater to examine its presence within a reform debate that wound through treatises on political economy, thus reprising the link between theater and society that at the same time, albeit with different accents, was taking place in France before and during the Revolution. From this brief overview of the volume’s structure, what emerges quite clearly is how it differs from other works published on such topics, in its multidisciplinary, comparative approach and in the network of relationships it weaves between the different European languages and cultures. Theatermania is thus investigated from different viewpoints and in different contexts, allowing us to draw a detailed historical-conceptual map of the fundamental role that theater played in creating the modern European consciousness.

Advisory For easier reading, given the complexity and heterogeneity, even on a linguistic level, of the contributions, we have chosen to leave in the original language, with translations in the footnotes, only the quotations outside the text, and, in the body of the text, only the lines taken from theatrical works and/or excerpts from poetic texts (with the sole exception of Hansmichael Hohenegger’s essay, in light of the specific exigencies of the author). In these instances, the footnote translations, unless otherwise indicated, are by the authors themselves. Quotations from letters, diaries, critical essays, and prose literature in general, have instead been translated directly into English. When, in these instnaces, the authors have considered it appropriate to refer to accredited translations, the reference has been indicated in the bibliography.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank all our colleagues whose scholarly rigor and expertise have made it possible to produce this volume. In particular, my gratitude and deepest esteem go to Hansmichael Hohenegger, a precious friend and adviser, not only on this occasion. A special thanks goes to Ilaria Lepore, a young, talented scholar, for her support, even morally, throughout this project from its earliest development phase. I also wish to express my gratitude to Edward Tosques, an excellent translator without whose efforts this work would never have seen the light. Lastly, but certainly not least, my deepest thanks to Simone Palmieri, for taking care of editorial matters with infinite devotion and patience. To him, best wishes for a splendid scholarly career built on passion, the gum that truly binds together the pages of this book.

Bibliography Anonymous. “Spectacles.” Mercure de France 1 April 1732: 775. Balme, Cristopher. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Chaouche, Sabine. Le “ Théâtral ” de la France d’Ancien Régime. De la présentation de soi à la représentation scénique. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010. Frantz, Pierre, and Michèle Sajous d’Oria. Le Siècle des théâtres. Salles et scènes en France, 1748–1807. Paris: BHVP, 1999. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. 10 Bde. (1783–1793). Eds. Sheila Dickson und Christof Wingertszahn. http://telota.bbaw.de/mze/ (12 October 2021). Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser. Romanzo psicologico. Ed. Simonetta Cantagalli. Pisa: Jacques e i suoi quaderni, 1996. Obermeit, Werner. Das unsichtbare Ding, das Seele heißt. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1980. Poirson, Martial, and Guy Spielmann. Société du spectacle. Editorial Dix-huitième siècle. Paris: La Découverte, 2017. Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste. Épigrammes (Livre I, Épigramme XVIII), in Œuvres de Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (nouvelle édition), Bruxelles: S. E., 1743. Reiser, Anton. Theatermania, oder die Wercke der Finsterniß: in denen öffentlichen Schau-spielen von den alten Kirchen-Vätern verdammet. Ratzeburg: Niclas Nissen, 1681. Web. 11 October 2021. https:// reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10923343_00005.html. Schmaus, Marion H.H. Psychosomatik. Literarische, philosophische und medizinische Geschichten zur Entstehung eines Diskurses (1778–1936). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009.

Part I: Theatermania – The construction of the individual

Helmut Pfotenhauer

‘Theatrical manias’. Karl Philipp Moritz and late eighteenth-century Theatermania Introduction In his Anton Reiser, an autobiographical novel that appeared between 1785 and 1790, Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793) models, on his own flesh – so to speak – and with full critical distance towards the protagonist, his alter ego, the original scenes of the modern worlds of experience. Theater, and in particular his obsession with acting, thus occupy a central place here. At the beginning of the fourth and last part of his work, Moritz affirms – on the basis of the facts narrated so far – that “Reiser’s irresistible passion for the theater was in reality one of the outcomes of his own life and experiences” (Moritz 1999a, 414). Through them, since childhood, he had been most bitterly alienated from the real world. So much so, the author goes on to say, that he had ended up living more in a fictional world than in reality, with the theater appearing to him as a fantasy and refuge against all adversity and oppression. Theater was therefore a compensatory world, the imaginative substitute for an unbearable reality. Since his imagination was unable to find any respite, it became, as Moritz states, a mania, a madness, an immoderate passion (Moritz 1999a, 239). These theater manias soon replaced, in his youth, another morbid fantasy: the desire to preach. Venues for public discourse became prestigious places, since they allowed one to rise from the world of concrete experiences, perceived as oppressive. This ambition was decisive for determining the social character of the German bourgeois youth – i. e. young people of humble status according to the class to which they belonged – in the late eighteenth- century. Moritz lists the main causes of the repression Anton has suffered in adolescence: on the one hand, the quietist religious education instilled by his parents, which aimed – in the name of “a completely detached love of God” (Moritz 1999, 88) – at suppressing any individual peculiarity and every love of self; and on the other, the economic exploitation suffered during his apprenticeship to a sanctimonious hatter of Braunschweig, who made his life miserable with bodily humiliations, considered the just means for an existence pleasing to God. Mania and hypochondria are the consequences that manifest themselves in our hero. Thus there surges in Anton, first as a teenager, the desire to be heard through preaching and to be able to imagine – at least in the hereafter – a better world; and later, the inexhaustible desire to act, in order to find his own inner fulfillment. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-002

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In portraying the hero of his novel in this way, Moritz narrated the spiritual logic inherent in late eighteenth-century Theatermania: of that time in which the dramas of self-reflection sprang forth amidst vacillating metaphysical and religious certainties and increased challenges to social repression. Anton Reiser – homonymous with a zealous persecutor of late seventeenthcentury Theatromania (Reiser 1681) – sheds light, in a psychological key, on some of the most important trends in the theater of Moritz’s time and on its representatives. For this reason, this essay will focus on the phenomena and theatrical studies of the time. Hence, Moritz, as a self-observer eager for experiences and capable of enduring the pains they bring with them, founded a new science, harbinger of the future: empirical psychology.

1 Theatermania and the birth of empirical psychology From 1783 to 1793, Moritz published the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde [Journal of Empirical Psychology], the first psychological journal to appear in Germany. His trip to Italy, from 1786 to 1788, and his replacement as director of the quarterly with the pedagogue Karl Friedrich Pockels until the end of 1789, took place in this period. In his Preface to the magazine’s first issue, Moritz stresses how its intent is to gather “facts, not moralistic chatter” (Moritz 1999b, 811). Therefore, he will focus his attention on the perception, as free from prejudice as possible, of the states of the human soul, even when they appear aberrant or morally reprehensible. What counts is the description, as objective as possible, of the phenomena, intended to broaden human knowledge. In the third volume (1785), under the heading Seelenheilkunde [psychological medicine], there is an account of an “insane addiction to theater” (Moritz 1999b, 868). Here the parallels are evident with the story of Anton Reiser, and hence with the author’s life. His novel about a theatermanic, which is an autobiographical narrative, and the exploration of Theatermania in a psychological sense, end up converging. It tells, in the first person, the story of the son of a friend – Johann Ludwig Pulmann, a Braunschweig preacher – who allows himself to be infected by a traveling theater company, which had made a stop in his city. In secret, he begins to act the roles played by the company, imitating the gestures of the actors. During which, he is discovered by his father, who punishes him with a glower of contempt, though without interfering. The boy is supposed to study theology and begin preaching, but his “dependence on theatrical declamation” (Moritz 1999b, 869) overwhelms his commitment to spread the word of God. Many young preachers,

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the report continues, fall victim to this need for theatricality, which has become a real vogue. The preacher’s son therefore abandons himself more and more to his imaginations, while his rational faculties progressively weaken and crumble. He becomes lazy, moody, depressed, locking himself in his room for days on end. But at last he seeks help from the author of the report, who observes the boy as he spends his mornings in the garden, in the open air, and in the evening sees him fall prey to attending theatrical performances. However, the young man is not forcibly removed from his obsession. On the contrary, his inclination to it is encouraged. Even his father, though skeptical, now says he is willing to go along with this paradoxical cure. However, one evening the boy returns from the theater full of “disgust and revulsion” (Moritz 1999b, 873) after having seen Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (1781). As compensation for such a horror, he now takes greater delight in mild, larmoyant plays, all that is close to nature; and he returns to the parental fold, cured of his desire to become an actor. No explanation is given of how this turn of events has occurred. Only the facts are to be presented. Nonetheless, not even empirical psychology can do without interpretive connectives. Empirical data must be understood in order to generate experience. It is for this reason that, compared to the collection of psychological data employed in the magazine, the novel provides more justifications. It is still fully within the confines of late Enlightenment literary science. And although it does not provide an analysis of the mood swings of the young protagonist, the reader learns more about psychic causality, passions, impulses of the imagination, inevitably recalled – by contrast – by deprivation and repression. At the age of fifteen, Anton Reiser begins attending a school in Hanover. Here he meets a boy his own age who, like him, derives pleasure from stage acting. He is a certain “I…” (Moritz 1999a, 216, 1055). The person concealed behind the initial was none other than the subsequently famous actor and theater director August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), who in 1779, hence just a few years later, would appear as Franz Moor in the premiere of Schiller’s The Robbers. I is better than Anton at expressing sensation in a lively, dynamic way, but Anton feels more deeply. I is able to portray all the motions of the spirit, make them seem real and meaningful, while Anton’s will fails to materialize or to become tangibly evident, hovering high above it all, as the novel states. I is a born actor, he is master of his expressions and gestures, able to perfectly imitate everything human, especially every minimal nuance. He manages to make every role real. Anton feeds on omens and fantasizes; his imagination finds no restraint in reality, and so he becomes excessive and maniacal: theatermanic. Instead, I, the realist, will become a professional actor.

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The poetic objects Anton’s unbridled theatrical imagination tries to cling to outline a panorama of the dramatic art of the time. He would like to act, along with I, in a touching verse drama, the Hermit, by a certain Pfeffel, an author now forgotten. “A moving drama in verse […] He wishes to act in a role that is truly full of emphasis, in which he can speak with the utmost pathos and transport himself into a series of sentiments that he likes very much but that he cannot access in his real world, in which everything proceeds so meanly and wretchedly” (Moritz 1999a, 238). He studies Lessing’s Philotas, Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti, as well as Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg’s Ugolino (1737–1823) (Moritz 1999a, 261). However, no role can engage Anton’s psychic energies, which seek only “to tragically rage against themselves” (Moritz 1999a, 261). His break with the world strains to be staged, but the world does not want to take on any distinct form [Gestalt]. Moritz formulates all this as an imaginative potential, but also as the pathology of an entire generation. Only a few, less unfortunate – such as Iffland – manage to find their place effortlessly in this world.

2 Theatermania and Anthropology The preacher’s son who is cured of his unhealthy theater addiction owes his improvement to psychic treatment. Procedures of this type, in the late Enlightenment era, were very often documented in the treatment of cases of morbid exaltation. Moritz himself underwent such treatment, carried out by the Berlin medical philosopher Marcus Herz (1747–1803). The writer suffered generally, but especially in 1782, from a fear of death. Herz cured him not by playing it down, but on the contrary by emphasizing it. He diagnosed Moritz with imminent death, advising him to accept his fate. Moritz consequently fell into a crisis from which he emerged healed. In that age it was believed that the staging of such a psychic drama – which had to be allowed to run its course, albeit in a controlled way – fell within the competence of the so-called medical philosophers, i. e., medics who were also able to understand the spiritual-mental area of the human being, and its interactions with the physical sphere. These reciprocal exchanges between soul and body – commercium mentis et corporis – were at the time, according to the most advanced indications of science, the purview of anthropologists. As a discipline of the whole man, caught in his psychophysical complexity, anthropology was deemed the queenly science, which pinpointed unrecognizable connections to a purely mechanistic or rationalistic model applied to the understanding of human feeling, thinking and acting. Anthropologists were now dealing, in the late Enlightenment, with

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deranged individuals, and especially with theater addicts: people plunged into states of morbid emotional exaltation, which also endangered their physical existence. Even the author of the account on the Theatermania of the preacher’s son – who was none other than Moritz himself – acts as a philosophical-spiritual doctor. After his appeal to the power of thought over the boy’s by now depleted capacity to reason,¹ he observes his behavior in the manner of an anthropologist, by reinforcing in him his theater fixation. The young man – as already mentioned – goes to see The Robbers, and gets well. Theatermania is a pathology, a mortally dangerous derangement, whose healing requires both an anthropologist expert in psychophysiology and a medic in the proper sense. Curing it is the first task that the new science of man poses in the second half of the eighteenth-century, in its relationship with theater and in the deliriums of its protagonists. The other is destined to be absolved by the dramatic role, the actor himself, who plays a part. He too can act as a connoisseur of the human being, since he is not only exposed to extreme emotional states but is also able to dominate them through the process of acting. The Englishman David Garrick (1717–1779) was a model in this sense, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) notes in his Briefe aus England [Letters from England].² According to Lichtenberg, to become an actor Garrick studied man, passing from the halls of Saint James to the grubbiest taverns of St. Giles (Lichtenberg 1972, 333). However, the great actor, in addition to his gift for observation, was also skilled in reproducing what he observed. His mimicry had to coincide perfectly with that of his character; every corner of his mouth, every crease of his brow must conform to it. Physical appearance and state of mind were made to coincide by the on-stage anthropologist. Garrick as Hamlet was, in this sense, a particularly illuminating example.³ Lichtenberg adds that in Germany it was Eckhof (1720–1778) who reached similar heights of mastery (Lichtenberg 1972, 337); that Conrad Eckhof who in the 1770s, first in Weimar and later in Gotha, aroused great attention with his theatrical company, in whose footsteps Anton, in the novel, strenuously follows, eager to achieve the same level of perfection (Moritz 1999a, 443 ff.). Germany’s theoretical writings also dealt with this anthropological attitude of the actor. One such text was Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785) [Ideas on Mimicry] by Jo-

 The advice given to the preacher’s young son was to find mild delight at the theater in the mildest characters portrayed.  Quoted in Lichtenberg 1972, 333 ff.  See the depiction of actor David Garrick in Hamlet (I, 4) by Irish engraver James Mc Ardell (1 november 1754). The work is preserved at: British Museum, London, location Ee, 3.106. Online source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_Ee-3-106.

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hann Jakob Engel (1741–1802), which analyzes the motions of the soul, on the basis of anthropological studies, as the art of appropriate expression, which he defines as pathognomic. The goal, Engel says, is to arouse human passion by imitating such exemplary models, which must be shaped for the sake of the spectator’s moral improvement. On his part, Iffland studied the works of Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779), widely read at the time: Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste [General Theory of Fine Arts] (1771), which Iffland addresses in his Briefe über die Schauspielkunst [Letters on acting] (1781/1782), considering it his Bible (Košenina 1995, 21). Sulzer had shown how analyzing gestures could help the actor produce more rapid and profound effects on the human soul, since they were “an […] exact and vivid image of the inner state of man” (Košenina 1995, 21), able to better reveal and influence sensations than words can. It is always a question of knowledge focused on psycho-physical relationships, in the name of modeling and a global representation of man. On the other hand, Moritz’s anthropological psychology was less oriented towards medium and moderate mental states. He rather sought what was extreme and uncontrollable. As a playwright unable to make a breakthrough, his Anton Reiser focuses on perjury, murder and incest: Es bildeten sich nun schon Schriftstellerprojekte in seinem Kopfe – er wollte ein Trauerspiel der Meineid schreiben. – Er sah schon den Komödienzettel angeschlagen, worauf sein Name stand – seine ganze Seele war voll von dieser Idee – und er ging oft, wie ein Rasender in seiner Stube wütend auf und nieder, indem er alle die gräßlichen und fürchterlichen Scenen seines Trauerspiels durchdachte und durchempfand.⁴ (Moritz 1999a, 384)

As a frustrated actor, he wanted to pass through, one by one, “all the shocking emotions of anger, revenge, magnanimity”, before as many people as possible, “to communicate his Self to the spectator’s every nerve” (Moritz 1999a, 387). The theater served here not so much as an institution for improvement, but rather, at bottom, as an institution of care for the mentally ill. The theater was the stage of Theatermania, not – or at least not primarily – a moral institution.⁵ One of Moritz’s most

 [“In his mind, writing projects were already forming – he wanted to write a tragedy entitled Perjury. He already saw the theatrical bill posted, with his name on it – his entire soul was filled with this idea – and he often paced up and down his room like a madman, while he conceived and deeply felt all the atrocious and terrible scenes of his own tragedy”].  Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet [“The stage considered as a moral institution”] was the title of the published speech that Friedrich Schiller had given on June 26, 1784 before the Deutsche Gesellschaft in response to the question of what positive effects a good stage could have.

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important achievements was to have outlined this darker aspect against the background of the theatrical practice of the late Enlightenment.

3 Theatermania, poetry and aesthetics Goethe’s Clavigo was now being staged in the theater of the school attended by Anton and I. Anton is not assigned any role, only that of spectator remains, while Iffland brilliantly plays the part of the antagonist Beaumarchais. Anton hides in a box, “and while I […] raged on the stage in the role of Beaumarchais, Reiser, who was lying on the floor of the stage, raged against himself, and his anger was so great that he cut his face with shards of glass that were on the floor and tore out his hair” (Moritz 1999a, 394). Iffland would become a professional actor, making his greatly successful debut in 1776 in Johann Jakob Engel’s play Der Diamant, in Ekhof ’s company,⁶ the same one Anton Reiser would try in vain to enter, after which his only alternative was to turn to writing [Schriftstellerei]. The fourth part of this psychological novel deals with illusion and the misunderstood inclination to poetry, along with the art of the actor (Moritz 1999a, 414). It gave the author an opportunity to distinguish himself by criticizing amateurism in the fundamental issues of aesthetics. Die Leiden der Poesie [The Sufferings of Poetry] is the title of the central section of this fourth part (Moritz 1999a, 466 ff.). The hero declares that he has no vocation as a poet. In his imagination, he aims only at the great, the sublime, the general, and wants to lose himself in it by means of sentiment, without grasping anything specific: a detail around which the general organizes itself, in a perfect totality, as an expansion of the single as a whole. Then all that remains is the most tawdry sensationalism: perjury, incest or parricide (Moritz 1999a, 499 ff.). Extreme, terrible things are alluded to; distant, unknown things are guessed at. No work is generated that has a tangible center and whose strength resides in itself and is self-sufficient. Here Moritz outlines his basic aesthetic ideas of the late 1780s and early 1790s. They find their first theoretical expression in his 1785 essay, Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten [Attempt to unify all the fine arts and sciences under the concept of what is in itself accomplished] and culminate in Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen [On the Formative Imitation of Beauty], a 1788 essay written in Italy  See Iffland’s depictions of mime performances for actors and draughtsmen. The drawings were made during Iffland’s performances in Berlin in the years 1808–1811. The work was produced and edited by brothers Wilhelm and Moritz Henschel, with copper plates owned by Goethe. The work is preserved at: Goethe-Nationalmuseum / Bestand Goethes Bibliothek, Ruppert Nr. 2528.

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and discussed with Goethe, who would cite it approvingly in his Italienische Reise [Journey to Italy]. Here, beauty is metaphysically uplifted to an image of creation in the small, in the sensible present. In Moritz’s aesthetic theory, imagination is replaced by Bildung [formation], a model of interior perfection, of a self-sufficient, complete, autonomous art. After his return from Italy in 1789, Moritz was appointed professor of fine arts theory at the Royal Academy of Berlin, and in 1791 as court advisor and member of the Academy of Sciences. The son of a military musician and apprentice hatter thus became one of the highest representatives and officials of the Prussian State. In this capacity, he imposed his theory of an autonomous, self-sufficient work of art, conclusive in itself in its entirety, a designed aesthetic ornament that functions as a template for manufacturing companies. His Vorbegriffe zu einer Theorie der Ornamente [Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Ornament], from 1793 (Moritz 1995), illustrates how even simple things, such as column decorations or common objects such as vases, when disinterested – i. e., released from any utilitarian end, as in his essay on vases – (Moritz 1995, 400), they can become independent and selfsufficient works of art. Hence antiquity as a model of the aesthetic forms that remain complete in themselves becomes guarantor of a taste marked by a firm and deft style, exemplified in his academic writings of the 1780s and 1790s (Moritz 1793, 600 ff.). Moritz’s aesthetic of autonomy thus culminates in classicism. And this classicism founded on aesthetic autonomy – which Moritz himself would never realize – would later become, at the turn of the nineteenth-century, one of the driving forces of Goethe’s Weimarer Klassik, focused on the artificiality of stage action, the theatrical event conceived as an autonomous world, as opposed to Iffland’s previous aesthetics of everyday naturalism. Here is the posthumous triumph of the esthete Moritz over Iffland as theatrical impresario, toward whom Moritz must have felt so inferior in real life. It was also the metamorphosis of a now mastered mania, derangement and frenzy. A mania forced into the corset of an antique garment. Rage forced into a buskin.

4 Final perspective: the end of Theatermania and the theater of classicism After a visit to the Frankfurt Opera in 1797, Goethe wrote an imaginary dialogue, Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke [On the true and the likely in works of art], in which he reports the spectators’ complaints about an implausible scenic structure where a fake audience had been painted on the curtain wings. In this regard, in Goethe’s text a defense lawyer for the arts declares

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that, here, it is not an image of reality but of appearance. To have aesthetic value, this seeming world should be true and coherent in itself; the yardstick of such a truth does not lie in the external world that is reproduced, but only in this immanent harmony. If a work is good, it produces a world in itself, in which everything proceeds and is judged according to its inner laws. The work of art is not a work of nature, but of Sur-natura; and hence only complete and true as a thing in itself. As applied to the theater of speech, Schiller formulates this concept more distinctly in the preface to his 1803 drama Die Braut von Messina [The Bride of Messina], where he justifies the use of the chorus in tragedy. Precisely because an onstage chorus does not portray everyday reality, it serves the higher purpose of art by building a living wall around the stage action and thus signaling that a higher truth is at play than that of stark reality. The introduction of the chorus should therefore “… declare war, openly and honestly, on naturalism in art” (Schiller 1996, 285). Because art breaks the chains of the world of the senses, which oppresses us like a blind power, and transforms it into a work of freedom. We are not talking here about Moritz ten years after his death. Yet Moritz’s insistence on the autonomy of art paved the way for the aestheticism of the theatrical culture in Weimar circa 1800, along with his recourse to the authority of the ancients and his reference to Winckelmann’s concept of beauty in art. In his preface, Schiller explicitly invokes ancient sculptors and their models as the ideal manifestation of human dignity and stillness (Schiller 1996, 287). In short, the actor should be depicted as an ancient statue. What does all this have to do with the Theatermania that Moritz spoke of? Nothing, apparently. Yet with his disappearance the extremization of the passions returned, now domesticated in the acquired stylization of the stage action. In Die Braut von Messina, as in Anton Reiser’s imagination, free rein was given to the extremization of the affections, such as brotherly love and the danger of incest, but incorporated into the heightened metrical language of trochees and dactyls, shielded by the chorus, which shaped the view of the figures, as the ancient artist shaped his with the drapery of their garments. In 1803 Goethe staged Schiller’s work, making it, in this sense, an exemplary model. He allowed the characters to act as if they were on a classical stage. The actors appeared in statuary groupings, as if they were in a painting, or better in a bas-relief. A painting by Johann Friedrich Matthei of 1812 recalls this tableau vivant. ⁷ In the same year in which Goethe staged Die Braut von Messina, he wrote his  See the Johann Friedrich Matthaei, scene from act v of Schiller’s Braut von Messina, performed in Weimar in 1808–1809. The painting, oil on canvas, is preserved in the Rokokosaal of the Zentralbibliothek der Weimarer Klassik. Online source: https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/digital/fotothek/fo tothek-online/?q=Matthaei%20die%20Braut%20von%20Messina.

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Regeln für Schauspieler [Rules for the actor] (Goethe 1988, 703–745), in which he defines the style of his theater. Here he states that the actor must not only imitate nature but above all present it in an idealized form. In short, he must unify the True and the Beautiful in his presentation. Hence, when on stage, each part of an actor’s body must be under his total mastery, revealing his skill in moving gracefully. His body posture must be straight, chest out, the upper half of his arms pressed to his sides up to the elbows, head held so that three quarters of his face are always in the viewer’s sight, and so on. The actor must perform graceful movements, and all must arrange themselves on the stage in groupings, as in old paintings or friezes. This was the only way, according to Goethe, to ensure the triumph of art over nature. The rules extend to the motions of the hands and the position of the fingers: “The two middle fingers must always remain together, the thumb, index and pinky must hang slightly bent. In this way the hand strikes the correct posture for all motions” (Goethe 1988, 718). Goethe himself, in interpreting the Orestes of his Iphigenia – as depicted in a painting by Georg Melchior Kraus – followed his own rules.⁸ And all this took place, not least, also in reaction to Iffland’s natural style, even if they too had initially served Goethe as a model for defining the reformist principles of his Weimarer-Klassik. ⁹ A classicist idealism, which undoubtedly was also formed – although he never explicitly stated it –¹⁰ on the aesthetics of Moritz, in which Goethe saw a younger brother of

 See Georg Melchior Kraus, Corona Schröter als Iphigenie und Goethe als Orest in Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris. The work is preserved at: Goethe-Nationalmuseum/ Bestand Gemälde, Inv.Nr.KGe/ 00496. Online source: https://www.akg-images.de/archive/Goethe-als-Orest-Corona-Schroter-als-Iphi genie-in-einer-Au-2UMDHUF3Q9Z.html.  Iffland had been a guest in Weimar several times between 1796 and 1812. During the last tours, Goethe’s original admiration for him gradually gave way to open criticism. Iffland, according to him, carried on a fruitless quest for effects as ends in themselves. On the occasion of the stagings of 1812, Goethe made fun of his Grundnichtswürdigkeit, the triteness of Iffland’s consumer acting, subservient to the wretched tastes of the petit-bourgeois masses.  One becomes aware of this in reading Goethe’s Italian Journey. Here, in the part on his second stay in Rome, he recalls Moritz’s essay On the artistic imitation of the beautiful: “Gedachtes Heft aber darf ich nicht unerwähnt lassen; es war aus unsern Unterhaltungen hervorgegangen, welche Moritz nach seiner Art benutzt und ausgebildet. Wie es nun damit auch sei, so kann es geschichtlich einiges Interesse haben, um daraus zu ersehen was für Gedanken sich in jener Zeit vor uns auftaten, welche späterhin entwickelt, geprüft, angewendet und verbreitet mit der Denkweise des Jahrhunderts glücklich genug zusammentrafen”, [“However, I cannot fail to mention this booklet that emerged from our conversations and that Moritz used and developed in his own way. In any case, it can be of some historical interest to spy in it what the thoughts were that we had in that period, which, subsequently developed, examined, applied and spread, coincided fairly successfully with the manner of thinking of that age”] (Goethe 1992, 631).

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kindred temperament, as neglected and damaged by fate as he had been favored by it.¹¹

Bibliography Engel, Johann Jacob. Ideen zu einer Mimik: mit erläuterden Kupfertafeln. Vol. 1–2. Berlin: Auf Kosten des Verfassers und in Commission bey August Mylius, 1785. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Begegnungen und Gespräche. Hrsg. v. Ernst Grumach und Renate Grumach. Bd. 3. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1977. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Italienische Reise, in Id., Sämtliche Werke, Münchner Ausgabe, Hrsg. v. Andreas Beyer und Norbert Miller. Bd. 15. München: Hanser, 1992. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Regeln für Schauspieler, in Id., Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Hrsg. v. Victor Lange et al. Bd. 6.2. München: Hanser, 1988. Košenina, Alexander. Anthropologie und Schauspielkunst. Studien zur “eloquentia corporis” im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Aufsätze, Entwürfe, Gedichte, Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. München: Hanser, 1972. Bd. 3 of Schriften und Briefe. 4 Bde. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Über den Einfluss des Studiums der Schönen Künste auf Manufakturen und Gewerbe.” Deutsche Monatsschrift. Berlin: Bei F. Vieweg Alteren, 1793. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorbegriffe zu einer Theorie der Ornamente.” Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur. Bd. 3: Klassik und Klassizismus. Hrsg. v. Helmut Pfotenhauer, Peter Sprengel, Sabine Schneider und Harald Tausch. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman, in Id., Werke in zwei Bänden. Bd. 1: Dichtungen und Schriften zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Hg. von Heide Hollmer, Albert Meier. Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1999a. 85 ff. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Vorrede zum “Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde”, in Id., Werke in zwei Bänden. Bd. 1: Dichtungen und Schriften zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Hrsg. v. Heide Hollmer, Albert Meier. Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1999b. 810 ff. Reiser, Anton. Theatermania, Oder die Wercke der Finsterniß: In denen öffentlichen Schau-Spielen von den alten Kirchen-Vätern verdammet. Ratzeburg: Nissen, 1681. Schiller, Friedrich. Die Braut von Messina, in Id., Werke und Briefe in 12 Bänden. Bd. 5: Dramen IV. Hrsg. v. Matthias Luserke. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996.

 “Er ist wie ein jü ngerer Bruder (…) von derselben Art, vom Schicksal verwahrlost und beschädigt”, [“He is like a younger brother (…) of the same nature, neglected and damaged by fate”] (Goethe 1977, 100).

Gabriele Guerra

Sacrificial manias. Imagination, theatrum mundi and renunciation in Anton Reiser In order to quickly outline the shadows that Moritz’s novel casts on the historicalcultural and historical-religious context in which the wretched hero Anton Reiser finds himself entangled, it seems useful to start with a personal anecdote which the author tells, one that, as we shall see, reflects the political, cultural, but above all contradictorily religious wretchedness in which late eighteenth-century Germany – and Italy – found itself, that späte Aufklärung [late Enlightenment] marked by its dialectic, in the words of Horkheimer and Adorno – a dialectic that cast its lights and shadows on the enchanted landscape – in a so to speak diabolical sense – of the Italy of the time. On the evening of May 12, 1787, Karl Philipp Moritz was in Italy, in Fondi, where the news reached him of a quarrel in which a young man had lost his life; and the news reached him together with the comment of the local people that the boy, instead of wanting to resolve the quarrel on his own, would have done better to contact a man of conscience – in Italian in the text as un uomo di coscienza – or at the very least a clergyman or someone not so underdeveloped as were the plebeians of which the dead youth was also one. Moritz comments indignantly: “Therefore, according to this concept, the less one has to lose, the less conscience he has. I’ve never heard such a terrible and degrading proposition for mankind”. Behind this statement, of course, there is, first and foremost, the whole cultural distance between the Latium countryside of the late eighteenth-century and the thirty-yearold sensitive, cultured German writer. However, this is a good starting point for attempting to develop a comprehensive understanding of Moritz and his Anton Reiser. Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner opens his excellent Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens with this very episode (Kittsteiner 1995, 13) stressing how much the writer’s pietistic family background enhanced the Enlightenment assumption that every man has his own conscience and needs no external counsel. Kittsteiner’s book lays out the historical-conceptual trajectory of the emancipation of moral conscience – in the sense of Gewissen – that led from Luther’s original religious construct to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. God’s voice resounds loud and clear in the early modern age’s interiority of the subject, pointing the way that human morality must take; while in the modern age, from Kant onwards, it has been superimposed on the voice of the individual himself, who now knows on his own what path to take, because his moral arsenal – Gewissen – has become

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a perspicuous Bewusstsein. ¹ Does this also apply to Moritz? For him, the effective stylization of a man who is ill and unhappy in body and spirit, unable to find satisfaction in creative work, which Peter Szondi describes (Szondi 1974).² More precisely, for Moritz it was a question of evoking each day, even in an aesthetic sense, the contours of an autonomous conscience, without ever being sure that this can happen – despite, I would say, the Kantian starry sky that would seem to safeguard the subject’s moral law. In short, the main theme of Anton Reiser is conscience. Hence, in the dual sense of postulating it in an absolute sense, and of summoning it as a ghostly apparition onto the theater of the world. Anton Reiser is, i. e., the ghost of a free subject who takes to the theater stage as soon as he learns – or rather, senses – that this freedom is radically denied by some anthropological and historical constants that take the forms of religious discourse. Also, the fact that the Fondi episode took place right in the midst of his intense editorial work on the novel, three parts of which had come out the year before, leaving the fourth decisive part to be completed in 1790, can be used as a symbolic juncture. Like the Fondi episode, the novel’s Anton Reiser stages his continually frustrated attempts to gain self-awareness – in the sense of Bewusstsein – through, so to speak, an aesthetic awareness – in a certain sense, that of Gewissen, though formulated as a doctrine of perception in an esthesiological sense – which got him a much longed for social and cultural recognition. Of course, Moritz also wanted such recognition to be understood as a liberation from the system of signs and values that originated in pietism, and that can be broadly considered religious – indeed very broadly, since it has been forcibly noted how the specifically religious performance of pietism in the German panorama had taken the form of a sort of theological reduction of the sphere of the sacred again traced back to human experience (Kaiser 1973, 7). For example, it has been rightly pointed out that Moritz’s other great publishing project, the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde [Journal of Empirical Psychology] was likewise conceived as a process of secularization, which, by means of emblematic case-studies, it intended to focus on the crucial issue of religious melancholy and Schwärmerei – exaltation: typical not only of German pietism, but of all religious sects that cultivated a sense of belonging to the more or less heterodox sacred – .³ Hence Moritz’s intention as editor of this original magazine

 This is the general meaning of the two German words.  This is a tradition that dates back to the description that Goethe gives of his unfortunate friend.  “Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte is the stage for this process of secularization. In a good fifth of his works, religion plays a principal or secondary role; alongside the dominant theme of religious melancholy, the religion of the deaf and dumb is a further topic of discussion. In the ‘Magazin’ the focus is on Pietism. Almost two

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was to present especially meaningful cases of spiritual illnesses that exhibited religious matrices, whose curative model was of an aesthetic nature that created a distance from the pathology through the illusionism of theater (Schmaus 2009, 68).⁴ The novel presented a program that was in many ways similar, based on the experiential space of its hero and on the manner in which he finds in the end a seeming respite in theater. Anton Reiser is a name that is at the same time transparent and encrypted: transparent in its reference to the sphere of reisen, i. e. travelling as a manifestation of radical Selbstfindung, self-seeking – which, as we shall see, presupposed a radical departure from the historically constituted self – but also encrypted, in its erudite reference to a 1681 treatise of the same name that had lashed out against Theatermania (Reiser 1681). Travel and theater – significantly united in the fourth part of the novel – become two sides of the same coin, namely a frustrated attempt to find a new self in a spatial and symbolic elsewhere. It is no coincidence that the hero of this last part is considered a labyrintische Kreisfigur (Berndt 1999, 145) who follows a circular existential path and at the same time one of entrapment in a labyrinth.⁵ When, that is, the hero, on the last page of the novel, at last manages to meet up with the theater company he has wanted to join at all costs, he is shocked to learn that its director has fled with all the troupe’s money, and that the company “was therefore a scattered flock” (Moritz 1981, 484).⁶ The encrypted evangelical image thus leads the hero back to his starting point, when he escapes from his family marked by the mysticism of annihilation, aimed, as Moritz writes, at “mortifying all passions and uprooting all propriety” (Moritz 1981, 11). French-style quietism was combined with the typical pietistic structuring of the ecclesiola, which coincided here with Reiser’s

thirds of the articles dealing with religion are devoted to this movement and to those related to it” (Schmaus 2009, 55). The author considers melancholy to be the period’s psychosomatic disease par excellence.  “The aesthetic experience of Nature makes reflective distance possible and thus produces a more noble, disinterested ‘Self ’; the aesthetic illusion of theater seems to promote a kind of addiction of identity” (Ibid.).  Wagner-Egelhaaf also speaks of labyrinth and arabesque as conceptual figures expressing chaos in the novel (Wagner-Egelhaaf 1992, 401).  In relation to this Berndt comments: “Gemäß der ‘Macht der Poesie’ produziert diese (Text‐)Figur aber gleichzeitig ein ästhetisches Produkt, das in vieler Hinsicht klüger als sein Erzähler ist. Denn das, was im ‘Anton Reiser’ mit dem Verdikt des Mangels belegt bzw. zum Symptom wird, markiert den Königsweg der Erinnerung: die Wiederholung”, [“in accordance with the ‘power of poetry’, however, this (textual) figure simultaneously produces an aesthetic product that is in many respects wiser than its narrator. For that which in ‘Anton Reiser’ is condemned to lack or becomes a symptom marks the royal road of memory: repetition”] (Berndt 1999, 155).

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family: “This home therefore formed a tiny republic in itself ” (Moritz 1981, 11), in turn a mirror image of Moritz’s own family. Hence the mystical concentration of the beginning reflects the dispersion of the end – a dispersion that, far from reproducing the New Testament model of Jesus’ disciples scattered around the globe to evangelize him, reflects instead the lack of a spiritual place in which to recognize oneself and one’s kind, which here coincides with theater. Frustrated attempts, as we said, for Anton Reiser presents itself as an inexorable pathography of late-Enlightenment man exposed to the contradictions of Empfindsamkeit, i. e. an excessive affection or pathos, etymologically understood as burden – that weighs on him – and which therefore ends up falling back into the pietistic modes of analysis and dissolution of the I, but without its underlying redemptive context, and without even being able to offer new horizons to that agonized conscience. In this sense, Pfotenhauer is correct in rating the literary calibre of the novel as the only one to achieve the level of Rousseau (Pfotenhauer 1987, 21); or as Steinmayr, who considers the novel “the self-experiment of a hero” (Steinmayr 2006, 14). Hence the novel’s greatness – which even today in Germany belongs to the Enlightenment literary canon – must be considered as a dialectical dissection of the problems it intends to raise, in the form of a failure to complete the Selbstfindung process of one’s conscience, which it posits but does not resolve. To better exemplify: a few lines before the aforementioned conclusion, the narrator sees Reiser walking in the cold German countryside, and comments: Reiser aber wanderte nun, ohne irgendeine Bürde zu tragen, mit reizenden Aussichten auf Ruhm und Beifall seine Straße fort Oft, wenn er auf eine Anhöhe kam, stand er ein wenig still und übersah die beschneiten Fluren, indem ihm auf einen Augenblick ein sonderbarer Gedanke durch die Seele schoß, als ob er sich wie einen Fremden wandeln und sein Schicksal wie in einer dunkeln Ferne sähe.⁷ (Moritz 1981, 483)

It is precisely in this dunkle Ferne that we find a very important stylistic figure: the final scene of the novel, while reprising the historical-conceptual place already mentioned by Hans Blumenberg, i. e. contemplation as a sign of “aesthetic curiosity about the world” (Blumenberg 1983, 343), which ranges from Petrarch on Mont Venteux to Goethe, who in December 1777 scaled the Brocken to observe the environs of Germany from up there, in Moritz such contemplation does not result in the full spiritual possession of that place – Goethe considered, in a letter to a friend, that  [“However, Reiser kept walking on his way, carrying no bundles, full of delightful prospects of glory and success.” Then he immediately adds: “Often, when he came to a hill, he stopped a bit, embracing the snow-covered fields with his glance, and for an instant a singular thought would flash in his mind: he seemed to see himself walking like a stranger in those places and viewing his destiny as in a murky distance”].

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excursion as “naturally a most adventurous undertaking” Blumenberg 1983, 342) –. Instead it ends up portraying a being painfully estranged from itself and the world. The scene is truly crucial, for it exposes its own catastrophe in the seeming forms of the heroically Stürm-und-Drang subject who achieves complete control of himself and his surroundings. In other words, we are dealing here with an overturned theologem, what has been called, in relation to the pietist context, the “Topographie der sündigen Seele”, a topography of the sinful soul aware of its shortcomings but also of the semiotic potential of self-analysis of his own Gewissen on the path to God (Steinmayr 2006, 158). Imagination degenerates into pathognomics. The desperate proclamations of Moritz’s narrator about freeing himself from his initial pietism continually and problematically refer to the pietistic model of self-analysis conceived as self-annihilation and at the same time as a necessary mode of biographization, typical of the most radical circles of Protestantism, for example the Calvinist one,⁸ which lie also at the basis of the constitution of the modern subject, always forced into self-analysis if it wants to establish itself as such – a self-analysis, though, permanently exposed to the danger of self-annihilation. Kittsteiner also notes that in the early modern age the subject was constituted starting from the division between innere Mission and Sozialdisziplinierung, between inner mission and mechanisms of social disciplining – which, however, in the religious sphere return to unite in the sign of the Culpabilisation of the soul subject in any case to variously pastoral and punitive discursive regimes. According to Kittsteiner, this model is grafted onto the particular pedagogical project of a Landaufklärung attentive to the needs of the simple populace, which now appears in the eyes of these particular Enlighteners, at last bildungsfähig, capable of Bildung, hence of intellectual development (Kittsteiner 1995, 293–295). This particularly complex construct, which cuts across very different forms of knowledge and discourse but which establishes a genealogically coherent process that in my opinion illustrates the formation of modern consciousness, can therefore be applied to Anton Reiser’s psychography, insofar as it also testifies to the puritanical, pietistic procedures of individualization through a rigorous self-examination bent on increasing multi-directional knowledge of the I. In short, the I must be the object of reflection, in the sense of the Stoics’ premeditatio malorum – i. e., it must imagine its own future in a concretely negative key, as a form of preventive processing of the errors that the subject may commit or encounter along the way. Foucault in his later years intended to direct his research toward the self, hinged on the history of sexuality, along an explicitly late-antiquity trajectory, from the

 Steinmayr again speaks about it, referring to Calvin’s Institutiones, of “negative Anthropologie des Wissens” of a “negative anthropology of knowledge” (Steinmayr 2006, 143).

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Stoic traditions to the formation of primitive Christianity, formulated on these very themes. For him, “Christianity belongs to the salvation religions. It is one of those religions that are supposed to lead the individual from one reality to another, from death to life, from time to eternity. In order to achieve this, Christianity imposed a set of conditions and rules of behavior for a certain transformation of the self. Christianity” – he adds – “is not just a salvation religion, it’s a confessional religion. It imposes very strict obligations of truth, dogma, and canon” (Foucault 1988, 40). Such a Christianity therefore coalesces around the binary duties of truth of faith and self-knowledge, which converge in the obligation of penance, understood as a public procedure for cleansing oneself of sin through daily stoic selfexamination. In this regard, Foucault comments: “the penitent superimposes truth about himself by violent rupture and dissociation”, or detachment from oneself: ego non sum ego, is the motto of this practice. Which, he concludes, “is not verbal. It is symbolic, ritual, and theatrical” (Foucault 1988, 43). In short, Foucault concludes, “disclosure of self is the renunciation of one’s own self ” (Foucault 1988, 48). A theatrical revelation of the self that implies a renunciation of the self. To wit, we are essentially on the same territory as that of Anton Reiser, notwithstanding that it takes place a hundred-fifty years earlier. For Moritz’s novel, renunciation of the self becomes the distressing realization of a failure, of which the world becomes only a mute observer, and the subject himself a desolate contemplator. As Pfotenhauer himself wrote, it is not a question in Anton Reiser of a too much in the subject’s experiences, which prevents the harmonious development of an anthropology in the Kantian sense, but of a too little: too little anthropology unfolds in this novel, because it essentially outlines the subject’s profound unease in the world (Pfotenhauer 1987, 12). The proclamation that reverberates at the start of the fourth part of the novel – which I shall now focus on – is in fact “Die ganze Welt lag vor ihm. – Und tausend Aussichten eröffneten sich vor seiner Seele of him” (Moritz 1981, 372).⁹ The development of the subject as a chance to conquer the world, in the aesthetic forms of theater and travel, becomes for Moritz the melancholy closure on an unresolved and closed self, reduced to sinking into a reading and bibliographic vertigo that runs throughout the novel. As the seventeenth-century English philosopher Samuel Clarke said, “A preacher has three books to study: 1. The Bible. 2. Himself. 3. The People” (Steinmayr 2006, 146).¹⁰ From this angle, Anton Reiser’s situation is the same as that

 [“the whole world stood before him, and a thousand perspectives offered themselves to his spirit”].  S. Clarke, Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines, London 1677.

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of the preacher described in an English treatise of a century earlier – only for him it is a question of studying not the Bible but the many books that his character and its determinations continually set before him – . Of course, it would be easy here to fall prey to the clear distinction between extensive and intensive reading which Robert Darnton speaks of apropos of the analysis of historians of reading, who postulate a crucial and quite spectacular eighteenth-century passage from the intense and repeated reading of a few books – ideally just one –, to the extensive, one-time, less thorough reading of many books (Darnton 2009). But there is basically no need to resort to such facile dichotomies, since Anton Reiser seems to bring back into a secular and modern corpus the same fundamentalist premises that open the way to the Bible and its correct interpretation of the pietistic circle of provenance, according to a model well-known in the studies on these specific historical-religious sectarian aspects.¹¹ Here the “Bible” became Goethe’s Werther, which combined the study of the self with that of the world, in a constellation that, far from defining – as in Clarke – the good qualities of the preacher, describes the collapse of the hero’s personality. The poetry of suffering – i. e., the stylization of the pathologies of the sinful soul for the purpose of religious edification typical of mystical-pietistic treatises – is overturned in the suffering of poetry, as the more programmatic section of the fourth part states, which in fact bears the heading Die Leiden der Poesie, to wit, the sufferings that poetry wreaks upon his sensitive soul: Wenn ihn der Reiz der Dichtkunst unwillkürlich anwandelte, so entstand zuerst eine wehmütige Empfindung, in seiner Seele, er dachte sich ein Etwas, worin er sich selbst verlor, wogegen alles, was er je gehört, gelesen oder gedacht hatte, sich verlor, und dessen Dasein, wenn es nun würklich von ihm dargestellt wäre, ein bisher noch ungefühltes, unnennbares Vergnügen verursachen würde.¹² (Moritz 1981, 460)

We are clearly at the opposite pole from the stoic-pietistic edification of the man of conscience of the dramatic Fondi episode: no longer an analysis of oneself that constitutes a pietistic ritual annihilation of the self (Rau 1983, 92), or semiotization

 [“The basic characteristics of the heterodoxies and sects that developed in Western and Eastern Christianity were closely related to the characteristics of the respective orthodoxies. Such close relations included first, the existence of an organized church which attempted to monopolize at least the religious sphere and usually also the relations of this sphere to the political powers, and second, attempts by the church to promulgate and regulate doctrines according to clear, cognitive criteria and to construct boundaries of the realm of cognitive discourse”] (Eisenstadt 1999, 24).  [“When he was seized by the impulse to poetic art, first of all a feeling of sadness arose in his spirit, and he imagined something in which he lost himself together with all he had felt, read and thought and whose essence, if he managed to truly portray it, he would procure an ineffable pleasure never before experienced”].

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of conscience as a process typical of all German Protestantism and in particular of pietism (Steinmayr 2006, 117). On the contrary, in Anton Reiser the process of “biographing the sinful life” (Steinmayr 2006, 120) becomes the ruthless pathography of an interiority that no longer possesses any key to access the world, other than that of the book and its erratic reception, in which the fact that the invention of the individual in the early modern age – which coincides with a process of inner differentiation of culture based on written communication (Steinmayr 2006, 295) – ends up constituting, with respect to the diffusion of books, an obstacle rather than an enrichment. Theatermania and bookmania: these are the two manias that obsess Reiser in his self-sacrificing anxiety, which exhibits itself as on a stage. Baioni is right in his historic book on Goethe: the Reiser story is one of a “negative Prometheus, or rather a petit-bourgeois Werther, a defeated and frustrated man”. His is an “anti-bourgeois adventure, in which poetry is no longer just an instrument of the individual’s emancipation from the mystical-pietistic culture of the German provinces but also, and this is the essential point, an instrument of alienation” (Baioni 1998, 80). Hence it could be said that the post-Anton Reiser Moritz was basically successful, more posthumously than otherwise, in constructing what Iwan D’Aprile, in a text that seems to me very original, defines as the schöne Republik of an urban and Berliner ästhetische Moderne, which tends to contrast with Weimar’s classicist one: a republic of beauty that has more distinctly governmental features than that presented by the Weimarer Klassik. In this global critical perspective, Moritz’s Anton Reiser takes on for D’Aprile a peculiar form of transition, from a child prodigy’s ordeal to a dilettante’s psychopathology (D’Aprile 2006, 160); hence from an original perspective, which dialectically interpolates the positive interpretation of the dilettante with his placing in question. But let us return briefly and finally to the novel. The existential pathography that delineates is therefore not only the clear mirroring of a social contradiction, as Baioni feels, but also of a religious situation in which the melancholic hero of this psychological novel manifests the traits of the fanatic reader, as Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf convincingly argues in her careful reconstruction of melancholy as an exemplary semiotic topos of German literature from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries (Wagner-Egelhaaf 1992, 205–209).¹³ Anton Reiser ap-

 “Der semiotische Ort der Melancholie ist, so könnte man formulieren, die Differenz zwischen Zeichen und Bedeutung, Signifikant und Signifikat. Das kritische Zeichenbewußtsein setzt sich in der Tradition der Melancholiedarstellung fort”. “Die Schrift der Melancholie ist Bild, weil ihr die räumliche Darstellung die Exposition ihrer materialen Gebundenheit und ihres Bedeutungsvakuums ermöglicht”, [“The semiotic place of melancholy is, one might say, the difference between sign and sense, signifier and signified. The critical consciousness of the sign continues in the tra-

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pears in it as “die Unheilsgeschichte eines fanatischen Lesers”, a story of the perdition of a fanatical reader (Wagner-Egelhaaf 1992, 328). Evidently, in this perspective Reiser’s story is inscribed within the explicitly pseudo-religious parable that contrasts with the theological history of salvation. The art which the hero desperately pursues, whether among the pages of a book or on the boards of a stage, always and inexorably points – in a fundamentalist way – to a sacrificial ritual: “He wanted to have for himself all that art demanded as sacrifice” (Moritz 1981, 401). The conclusion is that Anton Reiser expresses his ideal not only in the form of a theatrical and bookish mania, but that this mania, by its very nature, cannot fail to force it back into the religious model from which it desperately wants to free itself. An exemplary indication of this is the use of the word sacrifice in the text, a true threshold word between two worlds: one governed by the severe God of the pietists, who demanded the supreme sacrifice of the self, of its personal interiority through self-annihilation, and the other aesthetic, in which art has assumed this role, and demands that same sacrifice, while leaving the subject twisting in the wind. But at bottom the result remains the same. As we have seen, to emerge from this impasse Moritz will have to reflect on the question in autonomously aesthetic and theoretical terms, and no longer in the narrative form of the pathology of such a theatrically sinful soul.

Bibliography Baioni, Giuliano. Goethe. Classicismo e rivoluzione. Torino: Einaudi, 1998. Berndt, Frauke. Anamnesis. Studie zur Topik der Erinnerung in der erzählenden Literatur zwischen 1800 und 1900 (Moritz-Keller-Raabe). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge (Ms)-London: The MIT Press, 1983. D’Aprile, Iwan. Die schöne Republik. Ästhetische Moderne in Berlin im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006. Darnton, Robert. “The Mysteries of Reading”, in Id., The Case for Books. Past, Present, and Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. 149–173. Eisenstadt, Shmuel. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution. The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge Un. Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self”, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Kaiser, Gerhard. Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Säkularisation. 2nd ed. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1973. Kittsteiner, Heinz Dieter. Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995.

dition of melancholic representation”. “The writing of melancholy is image, because the spatial representation allows it to expose its material delimitation and its emptiness of meaning”] (Ibid.).

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Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman. Hrsg. v. H. Günther, Berlin: Insel Verlag, 1981. Pfotenhauer, Helmut. Literarische Anthropologie. Selbstbiographien und ihre Geschichte – am Leitfaden des Leibes. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987. Reiser, Anton. Theatermania, Oder die Wercke der Finsterniß: In denen öffentlichen Schau-Spielen von den alten Kirchen-Vätern verdammet. Ratzeburg: Nissen, 1681. Rau, Peter. Identitätserinnerung und ästhetische Rekonstruktion. Studien zum Werk von Karl Philipp Moritz. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1983. Schmaus, Marion. Psychosomatik: literarische, philosophische und medizinische Geschichten zur Entstehung eines Diskurses (1778–1936), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009. Steinmayr, Markus. Menschenwissen. Zur Poetik des religiösen Menschen im 17. und im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006. Szondi, Peter. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I. Antike und Moderne in der Ästhetik der Goethezeit. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. Die Melancholie der Literatur. Diskursgeschichte und Textfiguration. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992.

Marco Menin

From comédie larmoyante to lacrymanie. Metamorphosis of sensibility in late eighteenth-century French theater Introduction The goût des larmes (Coudreuse 1999) must certainly be included among the manias that characterized eighteenth-century European theater. As never before in Western history, the eighteenth-century featured floods of tears, which flowed and circulated both on the stage and among audiences, giving rise to a true “liquid” communication that simultaneously acquired an aesthetic and moral significance.¹ In addition to their intrinsically artistic and literary value, dramatic works and their representation became a privileged prism for studying the metamorphosis of the philosophical doctrine of sensibility.² For this reason, eighteenth-century French theater was marked by an increasingly didactic intent, which was counterpointed by the proliferation of theoretical reflection on the possible forms that emotion and pathos assumed during a performance, both on the stage and among audiences. Hence the peculiar synergy between philosophy and theater in the century of the Enlightenment.³ While dramatic art and philosophical speculation had been closely linked since antiquity, at least since Plato’s dialogues, it is undeniable that the philosophes consecrated themselves to theater with an enthusiasm unequalled in the history of Western culture. Not only were all of the most important theorists of sensibility theatrical authors – including Rousseau, destined to go down in history as a censor of the genre –, but theater itself became – as Diderot suggests in his Discours sur la poésie dramatique of 1758 – the privileged testing ground for ethical reflections: “The most pressing moral issues could be discussed in the theater” (Diderot 1980a, 339). It is precisely in the light of this intrinsic link between sensibility, emotion and morality that we can get an insight into the decisive role that tears played in eighteenth-century dramatic art, to the point of naming one of the most influential the-

 On the aesthetic and moral value of theatrical emotion, see Vincent-Buffault 1986; Roche 2007; Marchand 2009.  The critical literature on sensibility is endless. I limit myself here to refer, together with Baasner’s 1988 pioneering study, to Goring 2005, and Gaukroger 2011.  On this aspect, I limit myself to referring to the Fontaine’s classic work, 1967 [1878]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-004

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atrical genres of the period, i. e. comédie larmoyante, destined to be immensely successful not only in France, but also in Italy and Spain.⁴ This new genre, in addition to being an important attempt to overcome the rigid contrast between tragedy and comedy that had characterized French dramaturgy, became the medium for specific aesthetic-moral issues linked to promoting emotion and sensibility. Its declared intent was to induce tears by presenting pathetic stories at whose denouement the characters, at first menaced by imminent tragedy, reach a happy ending, transmitting to the spectators a sort of moral lesson drawn from the behavior of the dramatis personae. While, for a good part of the century, shedding tears at the theater was seen as a positive mania, a sort of secular liturgy that allowed one to socially experience sensibility, starting around the 1770s, the aesthetic and moral evaluation of the phenomenon radically shifted. What occurred was a reinterpretation of the culture of sensibility and the cult of emotion, which ended up branding tears – including theatrical ones – as an obsessive fixation, a pathological mania symptomatic of dangerous aesthetic and ethical imbalances. It was one of the most refined theorists of dramatic art, as well as a playwright, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who clearly emphasized the dangers and distortions that the doctrine of sensibility had led to. As the tireless inventor of neologisms that he was, Mercier coined, in 1801, the term sensiblerie to define the pathological and inauthentic excess of sensibility condemned by opponents of the larmoyant genre: “Sensiblerie. False sensibility. However, it is quite fashionable. Individuals devoid of any true sensibility wallow in sensiblerie” (Mercier 1801, vol. II, 246). To study this decisive change in the “emotional regime” (Reddy 2001, 19) of late eighteenth-century France,⁵ I will analyze two little-known plays by Michel de Cubières (1752–1820), programmatically centered on parodying the culture of sensibility: La lacrymanie, ou manie des drames of 1775 and La manie des drames sombres of 1777. Although works of modest literary value, they are of considerable interest to the historian of ideas and the historian of emotion, for they dealt in particular depth with the clash between the sentimentalist model of sensibility, which made a positive evaluation of tears as an indication of sincerity and virtue, and the new paradigm of sensiblerie, which declared the need for disciplining emotion and condemning tearful effusions as a sign of affectation and vice. Before proceeding to a more in-depth analysis of Cubières’ texts, we need to briefly reconstruct the philosophical basis of the comédie larmoyante and the

 See Warren 1911; Kosove 1977; García Garrosa 1990; and Castelvecchi 2013, chap. 2 and 3.  The notion of emotional regime indicates the set of practices that establish a society’s emotional norms and that sanction those who violate them.

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drame bourgeois, which Cubières set out to refute from within by using one of the rhetorical weapons most dear to the philosophes: irony.

1 The theater of sensibility: from comédie larmoyante to drame bourgeois The “inventor” of the new dramatic formula of the comédie larmoyante is conventionally identified as Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée (1692–1754), whose 1733 three-act verse play – in conformity to the Aristotelian unities –, La fausse antipathie, is considered the first tearful comedy to have been staged,⁶ though the true model of the genre is considered to be Mélanide, another work by the same author, which debuted on May 12, 1741. The homonymous heroine, a theatrical transposition of the model of the femme sensible – “The more intensely I feel, the more I feel I exist” is her motto (Nivelle de La Chaussée 1970, 90) – is estranged from her husband because of an arrest warrant from Parliament. When she finds him again, many years later, the situation is dramatic. Not only is the man about to marry another much younger woman, but he unwittingly vies for the girl against his own son, had by Mélanide. However, the heroine manages to win back her husband’s heart and to reconcile father and son, sanctioning the genre’s typical uplifting happy ending. While this essay makes no claim to exhaustively analyzing the comédie larmoyante as a literary phenomenon, it is interesting from a historical perspective to highlight two aspects. First, the pervasiveness that the reflection on tears and emotion assumed in the aesthetic debate of the time, even in the works of those who opposed the sentimental mode; and second, the growing weight of the philosophical and pedagogical element within the comédie larmoyante, which caused it to gradually transmute into bourgeois drama, one of the literary genres favored by the philosophes and which best reflected the complex social changes of the late eighteenth-century. The first attitude is represented by the behavior of Voltaire. The patriarch of Ferney, as the defender of classicism in the theatrical field, took a decisive stand on the side of laughter and irony, against the excess of tears: “Today it would be a great impertinence to try to make the public laugh, since, as it is said, they want nothing but tearful comedies” (Voltaire 1882a, 57). In a letter to d’Argental of 1770, Voltaire first describes with succinct efficacy the fundamental aesthetic shift that had come to dominate dramaturgy – “metaphysics and the larmoyant

 In addition to Lanson’s classic 1887 work, see Colombi 1978.

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have taken the place of comedy” (Voltaire 1882a, 259) – and somewhat later chides his correspondent, with his usual biting irony, for the latter’s adherence to the current vogue: “You have a predilection for the comédie larmoyante, which takes years off my life. Not for this do I love you less, but I weep, in my retreat, over the fact that you love to go and weep at the theater” (Voltaire 1882b, 164–165). But his harshest condemnation of tearful theater as the death of French dramaturgy came with his Art dramatique entry in the Dictionnaire philosophique: “One adopts the style of tearful comedy only because it is an easier genre, but it is precisely this quality that degrades it. The French have quickly become incapable of laughing … and so comedy has been cast aside” (Voltaire 1878, 420). Despite these premises, it may be somewhat surprising that Voltaire himself wrote a tearful comedy in 1749, entitled Nanine ou le préjugé vaincu. Nearly forgotten today, as is indeed almost all of Voltaire’s theatrical output, Nanine enjoyed considerable success both in his lifetime and after his death, especially in the revolutionary period.⁷ Vice versa, the claim of the philosophical aspect of theater is the main thrust of Diderot’s theoretical writings on dramatic art, to the point of becoming the core of his theatrical reform project. In particular, his Entretiens sur le fils naturel and De la poésie dramatique, published between 1757 and 1758, are considered the watershed between tearful comedy and bourgeois drama, a new theatrical genre which developed in the second half of the eighteenth-century and already began to wane in the years of the tournant des Lumières (around 1760–1820). In Diderot’s definition, drame bourgeois – which he also called “le genre sérieux” – was situated midway between comedy and tragedy, able to combine on a formal level the two traditional expressions of theater, and to reproduce no longer the characters, but the innumerable conditions of human life in its most common aspects.⁸ While staging situations substantially similar to those of the comédie larmoyante, as evidenced for example by Diderot’s Le fils naturel and Le père de famille, bourgeois drama implies the important development of a doctrinal morality. This aspect was often detrimental to the work’s artistic merit or, at least, its appreciation by the public. An example of this was the resounding failure of Fils naturel, when it was performed at the Comédie-Française in 1771.⁹ In bourgeois drama, emotion

 During the Revolution, Nanine played nearly two-hundred times, on more than fifteen different stages. See the entry Nanine de Voltaire of the Calendrier Électronique des Spectacles de l’Ancien Régime et de la Révolution, César (www.cesar.org.uk). See also Feilla 2013, 136–137.  “It is no longer, strictly speaking, character that must be staged, but social standing. Until now, character has been the main object of comedy, and social standing has been accidental; but social standing really should be the main focus, and character accidental” (Diderot 1980b, p. 144).  The first production of the work, in 1757, was private, held at the residence of the Duc d’Ayen in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

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and tears were no longer ends in themselves, as the detractors of the larmoyant genre objected, but they taught a precise lesson. One example is Fenouillot de Falbaire’s 1768 play L’honnête criminel, ou amour filial, which stigmatizes the persecution of Protestants in the moving story of a son who, though innocent, is sentenced to prison to spare his elderly father the ordeal. Another is Sedaine’s Philosophe sans le savoir, performed the same year and appreciated by Diderot, which denounces the barbarism of the institution of the duel, etc. In short, it can be said that bourgeois drama “is a new genre created by the parti philosophique to move and moralize the bourgeoisie and the people with touching portraits of their own settings and circumstances” (Gaiffe 1971, 594). Friedrich Melchior Grimm, in the pages of the Correspondance littéraire, offers one of the most effective descriptions of this moralizing effect of the drame bourgeois, comparable to a truly secularized ceremony of social reconciliation: Les hommes sont tous amis au sortir du spectacle. Ils ont haï le vice, aimé la vertu, pleuré de concert, développé les uns à côté des autres ce qu’il y a de bon et de juste dans le cœur humain. Ils se sont trouvés bien meilleurs qu’ils ne croyaient ; ils s’embrasseraient volontiers […]. On ne sort point d’un sermon aussi heureusement disposé. Une lecture qu’on fait dans le silence et dans le secret ne produira jamais le même effet. On est seul, on n’a personne pour témoin de son honnêteté, de son goût, de sa sensibilité et de ses pleurs.¹⁰ (Grimm 1878, 263)

2 The drama against drama: the example of Michel de Cubières The edifying value of theater, which – to adopt Grimm’s suggestive description – was able to shape the spectator’s real sensibility through the fictitious one of the staged character by means of the medium of tears, was progressively called into question. The theater of sensibility became the subject of multiple attacks, essentially attributable to three theses. On a physiological level, sensibility was no longer considered a privileged organic predisposition – characterized by a particular elasticity of the nerve fibers – but a pathology. On an aesthetic level, the pathos underlying the comédie larmoyante and the drame bourgeois turned into derision. And on a moral level, weeping was disqualified, transformed from a sign of sincerity to a device of hypocrisy.  [“The men are all friends at the end of the play. They have hated vice, loved virtue, cried together and developed, side by side, what is good and right in the heart of man. They have turned out to be much better than they had thought, enthusiastically embracing one another (…). No sermon could edify better. A reading done in silence and solitude would not have the same effect. One is alone, no one has witnessed their honesty, their taste, their sensibility and their tears”].

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These three objections were the driving force of the two plays by Michel de Cubières which we will now look at, and which make him one of the leading exponents of the enemies of pathos in general, and in particular of tears. This author – who did not enjoy particular success in life and is now completely forgotten – was an emblematic figure of that moment of crisis and transformation which was the tournant des Lumières, i. e., that of an eclectic writer eager to follow, though with scarce success, in the footsteps of the philosophes. After failing in his religious career, Cubières devoted himself with better luck to being a man of letters, by entering into the good graces of Claude Joseph Dorat, whom he considered his teacher to the point of adopting the nom de plume of Dorat-Cubières. Lacking particularly original ideas in both the literary, philosophical and political fields, Cubières ventured into the most far-flung genres, unable to excel in any of them. Most of his production ranges from moral essays to works of literary criticism, from apologies to theatrical writings and to a varied production with a political flavor. After having praised the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, he reworked the republican calendar in verse and commemorated the deaths of Marat and Lepeletier. He then celebrated with conviction the coup of 18 Brumaire and, with equal enthusiasm, welcomed the Restoration. He also collaborated with numerous periodicals, including Mercure de France, the Journal encyclopédique and Décade. As is often the case with so-called epigones, Cubières’ production, beyond its noted mediocrity – Rivarol defined it with contempt “a delusional mite that tries to imitate an ant” (Cubières 1791, 9) – proves to be interesting from the viewpoint of the history of ideas, since it reflects and re-elaborates a series of widespread problems in the intellectual debate of that time. Between 1775 and 1777, this author, so attentive to the tastes of the public, wrote two parodic comedies wholly focused on mocking tears, as can be seen from the aforementioned titles: La lacrymanie, ou manie des drames and La manie des drames sombres. What Cubières developed was essentially a meta-theatrical reflection, as confirmed by both the thematic choices of his pièces and their being conceived more for reading than for the stage. As regards the former, Cubières’ works can inevitably be labelled as a reworking of the topics Alexis Piron had addressed in his most famous work: La métromanie (1738). Inspired in turn by Boileau, in it Piron had derided those who, lacking true talent, nurture poetic ambitions even at the cost of being ridiculed. As for the latter, it is significant to recall how La lacrymanie, published anonymously in 1775, was never staged, while La manie des drames sombres was performed only once for the royals at Fontainebleau, on 29 October 1776, resulting in a sensational fiasco. The most interesting part of the piece is actually the long Lettre à une femme sensible that precedes it, added in the printed edition and occupying about a quarter of its length. From the very

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first lines of this sort of treatise on theatrical aesthetics, the critique of tears that embodies the dramatic production of Cubières clearly emerges: Je vous ai vu pleurer bien des fois aux représentations du Père de famille, du Philosophe sans le savoir, d’Eugénie et de quelques autres pièces de ce genre. J’y ai pleuré moi-même à vos côtés. J’aurais bien choisi ce moment pour vous faire une déclaration, sûr que l’attendrissement que vous causaient des héros imaginaires aurait tourné au profit d’un amant très réel ; mais il n’est pas aussi permis de vous déclarer son amour, qu’il est facile de le puiser dans vos yeux : on dirait que vous avez défendu à votre âme de partager les sentiments que vous faites naître, et que trop éprise pour des chimères, vous avez perdu le goût des réalités.¹¹ (Cubières 1777, 1)

The femme sensible whom the author is in love with is a victim of the disease of sensibility. She has foregone reality for chimeras, hiding behind a screen of tears that feeds on literary fiction until it becomes impenetrable even for the sincerest feelings: “The very eyes that cried in the evening at the staging of a touching drama reserved, so to speak, half their tears to be able to shed them at night” (Cubières 1777, 2). The idea that weeping is at the same time a form of physiological, aesthetic, moral degeneration is well exemplified by the neologism lacrymanie, which provided the title to the 1775 play.

3 Mocked tears The expression lacrymanie can take on a double meaning, depending on which one you want to attribute to the idea of mania. If understood in a medical and physiological sense, it refers to the heroes and heroines of dramatic events, who are prone to abnormal mood shifts that in turn translate into eccentric and grotesque behavior. While a predominantly aesthetic meaning was attributed to the idea of mania, it also referred to the literary genres that Cubières mocked – comédie larmoyante and drame bourgeois – which featured an equally harmful imbalance of form and content. The justness of this second interpretation – which in no way excludes the first – appears confirmed by the fact that Cubières’s plays have as their explicit polem [“I have seen you weep, many times, at the performances of the Père de famille, the Philosophe sans le savoir, Eugénie and other plays of the same genre. I myself wept beside you. I could have chosen that moment to make you a declaration, quite sure that the emotion caused by imaginary heroes would turn to the benefit of a very real lover. Yet it is forbidden to declare that love that is so easy to draw from your eyes: it would seem that you have forbidden your soul to share the feelings that you give birth to yourself and that, too caught up in chimeras, you have lost the taste for reality”].

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ical target the two greatest contemporary theorists of the morality of emotion and the sensible effect of dramatic representation: Diderot and Mercier. The name of the hero of Lacrymanie, ou manie des drames, Lisimon, clearly echoes the Lysimond of Fils naturel (see Bersaucourt 1920, 341), while Mercier – as Grimm already observed in Correspondance littéraire –¹² becomes the first-person hero of Manie des drames sombres. The author of Du théâtre was in fact portrayed on stage as Prousas, a playwright who is tyrannical and violently prone to the pathetic, and whose passion is to riffle through newspapers, in search of some sad event to inspire him. Prousas wants to marry his daughter Sophie, who is in love with Saintfort, to the son of one of his imitators, Sombreuses. However, he cannot accompany the groom-to-be to Paris to celebrate the wedding, since he is detained in the countryside by a revelatory pathology: “I would willingly have accompanied [my son] to Paris had I not been detained here by a lacrimal fistula that prevents me from leaving home and that I contracted by weeping at the performance of your plays” (Cubières 1777, 64).¹³ Eventually, Saintfort manages to win Sophie’s hand by wearing the mask of sensibility, thus gaining favor with Prousas. The same anti-lacrimal lesson had already been the explicit driving force of La lacrymanie, ou manie des drames. There too, the cult of sensibility ends up hindering true love, obviously without thwarting a happy ending. The lacrymane Lisimon, the (failed) author of pièces de sentiment, who pompously calls himself Monsieur de Francaleu de la Métromanie, is determined to marry his daughter Émilie only to a young man who can show his unflagging talent in the larmoyant genre. His choice falls on the hateful L’Ethérée, a young poetaster who is as arrogant as he is disliked by Émilie. However, Lisimon’s project finds a fierce opponent in his brother-in-law Alcipe, L’Ethérée’s uncle, the incarnation of the reasonable man, who scoffs at the fragility of the subjects treated in fashionable dramas and is a staunch supporter of the comic genre. Exasperated by Lisimon’s obtuseness and his nephew’s vainglory, Alcipe decides in the end to leave home, though Lisimon soon consoles himself by deciding to turn the quarrel into a tearful comedy entitled Les adieux, a work he unabashedly passes off as L’Ethérée’s: L’ETHERÉE. Oui, je veux qu’aujourd’hui le beau feu qui m’anime,

 Grimm, while noting that “the plot of the play, its common situations and its slow and unlikely development are weak”, acknowledges that it is “a rather cheerful critique of our modern dramas and, in particular, of Mercier’s theater” (Grimm 1877, 100). On the writing of the Manie des drames sombres, see Kadler 1969, 4–5; Franco 1997, 39; Coudreuse 2001, 172–173; Marchand 2007, 265–268.  The lacrimal fistula is a pathology of the supernumerary lacrimal canaliculi that connect the skin to the common canaliculus or the lacrimal sac.

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Du public étonné vous attire l’estime, Et qu’on pleure au tableau de deux amis parfaits, Qu’un sort dur et jaloux sépare pour jamais, Sans leur laisser du moins la plus douce espérance De se revoir un jour en ce lieu de plaisance.¹⁴ (Cubières 1775, 24)

When Lisimon – parodically using Diderot’s arguments –¹⁵ glorifies his touching poem, arguing that family disagreements are a dramatic subject par excellence, Alcipe opposes the tearful fashion, meritorious in his way for embracing exclusively Molière’s comic verve: LISIMON. On sifflerait plutôt les pièces de Molière ; Convenez entre nous que son trop de gaieté Dégénère parfois en inutilité. ALCIPE. Vous le haïssez donc ? LISIMON. Non, ma juste critique Ne hait que sa gaieté trop peu philosophique, Et s’il a pu jadis sur Monsieur Trissotin, Aux yeux de tout Paris distiller son venin, Il aurait respecté, dans sa rage d’écrire, Ces sages écrivains que tout Paris admire ; Et sans doute avec eux étonnant l’univers, Il eût mieux employé sa morale et ses vers. ALCIPE. Vous le connaissez mal, et jamais dans la France Il n’eût vu de sang froid pareille extravagance ; Jamais d’un sombre anglais les tragiques fureurs, Aux yeux des Parisiens n’eussent coûté des pleurs.¹⁶ (Cubières 1775, 5–6)

 [“Yes, today I want a beautiful fire to enliven me,/To attract the public’s astonished esteem,/And to make us weep at the sight of two perfect friends,/Whom a cruel and jealous fate separates forever,/Without leaving them at least the sweetest hope/Of meeting again some day in this place of pleasure”].  “Add to that all the family relations: father, husband, sister, brothers. The father of a family! What a subject, in a century like ours (…)!” (Diderot 1980b, 145).  [“LISIMON: We would rather whistle the plays of Molière;/Agree between us that his excessive gaiety/ Sometimes degenerates into the commonplace./ALCIPE: So you hate him?/LISIMON: No, my just criticism/Hates only his blatantly unphilosophical gaiety,/And if he could once have distilled his venom on Monsieur Trissotin/Distilling his venom before the eyes of all Paris,/He would have respected, in his rage to write,/Those wise writers that all Paris admires;/And undoubtedly with

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The reference to both Molière and the sombre anglais openly reveal Cubières’ desire to effect a meta-theatrical refutation of the tearful genre and the anthropology of sensibility, once again polemically targeting Diderot. The director of the Encyclopédie, in De la poésie dramatique, had more than once criticized both the Avare and the Misanthrope. Diderot had censured Molière’s choice of having the hero address the audience directly, thus breaking the “fourth wall” that guarantees a play’s verisimilitude: “Imagine, at the edge of the stage, a great wall that separates you from the stalls; act as though the curtain would never rise. But the Miser, who has lost his cassette, nevertheless says to the spectator: ‘Gentlemen, is not my thief among you?’” (Diderot 1980a, 373). In the second instance he had instead complained about the debasement of the character of Philinte in favor of that of Alceste: Je suppose que Le Misanthrope n’eût point été affiché, et qu’on l’eût joué sans annonce : que serait-il arrivé si Philinte eût eu son caractère, comme Alceste a le sien ? Le spectateur n’aurait-il pas été dans le cas de demander, du moins à la première scène, où rien ne distingue encore le personnage principal, lequel des deux on jouait, du Philanthrope ou du Misanthrope ? Et comment évite-t-on cet inconvénient ? On sacrifie l’un des deux caractères. On met dans la bouche du premier tout ce qui est pour lui et l’on fait du second un sot ou un maladroit.¹⁷ (Diderot 1980a, 378)

The criticism behind his reference to English theater is equally transparent. As in Richardson’s edifying novel Pamela, it had become an essential model for British sentimentalists, as confirmed, among other things, by the fact that Diderot himself had translated and staged Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753). The ridicule of the British model finds its emblematic representation in the play that Lisimon himself is working on, significantly entitled Les mille et un malheurs, whose plot is an ironic hodgepodge of themes dear to the sentimentalist tradition: Les mille et un malheurs ; la scène est à London ; On saura qu’en ces lieux il est une prison, […] Deux mille infortunés habitant ce séjour, Sous le poids de leurs fers gémissent tour-à-tour ;

them astonished the universe,/He would have used his morality and verses better./ALCIPE: You don’t know him, and never in France/Would you have seen such cold-blooded extravagance;/Never would a sinister Englishman’s tragic fury/Have brought tears to the eyes of Parisians”].  [“Let us suppose that posters announcing Le Misanthrope had not been stuck up and that the play was performed without publicity. What would happen if Philinte had as decisive a character as Alceste. Could not the spectator rightly ask, after the first scene at least, where as yet nothing shows who the principal character is, what is being performed: Le Misanthrope, or Le Philanthrope? How does one avoid that difficulty? One sacrifices one of the two characters. In the mouth of one is put everything that enhances him; while the other is made to appear clumsy and a fool”].

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Le plus âgé se lève et comptant ses blessures, Leur fait un long récit de quelques aventures. Voici comme il commence : humanité, frémis ; Mortel au cœur d’airain, pleure, tremble et gémis.¹⁸ (Cubières 1775, 33–34)

Here a conventional but effectual use of Cubières’ parody is evident. Parody was one of the most powerful forms of refutation of pathos, as a sort of deforming continuation implemented with its own tools: a hyperbolic use of language and, in particular, an accentuation of all bodily expressions of passions. But while these aspects were aimed, in the sentimentalist perspective, at piercing and shaping to the utmost the public’s moral sensibility, the goal of parody lay precisely in disavowing any moral value to pathos. Thus, it ultimately aimed at introducing an element of discord between a performative aesthetic device and the system of values on which that device was implicitly based.¹⁹ In other words, it was a question of undermining the natural link between sensation and sentiment – the heart of the eighteenth-century doctrine of sensibilité – to transform it into a fictitious link. Tears, in this perspective, were nothing more than a conventional sign, a humor devoid of any moral value, whose ostentation did not at all guarantee any inner correspondence. This awareness is conveyed not only by Alcipe, but also by Pasquin, L’Ethérée’s valet, and by Lisette, Émilie’s suivante. This choice was also a jab against Diderot, who deemed useless confidants guilty of slowing down the dramatic action, causing a loss of interest in the main characters.²⁰ Lisette, in particular, is well aware of how pathetic fashion, which cloaks itself with a pretended philosophy to hide its vacuity,²¹ is nothing more than a perversion of the moral message of classical theater:

 [“The thousand and one misfortunes; the scene is in London;/It will be known that in these places there is a prison,/(…) Two thousand unfortunates dwell in it,/Groaning one by one under the weight of their fetters./The oldest gets up and counts his wounds,/Gives a long account of his adventures. Here is how it begins: Humanity, shudder;/Mortal with a heart of brass, weep, tremble and groan”].  See Hutcheon 1978. On the parodies of eighteenth-century drama, I limit myself to referring to Lanson’s classic 1979 work; and Grannis 1931.  “I have carefully avoid giving any importance on stage to beings who are worth nothing in society (…). If the poet leaves them in the antechamber where they belong, the action taking place between the main characters will be that much more absorbing and powerful” (Diderot 1980b, 88–89).  “Qu’un Auteur de libelle a souvent la manie / De s’orner du manteau de la Philosophie” (Cubières 1775, 13).

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Que le temps sont changés, dans leur Drames en prose, Nous corriger n’est plus le but qu’on s’y propose, On veut nous attendrir et nous faire pleurer Sur de certains malheurs bien faits pour effrayer.²² (Cubières 1775, 10)

Pasquin, for his part, tries several times – albeit to no avail – to bring his master back to his senses. The valet explains to L’Ethérée how drames larmoyants end up replacing thought with a simplistically emphatic style, leading to repetitive and commonplace intrigues. The conclusion is a necessary reform of theater, which will have to do away with sensibility and tears: “C’est penser sagement ; on devrait pour longtemps / Cesser de nous donner des drames larmoyants” (Cubières 1775, 55).²³

4 Conclusion Pasquin’s wish is, on closer inspection, destined to be realized on a dual level. As regards the plot of Lacrymanie, the third and final act is marked by Lisimon’s repentance, the acknowledgment of his errors. In the end, he allows Émilie to marry the beau she is in love with, Clitandre, and, above all, abandons the tearful genre to favor Molière’s comedies: Je renonce, excusez, au genre larmoyant ; Vous ne concevez pas d’où vient ce changement. En deux mots le voici : je suis sexagénaire, Et cors me délasser et rire avec Molière.²⁴ (Cubières 1775, 54)

On a meta-literary level, the desired theatrical reform soon came about, since, as we know, the success of the comédie larmoyante and the drame bourgeois petered out in the next few years. Beyond their literary mediocrity,²⁵ which condemned them to oblivion, Cubières’s comedies effectively testify to a widespread change of perspective towards sentimentality and its underlying use of the pathetic. One of the author’s most success-

 [“That the times have changed, in their prose dramas/The goal is no longer to preach to us,/ They want to soften us and make us cry/About misfortunes well crafted to instill fear”].  [“It is wise to think that we should long / Have ceased producing maudlin dramas”].  [“I renounce, excuse, the maudlin variety;/You can’t imagine where this change comes from./In short, here I am, a sexagenarian,/encouraged to relax and laugh with Molière”].  Gaiffe (1971, 135) pitilessly defines Lacrymanie as “a work of an insipidness and banality beneath all possible criticism”.

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ful images probably lies in his observation of how this genre, now abandoned by Melpomene – the muse of tragedy, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosine – was forced to find a new, more modest patroness: “On appelle leur muse une muse amphybie / Jouant le sentiment et la Lacrymanie” (Cubières 1775, 16).²⁶ This clearly inadequate muse is “amphibious” not only because she protects a bastard genre like the drame but, above all, because she lives in the muck created by useless tears. The theater stage thus testified with surprising efficacy, anticipating it in some respects, to the decisive change in the emotional climate which, favored by the French Revolution and its excesses, would prioritize the need for emotional control, looking askance at tears and emotion, now considered expressive of a pathological sensiblerie.

Bibliography Baasner, Frank. Der Begriff ‘sensibilité’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Aufstieg und Niedergang eines Ideals. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1988. Bersaucourt, Albert (de). “Un ennemi de Diderot et du drame larmoyant.” Revue critique des idées et des livres 176 (1920): 340–347. Castelvecchi, Stefano. Sentimental Opera. Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Colombi, Piero. “Autant de mouchoirs que de spectateurs. Sensibilità e lacrime nel teatro francese del Settecento.” Atti della Accademia delle scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna 66.2 (1978): 237–279. Coudreuse, Anne. Le goût des larmes au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Coudreuse, Anne. Le refus du pathos au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001. Cubières, Michel de (Barbier Michel Cubières de Palmeseaux). La lacrymanie, ou manie des drames : comédie en trois actes, en vers. Amsterdam: s.e., 1775. Cubières, Michel de (Barbier Michel Cubières de Palmeseaux). La manie des drames sombres : comédie en trois actes, en vers. Paris: Ruault, 1777. Cubières, Michel de (Barbier Michel Cubières de Palmeseaux). Les États généraux du Parnasse, de l’Europe, de l’Église et de Cythère. Paris: L.P. Couret, 1791. Diderot, Denis. “Discours sur la poésie dramatique.” Œuvres complètes. Eds. Herbert Dieckmann, Jean Fabre, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot. Tome X. Paris: Hermann, 1980a. 325–427. Diderot, Denis. “Entretiens sur le fils naturel.” Œuvres complètes. Eds. Herbert Dieckmann, Jean Fabre, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot. Tome X. Paris: Hermann, 1980b. 83–162. Feilla, Cecilia. The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Fontaine, Léon. Le théâtre et la philosophie au XVIIIe siècle. 1878. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967. Anastatic repr. Franco, Bernard. Le despotisme du goût : débats sur le modèle tragique allemand en France, 1797–1814. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1997. Gaiffe, Félix. Le drame en France au XVIIIe siècle. 1910. Paris: Colin, 1971. Anastatic repr.

 [“They call their muse an amphibious muse / Playing with sentiment and tearfulness”].

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García Garrosa and María Jesús. La retórica de las lágrimas. La comedia sentimental española, 1751– 1802. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1990. Gaukroger, Stephen. The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Goring, Paul. The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Grannis, Valleria Belt. Dramatic Parody in Eighteenth-Century France. New York: Publications of the Institute of French Studies, 1931. Grimm, Friedrich Melchior. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. Ed. Maurice Tourneux. Tome II. Paris: Garnier, 1877. Grimm, Friedrich Melchior. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. Ed. Maurice Tourneux. Tome V. Paris: Garnier, 1878. Hutcheon, Linda. “Ironie et parodie: stratégie et structure.” Poétique 36.9 (1978): 466–477. Kadler, Eric H. Literary Figures in French Drama (1784–1834). The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969. Kosove, Joan Lynne Pataky. The “Comedia lacrimosa” and the Spanish Romantic Drama (1773–1865). London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1977. Lanson, Gustave. “La parodie dramatique au XVIIIe siècle”, Hommes et livres. 1895. Geneva: Slatkine, 1979. 261–293. Anastatic repr. Lanson, Gustave. Les origines du drame contemporain : Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante. Paris: Hachette, 1903. Marchand, Sophie. “Mythologies de l’effet pathétique au XVIIIe siècle : nature et enjeux de l’efficacité dramatique dans le discours commun.” Littératures classiques 62.1 (2007): 259–271. Marchand, Sophie. Théâtre et pathétique au XVIIIe siècle : pour une esthétique de l’effet dramatique. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009. Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Néologie : ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles. 2 voll. Paris: Moussard-Maradan, 1801. Nivelle de La Chaussée, Pierre-Claude. “Mélanide.” Œuvres. Tome II. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Roche, Denis. “Le partage des larmes : spectateur et tragédie au XVIIe siècle.” Littératures classiques 62.1 (2007): 245–257. Vincent-Buffault, Anne. Histoire des larmes. XVIIIe–XIXe siècles. Paris: Rivages, 1986. Trans. Teresa Bridgeman, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet. Correspondance (1770–1771), Œuvres complètes. Ed. Louis Moland. Tome XLVII. Paris: Garnier, 1882a. Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet. Correspondance (1772–1774), Œuvres complètes. Ed. Louis Moland. Tome XLVIII. Paris: Garnier, 1882b. Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet. Dictionnaire philosophique, Œuvres complètes. Ed. Louis Moland. Tome XVII. Paris: Garnier, 1878. Warren, Frederick Morris. French Classical Drama and the Comédie Larmoyante. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1911.

Micaela Latini

Is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? J.M.R. Lenz’s theatrical aesthetics The fleeting meteor of theater In the firmament of German-speaking culture, the Sturmer writer and playwright Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792) was unjustly labeled by the undisputed giant Goethe as a “fleeting meteor” (Goethe 2007, 651), destined to vanish without a trace. But he actually left many traces, both as the author of important fiction and non-fiction, but above all theatrical works, and as a literary figure that Georg Büchner immortalized in his famous short story Lenz. Eine Reliquie (1839).¹ In more recent times, Bertolt Brecht discovered Lenz’s theatrical timeliness by reinterpreting the private tutor of Der Hofmeister oder Vorteile der Privaterziehung (1774) in a twentieth-century key, The tutor or the Advantages of Private Education (1951). Even the popularity of Büchner’s story was centered mainly on Lenz’s eccentric personality, reconstructed in the Alsatian pastor John Frederic Oberlin’s recollections. But in doing so he overlooked a significant motif of similarity with Büchner, i. e. his attention to die Kleinen, from his Waldbruder [The Friar of the Forest], to Santa Caterina da Siena [Saint Catherine of Siena], and Die Kleinen [The little]. At bottom, Lenz’s entire opus is filled with simple, asocial people, an insulted and injured humanity, castrated in its aspirations, anti-heroes and prostitutes, petty criminals, suicides – Osborne. For these reasons, Lenz is considered a forerunner of realism, and also as the alternative that was lacking in Weimar classicism. In Italy, and maybe everywhere, Lenz is known and read above all for his comedies-tragedies, Die Soldaten, [The Soldiers, 1774–1775], Der Hofmeister [The Tutor, 1774], or for his reaction to Goethe’s Werther in that theatrically slanted epistolary text which is Der Waldbruder [The Friar of the Forest, 1776]. His theater, considered by no accident the most substantial and original of the Sturm und Drang, is the pulpit from which the Deutsche Misere is proclaimed, the situation of a country that remains chained to an antediluvian condition. But his dramas are also a sort of experimental laboratory, in which both the conflicts of a generation hovering between Pietism and the Enlightenment, and those of class struggle remain in a state of ferment. Lenz’s characters are trenchant cross-sections of Germany’s mis-

 See Rizzo 1979; Müller 1995; Titel-H. Haug 1967; Tommek 2003; Luserke 2001. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-005

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ery, or rather of a generation condemned to a sense of non-belonging. Lenz’s theater not only portrays the divisions of the time, between Pietism and Sturm und Drang, but sets them in motion. All that remains of his characters is their return to the private sphere, their escape into contemplation and inaction. Hence their declaration of failure, a break with the state of things, which can only manifest itself as castration, impotence. At the heart of Lenz’s work is the conflict between emotions – feelings, passions, aspirations – and its rigid moral setting. This friction between different forms of life generates a sense of guilt that acts as a corollary of social repression. Lenz’s characters are destined for laceration between their individual world and social reality, the fluidity of their dreams – which sees them as traitorous – and the rigidity of their fathers’ world. The fulcrum of Lenz’s tragedy is the inevitability of destiny. The image of the grandmother in the drama The Soldiers is in this sense emblematic. She is intent on her knitting and, as if in a crossstitch of production and destruction, on singing the ineffability of human action. For this reason it has been said that Lenz’s answer to Goethe’s Prometheus is Tantalus – Tantalus is indeed the title of a story he wrote in 1798. Like the character in Greek mythology, Lenz’s characters too are riddled with conflicts, as if torn by feelings of guilt for their aspirations. We see this in the country pastor in Die Landplagen [The Torments of the Land, 1777], who forswears the vice of literature, the temptation to write novels, while continuing to turn out economic treatises because these have a practical end. Or they are bent on overcoming, in a form of hubris, the garden of their fathers, but then, inevitably, are forced to deal with the bitter destruction of their utopian dreams. This is what happens to Läuffer by The Tutor, when he decides to take a job as tutor that is beneath his qualifications, hence submitting himself to a series of humiliations. Not very different is Stolzius’s predicament in The Soldiers, where, in an anticipation of Büchner’s Woyzeck, he is forced to enlist in order to avoid starvation. The same can be said of Marie, the heroine of The Soldiers (1776), a girl seduced and abandoned by an officer who also drags her fiancé, her father and her brother into misery. As the ending shows, it is perhaps Lenz’s only real tragedy, in that Marie sets her hopes on an impossible marriage beyond her social class. This is a salient point. Sentimental education acts as a litmus test for class differences, which cause Lenz’s characters to suffer agonies of injustice and humiliation. Many of them react to their ordeals with isolation, distancing themselves from the world – to be taken as a form of accusation against the aristocracy – through withdrawal and escape into themselves, in contemplation or in epistolary self-analysis. Lenz’s gaze is always lucid in immortalizing the backward pace of his potential fugitives in the face of an unstoppable process of monotonous repetition. In The Soldiers, Marie pays dearly for her amorous social sin. It suffices to cite the dramatic outcome in which the heroine, for having fallen in love with an ‘outclassing’ officer, causes the ruin of both her family

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and her ‘concurrent’ fiancé – who, after trying to emulate his superior alleged opponent, enters into a rivalry and winds up murdering him and then himself. While in The Soldiers the eighteenth-century model consecrated in Richardson’s Pamela (1740), cited in the play, is replicated and reinforced, in the Private Preceptor the formula is upended – perhaps in line with Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Eloise [Julie, or the New Heloise] nouvelle Eloise (1761) – with the young plebeian intellectual conquering the aristocratic girl, hence creating a potentially much more explosive situation vis-à-vis the social norms. But, at the end of the comedy, the status quo is restored, and the parable of his attempted emancipation from the father’s hovel ends with an extreme form of backsliding. The tutor, after seducing his aristocratic pupil, and after taking refuge in the lair of a moral eunuch – the sanctimonious teacher Wenzelhaus, who in turn exploits him – punishes himself with real castration. As a eunuch, in another form of reversion, he marries a simple peasant girl, and so falls back into the established social parameters. Lenz’s tragedy hinges precisely on the fact that social attempts at redemption are destined to fail. Castration for Lenz is certainly synonymous with sterility, the powerlessness of the social classes to enter into a fruitful dialogue; it is a break with a world that has rejected him. But it is also an act of self-mutilation for having missed one’s goal, a sort of narcissistic wound for not being able to assert oneself, to be recognized outside of one’s domestic confines.

1 A multiversal theater Lenz’s characters are so torn asunder by opposing forces that they appear at times, and in all their tragicity, grotesque. In this sense his tragedies are also comedies, parodies of comedy as tragedy. It is this mixed formula, a absurdist paradox of the tragic and the grotesque that according to Lenz’s Betrachtungen übers Theater [Observations on Theater, 1774] can educate even the most naive spectator to understand the struggle of the tragic hero/heroine and identify with him/her. But let us dwell on these observations, written in rhapsodic form. In these reflections Lenz emphasizes his need to write in a tragic-comic vein in order to make himself understood by ordinary people, and in this he clearly differs from Lessing, who instead catered to a bourgeois audience. The pages of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy [Hamburg Damaturgy, 1769] clearly reject the connection between comedy and tragedy – in perfect harmony with the thesis of Diderot – seeing in this hybridism a degenerate art form. But for Lenz comedy is the only artistic form that can appeal to uneducated people, teaching them to understand the tragic hero’s struggle and to identify with it. Lenz also reprises from Lessing the controversy over the use of the three Aristotelian unities. A large section of his Ob-

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servations proposes a reform of theater in an anti-Aristotelian sense. But in order to understand the full meaning of Lenz’s innovation, we must retrace the process of how this work came about. Lenz had given a lecture on his Anmerkungen as early as 1771. In the following years he reworked it into the written text that is the Observations on Theater, published in 1774. Actually, the basic structure remained as a sign of fidelity to the Sturm und Drang, that of the lecture’s spoken text, maintaining a style that is also an interesting feature of the work. His theses are in fact expounded and presented in a rhapsodic manner, apparently associative, idiosyncratic, in clear opposition to the French neoclassical style (McBride 1999, 397–419). In both form and content the Anmerkungen can be considered one of the most important programmatic texts on aesthetics of the Sturm und Drang. The dizzying pages of this study address some of the most trenchant thematic issues of Theaterwissenschaft. As a first point, and almost as a prerequisite for any subsequent consideration, Lenz asserts that the stage must be multiversal, accessible at all times and to all people.

2 Theater as portraiting dispositif One of the focuses of Lenz’s treatment concerns the question of art as imitation of nature. We read in a passage from his work: Wir alle sind Freunde der Dichtkunst, und das menschliche Geschlecht scheint […] einen gewissen angebohrnen Sinn für diese Sprache der Götter zu haben. Was sie nun so reizend mache, daß zu allen Zeiten scheint meinen Bedünken nach nichts anders als die Nachahmung der Natur, das heißt aller der Dinge, die wir um uns herum sehen, hören etcetera […] Wir sind […] die erste Sprosse auf der Leiter der freyhandelnden selbständigen Geschöpfe und da wir eine Welt hie da um uns sehen, die der Beweiß eines unendlich freyhandelnden Wesen ist, so ist der erste Trieb, den wir in unserer Seel fühlen, die Begierde’s ihn nachzuthun.² (Lenz 2014, 13)

Although action appears to be free and independent, in reality, according to Lenz’s theory, there is no pleasure for human nature that is not based on imitation. The concept of imitation [Nachahmung] plays a decisive role in these pages, which un-

 [“We are all friends of poetic art and mankind (…) and seem to have an innate sense for this language of the gods.What makes it so fascinating, in my opinion, is nothing more than the imitation of nature, that is to say of all those things that we see and hear around us (…) We are (…) the first buds in the scale of creatures who act freely and independently and, since we see here and there around us a world that is the proof of a Being that acts in an infinitely free way, the first impulse we feel in our soul is the desire to imitate it”].

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folds on two fronts, on the one hand as an imitation of nature and on the other as an imitation of the ancients (see Schlieske 2000). Lenz has no doubts: the impulse to imitate, to be able to “procure creation in what is small”, is a fundamental feature of the creative individual. For this same reason, it is an essential element of theater, and a basic requirement in his Anmerkungen: “No one can ever deny to me that theater requires an imitation and hence a poet. Already in ordinary life […] a skilled imitator is called a good comedian, and if theater were anything other than imitation, he would soon lose his audience” (Lenz 2014, 14). It is clear that for Lenz the ability to imitate does not follow a mechanical logic, but is nourished by enthusiasm, creative force. It is the ability to exercise a perspicuous gaze capable of “penetrating into the most intimate nature of all beings” (Lenz 2014, 16), of grasping with a single sensation and aggregating concepts to make them evident in the imagination and present. This drive [Trieb] is based on man’s innate desire to embrace the essence of things and the totality of being, not just with reason, but intuitively, with all his senses. It is a question of that Anschauung which is proper to geniuses, those minds “that at once penetrate and see fully what lies before them” (Lenz 2014, 16). Lenz also defines them as “little gods”, because with the divine spark in their breast “they sit on the thrones of the earth and, following his [God’s] example, shoulder a small world” (Lenz 12014, 16). Thus far, the path Lenz has taken coincides with the one Aristotle marks out in his Poetics. This passage suffices to understand this: Now tragedy is the representation of action, and action involves agents who will necessarily have certain qualities of both character and intellect. It is because of the qualities of the agents that we classify their actions, and it is because of their actions that they succeed or fail in life. It is the story of the action that is the representation. By the ‘story’ I mean the plot of the events.³ (Aristotle 2013, 23–24)

But from a certain point on the two paths start to deviate. For Lenz imitation is one of the keywords in his theatrical lexicon, but the question that follows is: what does theater imitate? Is the object of imitation man or is it man’s destiny? On this point, Lenz’s position parts ways with Aristotle’s. In order for the former to act, it is in fact the subject (Charakter). Hence his criticism of Aristotelian aesthetics, which continually separates action from the main character who acts, who must adapt to the plot like a thread to the eye of a needle. For Lenz, man is the main object of imitation, the individual character dominating theater. Aristotle differs on this point. As already stated, he concedes little to characters even in tragedy, focusing his attention instead on a specific action governed by an ineluctable

 This passage belongs to an accredited academic translation (see bibliographic reference).

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fate. The Aristotelian vision fits perfectly into the theoretical framework of ancient Greece, where men were represented as playthings of destiny. Far from relying on the tragic concept of the Greeks, Lenz models his theater on realism. We read in a significant passage of his work: […] nach meiner Empfindung schätz ich den Charakteristischen, selbst den Carricaturmahler zehnmal höher als den Idealischen, hyperbolisch gesprochen, denn es gehört zehnmal mehr dazu, eine Figur mit eben der Genauigkeit und Wahrheit darzustellen, mit der das Genie sie erkennt, als zehn Jahre an einem Ideal der Schönheit zu zirkeln, das endlich doch nur in dem Hirn des Künstlers, der es hervorgabracht, ein solcher ist […]⁴ (Lenz 2014, 23).

It is in such terms that Lenz defines his realism.

3 Lenz’s versus Aristotle’s theater. On the basis of the same assumptions, Lenz makes a decisive departure from Aristotelian-style theater. He emancipates his theater from the prison of the three unities – action, time and place – defined as a “terrible, sadly famous” bubble (Lenz 2014, 26). This move deals a severe blow to those sacrosanct unities, i. e. unities from whose perspective genius can be viewed and understood. In these emphatic terms Lenz shrugs off years of theatrical aesthetics, based on the consolidated device of the three unities: “Was heissen die drey Einheiten, meine Lieben? Ist es nicht die eine, die wir bey allen Gegenständen der Erkenntnis suchen […] Was heissen die drey Einheiten? Hundert Einheiten will ich euch angeben, die alle immer doch die eine bleiben. Einheit der Nation, Einheit der Sprache, Einheit der Religion, Einheit der Sitten […]” (Lenz 2014, 26).⁵ Lenz’s perspective thus presents itself as a blanching kaleidoscope, in which a single unity can only manifest itself in a multifaceted multiversum, a hundred unities.⁶ With the pathos that characterizes his style, Lenz – this time drawing on  [“(…) for my sensibility I appreciate the portrait painter, even the caricaturist, ten times more than the idealist, stated with exaggeration, because it takes ten times greater skill to portray a character precisely with that prediction and truthfulness with which a genius sees him, than to take a decade to measure with the compass an ideal of beauty that in the end is such only in the brain of the artist who produced it (…)”].  [“And what do the three unities mean, dear friends? It is not the only one we look for in all objects of knowledge (…) What do the three unities mean? I want to show you a hundred unities, which nevertheless remain a single unity. Unity of the nation, unity of language, unity of religion, unity of customs (…)”].  The multi-universal perspective Lenz outlines in his satirical text Pandämonium Germanicum. Eine Skizze is similar. See Morton 1988. The French philosopher and literary critic René Girard

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Lessing’s polemic against the three unities of Aristotelian poetics – dares to enact a full violation of the classical, institutionalized dramatic canons. In his theater, it is the rapidly successive shifts of viewpoint that ignore the unity of action: “With us it is the sequence of actions that follow one another like thunder, prop each other up, and grow atop each other and which must merge into a great all” (Lenz 2014, 27). A very different perspective from Aristotle’s, one that places man at center stage, “where the ancients saw only immutable Fate and its mysterious influences” (Lenz 2014, 26). Likewise, Lenz engages in a battle against the unity of place, which ends up coinciding, in his opinion, with the unity of the Chorus, or rather with a narrow and unambiguous vision of the state of things. Lenz abolishes the unity of time itself, which for Aristotle determined the distinction between tragedy and epic, when, in referring to Shakespeare, he proposes a theater capable of ranging from heaven to earth, aiming at the entire human race, in order to make it laugh and cry.

4 Between comedy and tragedy So we are at a fundamental point. In the whirlwind of Lenz’s theatrical aesthetics, the distinction between comedy and tragedy is also lost. The pages of his Observations on Theater leave no doubts; they expressly declare a preference for an artistic form capable of joining the tragic and the comic, seeing in this spurious and hybrid combination a better key for accessing reality, or even the best way to portray all of human society. Far from being opposite spheres, tragedy and comedy appear in his eyes as the two fires of a reflection on the very meaning of narrating and on the dialectical poles of the narrative system. For this reason, Lenz, who owed so much to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, distanced himself from the theater of Hamburg Damaturgy (1767–1769), still considered shut in on itself, thus opening the doors to the parodic and the grotesque. Only in their caricatural and hyperbolic traits could the anti-heroes of his time be drawn, pinned down to their contradictions and dissonances, crushed by the alienations typical of their class, but for this reason much more real than the Greek heroes (Osborne 1975). Unraveling a long thread of reasoning, Lenz arrives at his thesis of the union between comedy and tragedy – even if the historical presuppositions of all this are already found in Plautus, five plays of whom he translated.

makes some interesting observations in his 1968 book which takes a psychoanalytic slant, precisely on the issue of the connection between tragedy and comedy.

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The main sensation of comedy is manifestation, the main sensation of the tragedy is the person, the creation of one’s own manifestation. This already heralds the format of a tragi-comedy. The main sensation must be animated by the dramatic event. While tragedy deals with fear and compassion, comedy deals with laughter. Lenz also defines the manifestation – and so the dramatic or comic action – as a thing. Instead, at the center of tragedy is the person, who in the process of his very dynamic develops his own tragic situation. The most precise transmission of the tragic concept and the comic concept comes where the person/mask is simultaneously also the creator of the dramatic situation. In people as the subject and action of the dramatic occurrence, tragedy and comedy come together as tragi-comedy. With this, Lenz lucidly concludes his break with the teaching considered valid up to that moment, whose existing rules tragi-comedy is allowed to break. Tragicomedy is entrusted with the function of exploding all the canons, both social and ethical-normative. The task of comedy is to evoke the meaning of situations. The role of tragedy is to evoke the meaning of men as the original bearers of this situation. Finally, the function of tragicomedy is to restore the meaning of the separation of men and situations. And hence we understand all its necessary paradoxicality, as well as its significant topicality.

Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Girard, René. Lenz 1751–1792. Genèse d’une dramaturgie du tragi-comique. Paris: Libraire C. Klincksieck, 1968. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (von). “Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit.” Hrsg. Klaus-Detlef Müller. Vol. XIV. Werke. Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007. Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold. Anmerkungen übers Theater. Shakespeare-Arbeiten und ShakespeareÜbersetzungen. Studienausgabe. Hrsg. Hans-Günther Schwarz. Stuttgart: Reclam 2014. Luserke, Matthias. Lenz-Studien: Literaturgeschichte-Werke-Themen. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2001. Mc Bride, Patrizia C. “The Paradox of Aesthetic Discourse: J.M.R. Lenz’s‚ Anmerkungen Übers Theater.” German Studies Review 22/3 (1999): 347–419. Morton, Michael M. “Exemplary Poetics: The Rhetoric of Lenz’s Anmerkungen übers Theater and Pandämonium Germanicum.” Lessing Yearbook XX (1988): 121–152. Müller, Peter. J.M.R. Lenz im Urteil dreier Jahrhunderte. Berlin-Frankfurt/M.–New York–Paris-Wien: Peter Lang, 1995. Osborne, John. J.M.R. Lenz, The Renunciation of Heroism. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975. Rizzo, Roberto. J.M.R. Lenz. Storia di una critica e di una ricezione. Abano Terme: Piovan Editore, 1979. Schlieske, Jörg. Lenz und die Mimesis. Eine Untersuchung der Nachahmungsproblemartik bei J.M.R. Lenz. Bonn-Berlin: Peter Lang, 2000. Titel, Britta, and Hellmutt Haug. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Werke und Schriften. Stuttgart: Henry Goverts Verlag, 1967. Tommek, Heribert. J.M.R. Lenz. Sozioanalyse einer literarischen Laufbahn. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2003.

Sonia Bellavia

Theatermania and investigation of the Self What is better and nobler than going beyond this land and beyond oneself as if one were other than oneself? Karl Philipp Moritz (1991, I, 802)

1 Enlightenment conditions and pre-romantic issues In 1691 Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) considered the precursor of the German Enlightenment, stated that “among all the arts and sciences there is none more noble and necessary than knowledge of oneself ” (Grzesiuk 2011, 92).¹ His successors embraced his message and in the course of the eighteenth-century, more and more, in the German perspective, the stage became part of a journey aimed at reaching the highest form of wisdom, summarized in the ancient maxim of gnòthi seautón. ² This inevitably led to redefining the very idea of the nature of theater, and to resituating it in the broader context of knowledge, with the consequent return to grounding it in the actor and in acting. A true revolution, which essentially started with Lessing (1729–1781) and which was filtered through the often little-known reflections of his fervent admirer: Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793),³ who will be the focus of my article. As early as 1742, in a note sent to his mother Justine Salome, Lessing justified himself for having neglected his university studies with his perception that, while books had taught him a lot, they had not made him into a human being. For this, he had preferred to spend most of his time at the theater, watching Comödien (Grzesiuk 2011, 96). He claimed to have learned to know himself through theater, and of having no longer laughed at anyone since then, or mocked anyone other than himself (Lessing 1979, 8), thus revealing himself among the first persons – if not the

 The quote is taken from Thomasius’ Preface to his Ausübung der Vernunftlehre.  The Journal of Empirical Psychology that Moritz founded in 1783 (see below, nt. 20) opened with the motto that towers over the entrance to the temple of Delphi: know thyself. In the pages of the magazine, aimed precisely at the investigation of the entire human being, discussions on Theatermania – among others – also took place.  In 1786 Moritz spoke of the need for a center to which all ideas could be traced, similar to the many spokes of a wheel (Moritz 1990, 52). That center, increasingly, comes to be identified with the art of theater. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-006

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first – able to perceive the potential of theater as a privileged means of achieving self-awareness. By expanding the horizons of research towards the unknown of human nature – encouraged by the new paths opened by science and pseudoscience – from the second half of the century the interest of German thinkers turned to everything concerning human beings that Cartesian rationalism had left in the dark; not only, citing Johann Jakob Engel – author of Ideen zu einer Mimik, perhaps the most important treatise that closed the century – “the most hidden recesses of the heart” (Engel 1802, 243), but also its immaterial and transcendent component,⁴ to which art – and especially the eminently human one of theater – would open the way. And it was precisely here that the substantial difference in the way of conceiving theater between the French and the Germans seemed to be grafted onto the second Enlightenment and, conversely, between the late French Enlightenment and its German counterpart –. While the former considered it more closely linked to the public sphere, which at the dawn of the Revolution also appeared structured by theater life, the latter considered it increasingly linked to the individual sphere. French philosophers substituted it for the Church as a sanctuary of secular eloquence and new ideas of libertinage, making it a nexus for the political and cultural education of the masses (Balme 2014). For the Germans, it became instead the vehicle of a path of investigation and knowledge that the individual could undertake in relation to his own and others’ subjectivity; of research, in particular, on the whole an as yet unrecognized and/or elusive sphere of the human. To wit, enlightenment as illumination. ⁵  Kant’s Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (1755), is emblematic. Its proverbial concept of Aufklärung, delivered in the December issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784 (481–494), seems foundational to the Neugebauer-Wölk for the modernity of its thought, hardly that of the eighteenth-century (Neugebauer-Wölk 1999, 2). In the third part of the early work we read: “(…) the immortal spirit will hover, with a flap of its wing, above everything finite and will continue its existence, thanks to a closer link with the supreme Being, in a new relationship to the whole of nature” (Kant 2009, 185), and these lines appear on the page 199 of the 1755 edition, published by Johann Friedrich Petersen. A quarter of a century later, in The Education of the Human Race (1780), Lessing reflects on palingenesis and metempsychosis, imagining a possible path of gradual knowledge achieved through the continuous recurrence of man on the Earth. It was precisely the exaltation of reason, in the Enlightenment Age, that brought with it the impulse to confront issues that transcend the activity of reason itself. Like that of survival after death, or of the existence of spirits and the possibility of coming into contact with them, which for the eighteenth-century – observes Neugebauer-Wölk – was not gullibility, but an idea that derived from the heart of philosophical thought (Neugebauer-Wölk 1999, 193–195).  More than the light of reason, as for the French, the late German Enlightenment seems to have adhered to the idea of an inner illumination, which determined the differences in the way of understanding the value of theater, its purposes and function. The German variety of Enlightenment,

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It is no coincidence that as Lessing, in his ongoing dialectic with the dominant French model, deepened his interest in theatrical matters, he came to place emphasis on Charakter and consequently on the art of acting: the crux of theater and hence, in the end, the pivot of his entire theory of theater.⁶ When, in March 1772, he wrote to his brother Karl about Emilia Galotti, a work whose political meaning was often stressed and often interpreted as a symbol of the struggle of the nascent bourgeoisie against tyranny and its arbitrators, he spoke of her as a Virignie “modernized, freed from any interest in the State” (Lessing 1794, 186).⁷ For, as he had already remarked in 1767, the State in Hamburgische Dramaturgie “is too abstract a concept for our feelings” (Lessing 1956, 75). While establishing its link with the process and dissemination of knowledge, in the eighteenth-century the notion of theatrum also began to be associated with the concrete idea of theater, providing the conditions for its full aesthetic and cultural legitimation (Laube 2008, 42–81),⁸ which is considered the true hub of the events of European theatrical historiography. Situated at midpoint between art and science, and seen as a means of experimentation capable of broadening the insights into human beings and, later, into progress, at the end of the century of the Enlightenment, theater became a place where the two poles met, mediated by the fulcrum of the actor. Through his interpretation of character, the spectator acquired through empathy knowledge of a character’s nature and inner being, to wit, the most secret recesses of the human soul – in common with his own – which, objectified in the actor’s performance, could be observed, experienced and therefore empirically known. In 1774, thirty years after Lessing’s letter to his mother, Johann Jakob Engel, in his Über Handlung, Gespräch und Erzählung [On action, Conversation and Narra-

in this sense, found its explanation in the revival – from the second half of the eighteenth-century on – of the nucleus of esoteric thought that spread throughout the German-speaking area at the beginning of the seventeenth-century, linked to a project of radical reform of all fields of human endeavor and knowledge. The matter is so broad and complex that it cannot be discussed here, which is why I take the liberty of making reference to Bellavia 2021.  It is indicative that Eduard Devrient came to argue that no one else more than Lessing understood acting and behaved toward it in a likewise precise and detailed relationship (Devrient 1905, II, 124).  The quote appears in a letter, dated March 1, 1772, and Lessing wrote it in Braunschweig during the months preceding Emilia Galotti’s initial debut (July 13th), which took place at the Opernhaus in Braunschweig. For the composition of the opera, Lessing was inspired by the legend of Virginia as narrated by Livy, in which the young plebeian girl, the object of the lust of the politician Appius Claudius, is murdered by her father to prevent her from being dishonored.  Laube observes that in the eighteenth-century the baroque formula of theatrum mundi shifted from the field of sense perception to that of knowledge, placing the two domains in close correlation.

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tion: a theoretical tract on the novel, but which actually focused on dramatic characters], argued that “as soon as we start describing the soul” (Engel 1802, 233), the narrative style must shift to that of drama, so that the characters, by dialoguing with the others in the plot, can expose their inner life to the reader. And it is precisely when even the most subtle motions of the soul are captured in gestation – Gresziuk observes – that “a human being becomes an individual who differs from other individuals, even in the sphere of sensations” (Grzesiuk 2011, 98–99). It is parallel to and as a consequence of this path, that the actor begins to be seen as an authentic Menschendarsteller [interpreter of what is human], what the famous actor August Wilhelm Iffland, a schoolmate of Moritz, indicated as being such a prominent feature of the latter’s Anton Reiser (Moritz 1996, 86).⁹ And even earlier, his most illustrious colleague and rival – as well as a staunch follower of Lessing – Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, claimed that the actor was he “who knew a human being’s inner and outer workings” (Hoffmeier 1955, 4).¹⁰ For the eighteenth-century reformers, actors of this caliber were not only great performers, but true scientists and poets of the soul, in whose performances – as before the display cases of science labs containing nature’s oddities – the spectator could gain insights into his own human Self.

2 The know thyself imperative Know thyself (gnòthi seautón) was the motto of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde,¹¹ a quarterly review on empirical psychology founded in Berlin in 1783, with the support of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), by the former amateur actor Karl

 “In addition to him”, wrote Moritz, referring of himself in the third person, “there was also another student, named I …(…). This I… later became one of our first actors and one of our most popular playwrights; and Reiser’s destiny was to a certain extent similar to his” (Moritz 1996, 86). The I … does not indicate anything other than the initial of Iffland. Information on the true identities hidden behind the initials, was provided by Ludwig Geiger in his introduction to the edition of Anton Reiser (Geiger 1886, XXVII–XXVIII).  Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816) and August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) were the major German actors of the last quarter of the eighteenth-century. Both considered themselves heirs to the great Conrad Ekhof, whom Moritz also talks about in Anton Reiser.  Empirical Psychology is the title of a book by Christian Wolff (1679–1754), published in 1732, in whose Preface this most representative philosopher of the early German Enlightenment expressed the hope that the laws of the soul could be studied and understood as much as those of the body. The purpose of psychology, for Wolff, was therefore to place man in a position to direct and freely manage the dark faculties of the soul.

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Philipp Moritz, who from then until 1791 published fragments of his four-part psychological novel, Anton Reiser.¹² The publication of the quarterly was preceded and announced by Moritz’s Vorschlag [proposal] (Moritz 1999, I, 793–809), a text that suggests, though not explicitly, the idea of the proximity between the interpretive process of a character, which is the actor’s task, and the cognitive one of a scientific observer intent on shedding light on that human interior, believed to have been too long neglected, since the soul, as Moritz says, “is the noblest part” of the human Self (Moritz 1999, I, 793). Theater, in the person of Shakespeare – together with good novels – is indicated as a contribution to the inner history of humanity, and therefore the primary vehicle to begin to familiarize oneself with that dark world, whose unveiling resembles the raising of the curtain on the stage action. On the other hand, Moritz affirms that the study of the human heart – or what we now call psychology, or psychic processes – is necessary and preliminary for poets and novelists, whose main function is to deal with human nature. By virtue of the proximity between the actor and the poet, which Lessing had established in the Preface to his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, it appeared evident that the formula should apply even more to the theater interpreter (Lessing 1956, VII–VIII).

 We recall that Friedrich Maurer published Anton Reiser in Berlin in four volumes: the first in 1785, the second and third in 1786, and the fourth in 1790. In 1794, a fifth part of the novel appeared posthumously, the work of Karl Friedrich Klischnig – a close friend and biographer of Moritz – again for Friedrich Maurer. In the Magazin the four parts of the text in which the novel is structured there appeared fragments, some annotations and revisions. See Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde Bd. 1 (1783), 1. Stück; Bd. 2 (1784), 2. Stück; Bd. 4 (1786), 3. Stück; Bd. 5 (1787), 3. Stück; Bd. 6 (1788), 2. Stück and Bd. 8 (1791), 1. Stück (Fortsetzung des Fragments aus dem vierten Teil von Anton Reisers Lebensgeschichte and Die Leiden der Poesie) at http://telota.bbaw.de/mze/#. It is also interesting to note how the founding of the Magazin and the publication of the novel coincided with Moritz’s commitment as editor of the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung (1784–1785): a task that he took on joyfully and with great expectations – as Karl Friedrich Klischnig, a friend and biographer of Moritz, says – since even Lessing, during his almost uninterrupted stay in Berlin (from 1748 to 1755) had written extensively for the same newspaper. However, his expectations remained disappointed, since Moritz intended to concentrate the articles not so much on political issues as on human cases, and above all to shape the public’s taste through his articles on Theaternachrichten [the theater news column], which did not meet the favor either of its readers or of Mr. Voss, owner of the newspaper. In the theater column, he often criticized the quality of the plays, and several times he got into quarrels with the actors and theater director, Karl Theophil Döbbelin (1727– 1793), of his own theater, located in Behrenstraße. The dispute revolved around criticisms of how he had staged works such as Lessing’s Kabale und Liebe [Cabala and Love] and Schiller’s Die Räuber [The Robbers] (Klischnig 1794, 94–96).

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By the way, the central pages of the Vorschlag are emblematic, where Moritz lists the tasks of the true observer of the human: Wer sich zum eigentlichen Beobachter des Menschen bilden wollte, der müßte von sich selber ausgehen: erstlich die Geschichte seines eignen Herzens von seiner frühesten Kindheit an sich so getreu wie möglich entwerfen; auf die Erinnrungen aus den frühesten Jahren der Kindheit aufmerksam sein, und nichts für unwichtig halten, was jemals einen vorzüglich starken Eindruck auf ihn gemacht hat, so daß die Erinnerung daran sich noch immer zwischen seine übrigen Gedanken drängt. Dabei müßte er aber ja nicht etwa die Spuren seine Genies, oder dasjenige, was schon in ihm steckte, in den frühesten Begebenheiten seines Lebens oder in seinen kindischen Handlungen suchen wollen. Er müßte auf sein gegenwärtiges wirkliches Leben aufmerksam sein; die Ebbe und Flut bemerken, welche den ganzen Tag über in seiner Seele herrscht, und die Verschiedenheit eines Augenblicks von dem andern; er müßte sich Zeit nehmen, die Geschichte seiner Gedanken zu beschreiben, und sich selber zum Gegenstande seiner anhaltendsten Beobachtungen zu machen; ohne alle heftige Leidenschaften müßte er nicht sein, und doch die Kunst verstehen, in manchen Augenblikken seines Lebens sich plötzlich aus dem Wirbel seiner Begierden herauszuziehen, um eine Zeitlang den kalten Beobachter zu spielen, ohne sich im mindesten für sich selber zu interessieren. Von dem Leben der Menschen, deren Geschichte beschrieben ist, kennen wir nur die Oberfläche. Wir sehen wohl, wie der Zeiger an der Uhr sich dreht, aber wir kennen nicht das innre Triebwerk, das ihn bewegt. Wir sehen nicht, wie die ersten Keime von den Handlungen des Menschen sich im Innersten seiner Seele entwickeln. Dies bemerken wir nur so selten bei uns selber, geschweige denn bei andern. […] können wir in die Seele eines andern blicken, wie in die unsrige?¹³ (Moritz 1999, I, 799–800)

Hence, he must start with himself, from the knowledge of his own ego, and eventually his observations can pass beyond to the facial expressions, language and behavior of the young, of adults, and of the aged.

 [“Whoever wishes to train himself as a primary observer of human beings must begin with himself. He must first delineate, as faithfully as possible, the history of his own heart [his ‘feeling’] from early childhood; focus his attention on the memories of his early childhood years, without considering anything as unimportant, everything that once made a strong impression on him; so much so that the his memories still make their way through his other thoughts. [He] should focus his attention on his current life, note the dominant daily ebb and flow in his soul and the differences that take place from one moment to the next; should take the time to describe the history of his thoughts and make himself the object of his constant observations. He must not forego violent passions, but should learn the art of tersely withdrawing from the whirlwind of his desires, in certain moments of his life, in order to take on for a while the role of a cold observer, without taking any interest in himself. Of the lives of men, whose stories have been written, we know only the surface. We see how the hands of the clock turn, but not the mechanism that moves them. We do not see how the first seed of behavior develops in the human soul. We only note this, and rarely, in ourselves. (…) Can we look into someone else’s soul as well as our own?”].

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Von der geheimen Geschichte seiner eignen Gedanken müßte er durch Gesicht, Sprache und Handlung auf die Seele andrer schließen lernen. Keine Wendung im Ausdruck, kein oft gebrauchtes Apropos, kein oft angebrachtes was ich doch sagen wollte? keine Wiederholung einer und eben derselben Sache, oder gar eines und eben desselben Worts müßte ihm unwichtig scheinen, oder seiner Aufmerksamkeit [entgehn]: denn zuweilen sind solche oft wiederholte unbedeutend scheinende Ausdrücke im Reden, ein getreues Bild von der Schnelligkeit oder Langsamkeit, Beständigkeit oder Unstetigkeit, Ordnung oder Unordnung, im Denken und Handlen [sic] bei solchen Personen. Aufmerksamkeit aufs Kleinscheinende ist überhaupt ein wichtiges Erfordernis des Menschenbeobachters, und dann die Übung in der Nebeneinanderstellung des Successiven, weil der ganze Mensch bloß aus successiven Äußerungen erkannt werden kann.¹⁴ (Moritz 1999, I, 801)

Immediately afterwards, Moritz specifies how the study of human beings is endless, lasting a lifetime and becoming, for those who undertake it, a privileged occupation, since, as he asks, “what is better and more noble than to rise on this earth and beyond oneself as if one were other than oneself? Another who from a loftier region smiles at all these things and in so doing” – here Moritz seems to echo Lessing’s 1742 letter – “laughs at himself, at his own grievances. So”, he continues, “as soon as I see that you don’t want to assign any role to me, I put myself on the stage and view myself as an object of my own observation, as if I were a stranger whose fortunes or misfortunes I attentively harken to” (Moritz 1999, I, 802).¹⁵ The careful observer of human nature, says Moritz, “must peek through the curtain […] of self-indulgence and self-satisfaction, before penetrating into the innermost recesses of the human heart” (Moritz 1999, I, 802). That is, he must work on himself, before pretending to be able to venture into the depths of others’ souls, be it real human beings or theatrical characters, who increasingly at the turn of the nineteenth-century were starting to become characters tout-court, figures with a fictitious identity, but in all respects similar to real-life ones. The method that Moritz is suggesting here for the study of human nature – i. e., observing the other – seems almost to refer to the modus operandi of an actor who

 [“From the secret visages of his own thoughts, he should – through face, voice and action – learn to draw conclusions about the souls of others. Nothing must escape him: no change in expression, no ‘Apropos’ used too frequently, no too often repeated ‘what did I mean?’, no repetition of one and the same thing, or even of one and the same word, since these repeated expressions, apparently insignificant, are often a faithful image of speed or slowness, firmness or discontinuity, order or disorder in the thinking or acting of such people. Attention to everything that ‘seems small’, above all, is an important requirement of the observer, and then exercise in the ‘juxtaposition of what follows’; because the entire human being is recognized only by ‘successive’ externalizations”].  Moritz concluded: “To observe everything as if it were a play: what a victory! What an elevation towards the Creator of the universe, who understands everything in himself!” (Moritz 1999, I, 802).

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attempts to get acquainted with the character he must play: “In a young man I see for the first time , I try to note what is surprising”.¹⁶ That is, he clarifies, the “distinctive trait in the set of his face, its concordance with his tone, gait and every bodily movement; age and education are among the first things to be noted” (Moritz 1999, I, 806). Then, he continues, an attempt is made to question the subject; that is, to start gathering clues, and not just external ones, in order to delineate his identity. Identifying the subject’s peculiar trait will allow his minor characteristics to be subsumed under it, to grasp his being in its organic nature. It will then be a “pleasure to see [the] characters interact and follow their nuances in their smallest bodily movements, up to the play of mimicry” (Moritz 1999, I, 807). In this way, one captures the variety, the multiformity of human beings, all different from each other, each of which, on this earth, is a masterpiece. Because unique.

3 The path to unveiling the Self Referring back to the reflections of the Vorschlag, in his preface to the first issue of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde Moritz asked: “What is more important for a human being than a human being? Hence I want to devote my time and my powers to this excellent study […]” (Moritz 1783–1793, I, 1). That theater was considered a privileged means for undertaking this excellent study seems to stress two factors: the use – in the fourth issue of the magazine – of the metaphor of raising the curtain to illustrate the moment in which one becomes aware of the existence of something beyond external reality,¹⁷ and the very decision to start the publication of Anton Reiser in the very pages of the Magazin: an autobiography cloaked under a fictitious name, behind which the author conceals himself as an actor does with his role, making the novel the paradigm of a journey of identity formation – Reiser literally means traveler – moved precisely by his passion for theater. Having started out in adolescence with an enthusiasm for religious preaching and dramatic literature, Moritz gradually acquired self-awareness as he tried to fulfill his inordinate desire to become a professional actor. As a dilettante participating in student plays and amateur performances, he played both male and fe The first details to consider, according to the physiognomy of Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), who was Moritz’s declared referent, were facial features and expressions.  That moment in which it is “as if an impenetrable curtain is about to rise, which is stretched out before our eyes, but from which, without knowing how, we always imperceptibly deviate” (Moritz 1783–1793, IV, 3, §4).

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male characters – the latter with a certain reluctance –.¹⁸ His success made him aware of his talents. The continual frustration of failing to become a professional actor and the sting of having to recognize his limits stimulated him to take the path of a theorizer and formulator of his mature ideas. It was the need to narrate – making it concrete – that troubled path, studded with disillusioned hopes, envy and jealousy, small successes and countless failures, which led Moritz to write his psychological novel Anton Reiser, today considered one of the most interesting outcomes of eighteenth-century German literature. As is well known, it was his desire to explain the reasons for those many cumulative failures to become an actor that prodded him to produce his best theoretical essay: On the Visual Imitation of Beauty. ¹⁹ To the point that, in the pages of the Magazin – as Marion Schmaus observes – the theater became, in Moritz’s view, the parable of the great and small world of the aesthetics of art and nature, distance and identification, the healthy and – as we will see shortly – the sick Self (Schmaus 2009, 70). The journey that theater enabled the author of Anton Reiser to take within himself made him aware not only of his positive qualities, with his own potential, but even more – as we mentioned a moment ago – revealed to him his own limits. Hence, his ambivalent attitude towards the stage: unavoidable passion, the way to self-realization, and at the same time actual damnation. “The origin of all his misadventures”, as he writes in Anton Reiser (Moritz 1996, 109) – a title that refers to a fictitious but not invented name, apanage of a Lutheran pastor of Hamburg who in 1681 had published a work entitled Theatermania, in which he condemned all theatrical performances as products of madness and works of darkness (Reiser 1681)²⁰. A century later in the Magazin, in the column where fragments of Anton

 As an amateur actor, Moritz played Clelie in Christian August Clodius’s (1737–1784) three-act comedy Medon oder die Rache des Weisen. He played two other female roles when he was a student in Erfurt, in Lessing’s Der Argwöhnische, and a male role – that of Maskarill – in Der Schatz, also by Lessing.  In the first part of Schlegel’s Lessons (Die Kunstlehre, 1801–1802), Mortiz’s essay is defined as “un brief, excellent text” (D’Angelo 1999, 29).  The work on Anton Reiser, entitled: Theatromania, oder die Wercke der Finsterniß: in denen öffentlichen Schau-spielen von den alten Kirchen-Vätern verdammet, was inspired by the theatrical controversy that broke out in Hamburg in 1677 and lasted eleven years. It resonated greatly among the public, and was generated by the opening of today’s Hamburgische Staatsoper – at the time: Opera am Gänsemarkt – whose inaugural piece was a Singspiel – mixed genre, recited and sung – on a religious subject – Adam and Eve. The controversy, which on the one hand saw Anton Reiser opposing the pietists, and on the other the deacon of the Church of St. Catherine Heinrich Elmenhorst – one of the Opera’s founders and author of the Singspiel libretto staged for its inauguration –, led to the ban, ordered by the mayor in 1686, of all theatrical productions. A prohibition soon ignored.

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Reiser were published and the addiction to theater is discussed, he also speaks of illusion and self-illusion, and prophesies possible different states of consciousness.²¹ And, in a psychosomatic disturbance generated by a sort of hypertrophy of the imagination – the main faculty of theater – the proximity between Theatermania and melancholy is established, considered, along with religious exaltation, the major pathologies of the century of the Enlightenment.²² At the time of the discovery of the unconscious, and before the term itself was coined and psychiatry was institutionalized in 1808, this laboratory of literary anthropology – as the editors of the Magazin’s digital edition have defined it – constituted a real curtain raised on issues as yet far from being explored in depth. A matter that Moritz himself seemed aware of, since in his Vorschlag he states that while the quarterly may have done its proper job,²³ the German nation was destined to make the first decisive contribution toward achieving a truly comprehensive knowledge of humanity, thus fulfilling the Enlightenment’s culminating purpose. Again, not surprisingly, the curtain metaphor reappears when Moritz himself uses it to concretize the unveiling of consciousness. The metaphorical raising of the curtain is a rending of the veil on one’s Self, which – as Goethe, too, points out in

 Without ignoring the input of the so-called pseudosciences – first and foremost mesmerism – in Moritz’s quarterly, it also began to reflect on the role of suggestion and self-suggestion in various psychic illnesses, as well as in their healing. Therefore, starting in 1775, shortly before the foundation of the Magazin, the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) developed his theory of healing through the current of a magnetic fluid. On November 23rd of that year, in Munich, he gave a practical demonstration, arousing in patients the appearance of various symptoms – including convulsions – which he then dispelled with a simple snap of his fingers. In February 1778, the hostility of the Vienna medical establishment – where Mesmer had been stationed since 1759 – forced him to move to Paris. Here his fame reached its peak around the mid-1780s, after which it experienced a rapid decline. On his return to Vienna in 1793, Mesmer was expelled on charges of being politically suspect and fled to Switzerland, where he remained until his death (Ellenberger 2013, I, 65–79). Mesmer’s activity is referred to in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde in the Seelennaturkunde section (Moritz 1787, 5.3, 23–26).  “Expectations of playing an important role on the world stage,” Schmaus observes, “can lead to melancholy preachers as well as gloomy actors” (Schmaus 2009, 66). However, Schmaus notes a subtle difference: she sees religious melancholy as a disease having mainly affected the lower classes, while Theatermania affected those who, however poor – like Moritz himself – belonged to the intellectual sphere. From which we may deduce that the Magazin, among others, also had the merit of restoring the historicity of some psychosomatic pathologies – diseases strictly linked to a specific period but which later disappeared; not because they did not exist or were invented, but because diseases – she continues, paraphrasing Freud – “are a form of active behavior and react to certain temporal situations or circumstances” (Schmaus 2009, 45).  See Dickson, Wingertszahn. http://telota.bbaw.de/mze/#

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Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] –²⁴ unfolds before our eyes, but which we unwittingly and imperceptibly evade (Moritz 1786, IV.3, 76–82). It is the beginning of the process of self-knowledge, which he indicates in the Vorschlag as an indispensable prerequisite for knowing the other.

4 Theatermania and real life Hence, the Enlightenment quest to reveal inner reality seems intimately connected with the theatrical dimension, and in turn heightened the fascination exerted by theater. An attraction that, if it were to intensify to the point of being all-encompassing, would become truly pathological. An evil called Theatermania: an illness caused by an imagination which, when stimulated to the highest degree, leads to confusing fantasy with reality.²⁵ In essence, what St. Augustine said in De Trinitate (X, 5–6) about ecstasy would seem to occur with Theatermania: compared to ‘altered’ states such as sleep or madness, capable of deranging the faculty of thought by which the spirit interiorizes the images of real things, compromising the ability to discern between the reality of the physical object and its representation. In short, one who is affected by it is no longer able to distinguish what lies before him from his inner imaginings. In theater addicts, the hypertrophy of the imaginative faculty has an ambivalent effect – like Moritz’s passion for the theater, described in Anton Reiser. On the one hand, imagination makes it possible to overcome the limitations that threaten to hinder the development of the I by opening the way to self-realization, while on the other it increasingly risks taking on “an independent existence and push[ing] reality aside in order to impose itself completely” (Catholy 1962, 39). In addition to his quarterly magazine, Moritz also talks of this danger in the third part of his A German Traveller in Italy, mentioning it in reference to a particular kind of performer who is not really an actor but a so-called improviser,²⁶

 “It is as if a curtain had opened onto my soul”, wrote Goethe, “and the stage of infinite life changed before my eyes in the abyss of the eternally open tomb”. In Goethe’s novel, these lines are found on pages 119–123 of the original edition (1787), and is quoted in Klischnig (1794, 213).  Theatermania – Eckehard Catholy observed – is not a real artistic passion, but a promise of fantasy (Catholy 1962, 39).  In the Romantic period, Angela Esterhammer writes, and especially in Italy, there were performers known as improvvisatori and improvvisatrici, who created poetry extemporaneously, on any subject the public might request. This type of exhibition fascinated travelers – even illustrious ones – from all over Europe, who left their impressions in books and newspapers, letters and articles published in periodicals (Esterhammer 2008).

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like the Venetian who in October 1787 put on a show every afternoon in Piazza di Spagna: a young man “from a good family”, says Moritz, who “in his home town was esteemed and sought after for his skills as a lawyer”, whose friends and relatives “had done their utmost to have him lead a respectable life”, but which he had repeatedly fled from “to satisfy his irrepressible craving to wander among the cities of Italy as an improviser” (Moritz 1792, 27–28). Sometimes he would dress very neatly, “powdered – to his credit – and with a sword at his side; at other times”, Moritz continues, “he goes around in extremely tattered clothes, because he enjoys his own excellent existence in his ideal poetic world and so doesn’t care much for life’s ordinary necessities” (Moritz 1792, 29). He warns of this same danger in the Vorschlag, in reference to anyone who has tried to probe the human soul, and therefore by extension to the poet and hence to the actor, who “works alongside and like the poet, indeed, works for him when he deals with the human” (cfr. supra p. 57). Even the scientific observer, when engaged with the recesses of the heart, writes Moritz in the Vorschlag, “must protect himself from any tendency to dream of an idealized world” (Moritz 1999, 799). And he must proceed with coolness and serenity of mind, in order to avoid getting too involved in the affairs of others. While, in the France of the last quarter of the eighteenth-century, Diderot warns, in his Paradox sur le Comédien, against the excess of sensitivity that leads an actor to lose control over his artistic performance – not excluding even there to set up parallels with real situations – in Germany Moritz identifies in the uncontrolled imagination a problem that goes beyond the confines of theater, to invade those of real life. The problem of the Piazza di Spagna improviser is not the quality of his performance, which is indeed flawless, but his loss of contact with reality, which is damaging – so to speak – on the level of daily existence, because he constructs a world of fantasy, an ideal, poetic world he ends up taking for real and in which, essentially, he loses himself. Exactly as in the instances of Theatermania mentioned in the third volume of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (1785), one of which deals with a certain D. – son of a friend of Moritz’s – who had begun to read plays, and whose readings had become so obsessive that “his entire soul was filled with the ideas of the theatrical world”. The boy’s meeting with a company of professional actors did the rest: “now he had lost control. The real world before him had vanished, and he lived and worked exclusively in the world of theater” (Moritz 1783–1793, III, 1). Only the study of theology, which allowed him to preach, could somehow satisfy his irresistible addiction to acting, when once again participation in a performance as spectator, “the world of the theater appeared before his eyes in all its glittery splendor. He hated all else” (Moritz 1783–1793, III, 1).

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The split between the world in which he would have liked to live, but which existed only in his imagination, and the one in which he was really forced to reside, caused in the subject a weakening of the faculties of the soul, which by virtue of the correspondence between psyche and soma – already established by the psychology of Christian Wolff, and which empirical science was just gathering its first findings²⁷ – produced its physical symptoms. The pathology, once overt, manifested itself as a state of deep melancholy – which today we would call depression –. D. became “inactive, sad and discontented; he lock[ed] himself into his room for days, avoided seeing other people, couldn’t lift a finger – the decisive force of his soul was paralyzed” (Moritz 1783–1793, III, 1). In the end, he gave up the idea of joining an actor’s company, without however being able to fully recover (Schmaus 2008, 66). Another emblematic story published in the third part of the seventh volume (1789) of Moritz’s quarterly was writen by Immanuel David Mauchart, future deacon of Nürtingen, who tells of the long and unhappy addiction to theater of a friend of his.²⁸ An addiction that grew so immeasurably that it pushed him to found with some school friends, in his hometown, a small theater where he could stage performances once a week, also with the participation of girls for the female roles. It did not proceed beyond the first rehearsal because his father, warned by third parties of what was going on, intervened to extinguish his son’s artistic ardor, and the boy ended up burning the theatrical texts he had collected as a repertory for his little theater. Having recovered his reason, he recalled that experience in retrospect as the result of a state of confusion. From what can be deduced from Moritz’s writings, starting with Anton Reiser, proceeding through the Traveller and ending with the Vorschlag and the pages of the Magazin, Theatermania appeared as a danger for anyone who embarks on a quest to define his own identity and his own role on the world stage, without applying a method that allows him the same detachment a scientist has from the object of his observation. Even the student of the human soul, Moritz says in the Vorschlag, should proceed with detachment, to “observe everything as if it were a spectacle” (Moriz 1999, I, 801) and to be able to experience what was “best and noblest”, “To go beyond this earth and beyond oneself as if one were other than oneself ” (Ibid.).

 From 1778, Marion Schmaus observes, the problem of the relationship between the body and the soul entered the purview of empirical science. Only since then does it make sense to speak of a psychosomatic discourse (Schmaus 2009, 15).  Moritz 1783–1793, VII, 3. Mauchart tells of having been set apart from the story by letter, by the hero himself.

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Precisely what the acting profession allowed, seen at the time as a privileged means of accessing the breadth of existence.²⁹ “The actor was the real man”, observed Catholy, “who with his roles had traversed and continued to traverse all the heights and depths of life; he understood the vast world of men, with all its contrasts and by virtue of what he performed he put into action – as they used to say – an ever new enlargement of his own existence” (Catholy 1962, 5). This is why it was so difficult not to succumb to Theatermania, to escape the fascination of playing theatrical roles – i. e., of embodying someone other than oneself – and of changing dress, of ‘disguising oneself ’. The stage made it possible to experience an impossible completeness in real life, but in this complete ideal world you could lose yourself, end up really believing it – like the Piazza di Spagna improviser – or suffer from the awareness of the ineliminability of the gap between what is real and what is imagined, between life and art. To conclude: the idea of acting as a means of knowing and revealing the human, born in the hive of the century of the Enlightenment, went through the following decades, crossing the Romantic and Late Romantic age, until it nourished the actor’s pedagogy in the twentieth-century, as clearly demonstrated by the declaration of the Austrian actor and director Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), great discoverer of talents and pedagogue, who in 1922 argued that “at the basis of all forms of theater lies one and the same process: the indomitable, stormy desire for transformation into another figure, into an imaginary destiny, and at the same time the deepest immersion in one’s own being, down to the roots; for only here does the true metamorphosis take place” (Reinhardt 1978, 313). This is so because, he continued, “the actor’s profession does not consist of external fiction, but in the most intimate revelation”. Once we have reached the path that leads to ourselves, “the path is also opened for other men, since in our deepest self, nothing human is foreign to us” (Reinhardt 1978, 313). Another of the reflections, perhaps the fundamental one, that the century of Theatermania has delivered to us successors.

 Markus Koch interprets the ‘I’ as described in Moritz’s Anton Reiser, published in the Magazin, as representing not just the author, but also a bourgeois social reality. The conflict that arose between the individual and society, and the consequent rebellion of the inner self, was a typical motif of the Sturm und Drang (Koch 2007, 3). Even earlier, Baioni wrote: “Anton Reiser (…) is – as Hofmannsthal clearly saw – the other face of the Sturm und Drang, which Moritz portrayed in the negative form of a young intellectual whose destiny is to ‘be repressed’ by conditions of absolutist paternalism and is therefore condemned to suffer the pains of poetry” (Baioni 1969, 43–44).

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Bibliography Baioni, Giuliano. Goethe. Classicismo e Rivoluzione. Torino: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 1969. Balme, Cristopher. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Bellavia, Sonia. “La vocazione teatrale di Karl Philipp Moritz.” Acting Archives Review IX.19 (2020): 76– 101. https://www.actingarchives.it/review/archivio-numeri/31-anno-x-numero-19-maggio-2020/ 223-la-vocazione-teatrale-di-karl-philipp-moritz.html (12 October 2021). Bellavia, Sonia. “L’eco del pensiero rosacrociano nell’idea di teatro tedesco del secondo Settecento.” Filosofia 66 (2021): 73–86. Catholy, Eckehard. Moritz und die Ursprünge der deutschen Theaterleidenschaft. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1962. D’Angelo, Paolo. “Presentazione.” Scritti di estetica di Karl Philipp Moritz. Ed. Paolo D’Angelo. Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni, 1990. 7–39. Devrient, Eduard. Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst. 2 Bde. Berlin: Otto Elsner, 1905. Dickson, Sheila, and Christoph Wingertszahn. “Einführung.” ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ oder Das Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. n.d. http://telota.bbaw.de/mze/ (12 October 2021). Ellenberger, Henry Frédéric. La scoperta dell’inconscio. Storia della psichiatria dinamica. 1976. Eds. Wanda Bertola, Ada Cinato, Fredi Mazzon and Riccardo Valla. 2 vol. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri 2013. Engel, Johann Jakob. “Über Handlung, Gespräch und Erzählung.” Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste 16/2 (1744). Leipzig: Dyck Buchhandlung. Print. 177–258. Engel, Johann Jakob. “Über Handlung, Gespräch und Erzählung.” 1774. Repr. In J.J Engel’s Schriften. Vierter Band. Reden. Ästhetische Versuche. Berlin: Myliussische Buchhandlung, 1802. 101–266. Engel, Johann Jakob. “Lettere sulla mimica.” Ed. Lucia Sabatano. Acting Archives Review III.6 (2013): 291–643. https://www.actingarchives.it/en/books/128-lettere-sulla-mimica.html (11 October 2021). Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Geiger, Ludwig. “Einleitung.” Anton Reiser, ein psychologischer Roman von K. Ph. Moritz. Ed. Bernhard Seuffert. Stuttgart: G.J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1886. XXVII–XXVIII. Grzesiuk, Ewa. “Gnothi sautón oder die Literatur und Menschenkenntnis im 18. Jahrhundert. Gewählte Aspekte.” Roczniki Humanistyczne LIX.5 (2011). 91–113. Heeg, Günther. Das Phantasma der natü rlichen Gestalt. Körper, Sprache und Bild im Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M.-Basel: Stroemfeld Verlag, 2000. Hoffmeier, Dieter. Ästhetische und methodische Grundlagen der Schauspielkunst. Friedrich Ludwig Schröder. Dresden: VEBVerlag der Kunst, 1955. Kant, Immanuel. Storia universale della natura e teoria del cielo. Eds. Giacomo Scarpelli, Stefano Velotti. Roma: Bulzoni, 2009. Klischnig, Karl Friedrich. Erinnerungen aus den zehn letzten Lebensjahren meines Freundes Anton Reiser. Berlin: Wilhelm Vieweg, 1794. Koch, Markus. Kritische Discussion über den Zusammenhang von Theater und Bildung in Karl Philipp Moritz’ “Anton Reiser” unter Einbezug von Goethes “Wilhelm Meister”, Grin Verlag (books on demand) 2007. Laube, Stephan. “Wissenstheater-Theaterkunst. Theatralische Episoden im Pietismus.” Pietismus und Neuzeit. Ein Jahrbuch zur Geschichte des neueren Protestantismus. 34. Eds. Rudolf Dellsperger, Ulrich Gäbler, Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen et al. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 42–81. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, “Briefe” (20 Januar 1742). Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Herbert G. Göpfert. München: Carl Hanser, 1970–1979. Bd. VII (1979).

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Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Briefwechsel mit seinem Bruder Karl Gotthelf Lessing. Ed. Karl Gotthelf Lessing. Berlin: Voß Buchhandlung, 1794. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. La Drammaturgia d’Amburgo. Ed. Paolo Chiarini. Bari: Laterza, 1956. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Lo scopo ultimo del pensiero umano.” Scritti di estetica di Karl Philipp Moritz. Ed. Paolo D’Angelo. Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni, 1990. 51–53. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser. Romanzo psicologico. Ed. Simonetta Cantagalli. Pisa: Jacques e i suoi quaderni, 1996. Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungs-Seelenkunde.” Karl Philipp Moritz, Werke. Ed. Heide Hollmer, Albert Meier. 2 Bd. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999. Bd. 1. 793–809. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. 10 Bd. (1783–1793). http://telota.bbaw.de/ mze/ (12 October 2021). Moritz, Karl Philipp. “Improvisatoren.” Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788. In Briefen. Berlin: Maurer, 1792. Theil 3. 27–28. Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika. “Esoterik im 18. Jahrhundert – Aufklärung und Esoterik. Eine Einleitung.” Aufklärung und Esoterik. Ed. Monika Neugebauer-Wölk. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999. 1–37. Reinhardt, Max. “Über die Fähigkeit der Verwandlung.” Max Reinhardt in Amerika. Eds. Edda Fuhrich-Leisler, Gisela Prossnitz. Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1978. 312–314. Reiser, Anton. Theatromania, oder die Wercke der Finsterniß: in denen öffentlichen Schau-spielen von den alten Kirchen-Vätern verdammet, Ratzeburg: Niclas Nissen, 1681. https://reader.digitale-sammlun gen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10923343_00005.html (11 October 2021). Schmaus, Marion H.H. Psychosomatik. Literarische, philosophische und medizinische Geschichten zur Entstehung eines Diskurses (1778–1936). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009.

Roberta Ascarelli

Transgression and moralism. Lessing and the vain seduction of sin Introduction On the occasion of Duchess Philippine Charlotte’s birthday a new play by Lessing, Emilia Galotti, was staged at the court of Braunschweig. The noblewoman wanted from the famed writer a classical tragedy with ancient echoes, heroic values and a style full of pathos supported by an emphatic declamation. For the occasion Lessing wrote instead a bürgerliches Trauerspiel, as the subtitle stated, in which genres and stage traditions intertwined, abandoning any emphasis on oratory and any explicit statement of values, in favor of an open work in a middle style, full of contradictions and shifting sentiments that cover a host of more or less explicit themes dealing with the limitless political, ethical, critical, pedagogical expansion of late eighteenth-century theater, at the onset of well-tempered German Theatermania.

1 How to dismiss the classic “Another unspeakable happening occurred in the city as a result of lust; this was as abominable in its outcome as was the rape and death of Lucretia that had driven the Tarquins from the city and kingship. And so, not only did the same end befall the decemvirs as befell the kings, but the same cause also deprived them of power” (Livy 2006, 216). Thus Livy begins his telling of the story of Virginia, the young woman whom the decemvir Appius Claudius had tried to enslave against the will of her father Virginus and Roman law. Her father’s reaction is proud and steadfast: “It was to Icilius, not you, Appius, that I promised my daughter. I raised her to be married, not debauched. Animals and wild beasts fornicate indiscriminately. Is this what you want? I do not know whether these people here will tolerate this. But I don’t expect that those who have arms will do so” (Livy 2006, 220). But deception and power prevail over reputation and Virginius decides to kill the girl in order to save her from being dishonored. Then, with bloody hands, he invites soldiers and plebeians to revolt, thus triggering, in indignation and horror, the expulsion of the decemvirs.

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Boccaccio had revisited the ancient tale in De claris mulieribus (Boccaccio 2011, 128–130) and over the centuries it had inspired many others.¹ Lessing’s 1772 political-sentimental drama recast the ancient story with modern characters and sensibilities, and a language, while at times antiquated, was far from classicist rhetoric. For the sake of political prudence and literary coloring, he set it at an Italian court well known to Maria Theresa’s politics, that of Guastalla, and in a cruel sixteenthcentury distant enough not to arouse suspicion. The story is well known. Emilia Galotti, daughter of a retired officer, a model of virtue who lives far from the court, is about to marry Count Appiani, but the despotic lord of those lands, Hettore Gonzaga, instructs his Chamberlain Marinelli to prevent the wedding. Emilia is kidnapped, to be taken to one of the prince’s palaces, while Appiani falls victim to the assassins’ attack. Too fragile and confused to escape or resist, Emilia begs her father to take her life. As Virginius had once done, but without the pride of the ancient soldier, Odoardo, in a fit of rage, stabs his daughter to death, “Eine Rose gebrochen, ehe der Sturm sie entblättert” (Lessing 2000, 370). An atrocious conclusion that appears incomprehensible and unnatural in the text’s bourgeois framework.² Odoardo, disoriented, refuses to end his life with the bad tragedy of a suicide and entrusts himself to divine justice without even invoking earthly justice: “Sie erwarten vielleicht – says Odoardo to Hettore –, dass ich den Stahl wider mich selbst kehren werde, um meine Tat wie eine schale Tragödie zu beschließen?” (Lessing 2000, 370).³ Hettore too is shocked, and with his gaze fixed on the corpse of his beloved, blames that death on the fragility of human nature and Marinelli’s wickedness: “Ist es, zum Unglücke so mancher, nicht genug, dass Fürsten Menschen sind: müssen sich auch noch Teufel in ihren Freund verstellen?” (Lessing 2000, 371).⁴ Amidst barely muttered accusations, uncontrollable emotions, doubts about the meaning and need for such a conclusion, in the absence of shared ethical references, Lessing’s drama aroused above all a human pity – and the author under-

 Eighteenth-century dramas that preceded the writing of Emilia: John Dennis, Appius and Virginia (1709); Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Appio Claudio (1712); Saverio Pansuti, Virginia (1725); Giovanni Antonio Bianchi, La Virginia (1732), John Moncrieff, Virginia (1755); Frances Brooke, Virginia (1756); Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Virginie (1767); Durante Duranti, Virginia (1768–1772); we should also cite the texts that Lessing had commented on: Montiano y Luyando, Virginia (1750); Samuel Crisp, Virginia (1754), Johann Samuel Patzke, Virginia. Ein Trauerspiel (1755).  See Friedrich Nicolai’s letter to Lessing of April 7, 1772, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe von und an Lessing 1770–1776, Bd. 12, 389.  [“Do you perhaps expect – Odoardo tells Hettore – me to turn steel against myself to conclude my action, as in a tawdry tragedy?”].  [“It is not enough, for the misfortune of many, that princes are men: must devils also hide among their friends?”].

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scored this in two letters written to his brothers Karl and Nicolai – for the end of that young woman, while there lurked in the shadows the antagonistic dimension of Livy’s tale, which dominated the versions of it in his day. There is no plebeian who rebels against a despotic gentleman,⁵ there are no bitter reflections on justice, which Boccaccio’s tale ends upon, nor the exaltation of the ancient virtues that had inspired his eighteenth-century epigones. Even the contrast between the immorality of the courts and the morality of those who live far from power remains blurred, for Lessing had in any case staged it in a much more convincing way in Minna von Barnhelm, while here it was domesticated in a generalized sentimental disorientation (Greis 1991, 104–107) that ends up annihilating all the protagonists (Müller 1987, 314). This political, ethical and even historical cancellation of the conflict baffled audiences that, if they did not expect a revolt, could at least count on a minimal brave soldier’s heroism against an inept tyrant: “For the Virginia story, which Emilia herself alludes to in the penultimate scene, was familiar to everyone, and the omission of the revolution in Lessing’s version draws attention to it by its very absence” (Nisbet 2013, 501). The unexpected and weird conclusion of the drama (Tucci 2005, 265), with its characters who do not arouse any particular identification – a reviewer of the Neue Critische Nachrichten even claimed that Lessing intended to dampen the tragic feeling – left an empty space in which a large number of issues were stirred up, contributing to making Emilia Galotti one of the most problematic texts in German literary history.⁶ For Lessing, the horrid pedagogy of seventeenth-century theater did not suffice, nor was the idealizing formalism advanced by Johann Christoph Gottsched, the compunctious reformer of German theater. By foregoing the mythical, heroic model, the determinism of destiny and the consolations of morality , he was able to involve the public in a “game of discovery” (Sanna 1983, 12) that runs like a common thread through much of his work: Ich erinnere hier meine Leser, dass diese Blätter nichts weniger als ein dramatisches System enthalten sollen. Ich bin also nicht verpflichtet, alle die Schwierigkeiten aufzulösen, die ich mache. Meine Gedanken mögen immer sich weniger zu verbinden, ja wohl gar sich zu wi-

 A rebellion that Lessing also employed in other plays, such as Samuel Henzi or the fragment on Masaniello, and that therefore was not unthinkable in a dramatic text about the Court of Guastalla.  Critics have strongly insisted on the enigmatic nature of the text and, above all, on its conclusion: see, among others, Weigand (1929); Steinhauer (1949); Wierlacher (1973); Whiton (1985); Lamport (1990).

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dersprechen scheinen: wenn es denn nur Gedanken sind, bei welchen sie Stoff finden, selbst zu denken. Hier will ich nichts als Fermenta cognitionis ausstreuen.⁷ (Lessing 1968, 395)

In his diary of the Hamburg experience he clarifies what the bumpy critical path he offered his audience was: “Primus sapientiae gradus est falsa intelligere”, “secundus, true knowing”, Lessing writes (Lessing 1968, 297), defining procedures that, if they aspired to knowledge of the truth, were not afraid to venture through visions, hypotheses and tentative beliefs, “born by chance and more as a result of my readings, than by a methodical development of general principles” (Lessing 1990, 15). Often Lessing’s theater is conspiratorial and provocative, owing to the contrast between reality and what is portrayed – or at least what the public expects – starting with the Reisender in Die Juden of 1749 – but published in 1754 – too German to be Jewish according to Michaelis⁸ and too Jewish, according to Lessing, to find acceptance in the German world. Thus, at the end of Minna von Barnhelm, the desired pardon/reinstatement of Major Tellheim, expelled without guilt from the army, appears so unlikely in Frederick II’s Prussia that it raises ethical and political questions about the nature of that dominion. Lastly, the happy and theologically open ending of Nathan der Weise, brimming over with recognitions and good sentiments, is striking for its absence of a dialogue between faiths and world views, declaring, though with prudence, the rational limits of revealed religions and suggesting a comparison with eccentric (and suspicious) interpretations of history and the divine.⁹ In Emilia Galotti, between bizarre collocations, an illogical outcome, incongruous stage directions and a hodgepodge of theatrical traditions, it is more than ever clear that the author’s aim was “to inhibit the audience’s identification, on the con-

 [“I remind my readers here that these pages make no claim to providing a systematic treatment of dramaturgy. I am therefore not obliged to solve all the problems I pose; it does not matter that my thoughts are not strictly connected: it suffices that my readers themselves should find enough materials to reflect upon. I do nothing but scatter fermenta cognitionis”].  Michaelis’s review, published in Göttingsche Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen in 1754, is in Lessing (1981, 490).  “Nathan aber dient nicht als Sprachrohr von Lessings Ideen, wie oft behauptet wird. Vielmehr stellt Nathan eine Figur dar, die durch den Prozess von Erfahrung, Praxis und Handeln zu einem Verständnis gelangt, welches er nicht durch Predigen verbreitet, sondern in der Praxis dialogischer Interaktion bewährt”, [“However, Nathan, he doesn’t make himself the mouthpiece of Lessing’s ideas, as is often maintained. Rather, he is one who, through the process of experience, practice and action, arrives at an understanding that he spreads not by preaching but by demonstrating in the practice of dialogical interaction”] (Goetschel 2010/2011, 153).

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trary arousing a sort of critical and cultural distance from the events being portrayed” (Paolucci 2016, 324).

2 Encroachments, amazements and disconnections Relying on the whimpering helplessness of the protagonists and the contradictions within the text, Lessing mainly stages what does not happen. And so the author, who in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie had forcefully stated the theme of the citizenship of his people in a conscious modernity, declares with an insurrection that fails to take place and a conscienceless bourgeoisie the tasks of his ambitious dramaturgy to orient – Paolo Chiarini wrote in the Italian edition of Lessing’s theater diary – “life, passions, the ideals of a people, as can happen in no art” (Chiarini 1975, xxiv). A process that in the dearth of solutions tends to define above all a method and to set the goal of a moderate and shareable happiness: Das Total der einzeln Glückseligkeiten aller Glieder, ist die Glückseligkeit des Staats. – Lessing writes in Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimaurer of 1778 – Außer dieser gibt es gar keine. Jede andere Glückseligkeit des Staats, bei welcher auch noch so wenig einzelne Glieder leiden, und leiden müssen, ist Bemäntelung der Tyrannei. Anders nichts!¹⁰ (Lessing 2001, 24)

Consistent with the criticism he wrote in his 1753 review of L’Esprit des Nations, in which he distances himself from the universal spirits that generate imaginary systems within the rationalistic-dogmatic edifice of Wolffism, and from the hypertrophically systematic Germans, Lessing outlines a field in which obscurities seem to have a particular hermeneutic value. He therefore devotes himself to “concealing and surrounding with mystery” (Nisbet 1986, 291) elements of his world view while crucial issues appear exclusively between the lines. In his Prologue to the staging of Johann-Friedrich von Cronegk’s Olint und Sophronia – which Lessing mentions in full in chapter six of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie – he stresses the importance of theater. It is not just a question of arousing pity and compassion, forming customs and teaching virtue. It is also about learning to reflect, in the absence of dogmas and empty certainties, on all the themes of nature – not excluding those of its creation and its beauty – and of virtuous coexistence:

 [“The sum of the individual happinesses of all members is the happiness of the State. Beyond this there is nothing. Any other happiness of the State, in which even a few members suffer, and they must suffer, is a disguise for tyranny. Nothing more!”].

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Die Fürsicht sendet sie mitleidig auf die Erde, Zum Besten des Barbars, damit er menschlich werde; Weiht sie, die Lehrerin der Könige zu sein, Mit Würde, mit Genie, mit Feur vom Himmel ein; Heisst sie, mit ihrer Macht, durch Tränen zu ergötzen, Das stumpfeste Gefühl der Menschenliebe wetzen; Durch süsse Herzensangst, und angenehmes Graun Die Bosheit bändigen und an den Seelen baun; Wohltätig für den Staat, den Wütenden, den Wilden Zum Menschen, Bürger, Freund und Patrioten bilden. Gesetze stärken zwar der Staaten Sicherheit Als Ketten an der Hand der Ungerechtigkeit; Doch deckt noch immer List den Bösen vor dem Richter, Und Macht wird oft der Schutz erhabener Bösewichter. Wer rächt die Unschuld dann? Weh dem gedrückten Staat, Der, statt der Tugend, nichts als ein Gesetzbuch hat! Gesetze, nur ein Zaum der offenen Verbrechen, Gesetze, die man lehrt des Hasses Urteil sprechen, Wenn ihnen Eigennutz, Stolz und Parteilichkeit Für eines Solons Geist den Geist der Drückung leiht!¹¹ (Lessing 1968, 29)

The real challenge of dramaturgy in those years, through and beyond Lessing, took shape in this. To shape it, a reform of writing and a general reform of theater were needed to offset both the pathetic and terrifying forms of the Baroque, and the bloodless ones of Gottsched’s reform, in order to grasp the propensities of man, the strength and risks of passions, the primacy of praxis, and to place at the center, in the art of the actor as in the texts, the aspiration to truth and to a new, profound harmony. Lessing’s stage suggestions thus presuppose the theater’s coming to terms with some fundamental questions on the prospects of an equilibrated education of mankind, as Lessing’s 1780 book is titled. There he affirms, in a universalistic key, the need to safeguard the contradictory aspects of human nature in every per-

 [“Compassionate Providence sent her to earth to tame the barbarian and make him more human. He clothed her with her dignity, genius, celestial fire, consecrating her as preceptress of kings; he commanded her to use her strength to recreate with tears, to arouse love for one’s neighbor even in the hardest heart; to harness perfidy, to edify souls with sweet anguish and pleasant terrors, to render a service to the State, transforming the ferocious barbarian into a man, citizen, friend and patriot. Laws strengthen the security of States and are like chains in the hands of injustice; but often deceit still keeps the wicked under cover of the judge. And power makes a noble shield, it will choose you. Therefore, who will avenge innocence? Woe to the oppressed country that relies solely on a code and not on virtue! Laws only mitigate manifest crimes. They are given the language of hatred, when interest, pride and partiality instill its spirit with oppression in place of Solon’s wisdom”].

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formance. “Education gives man nothing that he cannot find in himself. It gives him what he could find in himself, only more quickly and easily” (Lessing 2001, 75) proceeding by successive steps, with pauses and second thoughts. This defines a spectrum of unprecedented breadth for the vicarious function of the German stage, which extends to all areas of life, from forming individuals to forming citizens, from individual motivations to historical ones. An expanded dimension, especially suitable for an enigmatic drama like Emilia Galotti, which, from emotions to enunciations, self-censorship and absences, satisfies most of the tasks that Lessing assigns to theater, thus outlining a model of the theoretical, conceptual and aesthetic breadth of late eighteenth-century German theater.

3 Contaminations and gambles If we question this bourgeois drama, looking for all the nooks and crannies that the public – and with it the theater as an institution – was called on to fill, we find an amazing and thunderous clue in the fact that audiences at Vienna’s Kärtnertortheater in July 1772 enjoyed the performances of that tragedy despite its bloody, plaintive plot – as Kafka’s friends had done on hearing him read The Metamorphosis, in possession of a key that time has partially erased –. The reaction is surprising, especially if we consider that, for the Vienna representation, there had been no significant script changes. In a letter dated July 1772, Eva König informs Lessing that the three repeat performances had been resoundingly successful. She adds with astonishment that she has never heard such laughter, even in scenes that were most appropriate to weeping. Even the emperor, after praising the work and the performers, claimed that he had never enjoyed himself so much watching a drama (Lessing 1988, 442–443). For Paul Rilla it was just the proof of the gross ignorance of the Habsburg ruler (Rilla 1968, 279) and a confirmation of the backwardness of Austrian theater. But Lessing did not seem surprised, aware as he was of the text’s grotesque twists and turns, which Ramler noted in his review (Ramler 1884, 366) and convinced, as he writes in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, of the need to stress, in the wake of Shakespeare, the mixed character of drama – especially in chapters I and II (see Müller 1972, 28–60) – and of not definitively abandoning the tradition of popular theater. Lessing makes no comment on König’s judgment, when she attributes such hilarity to a third-rate performance. In particular, the actor who played Hettore Gonzaga, Stephanie der Ältere, in fact appreciated in Vienna above all for the elegance of his style, interpreted the role by making the prince a sort of clown who moves spasmodically, with often rash gestures, mouth gaping, eyes bulging, tongue hanging out.

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Turning the bourgeois tragedy into a farce, with actors who imitated gesticulation and characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, had for the audience of the Kärtnertortheater a confirmation in the name Lessing had chosen for the shady courtier who does everything possible to humor Gonzaga’s unbridled libido. The Chamberlain’s name, Marinelli, which for critics echoes the historical one of Machiavelli, as proof of the work’s political context,¹² actually belongs to a Viennese contemporary: Karl Marinelli, the comedian who had defended the lustige Person, written texts for Kasperl’s mask and dared to polemicize with Joseph von Sonnenfels on his theater reform.¹³ Hence for Viennese audiences it was not a crafty Renaissance character who holds together the threads of the plot, but an actor who bombarded his audiences with Commedia dell’Arte type gags and getups, despite the firm opposition of reformers. Hettore, under Marinelli’s direction, thus became a sort of clumsy, inept Kasperl who aroused hilarity also for the Lessing’s stage directions, which, irreconcilable with the eighteenth-century postures of the tragic actor, were perfectly suited to a popular theater of masks – or even puppets. The text required brusque movements interrupted without a reason, a mimic that, incongruous and excessive, became an integral part of the dialogue, and above all the fact that Hettore placed absolute trust in Marinelli, even throwing himself, as Johann La Roche did in Kasperl’s farces, into the arms of the lead actor: “(jumping to grab the portrait); (At this point the prince snatches the painting out of Marinelli’s hands again and throws it to one side), The PRINCE (who throws himself full of despair onto a chair), (who jumps at him again), (throws himself into his arms)” (Lessing 2000, 12–14). Anyway, there is a long list of stage directions that conflict not only with the tastes of the time, but also with the considerations the author makes in the fragment Der Schauspieler in the fourth section of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie.

 On the origins of names in Lessing’s works, see Ziolkowski 2016.  Karl Marinelli was a man of the theater, actor, a comedy writer, an opponent of Sonnenfels and his Enlightenment reform of the theater, censured by the reformers and particularly adored by the general public. In 1760, he joined Johann Schulz’s tour company. Starting from 1768 he authored texts in which a new mask, Kasperl, played by Johann La Roche, triumphed. In Vienna he developed an old style: cumbersome works, full of twists and disguises, in which Kasperl’s gags were combined with the wonders of an impressive theater that did not eschew magical or surreal elements. Despite the hostility of the reformers, the comedians attracted the capital’s audiences. In a letter from Vienna dated January 26, 1771, Koenig cites one of her works, Der Geschmack der Komödie ist unbestimmt, with Hanswurst and Kasperl next to Lyceon, a parodic depiction of Sonnenfels.

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Here, analyzing the gestures of the actor, Lessing invites us to take as a model the composure of the greatest German interpreter, Konrad Ekhof: Er gebrauchte sich also seiner Hände sparsamer, als der Pantomime, aber ebensowenig vergebens, als dieser. Er rührte keine Hand, wenn er nichts damit bedeuten oder verstärken konnte. Er wusste nichts von den gleichgültigen Bewegungen, durch deren beständigen einförmigen Gebrauch ein so grosser Teil von Schauspielern, besonders das Frauenzimmer, sich das vollkommene Ansehen von Drahtpuppen gibt.¹⁴ (Lessing 1968, 20)

Of course, Lessing, as a promoter of the distance between dramaturgy and historical/documentary reality, did not make his Marinelli a simple replica for the Viennese actor.¹⁵ The profile of a wicked man was already present in the first drafts of the text, in keeping both with Livy’s account of an impostor, Marcus Claudius, who is willing to lie in order to curry favor with the decemvir, and with highlighting the link between this ‘bourgeois tragedy’ and the Commedia dell’Arte with its crowd of shifty characters who exhibit few scruples and much brazenness. Yet, the downgrading of the prince to a puppet in the hands of a director for whom life was just “ein Spiel, ein Plan, ein Tanz”: a play, a plan, a danze (Guthke 1973, 60), so passive that he does not understand what is happening around him and is unable to make decisions, suggests a further expansion of what in this drama is not made explicit but only hinted at by its absence, strangeness or inner contradiction, i. e. the relationship between reason and feeling which, in its late eighteenth-century centrality, was interestingly mirrored in Lessing’s readings of Spinoza. Of importance for gauging the amplitude of Lessing’s project – and therefore of the expansiveness of the stage space in late eighteenth-century Germany – is

 [“He therefore used his hands less than the pantomimist, but as little in vain as he. He did not move his hand if he could not mean something thereby or emphasise something. He knew nothing of those indif-ferent movements through whose constant monotonous use a large portion of actors, especially women, give to themselves the appearance of mere marionettes”] (Lessing 1962, 16).  “Nun ist zwar wahr, dass wir diesen ihren Charakter aus ihren wirklichen Begegnissen abstrahieret haben: es folgt aber daraus nicht, dass uns auch ihr Charakter wieder auf ihre Begegnisse zurückführen müsse; er kann uns nicht selten weit kürzer, weit natürlicher auf ganz andere bringen, mit welchen jene wirkliche weiter nichts gemein haben, als dass sie mit ihnen aus einer Quelle, aber auf unzuverfolgenden Umwegen und über Erdstriche hergeflossen sind, welche ihre Lauterheit verdorben haben”, (Lessing 1968, 323) [“Now it is true that we have abstracted this character from the real events of their lives, but it does not therefore follow that their character must lead us back to these events. Not rarely it will lead us far more briefly and naturally to quite others with which those real ones have nothing in common save that they have flowed from one source, but by paths that cannot be fol- lowed, and over tracts of land that have fouled their purity”] (Lessing 1962, 238–239).

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that a play with a classical plot – albeit sprinkled with bourgeois values and in a markedly secessionist perspective (Mattencklott and Peitsch 1976, 177) – with its Renaissance court, a tyrant, a shabby courtier and threatened virtue can be the container not only of a revolutionary theatrical experimentation (Schlegel 1801, 202), but also the site of a theoretical gamble. Lessing’s procedure appears more evident in his later years when, forced by the Duke of Wolfenbüttel to relent on his religious polemic, he chose the dramatic fable of Nathan der Weise for an engaging – and radical – treatment of deism: “I must see if they will still let me preach undisturbed in my old pulpit, at least in the theater” (letter dated 6. 9.1778, B, Bd. XII, 193), he wrote to Reimarus’s daughter and to his brother Karl (letter dated 11.7.1778, B, Bd. XII, 207). Even in the case of Emilia Galotti Lessing used theater to express his thoughts touching on dangerous themes that involve, beyond the relationship between reason and sentiment, the place of God in, highlighting, through “Spinozistic exercises” (Allison 1982, 223–233), his proximity to the Dutch philosopher.¹⁶ Lessing was interested over the years, with varying intensity, in different aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy. He discussed themes of Spinoza’s metaphysics with Mendelssohn in the 1750s, even with the idea of staging a portrayal of passions: “In the second half of the decade, however, in the context of the exchange on tragedy, the discussion shifts, on Mendelssohn’s initiative, to the role Spinoza’s theory of affects could play in a modern and effective theory of the stage play” (Goetschel 2004, 183). Then, in Breslau, between 1760 and 1765, he took a deeper look into Spinoza’s Ethics (Pons 1964, 83, 102, 108; 126–127; 311). In the following decade, Lessing’s Spinozism turned above all to the Tractatus theologico-politicus, though the Ethics left powerful, traces on the writing of Emilia Galotti, precisely within the metaphorical field, introduced by the play on a surname stolen from the Kasperltheater, where puppets and puppeteers seem in the grip of passivity and necessity. Thus, while the characters were part of a recognizable theater of the world, the plot placed the drama within an imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and a poet who ‘sets in motionʼ on the stage the reflections of a great and forbidden thinker.

 On this topic: Van Stockum 1916; Allison 1966; Pä tzold 1985, 1995; Fick 2000, 425–433.

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4 Reading Spinoza at the Court of Guastalla All the characters in Lessing’s work enact a detailed – and desperate – phenomenology of the passions, closely related to the analysis Spinoza makes in De affectibus, the third part of his Ethics. ¹⁷ The figure of Hettore, a puppet at the mercy of a corrupt and perverted ratio, which critics of the time had interpreted as an example of a sovereign insensitive to Enlightenment teaching – “Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi” (Schmid 1985, 371) – has in it sufficient elements of Spinoza’s thought to suggest an interpreation of Emilia Galotti that takes his Ethics as a subtext, related to the specific theatrical question of passions, their power and use. Actually all the characters show the appetites analyzed in the seventeenth-century text: the effort to prevent the conquest of what one alone can conquer; the impetuosity of Orsina’s hatred, all the greater as her love had once been passionate; the dangers deriving from Odoardo’s progressively enfeebled vision and orientation: “he looks about him wildly, stamping his feet and foaming at the mouth. […] Rummaging through both sides of his garments and finding himself weaponless” (Lessing 2000, 355); Appiani’s blindness to the nature of his own desires; Emilia’s confusion and ambiguity, the only one who understands the nature of her feelings but on too elementary a level to become fully aware. But it is above all Hettore who displays clear textual references, from his first meeting with Conti, in which the prince confuses Emilia’s painted image with reality and allows all his actions to be conditioned by a passion for the girl in the picture. In his emotional inconstancy Hettore confides only in those who indulge the moods of his feckless soul, as well as his desire to banish from his mind – and from life – anything he considers with “animosity” (Spinoza 2020, 350–352; 354–356). Lessing defines this human constellation in line with Spinoza’s treatise in how he makes his characters interact, denying them both the intervention of a by now far-away Grand Puppeteer, and the guidance of reason, which nevertheless is the only reliable guide to look to, in God’s absence, for probing and comprehending the depths of man. In a 1750 text on the Pietist Herrnhuter movement he had clearly indicated the horizons of this attempt to understand human emotions:

 “[…] the actual economy of affects at play in Lessing’s dramas from Minna von Barnhelm to Emilia Galotti and Nathan der Weise resists a simple reduction to the Aristotelian framework. Instead, Lessing’s mature dramas accommodate a conception of the free and unrestricted play of affects” (Goetschel 2004, 129).

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Kehret den Blick in euch selbst! In euch sind die unerforschten Tiefen, worinnen ihr euch mit Nutzen verlieren könnt. Hier untersucht die geheimsten Winkel. Hier lernet die Schwäche und Stärke, die verdeckten Gänge und den offenbaren Ausbruch eurer Leidenschaften! Hier richtet das Reich auf, wo ihr Untertan und König seid! Hier begreifet und beherrschet das einzige, was ihr begreifen und beherrschen sollt; euch selbst. So ermahnte Sokrates, oder vielmehr Gott durch den Sokrates.¹⁸ (Lessing 1989, 937)

With a procedure that tends to stage the dramatic outlooks of an erroneous guide to human nature, he entrusts his characters to Marinelli and his strategy, which aims solely at satisfying what is immediate, leaving all his characters at the mercy of their perverted feelings and whims of fortune. He thus sets forth, by negation and with all the demonstrative force of a play, the theses of Part V of the Ethics, on how dramatic the results of an inadequate management of individual complexity can be. Slavery – Spinoza affirms – is man’s powerlessness to moderate and repress his affections, since man in the thrall of his affections is not master of himself but at the mercy of chance, to whose power he is so subject that he is often forced to take the worst path while in sight of the best. Interpreted in this perspective, Emilia Galotti represents with great effectiveness, and without ceding anything to a mannered pedagogy, a revolutionary and courageous reflection on central aspects of the Enlightenment. Among innovations in language, in Handlung, in the psychology of his characters and the style of acting, he questions the will of the mighty together with the distorting effects of unknown and violent passions, orienting his audience towards a critical vigilance regarding different systems of power, whether that of the State or of individual characters; he invites us to reflect on the ‘grip’ of bourgeois values, in order to display their qualities together with their limits, and he elaborates precise references to Spinoza’s Ethics, which graft this bourgeois drama onto a philosophical-religious re-elaboration. And it gives voice, as a remedy to such senselessness, to a pulpetless preaching: if whoever is prey to his sentimental disconnection is represented as inhuman, or at least as a loser, then it is a question of re-establishing a perspective of happiness for mankind on a non-ideological or moralistic basis, as J.G. Sulzer suggested in his Untersuchung über den Ursprung der angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen of 1773, guaranteeing the relationship between ethics, reason and sentiment, so that a new alliance between morality, reason and passions can take place. What  [“Look into yourselves! In you are those unexplored depths in which you can profitably lose yourself. Seek here the most secret corners. Learn here weakness and strength, the tortuous paths and the manifest eruption of your passions! Build here the kingdom in which you are both subjects and kings! Conceive and dominate here that one reality which you must conceive and dominate: yourselves. So Socrates admonished, or rather it was God who admonished it through Socrates”].

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does virtue consist of? Jerusalem wondered, expressing wholeheartedly a perspective that more than his own seems Lessing’s: It is that in our choices we prefer what reason presents us as the greatest good over what our passions present to us as good, and we orient our actions consistently. In short: it is the domination of our passions by means of reason. Nothing more than illuminating the darkness of our passions with reason (Jerusalem 1776, 32–33).

Bibliography Allison, Henry. “Lessing’s Spinozistic Exercises”. Humanitä t und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht. Eds. Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris and Lawrence G. Lyon. Mü nchen-Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982. 223–233. Allison, Henry. Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. Arendt, Hannah. Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten. Rede über Lessing. München: Piper, 1960. Boccaccio, Giovanni. De claris mulieribus. Trans. with Introduction and Notes by Guido A. Guarino, On Famous Women, New York: Italica Press, 2011. Chiarini, Paolo. Introduzione, in G.E. Lessing, Drammaturgia di Amburgo, Ed. Paolo Chiarini, Roma: Bulzoni, 1975. VII–LXXI. Fick, Monika. Lessing-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. Goetschel, Willi. “Inszenierungen einer Figur: Lessing und die jüdische Spinoza-Rezeption.” Lessing Jahrbuch, XXXIX (2010/2011): 143–158. Goetschel, Willi. Spinoza’s Modernity, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. The Madison-Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Greis, Jutta. Drama Liebe: Zur Entstehung der modernen Liebe im Drama des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Guthke, Karl Siegfried. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967 (1973). Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm. “Über die Freiheit”. Philosophische Aufsätze. Hrsg. v. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Braunschweig: Buchhandlung des Fürstlichen Waisenhauses, 1776. 19–54. Lamport, J. Francis. “The Death of Emilia Galotti. A Reconsideration.” German Life and Letters 44, 1 (1990): 25–34. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburg Dramaturgy. Trans. by Victor Lange. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Sämmtliche Schriften. Hrsg. v. Karl Lachmann, Wendetin von Maltzahn. Bd. 7. Leipzig: Göschen, 1854 – Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Sämmtliche Schriften. Hrsg. v. Karl Lachmann, Wendetin von Maltzahn. Bd. 6: Minna von Barnhelm. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Wie die alten den Tod gebildet. Hrsg. v. Klaus Bohnen, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. 181–694. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985 ff.

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Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Eva Koenig’s Letter to Lessing of July 15, 1772”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Bd. XI/2: Lessing Briefe 1770–1776. Hrsg. v. Helmuth Kiesel unter Mitwirkung v. Georg Braungart et al., Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. 441–444. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Friedrich Nicolai’s Letter to Lessing of April 7, 1772”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Bd. XI/2: Lessing Briefe 1770–1776. Hrsg. v. Helmuth Kiesel unter Mitwirkung v. Georg Braungart et al., Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. 389–393. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Lessing’s Letter to Karl Lessing of November 7, 1778.” Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al., Bd. XI/2: Lessing Briefe 1776–1781. Hrsg. v. Helmuth Kiesel unter Mitwirkung v. Georg Braungart et al., Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. 207–208. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Die Juden. Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Bd. 1: Frühe Lustspiele. Hrsg. von Jürgen Stenzel. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. 447–488. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim et al. “Gedanken über die Herrnhuter”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Bd. 1: Frühe Lustspiele. Hrsg. von Jürgen Stenzel. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. 935–945. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Bd. V/2. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al., Bd. V/2. Hrsg. v. Wilfried Barner, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990. 9–321. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Lessing’s Letter to Elise Reimarus of September 6, 1778”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al. Bd. XII/2: Lessing Briefe 1776–1781. Hrsg. v. Helmuth Kiesel unter Mitwirkung v. Markus Reppner et al. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. 193–194. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Emilia Galotti”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Hrsg. von W. Barner et al., Bd. VII. Hrsg. v. Klaus Bohnen, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000. 291–371. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimaurer”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Bd. X. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2000. 11–71. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts”. Werke und Briefe 12 in 14 Bänden. Bd. X. Hrsg. v. Arno Schilson und Axel Schmitt. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001. 73–99. Livy, The History of Rome. Trans. with intr. and notes by Valerie M. Warrior. Indianapolis-Cambridge: Hacket, 2006. Mattenklott, Gert and Helmut Peitsch. “Das Allgemeinmenschliche im Konzept des bü rgerlichen Nationaltheaters Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Mitleidstheorie.” Literatur im historischen Prozeß. Hrsg. v. Gert Mattenklott und Klaus R. Scherpe. Kronberg: Scriptor, 1976. 147–189. Müller, Klaus-Detlef. “Das Erbe der Komödie im bürgerlichen Trauerspiel. Lessings Emilia Galotti und die Commedia dell’Arte.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte XLVI (1972): 28–60. Müller, Klaus-Detlef. “Das Virginia Motiv in Emilia Galotti.” Orbis Litterarum 42 (1987): 305–316. Nisbet, Hugh Barr. “Zur Funktion des Geheimnisses in Lessings ‘Ernst und Falk.” Lessing und die Toleranz, Text+Kritik. Hrsg. v. Peter Freimark, Franklin Kopitzsch and Helga Slessarev. Mü nchen-Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. 291–312. Nisbet, Hugh Barr. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Paolucci, Gianluca. “Colore locale o motivo politico? L’Emilia Galotti a Guastalla.” Studi germanici 10 (2016): 321–342. Pä tzold, Detlev. “Lessing und Spinoza: Zum Beginn des Pantheismus-Streits in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts”. Aufklä rung–Gesellschaft–Kritik: Studien zur Philosophie der Aufklä rung. Hrsg. v. Manfred Buhr und Wolfgang Fö rster. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985. 298–355. Pä tzold, Detlev. Spinoza—Aufklä rung—Idealismus: Die Substanz der Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1995. Pons, Georges. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing et le Christianisme. Paris: Marcel Didier, 1964. Ramler, Karl Wilhelm. “Rezension.” Berliner priviligierte Zeitung (1772), in Lessing im Urtheile seiner Zeitgenossen. Zeitungskritiken, Berichte und Notizen, Lessing und seine Werke betreffend, aus den Jahren 1747–1781. Hrsg. v. Julius W. Braun. Berlin: Friedrich 1884. Bd. I. Rilla, Paul. Lessing und sein Zeitalter. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1963. Sanna, Simonetta. Minna von Barnhelm di G.E. Lessing: analisi del testo teatrale. Pisa: Pacini, Pisa 1983. Schenkel, Martin. “‘Wer ü ber gewisse Dinge den Verstand nicht verliert, der hat keine zu verlieren’. Zur Dialektik des bü rgerlichen Trauerspiels in Lessings Emilia Galotti”, Zeitschrift für Philologie 105 (1986): 161–186. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. “Ü ber Lessing (1798/1801).” Charakteristiken und Kritiken von A.W. Schlegel und F. Schlegel, Bd. I. Hrsg. v. August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel. Kö nigsberg: Nicolovius, 1801. Schmid, Christian Heinrich. Ü ber einige Schö nheiten der Emilia Galotti: an Herrn Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter. 1773. Hrsg. v. Hans Henning. Lessings ‘Emilia Galotti’ in der zeitgenö ssische Rezeption, Erstausgabe, zeitgenö ssische Quellen, Anmerkungen und Register. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1981. 357–393. Spinoza, Benedictus de. Ethics. Trans. George Eliot. Eds. Clare Carlisle, Zachary Gartenberg and Davide Monaco. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. Steinhauer, Harry. “The Guilt of Emilia Galotti.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48 (1949): 173–185. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Untersuchung über den Ursprung der angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen (1773). See Id., Vermischte philosophische Schriften. Hildesheim-New York: Olms, 1974. 1–98. Tucci, Francesca. Le passioni allo specchio. ‘Mitleid’ e sistema degli affetti nel teatro di Lessing. Roma: Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, 2005. Van Stockum, Theodorus Cornelis. Spinoza—Jacobi—Lessing: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur und Philosophie im 18. Jahrhundert. Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1916. Weigand, J. Hermann. “Warum stirbt Emilia Galotti?” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 28 (1929): 467–481. Whiton, John. “Why does Emilia Galotti want to die?” Seminar 21 (1985): 243–252. Wierlacher, Aloise. “Das Haus der Freude oder Warum stirbt Emilia Galotti?”. Lessing Yearbook 5 (1973): 147–152. Ziolkowski, Saskia. “Names, Mediation, and Italian Literature in Emilia Galotti. From Dante’s Galeotto to Lessing’s Galotti.” Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch XLII (2016): 161–182.

Fiorella Gabizon

Identity construction and Theatermania in Richard Cumberland In eighteenth-century England it was the novel and not the theater that held up the most faithful mirror to the ethos of the day. The novel took on the role that was formerly the theater’s, or in Hamlet’s famous definition, the task of “holding […] the mirror up to nature” (Shakespeare 1989, 288), or rather, we may say, to society and, indeed, to the middle class. Hence theater was eclipsed by the rise of the novel, which nearly supplanted it, becoming enormously successful because it was considered the most effective artistic medium for expressing the full-fledged bourgeois spirit. Yet Theatermania – an extremely complex phenomenon in its disparate facets, which affected Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century – had very interesting outcomes in England as well, especially if we take into account some works by Richard Cumberland (1732–1811). His work as writer and playwright have been largely neglected by Italian critics, although in his day he was a prominent figure on the British scene, and a somewhat controversial one, who reaped both the successes and the failures of the stage (see Williams 1917, 62). Some critics even believe it plausible that Sheridan based the character of Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic; or A Tragedy Rehearsed (1779) on him, providing the public with a “devastating portrait” (Waith 1978–1979, 283) of Cumberland, who was famous for generously drawing on the works of others and for his inability to take criticism. A portrait that is not only unflattering but also clearly recognizable, “so true was the resemblance […] that one of his sons being present at the representation immediately recognised his father” (Mudford 1812, 180). Despite having written a few novels, among which Arundel (1789) and Henry (1795), which show the clear influence of Fielding, and his autobiography, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland (1806), which through various anecdotes involving many well-known characters provide a precious insight into the life and fashions of his day, Cumberland is best known for his theatrical production, which was his true passion. As Stanley Thomas Williams observed, For dramatic writing he had many talents. His passion for the stage itself was innate and deep seated; he saw plays with enthusiasm and with more than usual insight into their merits and faults; his judgments of actors’ abilities were penetrating and sound; and he occasionally acted himself. In addition to these gifts he was possessed of a rare knowledge and command of all previous drama, both ancient and modern. His plays are steeped in scenes and language reminiscent of the master. (Williams 1917, 62)

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Cumberland wrote several works in the sentimental genre, the most famous being The Brothers (1769), The West Indian,¹ and The Fashionable Lover (1772). And yet again, among his best-known comedies, The Natural Son (1785) and The Jew (1794) are also worthy of mention. Many of his other works were published posthumously in two volumes in 1813. The comedies I analyze here are The West Indian and The Jew, because of their central theme of Theatermania, especially cogent for its bearing on the construction of identity, i. e., that incessant desire to change dress, as Sonia Bellavia (cfr. supra, pp. 1-2) argues, “to experience the most diverse emotions, to interpret roles and parts, feeling different from oneself, in a process that, in the era of the discovery ‘of that invisible thing called the soul’, becomes the high road to knowledge of the inner human being (cfr. supra, p. 2)”. That disease of the age made it possible to construct fictitious realities through which new identities were constructed. The actor could experience a transformation into the other, thus transcending the boundaries of his own self and, by impersonating this outsider, could explore otherness. In addition to addressing the subject of alien identities, he could also involve the public in this process by leveraging, in a much more immediate and effective way, the empathy that the theater itself, unlike the novel, aroused. Another aspect, intrinsically linked to the first and to be kept in mind in analyzing these two works, is that the staging of the other strictly concerned the dimension of sociality and therefore made it possible to build, shape and, especially in the case of Cumberland, even deconstruct those stereotypes that were rooted in the collective imagination of a people. We can take Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817) as a perfect example of this. In her novel – which Edgeworth wrote after being accused by an American reader of anti-Semitism – she shows how, while literature contributes to forming stereotypes, theater is the really crucial medium for deconstructing and reshaping one’s beliefs and emotions: I must observe, that not only in the old story-books, where the characters of Jews are as well fixed to be wicked as the bad fairies, or bad genii, or allegorical personifications of the devils, and the vices in the old emblems, mysteries, moralities, &c, but in almost every work of fiction I found the Jews represented as hateful beings; nay, even in modern tales of very late years. (Edgeworth 1817, 30)

For the purpose of deconstructing such stereotypes, she thus brings the theater into her novel, affording her hero a crucial experience a crucial experience attending a staging of The Merchant of Venice, where Charles Macklin plays the role of

 A comedy staged at Drury Lane and directed by David Garrick in 1771, whose great success even led to its being staged overseas.

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Shylock, probably in one of his last performances – he played Shylock for the last time in 1789, the year he retired from the stage. This performance changes Harrington’s perception of the other. His inverted sympathy allowes him to fully identify with the Jew: I almost wished that Shakespear [sic] had not written, or Macklin had not acted, the part so powerfully: my imagination formed such a strong conception of the pain the Jewess was feeling, and my inverted sympathy, if I may so call it, so over powered my direct and natural feelings, that at every fresh development of the Jew’s villainy I shrunk, as though I had myself been a Jew. Each exclamation against this dog of a Jew, and still more, every general reflection on Jewish usury, avarice, and cruelty, I felt poignantly. No power of imagination could make me pity Shylock, but I felt the force of some of his appeals to justice; and some passages struck me in quite a new light, on the Jewish side of the question. (Edgeworth 1817, 152–153)

It should also be emphasized that Macklin’s naturalistic interpretation, incisive for the emotional impact it had on the public, as Carla De Pretis points out, revolutionized the acting canons of the time: Until then, Shakespeare’s drama had been staged in George Granville’s comic version entitled The Jew of Venice. Shylock was portrayed as a Commedia dell’Arte character, a Pantalone with a red wig and a large nose. Macklin partially restored Shakespeare’s text, studied the gestures, dress and patois of the London Jewish community and restored to the role its original dramatic and satiric depth. (De Pretis 2012, XXIX)

Obviously, in this process, which in the eighteenth-century led to a new way of exploring one’s identity and that of others, theatrical architecture also played an important role. The Elizabethan architecture of the playhouses, with their apron stage, meant that the audience, which stood on their feet and surrounded the actors on three sides, felt almost catapulted into the story being performed. Precisely for this reason the portrayal of the outsider also aroused acute distrust in spectators and/or even fear for their personal safety, as with the infamous Barabas in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, or Shakespeare’s Shylock, Othello, and Caliban: a savage, the latter, labelled a “thing of darkness” (Shakespeare 2000, 238), whom Prospero recognizes as part of himself – “I acknowledge as mine” (Shakespeare 2000, 321) – as if to reaffirm that the darkness we see in the other is actually within ourselves. The physical proximity between actor and spectator made each performance a lived, dialogical experience, and so the outsider, whose proximity was felt even more primally, represented a danger, generated fear and at times even terror and bewilderment. But the Restoration period ushered in the new theatrical architectures that began to mirror those of European theaters, in which the stage acquired depth. In the eighteenth-century the scenic arch changed perceptive norms, fostering a new aesthetic that Diderot described so well: “the spectator is

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in the theater as if before a canvas, where different paintings follow one another by magic” (Diderot 1980, 305). Another important element were the innovations introduced by the Alsatian set designer and painter De Loutherbourg, who, hired by Garrick in 1771, worked at Drury Lane even under Sheridan’s direction, until 1781. His set designs, as Maria Chiara Barbieri highlights, “upstaged the dramatic action” (Barbieri 2006, 52): This tendency to push the area where the actors were performing away from the public was imposed especially in the 1790s, when both Drury Lane and Covent Garden were rebuilt considerably larger. The playwright Richard Cumberland noted that theaters had since then become “for spectators rather than listeners”. Not that until then the visual aspect had been unimportant, but while before attention was focused on the actors, whose minutest facial expressions could be perceived […], in the theaters of the 1790s the public’s eyes were feasted upon a splendid overview of all the scenic elements, with stage machinery so suggestive that they often stole the show – as we might put it – from the actors themselves, who were increasingly immersed in the scenography. (Barbieri 2006, 52)

It is precisely this upstaging and perspective depth, which seem to distance the audience, that allowed the spectator to feel safer while exploring the unknown territory of otherness. The other could now be known in a new way because he was perceived as a distant threat, encapsulated inside a confined, detached, non-bewildering space that did not enthral one’s emotions. In this way, the physical distance from the stage made it possible to reduce the sense of distance from the other in the real world, thanks to that balance between the emotional aspect and scientific observation. Another fundamental element to bear in mind is the cultural revolution of sympathy, the result of the historical events of the time that led to the rise of new values. In late eighteenth-century Europe people had to come to grips with many transformations, and the Enlightenment ideas that characterized the century also influenced and transformed theater, which became, among other things, a sounding board for the new ideals that were gaining ground, and of which Cumberland was also a spokesperson, especially with his The West Indian and The Jew. In The West Indian the character who treads the stage is a West Indies-born Englishman, a character little known to the English stage, though we should also note the farce High Life Below Stairs – staged in 1759 at the Drury Lane Theater – attributed to Garrick but actually written by Reverend James Townley, in which the hero of the play is Lovel, a Jamaican landowner. An article on The West Indian, published in the February 1771 issue of The Critical Review, states: “He who would look for the true designation of the Creole will rather find him in the hasty outlines of Lovel in High Life Below Stairs than in the most laboured scenes of this finished comedy” (Williams 1920, 414).

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Cumberland’s West Indian plantation owner, Belcour, is made the comedy’s hero by the very title. He embarks on a journey to London, where he falls in love with Louisa and is eventually recognized by Stockwell, his real father, who for much of the play poses as an actual spectator, a distant observer of his own son’s character. Paradoxically, only a sort of distancing can lead to an approach; the idea suggested to the public is that knowledge of the other requires (and arises from) a view from afar: “before I publickly [sic] reveal myself, I could wish to make some experiment of my son’s disposition: this can only be done by letting his spirit take its course without restraint; by these means, I think I shall discover much more of his real character under the title of his merchant, than I should under that of his father” (Cumberland 1792, 3). Belcour is an impetuous, impulsive young man, with a frank and generous soul – “All the reports I ever received, give me favourable impressions of his character; wild, perhaps, as the manner of his country is, but, I trust, not frantic or unprincipled” (Cumberland 1792, 5). He is ignorant of the sophisticated manners of Londoners, an aspect that makes him an amusing character in the various situations that arise. He is a reckless, wealthy libertine – “he’s very rich […] They say he has rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch” (Cumberland 1792, 4) – who through marriage and family will be able to fully enter English society and its metropolitan world. The work aroused considerable interest among the critics of the time. As Stanley T. Williams observes: “The plot was attacked by the critics […] but the best proof of the popularity of Belcour as a stage character is the mass of criticism in the periodicals of the day. Belcour was at once one of the most censured and most popular of dramatic characters” (Williams 1920, 414). Williams further points out that “The critics attacked not only Belcour’s conventionality, but also his ‘immorality.’ […] But Belcour continued to be a popular Drury Lane character” (Williams 1920, 414). The West Indian was thus a smashing success, so much so that it even aroused the interest of Goethe who, upon Boden’s translation of the script into German, decided to interpret the role of Belcour in Weimar – “Goethe, Belcour, dressed in a white coat with silver lace, blue silk vest, and blue silk knee-breeches, in which, it is said, he looked superb” (Lewes 1873, 203). Yet Cumberland was accused of having drawn an unrealistic picture of the Jamaican. David Garrick’s playwright and biographer, Arthur Murphy, highlights the limitations of this portrait in an article published in 1771: “Though it had a good effect upon the stage, it cannot be said to be a copy from life. The foibles, the humours, and the real manners, of a West Indian planter, are not delineated with truth and accuracy” (Williams 1920, 414). Nevertheless, according to Williams, it was the most talked about sentimental comedy in the eighteenth-century, to such extent that it entered the sphere of everyday topics:

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The Whitehall Evening Post [… in 1771] accepted the play as “a good representation of life,” and the following anecdote attests its currency in everyday talk: Lady Blessington, at Genoa with Lord Byron, turned to him and said: “You remind me of Belcour in the ‘West Indian,’ when he exclaimed, “No one sins with more repentance, or repents with less amendment than I do.”² (Williams 1920, 413)

The success of this new character seems attributable above all to David Garrick. As reported by William Mudford, “many alterations were suggested and improvements proposed in the course of frequent interviews between him and Cumberland; his hints were scrupulously followed, and it may be inferred, therefore, that the West Indian owes some of that excellence which it now displays to the friendship of Garrick” (Mudford 1812, 203). Cumberland followed his advice with great zeal and enthusiasm, as evidenced by their private correspondence. In a letter dated July 2, 1770, he wrote to Garrick: “I have twice the pleasure in following your corrections that I had in composing the piece; and if your patience does not give out, mine never will. I entirely adopt your observation on the first scene, and have already executed it in a manner that I hope embraces your ideas” (Boaden 1831, 387). Mudford evocatively narrates what happened at the premiere, where he witnessed Garrick and Cumberland approach the evening with very different attitudes: On the first night of its performance, the audience assembled with intentions hostile to its prosperity. It had been rumoured, from the title of the piece, that it contained some satirical strokes against the West Indians, and numbers of those who conceived that they were to be ridiculed under this appellation, repaired to the theatre with a resolution to rescue themselves from the anticipated indignity. When the first lines of the prologue were spoken, the tumult began to shew itself. All was uproar and confusion. (Mudford 1812, 204)

Although the public’s initial resentment worried Garrick no little, Cumberland remained confident and convinced that the audience would understand the comedy’s ultimate goal, which certainly was not to rage against West Indians but to reveal their noble nature. Garrick, who was sitting in his own box with the author, remarked, that he had never seen such decided indications of a turbulent disposition in an audience, and drew the most unfavourable conclusions as to the success of the play. Cumberland was not impressed with same terrors; he trusted to the actual scope and intention of his drama, and believed that when they saw his views were honourable they would give him honourable reception.

 The Whitehall Evening Post was a London newspaper, founded by Daniel Defoe in 1718.

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His conjecture was the right one. Silence was enforced, and the actor ordered to re-commence the prologue; it was now suffered to proceed till it came to the line where they were told to expect from the chief character of the play, ‘Some emanation of a noble mind.’ This, if it did not quiet their fears, gave them reasonable motive for awaiting the development of the piece, and they without offering any further interruption; ready for peace or war, according as they were soothed or provoked. (Mudford 1812, 204–205)

When the curtain had fallen, Cumberland savored his success: “the success of this play I need not tell. Every murmur of disapprobation was silenced before the curtain dropped, and the author retired from the field flushed with the honours of victory” (Mudford 1812, 205). Obviously, the playwright’s intent was also to address one of the most debated issues of the time, i. e. England’s colonial policy. At the end of the Seven Years War, the great expansion of Britain’s territories made the Crown a power to be reckoned with. Cumberland wanted to draw attention to the Caribbean area – where British interests had intensified from the sugar cane plantations and the slave trade – and in particular to Jamaica which, in the collective imagination of the time, was a sort of an abstract entity, little known and above all negatively linked to the yellow fever that decimated intrepid settlers, bold sailors and fearless merchants. As the theater and Theatermania of the day shone a new spotlight on everyday life, Cumberland wanted to highlight this increasing day-by-day presence of English subjects native to the colonies, who were returning to London in greater and greater numbers and arousing, in their portrayals of otherness, curiosity and amazement. The author thus confirmed that informative aspect of theater linked to current events and the most debated issues of the moment, moreover the theater certainly made it easy for a playwright to shape the public’s orientation. The new identity of the Jamaican that Cumberland had built theatrically undoubtedly impacted the English collective imagination, and it was precisely the sentimental element of this dynamic that played a central role in plucking audiences’ heartstrings. Cumberland himself in his Memoirs reveals the traits with which he wanted to characterize Belcour and deliver his vision of the West Indian to the world: To the West Indian I devoted a generous spirit, and a vivacious giddy dissipation; I resolved he should love pleasure much, but honour more; but as I could not keep consistency of character without a mixture of failings, when I gave him charity, I gave him that, which can cover a multitude, and thus protected, thus recommended, I thought I might send him out into the world to shift for himself. (Cumberland 1806, 116)

In a short time, The West Indian became, as Williams argues, an extremely popular “stock play” (Williams 1917, 77): “no play of Cumberland’s and few of the age fur-

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nished roles for so many distinguished actors and actresses as The West Indian” (Williams 1917, 86). After a good twenty-three years from the writing of this work – which was followed by other dramas – Cumberland returned with another outlander: the Jew. The Jew is a comedy that could well be deemed revolutionary, in consideration of Cumberland’s conscious attempt to deconstruct the stage-Jew (see Gabizon 2021, 7–22), a stereotyped figure rooted in the distant past. It was thanks to Cumberland that a Jew could be seen for the first time as a positive dramatic hero. Sheva is, in fact, undoubtedly the undisputed protagonist of the comedy, as the title suggests. He represents a new stage-Jew (see Gebbia 2014, 245–260), far from the one who trod the stage in The Play of The Sacrament – a late fifteenth-century miracle play whose dating is uncertain (see Mullini 2011, 43–60) – and embodied in the Elizabethan age as Barabas, an authentic portrayal of evil for evil’s sake, and as Shylock. Cumberland redeemed him on the stage. Sheva is not a demonic figure who terrifies with his inhumanity, nor an outraged and ridiculed buffoon. The author publicly took the sides of those who were extremely offended and/or ridiculed, through an explicit attack on the playwrights who preceded him, not only in the Prologue, which is a true statement of intent, but also through the voice of his main character: “If your play-writers want a butt or a buffoon, or a knave to make sport of, out comes a Jew to be baited and buffetted through five long acts for the amusement of all good Christians – Cruel sport, merciful amusement!” (Cumberland 1797, 6). Cumberland also testifies to this intent in his Memoirs, where he reveals that he wants to present the figure of the Jew in a new light that can lead to peace with the world at large: I fancied there was an opening for some originality, and an opportunity for shewing at least my good will to mankind, if I introduced the character of persons, who had been usually exhibited on the stage, as butts for ridicule and abuse, and endeavored to present them in such lights, as might tend to reconcile the world to them, and them to the world. (Cumberland 1806, 115)

This attitude of benevolence towards the other, who is no longer seen as a mere outcast, clearly emanates from those ideals of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité that were affirming themselves from the French Revolution. Moreover, the Jewish world itself felt the need to alter its lifestyle in view of its possible integration. So, it was no coincidence that the philosophical and cultural movement of the Haskalah (a sort of Jewish Enlightenment) founded by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) spread in the eighteenth-century. All these political, philosophical and cultural ferments created a fertile soil that led to the composition of The Jew (see Gabizon 2019, 51–61) and its international success: “The dramatist’s fame rose with mercu-

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rial speed. ‘The Jew,’ says Boaden, ‘became popular all over these islands.’ The play was staged many times in America; the mighty actor Theodore Döring made it famous in Germany; and it was imitated on the Parisian stage. […] The Jew dissolved the audiences in tears” (Williams 1917, 231). The plot is quite simple but functional to the author’s intent. Frederic Bertram and Eliza Ratcliff marry in secret and find themselves facing the disapproval of Stephen, the groom’s father, who does not accept his son’s marriage to a dowerless girl and thus disowns him. Sheva provides Eliza with a generous dowry and thereby reunites the family. He also helps Charles, Frederic’s brother-in-law, whom Stephen has fired on account of this marriage. Sheva embodies some old stereotypes – Christians call him a “Jewish dog” (Cumberland 1797, 8), a “baboon” (Cumberland 1797, 8), an “imp of Beelzebub” (Cumberland 1797, 8) – but at the same time he deconstructs them. Though a moneylender, he is also a philanthropist. His very first appearance reaffirms the Jewish-money association – “Hold! Here comes one that supersedes all other visitors – old Sheva, the rich Jew, the merest muck-worm in the city of London” (Cumberland 1797, 4) and a bit further on he is defined as a “good man of money” (Cumberland 1797, 4) – which makes his action unexpected in the audience’s eyes. It is this very expedient that allows the playwright to subvert that deeply rooted idea in the collective imagination. Sheva, though very wealthy, leads a modest life in order to help others in need. To overturn the stereotype, Cumberland uses some Shakespearean echoes: “The world! The world knows no great deal of me. I live sparingly and labour hard, therefore I am called a miser – I cannot help it – an uncharitable dog – I must endure it – a bloodsucker, an extortioner, a Shylock – hard names, Mr. Frederic, but what can a poor Jew say in return, if a Christian chuses to abuse him?” (Cumberland 1797, 6). And, a little further on, continues, echoing Shylock’s accusation against Christians: “We have no abiding place on earth, no country, no home: every body rails at us, every body flouts us, every body points us out for their maygame and their mockery. Hard dealings for a poor stray sheep of the scattered flock of Abraham! How can you expect us to show kindness, when we receive none?” (Cumberland 1797, 6). Some critics have seen the character of Sheva as too good to be true and therefore hardly credible (see Calisch 1909, 108). Yet the public of the time welcomed the work with extreme benevolence. As Cumberland writes in his Memoirs: The benevolence of the audience assisted me in rescuing a forlorn and persecuted character, which till then had only been brought upon the stage for the unmanly purpose of being made a spectacle of contempt, and a butt for ridicule. In the success of this comedy I felt of course a greater gratification, than I had ever felt before upon a like occasion. (Cumberland 1806, 290)

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Thus Cumberland, as Edward Nathaniel Calisch states, “was the first dramatist who dared to oppose popular prejudice and produce a drama in which a Jew was not only not a villain, but the leading and heroic character” (Calisch 1909, 107), while he also tried dramaturgically to construct a new identity for West Indians. In the denouements of both works the outlanders are integrated into the English social fabric. To conclude, while what Antonio, Shylock’s antagonist par excellence, says remains true, “I hold the world but as the world […]/A stage where every man must play a part” (Shakespeare 1961, 8), Theatermania also made it possible to put oneself in the shoes of the other, instead of being confined to playing one’s own role alone. Otherness had to be artistically experienced and to force the public to experience it through a feeling of sympathy. With Theatermania the actor was pushed, and in turn pushed the audience, to explore the soul of others, dragged the spectator along with him into that unknown land – the “undiscovered country” (Shakespeare 1989, 279) to quote Hamlet – so feared because it is unknown and unfathomed in its authenticity, where the true identity of the outsider resides, which the preceding theater had portrayed as an alien role to be distanced from oneself. Theatermania allowed audiences to immerse themselves in the abyss of their sick superstructures in order to embark on an epistemological journey into the soul of the outcast, to recognize in him a part of ourselves or even the best part of our effective or potential selves. But it is perhaps also true that in constructing this identity Cumberland also seems to embody that excess, or “hyperactivity of the imaginative faculty” to quote Sonia Bellavia, which “fused the material with the immaterial [symbolized, in this analysis, by the outsider who previously embodied a virtual identity, understood as a collective imaginative construction] […] bringing man back to the One” (cfr. supra, p. 2). After all, as the philosopher Martin Buber argues, “man becomes I in contact with you. What lies before one comes and disappears, relational events condense and disperse, and in this exchange, each time increased, the awareness of that element which remains the same between the two, the consciousness of the self, becomes clear” (Buber 1993, 78). Here then it is that, with Cumberland, the I and the you at last meet, albeit arriving, as especially occurs in The Jew, to further excesses in highlighting the virtues and qualities that may at times seem more idealized than real. However, the reality is that The West Indian and The Jew represent a path, apparently free of prejudice,³  I’m speaking about a path apparently free of prejudice, since Judith W. Page rightly observed that Cumberland’s attitude, at least toward Jews, is rather ambiguous, so that his intent could be considered “more mercenary than philanthropic” (Page 2004, 35). As he writes in his Memoirs, “I do most heartily wish they had flattered me with some token, however small, of which I might have said this is a tribute to my philanthropy […] but not a word from the lips, not a line did I ever

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of exploration of one’s own subjectivity and the subjectivity of others – a path that further leads, effectively and not just on the surface, to the construction of new identities, all in the name of Theatermania.

Bibliography Barbieri, Maria Chiara. La pagina e la scena: l’attore inglese nella trattatistica del ‘700. Firenze: Le lettere, 2006. Boaden, James, Ed. The Private Correspondence of David Garrick with the most Celebrated Persons of his Time; Now First Published from the Originals, and Illustrated with Notes and a New Biographical memoir of Garrick in Two Volumes, Vol. I., Ed. James Boaden, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Buber, Martin. “Io e tu.” in Id. Il principio dialogico e altri saggi. Ed. Andrea Poma, trans. Anna Maria Pastore. Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 1993. Calisch, Edward Nathaniel. The Jew in English Literature, as Author and as Subject. Richmond: The Bell Book and Stationery Co. Publishers, 1909. Cumberland, Richard. The West Indian. A Comedy. As it is Performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane. London: Printed for W. Griffin at Garrick’s Head, 1771. Cumberland, Richard. The Jew: A Comedy. Performed at the Theatre Royal. Drury Lane London: C. Dilly, in the Poultry, 1797. Cumberland, Richard. Memoirs of Richard Cumberland. Written by Himself. Containing an Account of His Life and Writings, Interspersed With Anecdotes and Characters of Several of the Most Distinguished Persons of His Time, With Whom He Has Had Intercourse and Connexion. Boston: David West and John West, and O.C. Greenleaf; David Carlisle, printer, 1806. De Pretis, Carla. “Introduzione.” Harrington. By Maria Edgeworth. Trans. Raffaella Leproni. Leghorn: Salomone Belforte & C., 2012. IX–XLII. Diderot, Denis. Teatro e scritti sul teatro. Ed. Maria Luisa Grilli. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Edgeworth, Maria. Harrington, A Tale and Ormond, A Tale. Vol. I. London: H. Bryer Printer, 1817. Gabizon, Fiorella. “The Jew di Richard Cumberland. Nuove mappature della figura dell’ebreo nell’immaginario collettivo inglese.” La questione romantica. Vecchie Rotte, nuove cartografie 11.1– 2 (2019): 51–61. Gabizon, Fiorella. “Da The Play of the Sacrament a Robert Wilson e Richard Cumberland: la decostruzione dello stage-Jew.” L’ebreo. Una commedia. By Richard Cumberland. Ed. and trans. Fiorella Gabizon. Roma: Rogas, 2021. 7–22. Gebbia, Alessandro. “Lo ‘Stage Jew’ o l’archetipo dell’ebreo nella letteratura inglese.” Outside Influences. Essays in Honour of Franca Ruggeri. Comp. and eds. Richard Ambrosini, John McCourt, Enrico Terrinoni and Serenella Zanotti. Mantova: Universitas Studiorum, 2014. 245–260.

receive from the pen of any Jew, though I have found myself in company with many of their nation; and in this perhaps the gentlemen are quite right, whilst I had former expectations, that were quite wrong; for I have said of them only what they deserve, why should I be thanked for it? But if I said more, much more, than they deserve, can they do a wiser thing than hold their tongues?” (Cumberland 1806, 258).

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Lewes, George Henry. Story of Goethe’s life. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873. Mudford, William. A Critical Examination of the Writings of Richard Cumberland, Esq. With an Occasional Literary Inquiry Into the Age in Which He Lived, and the Contemporaries With Whom He Flourished. Vol. I. London: Printed by Charles Squire, 1812. Mullini, Roberta. “The First Medical Practitioners in English Drama: Medical Knowledge and Quackery in The Play of the Sacrament and in John Heywood’s The Foure PP.” Linguæ & – Rivista di lingue e culture moderne 1 (2011): 43–60. Page, Judith W. Imperfect Sympathies. Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins, London/New York: Routledge, 1989. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. John Russell Brown, London: Meuthen, 1961. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Waith, Eugene M. “Richard Cumberland, Comic Force, and Misanthropy.” Comparative Drama, 12. 4 (1978–1979): 283–299. Williams, Stanley Thomas. Richard Cumberland. His Life and Dramatic Works. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917. Williams, Stanley Thomas. “Richard Cumberland’s West Indian.” Modern Language Notes 35.7 (1920): 413–417.

Part II: Theatermania – The construction of society

Mara Fazio

Voltaire and the théâtres de société

In France Theatermania, a widely used term of the time, was associated throughout the eighteenth-century with the extraordinarily popular théâtres de société, i. e. private theaters where the spectators doubled as actors.¹ From bourgeois homes to hotels, military barracks, castles and royal residences, theater was a favorite pastime of eighteenth-century France – a pastime that became a mainly female passion, not just of the women who enlivened the salons but also of those who ran private theaters, starting with the royal houses: Mme de Pompadour (Versailles 1747–1750) the Duchess du Maine, wife of the bastard son of Louis XIV, in Sceaux (1703–1753), and Marie Antoinette, last queen of France, in her little Trianon theater inaugurated in Versailles in 1780. But private theaters were not the exclusive purview of the nobility. Magistrates, merchants, clerics and the general populace were all infatuated with it. Public halls multiplied and those for private use cropped up everywhere. The less prosperous set up stages in their living rooms, while the wealthier built theaters in their palaces or castles. The fad was such that portable stage sets could be rented and installed in apartments. People devoted themselves to what was called le théâtre de société, friends who gathered together to act, alternating as actors and spectators, and having great fun with repertory pièces, tableaux vivants, pantomimes, proverbs and charades. Voltaire, for whom even writing was activism, and who had a strong playful vein, was always putting his life on display as the most famous and indefatigable protagonist of the théâtre de société. He loved acting, curating and directing rehearsals, staging and organizing theatrical performances in his homes. Wherever he was sojourning he would set up or push for setting up theater halls. Mais quel plus noble amusement les hommes bien élevés peuvent-ils imaginer ? De bonne foi, vaut-il mieux mêler des cartes, ou ponter au pharaon ? C’est l’occupation de ceux qui n’ont point d’âme. Ceux qui en ont doivent se donner des plaisirs dignes d’eux. Y a-t-il une meilleure éducation que de faire jouer Auguste à un jeune prince et Émilie à une jeune princesse ? On apprend en même temps à bien prononcer sa langue, et à bien parler. L’esprit acquiert des

 Unlike Germany, which in the eighteenth century was not yet a state but a set of principalities and duchies, each of which had a court theater, in France everything was concentrated in the capital. Paris had an official State theater since 1680, the Comédie-Française, which had a monopoly on performances and represented the pinnacle of quality. This different theatrical structure naturally affected a different relationship between professionalism and amateurism of the actors. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-009

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lumières et du goût ; le corps acquiert des grâces, on a du plaisir et on en donne très honnêtement.²

In his théâtres de société Voltaire presented his works, tragedies and comedies with different ends and modes according to the periods of his life. His activity began in Paris at Mme de Fontaine-Martel’s house, in rue des Bons Enfants, behind the Palais Royal, where Voltaire temporarily went to live in late 1731, when he was thirty-seven. His idea was to try out at home and improve works intended for the Comédie-Française. At the start of his career as a dramatic poet, Voltaire seems to have devoted himself to writing above all in verse. “When I wrote Oedipe (…) I knew very little about Parisian theater; I worked as if I’d been in Athens”.³ Later he gradually became aware of the profound differences between a reader’s and a spectator’s point of view. In February of 1732, while waiting to make his debut at the Comédie-Française, Voltaire staged his new reworked version of Ériphile at Mme Fontaine Martel’s house. From then on, personally staging a new dramatic text became a means for observing it objectively, judging and correcting it. “I reworked my tragedy with the ardor of a man who has no other passions,” he wrote to his friend Cideville. “You know quite well that in the end the proof of a script lies in its performance”.⁴ “Theatrical effects aren’t worked out at the writing table”, he confided a few years later to La Noue.⁵ When the Comédie reopened after Easter, Ériphile was staged in a new version. On November 12, 1732 the Comédie-Française again staged Zaïre,⁶ which till the following January 11th ran for almost 31 consecutive performances, a surprising number for the time. A few days later, in January 1733, to satisfy the request of the educated public of connoisseurs, Zaïre was staged privately, once again at the rue des Bons-Enfants home of Mme de Fontaine-Martel, who died shortly after. On that occasion Voltaire, in the role of Lusignan, made his debut as an actor-interpreter of his

 [“What nobler amusement can persons of good breeding imagine? Is shuffling or dealing cards perhaps any better? Such is the occupation of those who have no soul. Those who have it must indulge in pleasures worthy of them. Is there any finer way to educate than having a young prince play Augustus and a young princess play Emilie? In the process, one learns to pronounce one’s language well and to speak it well. The mind acquires light and taste, the body acquires grace, one feels pleasure and communicates it to others, all quite wholesomely”]. Voltaire, Letter to Giovanni Paolo Simone Bianchi, November 2, 1761 (Best. D10126). All of Voltaire’s letters are cited on the basis of the definitive edition of Voltaire’s Correspondance, published by Gallimard and edited by Theodore Besterman.  Voltaire, Letter to Charles Porée, January 7, 1729 (Best. D392).  Voltaire, Letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville, 1733 (Best. D459 and D593)  Voltaire, Letter to Jean-Baptiste Sauvé de la Noue,1741 (Best. D2404).  Zaïre debuted at the Comédie-Française on August 13, 1732.

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own plays, a habit that would remain constant throughout his life. That role of an old dying man “exhausted by age, who rises from the grave to utter words full of consequence with nobility but vivacity”, and which Voltaire played with “frenzied pathos” (Pomeau 1985–1995, I, 233), would remain his favorite. In 1734, to escape arrest after the publication of his Lettres philosophiques, which were burned by the Parliament of Paris, Voltaire and his scientist lover Mme du Châtelet took refuge in her castle at Cirey, in Champagne, where they continually entertained guests, and to socialize incessantly staged plays with their friends. In the attics of the castle’s oldest wing, Voltaire had a 34-seat Italianstyle theater built.⁷ The theater is “truly lovely, though the hall is tiny. A theater and a puppet hall. […]”. The back of the hall is nothing more than a painted loggia, decorated with a sofa, and the edge on which it rests is also decorated. The backdrop consists of columns with orange vases between the columns” (Graffigny 1820, Lettre V, 97).⁸ All the guests passing through Cirey were immediately conscripted in the shows and assigned roles to play, reciting them under the direction of Voltaire who, alternating affability and rage, spared them no level of duress. Mme de Graffigny, who between 1738 and 1739 spent six months at Cirey as a guest of Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet, wrote to her friend Panpan: Toutefois ce qui ne manquera pas de causer une vive surprise, c’est l’inconcevable flexibilité d’humeur et de talent de l’auteur de Brutus, Zaïre, de Mérope, que l’on voit composer des parades de boulevard, les exécuteur lui-même pour divertir les oisifs de Cirey, jouer, le diraisje, les marionnettes, et montrer la lanterne magique. […] Nous jouons aujourd’hui L’Enfant prodigue et une autre pièce en trois actes, dont il faut faire des répétitions. Nous avons répété Zaïre jusqu’à trois heures du matin; nous la jouons demain avec la Sérénade. ⁹ Il faut se friser, se chausser, s’ajuster, entendre chanter un opéra; oh! Quelle galère! On nous donne à lire des petits manuscrits charmans qu’on est obligé de lire en volant. […] Nous avons compté hier au soir que, dans les vingt-quatre heures, nous avons répété et joué trente-trois actes, tant tragédies, opéras, que comédies. […]Et ce drôle-là, qui ne veut rien apprendre, qui ne sait pas un mot de ses rôles, au moment de monter au théâtre, est le seul qui les joue sans fautes; aussi il n’y a d’admiration que pour lui. Il est vrai de dire qu’il est étonnant. Il a joué hier divinement Thibaudois ¹⁰ et un autre rôle encore plus plaisant et fort long. Le fripon a manqué sa vocation. Enfin, après souper, nous eûmes un sauteur qui passe par ici et qui est

 A photographic reproduction of the theater built by Voltaire can be found in Renaud Bret-Vitoz, Cirey en Champagne avec Voltaire, Bleulefit sas, 2011.  Mme de Graffigny, Vie privée de Voltaire et de Mme du Châtelet pendant un séjour de six mois à Cirey, Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz, 1820  A one-act comedy by Jean-François Regnard (1655–1709).  Monsieur Thibaudois, a character in L’esprit de contradiction, a comedy by Charles Dusfreny or Du Fresny (1648–1724), pseudonym of Charles Rivière.

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assez adroit. Je vous dis que c’est une chose incroyable, que l’on puisse faire tant de choses en un jour.¹¹ (Graffigny 1739, 250)

Another guest, Léopold Desmarets, in Cirey at the same time as his friend Mme de Graffigny, completes the story: “We rehearsed Zaïre […] till six. There were hitches at every turn, M. de Voltaire was always out of sorts with us. After the reharsal, the ladies went to do their hair and dress in Turkish costumes, which lasted until 9:30. At that point we began our performance, which ended at half-past midnight because after Zaïre we did L’Esprit de contradiction” (Longchamp1826, II, 171–175).¹² In 1749, following the death of Madame du Châtelet, Voltaire left Cirey and moved with his niece and mistress Madame Denis to Paris at 8 rue Traversière, now rue Molière. Here in the early months of 1750, he built a theater hall in his home and hosted the young actor Henri Louis Cain – later called Lekain – whom he had met and seen on an amateur stage, and had him act together with Mme Denis. This time the théâtre de société, where professionals and amateurs mingled, was used as a gym to train actors. Lekain would go on to be the most important actor in the Comédie-Française, while Voltaire’s private theater competed with it. Various persons testify to a frenetic, tireless Voltaire metteur en scène, and to long, intense, lively and noisy rehearsals. Voltaire galvanized the actors, overseeing, checking, advising, correcting, explaining. Years later, Lekain would recount in his Memoires the rehearsals of Mahomet: “A very attractive

 [“What will not fail to arouse a lively surprise are the unbelievable shifts of mood and talent in the author of Brutus, Zaïre, Mérope, who can be seen composing boulevard-style parades, performing them himself for his bored Cirey friends, working the puppets and displaying the magic lantern. (…) Today we’re doing his Enfant prodigue and another three-act play that we have yet to rehearse. We rehearsed Zaïre till three in the morning, and tomorrow we’ll perform it along with Sérénade. You have to curl your hair, put on your shoes, settle down, hear an opera sung; Oh what a jail! They give us small manuscripts that we’re forced to read on the fly. Last night we calculated that in twenty-four hours we’d rehearsed and recited thirty-three acts, including tragedies, operas and comedies (…) And he, who refuses to learn anything, knows not a line of his roles, when he comes on stage he’s the only one who recites them without a hitch; so my hat goes off for him. It’s truly surprising. Yesterday he performed Thibaudois splendidly and another even longer and more pleasing role. The rascal has missed his true vocation. Lastly, after dinner, we had a rather skilled jumper who was passing through. It’s really incredible to be able to do so many things in a single day”] Lettre XXVIII, Cirey, ce lundi gras, 9 février 1739.  He continues: “Voltaire didn’t know his part by heart; not even two lines in a row, I’m not exaggerating. Mme du Châtelet can’t act to save her behind, in a soulless monotone, and pausing between each verse and the next. (…) M. du Châtelet, literally uttered not a single verse, and stammered. (…) I acted with the script in hand. All the rest went dreadfully, Voltaire dressed like a beggar. And yet, in my life I’ve never cried so much in a tragedy because in what little he recited he was divine” (Longchamp 1826, II, 171–175).

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young lady, daughter of a public prosecutor in Parliament, played the role of Palmire in Mahomet along with me in Voltaire’s theater. This sweet girl, who was just fifteen years old, was far from competent to recite with the proper verve the curses she inveighs against the tyrant. She was just young, pretty, and interesting, and this led Voltaire to address her with greater gentleness; and to show her how far she was from the situation of her role, he said to her: “Mademoiselle, figurez-vous que Mahomet est un imposteur, un fourbe, un scélérat, qui a fait poignarder votre frère, qui vient d’empoisonner votre père, et qui, pour couronner ses bonnes œuvres, veut absolument coucher avec vous. Si tout ce petit manège vous fait un certain plaisir, ah ! Vous avez raison de le ménager comme vous faites ; mais pour le peu que cela vous répugne, voilà comme il faut vous y prendre…” Alors M. de Voltaire, en repentant luimême cette imprécation, donna à cette pauvre innocente, rouge de honte et tremblante de peur, une leçon d’autant plus précieuse, qu’en joignant le précepte à l’exemple, il en put faire par la suite une actrice très agréable.¹³ (Lekain 1825, 434–435)

On June 6, 1750, Mahomet gave the rue Traversière theater hall its public debut. Mme de Graffigny, who was among the guests, wrote the next day: “Yesterday’s play was Mahomet, performed by young people from the Rue Saint-Antoine. Grandvaldidn’t act nearly as well as the boy who played Mahomet” (Plagnol-Diéval 2001).¹⁴ Later in the letter she estimates at a hundred people – for a space that she considers rather intended for fifty. Two days later, on June 8, 1750, saw the first performance of Rome sauvée, a new tragedy by Voltaire that had been rejected by the Comédie-Française. Maudron played Cicero, Lekain was Caesar, Hertaux was Catiline. “There were few ladies in the hall. Among the guests D’Alembert, Diderot, Marmontel, Hesnault, Voisenon, Raynal, Richelieu, La Vallière, the Jesuit Father de la Tour, dramatic author of the College Théâtre” (Claretie 1906, 69). After doing Rome sauvée at rue Traversière, Voltaire and his troupe were invited to present the play at the residence of the Duchess du Maine. The actors went to Sceaux and were applauded. Voltaire played Cicero (Olivier 1900, 180). One of his

 [“Miss, you must think of Mahomet as an impostor, a con man, a villain, who has had your brother stabbed, who has just poisoned your father, and who, to crown his good deeds, is dying to sleep with you. If this whole little intrigue gives you any pleasure, ah! then you’re right to play the role as you do; but if it repels you in the least, here’s how you should do it….” At which Voltaire, repeating the curses himself, gave that poor innocent girl, red with shame and trembling with fear, a truly precious lesson that, by combining the precept with his example, succeeded in turning her into a truly fine actress”].  Jean-Baptiste Charles François Nicolas Racot de Grandval, sociétaire at the Comédie-Française from 1729 to 1768. He acted the great roles of Voltaire’s works before the appearance of Lekain

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detractors, La Chaussée, wrote to Abbot Leblanc: “He acts like those pastry chefs who, unable to sell their pastries, eat them themselves” (Claretie 1906, 40) In 1754, on his return from Potsdam, spent at the court of Frederick II of Prussia from 1750 to 1753, after a year of wandering in the vain hope of returning to Paris, Voltaire moved to Switzerland, on the border with France. He purchased a house he called Les Délices on the Saint Jean hill in Geneva, and was intent on regaling the followers of Calvin with the pleasures of theater in the Republic founded by the latter two hundred years earlier (1536–1540). The following year, in 1755, on the occasion of a visit by Lekain to Les Délices, Voltaire improvised a performance of Zaïre in the role of Lusignan alongside Lekain playing Orosmane and Mme Denis Zaire. He was seen entering from the wings in his Lusignan costume, following Zaïre’s last scene from offstage, tripping over his stool, and finding himself upstage next to Orosmane, at the instant in which his jealous fury leads him to stab his lover. Encouraged by the success, Voltaire decided to stage L’orphelin de la Chine, the new tragedy he had just finished writing. He set up a temporary theater hall and with local friends, many from the Cramer family, his editors, and the Tronchin family, including his doctor and banker, he started rehearsals. But the Council and the Consistory, the supreme Calvinist ecclesiastical body, blocked the performances and forbade Genevans to participate in it. Voltaire limited himself to a dress rehearsal. At the end of December he moved to Monriond, in the countryside between Lausanne and the lake, his “little hut”, his “winter palace”, where he spent the winter season, reserving the summer for the “pretentious Délices” (Olivier 1842, 9). In Lausanne, then in the canton of Bern, culturally closer to France because inhabited by many French families who had emigrated there after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,¹⁵ there was no trace of the strict Genevan customs, and the pleasures that the city of Calvin considered crimes were tolerated. In that more favorable environment, where he spent three consecutive winters (1756–1757– 1758), Voltaire intended to do what Calvinist Geneva had not allowed him to, i. e. model a society through theater by refining audiences and instilling them with a taste for theater. East of the city, in the countryside but close to the center, there was an excellent hall that could accommodate two hundred spectators located in the barn of a farm adjacent to the residence of the Marquis de Langalerie, who had made it available to amateur troupes: the Monrepos theater. There Voltaire assembled a company of Swiss nobles: Constant d’Hermenches and his

 In 1598 the Edict of Nantes, promulgated by Henry IV, had put an end to the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots. In 1646 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and the Huguenots were expelled from France

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wife, Mme d’Aubonne, the Marquis and Marquise de Gentils, and Monsieur de Crousaz. He wrote to his Parisian friends after a performance of Zaïre: J’ai fait le bonhomme Lusignan…cela me convient fort. Je vous avertis sans vanité que je suis le meilleur vieux fou qu’il y ait dans aucune troupe. (…) Nous avons un très beau et très bon Orosmane, un Nérestan excellent, un joli théâtre, une assemblée qui fondait en larmes. Mme d’Hermenches a très-bien joué Enide. Et que dirons-nous de la belle-fille du marquis de Langalerie, belle comme le jour ? Elle devient actrice. Son mari se forme. Tout le monde joue avec chaleur. Vos acteurs de Paris sont à la glace. Je voudrais que vous eussiez passé l’hiver avec moi à Lausanne. Vous y verriez des pièces nouvelles exécutées par des acteurs excellents ; les étrangers accourir de trente lieues à la ronde, et mon pays roman, mes beaux rivages du lac Léman, devenus l’asile des arts, du plaisir et du goût. On croit chez les badauds de Paris que toute la Suisse est un pays sauvage : on serait bien étonné si on voyait jouer Zaïre à Lausanne mieux qu’on ne la joue à Paris : on serait plus surprise encore de voir deux cents spectateurs aussi bons juges qu’il y en ait en Europe. J’ai fait couler des larmes de tous les yeux suisses. La tragédie était suivie de danses exécutées à merveille, et d’un opéra-buffa encore mieux exécuté ; le tout par de belles femmes, par des jeunes gens bien faits, qui ont de l’esprit, et devant une assemblée qui a du gout. Les acteurs se sont formés en un an ; ce sont des fruits que les Alpes et le Mont-Jura n’avaient point encore portés. César ne prévoyait pas, quand il vint ravager ce petit coin de la terre, qu’il y aurait un jour plus d’esprit qu’à Rome.¹⁶ (Olivier 1842, 19–20)

Lausanne’s cultural reputation remained high after Voltaire’s departure. The English historian Edward Gibbon, in Lausanne from 1753 to 1758, wrote in his Autobiography: Le plus grand agrément que je tirai du séjour de Voltaire à Lausanne fut la circonstance rare d’entendre un grand poète déclamer sur le théâtre ses propres ouvrages. […] Un théâtre décent fut arrange à Mon-Repos, maison de champagne à l’extrémité d’un faubourg ; les

 [“I play the bonhomme Lusignan (…) which I really like. I tell you without vanity that I’m the best old fool in the troupe. We have a lovely Orosmane, an excellent Nerestan, a fine theater, an audience that melts into tears. Mme d’Hermenches played Enide very well. And what to say of the belle-fille of Marquis de Langalerie, as beautiful as day? She is about to become an actress. Her husband is learning. Everyone is acting ardently. Your Paris actors are glacial. I’d love it if you’d spend the winter with me in Lausanne. You’d see new plays performed by excellent actors; foreigners flock to within thirty leagues, and my Romanesque country, my beautiful shores of Lake Leman, have become an asylum of the arts, pleasure and taste. Parisians believe that Switzerland is a totally backward country. They’d be amazed to see Zaïre be more of a hit in Lausanne than in Paris, and even more amazed to see two hundred of the most competent spectators in Europe. I brought all Swiss eyes to tears. After the tragedy we had dances performed wonderfully and a comic opera done even better: all by beautiful women, smart-looking, well-bred young people, and to an audience that has taste. The actors were trained in a year; these are fruits that the Alps and Mount Jura had not yet yielded. Caesar, when he came to devastate this small corner of land, didn’t foresee that one day there would be more culture here than in Rome”].

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habillements et les décorations faites aux dépens des acteurs ; les répétitions soignées par l’auteur, avec l’attention et le zèle de l’amour paternel. Deux hivers consécutifs, ses tragédies de Zaïre, Alzire et de Zulime et sa comédie sentimentale de L’Enfant prodigue furent représentées sur le théâtre de Mon-Repos. Voltaire jouait les rôles convenables à son âge, de Lusignan, Alvarès, Benassar, Euphémon.¹⁷ La déclamation était modelée d’après la pompe et la cadence de l’ancien théâtre, et respirait plus l’enthousiasme de la poésie qu’elle n’exprimait les sentiments de la nature […] L’esprit e la philosophie de Voltaire, sa table et son théâtre contribuèrent sensiblement à raffiner, à Lausanne, et à polir les manières. Il semble que cette vieille coutume du théâtre en société ait duré et se soit implantée depuis dans la region.¹⁸ (Claretie 1906, 69–70)

The 1758 saw the issue of D’Alembert’s entry Genève for the Encyclopédie, which denounced Geneva’s prejudice against theater spectacles, expressed the hope that theater would come into its own in Geneva, and responded to Rousseau’s Lettre sur les spectacles (1758) attacking theater as a useless and harmful entertainment, which had given fodder to all of Voltaire’s enemies. But the city stood with Rousseau, and Voltaire reacted by seeking an alternative place to live outside the Republic. He decided to leave Les Délices and settle in France, though just a few kilometers from the Swiss border, first in Tournay and later definitively in Ferney. There, a quarter of an hour from Geneva, he continued and increased his theatrical activity and his battle in defense of theater, which part of the Geneva public fervently continued to support. In the autumn of 1760, in Tournay, Voltaire organized an authentic festival: 14 performances of 7 tragedies in the space of a month to a huge audience and with huge success, including Alzire, Tancrède, Mahomet – played by the publisher Cramer together with a very young Palmire – , “young, naive, charming, siren’s voice, sensitive heart, with two eyes that melt into tears”, much better, according to Vol-

 Alvares in Alzire, Benassar in Zulime, Euphémon ne l’Enfant prodigue.  [“The greatest pleasure that Voltaire’s stay in Lausanne gave me was the chance to hear a great poet declaim his works in the theater. He had formed a company of men and women among whom some were not without talent. A theater has been set up in Monrepos, in a country home at the end of a suburb; costumes and sets made at the expense of the actors; the texts edited by the author, with the attention and zeal of paternal love. Two consecutive winters his tragedies Zaïre, Alzire and Zulime, and his his sentimental comedy L’Enfant prodigue were performed in the Monrepos theater. Voltaire played the roles suited to his age, Lusignan, Alvares, Benassar, Euphémon. The declamation was modeled on the pomp and cadence of ancient thea ter, and rather than expressing the sentiments of nature it transmitted the enthusiasm of poetry. (…) Voltaire’s spirit and philosophy, his table and his theater have contributed significantly to refining and educating manners in Lausanne. It seems that this old custom of the Théâtre de société has endured and taken root in the region ever since”].

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taire, than Mlle Gaussin, whom he dubbed “a statue” Marmontel,¹⁹ who visited him at Les Délices and saw him act at the Château de Tournay, relates: M. de Voltaire voulut nous faire voir son château de Tournay, où était son théâtre, à un quart de lieue de Genève. Ce fut, l’après-dînée, le but de notre promenade en carrosse. Tournay était une petite gentilhommière assez négligée, mais dont la vue est admirable. Dans le vallon, le lac de Genève (…) une chaîne de montagnes de trente lieues d’étendue et ce mont Blanc chargé de neiges et de glaces qui ne fondent jamais (…) Là, je vis ce petit théâtre qui tourmentait Rousseau, et où Voltaire se consolait.²⁰ (Claretie 1906, 69–70)

In 1760 Voltaire began to settle in Ferney. He liked feeling safe on French soil and being able to say: “I want to be a solitary Frenchman, a Frenchman far from Paris, a free Swiss Frenchman” (Olivier 1842, 28). He had an old castle renovated and carefully built a theater hall on the model of the Lyon hall for staging his tragedies. The female protagonist was almost always Mme Denis, while the other actors were mostly Genevan friends. Lekain recounts in his Mémoires: Après mon départ de Ferney, au moins d’avril 1762 ; M. de Voltaire eut la fantaisie de faire jouer sur son petit théâtre la tragédie de L’Orphelin de la Chine. Le libraire Cramer s’était exercé avec M. le duc de Villars sur le rôle de Gengis-Kan. Il n’y a personne qui ne soit instruit de la prétention de ce grand seigneur pour bien enseigner la comédie ; aussi fit-il de son élève Cramer un froid et plat déclamateur, et c’est ce don’t M. de Voltaire ne tarda pas à s’apercevoir. (…) M. de Voltaire, en consequence, se mit à persifler son Cramer, et promit de le tourmenter jusqu’à ce qu’il eût changé sa diction (…).²¹ (Lekain 1825, 436–437)

 Voltaire, Letter to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, October 8, 1760 (Best.D9294). Mlle Gaussin, an actress Voltaire particularly esteemed, had been the heroine of Mahomet in Paris on August 9, 1742. After only three performances, the tragedy was suspended and resumed at the Comédie-Française only in 1751.  [“Monsieur de Voltaire wanted to show us his Château de Tournay a quarter of an hour from Geneva. This was the purpose of our after-dinner carriage tour. Tournay was a rather neglected little manor house, though the view was magnificent: Lake Geneva, a mountain range that stretched for thirty leagues, and Mont Blanc laden with snow and ice that never melts… There I saw this little theater that so tormented Rousseau and so consoled Voltaire”].  [“After my departure from Ferney in April 1762, M. de Voltaire had the idea of presenting his tragedy L’orphelin de la Chine in his little theater. The bookseller Cramer had rehearsed with the Duke de Villars in the role of Genghis. The claim of this great gentleman to teaching how to act comedy is known to all, so he made Cramer his pupil, a cold and flat declaimer. Voltaire soon realized this, began to make fun of him and promised to torment him until he should succeed in improving his diction. Cramer took pains to forget everything the Duke de Villars had taught him and returned after 15 days to play the role with Voltaire (…)”].

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We know from Prince de Ligne how Voltaire was dressed when he was rehearsing at Ferney. He wore gray shoes, rolled-up iron gray stockings, a large knee-length jacket, a great long wig and a black velvet cap. On Sundays he would sometimes wear a lovely solid color suit, jacket and trousers of the same color but the jacket gold-braided, large lace cuffs up to his fingertips, to give him, as he said, a nobleman’s look. When he came to Ferney in 1763, Prince de Ligne often had the opportunity to see Voltaire act, in both organized performances and ones improvised in a corner of his living room. Were they talking about Molière? He immediately remarked: “My niece, Les femmes savantes! We just performed it! And at once he gathered the actors together and staged the play. He played Trissotin, very badly, but having loads of fun in the process. When he acts he can’t stand not being listened to, he puts the Swiss waitresses at the door who pass by serving custards and distracting the male spectators” (Claretie 1906, 74–75). But other witnesses testify that Voltaire was acting better than Prince de Ligne claimed. Guy de Chabanon, a poet, musician, composer and member of the French Academie, who lived in Ferney in the years 1766–1767, recounts: Durant les sept mois que je passai cette année à Ferney, nous ne cessâmes pas de jouer la tragédie devant Voltaire, et dans l’intention d’amuser ses loisirs par le spectacle de sa gloire. La première pièce que nous jouâmes fut Les Scythes, qu’il avait nouvellement achevée. Il y joua un rôle. J’en ai pu juger son talent d’acteur parce que, mon rôle me mettant toujours en scène avec lui, j’aurais craint de me distraire de mon personnage si j’eusse donné au sien un esprit d’observation. À l’une de nos répétitions seulement, je me permis de juger et d’écouter le premier couplet qu’il avait à dire. Je me sentis fortement ému de sa déclamation, tout emphatique et cadencée qu’elle était. Cette sorte d’art était naturelle en lui. En déclamant, il était pöète et comédien, il faisait sentir l’harmonie des vers et l’intérêt de la situation. Ce qu’on dit de la déclamation de Racine en donne une idée assez semblables. La première qualité du comédiens, Voltaire l’avait : il sentait vivement; aussi faisait-il beaucoup d’effet. Il pensait qu’un grand volume de voix et des inflexions fortes sont nécessaires pour émouvoir la multitude, pour ébranler cette masse inactive du public. Il n’a point exercé d’acteur tragique à qui il n’ait dit en plus d’un endroit : «Criez, criez ! – Point de grands effets sans cela !» ²² (Claretie 1906, 75–76)

 [“During the seven months I spent in Ferney we never ceased performing the tragedy for Voltaire with the intention of cheering up his free time with the spectacle of his glory. The first work we performed was Les Scythes, which he had recently finished writing. Even I had a role. I couldn’t judge his acting talent because I was always on stage with him and would have feared being distracted from my character if I observed him. Only in one rehearsal did I allow myself to judge and listen to his first line. I was deeply moved by his declamation, emphatic and rhythmic as it was. This type of art came naturally to him. When he declaimed he was both a poet and an actor, he conveyed the harmony of the verses and the interest of the situation. From what they say, Racine’s declamation must have been quite similar. Voltaire had the primary quality of an actor: he felt intensely; and he was very effective. He was convinced that a loud voice and emphatic

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People flocked to the Ferney performances from Geneva, Switzerland and Savoy. Many came from the French regiments stationed in nearby places. Every performance day at the castle was a day of celebration. Sixty or eighty people remained for dinner and danced all night long. Voltaire appeared sporadically for a few moments at the meal or at the dances. Having paid his public tribute, he retired to his bedroom, not at all bothered by the din. The Grand Council of the Geneva Calvinists, unable to prevent Voltaire from staging plays in his home, forbade Genevans from participating in the performances, as both actors and spectators, together with the French, who might corrupt them. For fear of the Consistory, the Genevans began to desert the Ferney theater. Voltaire must have counted on his French guests and very much on his niece Mme Denis, whom in his letters he often judged superior to Mlle Clairon.²³ But the Ferney theater had another interesting function that interests theater historians. It became a kind of theater workshop, whose activity consisted of presenting the new works Voltaire wrote to be staged at the Comédie-Française. The history of the composition and performances of Olympie (between 1762 and 1764), inasmuch as we can reconstruct it through Voltaire’s correspondence, is emblematic, a precious source of information on Voltaire’s dramaturgical working method (making, undoing, revising, rewriting, performing, changing, revising, rewriting) and on the experimental, testing function, as model, that the Ferney stage had in view of the ultimate goal, the stage of the Comédie-Française, on which Voltaire’s fame in France and the rest of Europe depended. Often Voltaire was convinced that his staging, his scenography, his actors and he himself were superior to Paris. But he actually awaited its judgement with fear. In March 1762 he wrote Olympie, the tragedy that was initially called Cassandre, in six days, and then worked on it for two years, up to its debut at the Comédie-Française in March 1764. This obsession with reworking was a characteristic trait of Voltaire’s: “One jots down a rough draft in six days and then tinkers with one’s creation. One must nurture one’s meager talent up to the last minute”.²⁴ On March 14, 1762, he wrote to Henri Lambert d’Herbigny, Marquis de Thibouville: “The work is at last nearly finished. […] We rehearse the play, recite it incessantly with the best scenes, the best lighting, the loveliest costumes, the most ravishing priestesses, the greatest illusion. The pomp, the polish, the magnificence,

inflections are necessary to move the multitude, stir the inert mass of an audience. His instructions to a tragic actor never omitted in more than one point the rule: Shout, shout! No great effect if this is missing!”].  Mlle Clairon (1723–1803) was Voltaire’s guest at Ferney in the summer of 1765, where she played Amenaide in Tancrède and Electre in Oreste.  Voltaire, Letter to Etienne-Noel Damilaville, April 4, 1762 (Best. D10406).

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there is everything, all we need is a good tragedy”.²⁵ On March 15, Voltaire wrote to D’Argental, his agent in Paris: “I’m not placing Olympie at your feet just yet, I’m waiting for it to be performed to be able to relate the judgment of our Allobroges and the extraordinary way in which we’ve set up our vestibule, our temple, our altars and our pyre.²⁶ This pyre will be used to cast the pièce into the fire if it isn’t overwhelmingly acclaimed by our mountaineers”.²⁷ On March 24, 1762, the play had its public debut in Ferney.²⁸ The next day Voltaire wrote: Hier mercredi, 24 de mars, nous essayâmes Cassandre. Notre salle est sur le modèle de celle de Lyon ; le même peintre a fait nos décorations ; la perspective en est étonnante : on n’imagine pas d’abord qu’on puisse entendre les acteurs qui sont au milieu du théâtre : ils paraissent éloignés de cinq cents toises. (…) Le mariage, la cérémonie, la procession des initiés, des prêtres, et des prêtresses couronnées de fleurs, etc., les serments faits sur l’autel, tout cela forma un spectacle auguste.²⁹

On March 30, 1762, Voltaire communicated to Etienne-Noel Damilaville: Je prie mon cher frère, de dire au frère Platon [Diderot], que ce qu’il appelle pantomime j’ai toujours appelé action. Je n’aime point le terme de pantomime pour la tragédie. J’ai toujours songé autant que je j’ai pu à rendre les scènes tragiques pittoresques. Elles le sont dans Mahomet, dans Mérope, dans L’Orphelin de la Chine, surtout dans Tancrède. Mais ici toute la pièce est un tableau continuel. Aussi a-t-elle fait le plus prodigieux effet. Mérope n’en approche pas, quant à l’appareil et à l’action ; et cette action est toujours nécessaire, elle est toujours annoncée par les acteurs mêmes. Je voudrais qu’on perfectionnât ce genre qui est le seul tragique, car les conversations sont à la glace, et les conversations amoureuses sont à l’eau de rose.³⁰

 Voltaire, Letter to Henri Lambert d’Herbigny, Marquis de Thibouville, March 14, 1762 (Best. D10371).  A celtic tribe of Gaul between the Rhone and the Lake Geneva.  Voltaire, Letter to the Count and Countess d’Argental, March 15, 1762 (Best. D10373).  The parts were assigned as follows: Cassandre: Gabriel Cramer; Statira, widow of Alexander: Mme Denis; Olympie: Mme d’Hermenches; the Hierophant (or High Priest): M. Rillet; Antigone: M. d’Hermenches. Voltaire was supposed to appear in the part of the High Priest but due to a cold and fever opted out of performing.  [“Yesterday, Wednesday March 24th, we presented Cassandre; our hall is modeled on the one in Lyon; the painter who made the sets is the same: the perspective is amazing, at first it seems impossible that the actors can be heard at center stage, they seem five hundred fathoms away. (…) The wedding, the ceremony, the procession of the initiates, the priestesses with flower crowns, etc., the vows on the altar, all this gives life to a grandiose spectacle”].  [“I beg my dear brother to tell his brother Plato [Diderot] that what he calls pantomime I have always called action. I don’t like the term pantomime for tragedy. I’ve always tried, as far as I could, to make tragic scenes picturesque. That is how they are in Mahomet, Mérope, L’Orphelin de la Chine, and especially Tancrède. But here the whole piece is a continuous tableau. It also had the

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Finally, on April 2nd he told Mme du Deffand: “We’ve just performed a new tragedy […] I think that with a lot of action and a lot of feeling we could at last have real tragedies, which we perhaps don’t even have a shadow of “.³¹ Two years later, on the eve of his debut at the Comédie, Voltaire wrote to the d’Argentals: C’est donc demain, que vous prétendez qu’on fera le service d’Olympie dans le couvent d’Éphèse. Je doute fort que vous ayez un acteur digne d’officier et de jouer le rôle de l’hiérophante. J’ai représenté ce personnage, moi qui vous parle ; j’avais une grande barbe blanche, avec une mitre de deux pieds de haut, et un manteau beaucoup plus beau que celui d’Aaron. Mais quelle onction était dans mes paroles ! je faisais pleurer les petits garçons. Mais votre Brizard³² est un prêtre à la glace ; il n’attendrira personne. Je n’ai jamais conçu comment l’on peut être froid ; cela me passe. Quiconque n’est pas animé est indigne de vivre ; je le compte au rang des morts.³³

On March 17, 1764, Olympie was at last presented at the Comédie-Française. The play – which should have premiered on March 12th, was postponed for 5 days because of an indisposition of Mlle Dumesnil, and ran for 10 performances, up to the annual Easter closure, and afterwards never resumed. In the subsequent years Voltaire continued his theatrical activities in Ferney, attended by audiences from Geneva, Savoy and Switzerland. In 1770 he felt too old to continue acting and closed the theater next to the castle. The premises were transformed into a laundry and guest rooms. In 1772 Saint-Gérand, a theatrical impresario in Chatelaine, Switzerland, two kilometers from Geneva, on the border with France, launched a theater in imitation of Ferney’s. Voltaire also performed it every now and then, attracting audiences. In June 1776, six years after the castle theater was closed, construction was completed on the new Ferney theater, no longer a théatre de société but a public hall inside the village, occupying the space of an old warehouse. Voltaire’s theatrimost prodigious effect. Mérope does not come close to it, as far as the apparatuses and the action are concerned; and this action is always necessary, it is always announced by the actors themselves. I’d like this, which is the only possible tragic genre, to be perfected, because the dialogues are glacial and the love dialogues are maudlin”] Voltaire, Letter to Étienne-Noel Damilaville, March 30, 1762 (Best. D10397).  Voltaire, Letter to Mme du Deffand, Aprile 2, 1762 (Best. D10403)  Jean Baptiste Brizard (1721–1791), sociétaire of the Comédie-Française from 1758 to 1786.  [“It is tomorrow, therefore, that you think the Olympie service will be celebrated in the convent of Ephesus. I very much doubt that you have an actor worthy of celebrating and playing the role of the hierophant. I, I who speak to you, have played this character, I had a long white beard with a two feet high miter, and a much lovelier cloak than Aaron’s. But what anointing there was in my words! I made the children cry. Your Brisart, on the other hand, is a glacial priest, he won’t soften anyone; I’ve never understood how one can be cold; to me it’s incomprehensible; anyone who isn’t lively doesn’t deserve to live: for me he’s like a corpse”] Voltaire, Letter to Count and Countess d’Argental, March 11, 1764 (Best. D11761).

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cality had become a model, and had been victorious. Two years later Voltaire left Ferney, returned to Paris after twenty-seven years, and died.

Bibliography Claretie, Léo. Histoire des Théâtres de société, Collection XIX. Paris: Librairie Molière, 1906. Graffigny, Madame (de), Vie privée de Voltaire et de Mme du Chatelet pendant un séjour de six mois à Cirey. Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz, 1820. Lekain, Henri Louis Cain. Mémoires de Lekain : précédés de réflexions sur cet acteur et sur l’art théâtral par Talma. Paris: Ponthieu,1825. Longchamp, Sébastian G., and Wagnière, Jean-Louis. Mémoires sur Voltaire et sur ses ouvrages. Paris: Aime André 1826. Olivier, Jean Jacques. Voltaire et les comédiens interpretres de son théâtre. Étude sur l’art théâtral et les comédiens au XVIIIe siècle, d’après les journaux, les correspondances, les mémoires, les gravures de l’époque et des documents inédits. Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1900. Olivier, Juste. Voltaire à Lausanne. Lausanne: Marc Ducloux, 1842. Plagnol-Diéval, Marie-Emmanuelle, Quéro, Dominique, and Trott, David (avec la collaboration de Plante, Gilles). Théâtres de société : rayonnement du répertoire français entre 1700 et 1799. Inventaire hypertextuel. Publié en ligne le premier juillet 2001. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ ~trott/societe/societe.htm Pomeau, René. Voltaire en son temps. Oxford: Fayard, Voltaire Foundation, 1985–1995. Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet. Correspondance. Éd. T. Besterman. Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1977– 1983.

Ilaria Lepore

La Théâtromanie, a comedy by Pierre de La Montagne. Theater, mimesis and contagion In April 1732, the Mercure de France wrote that «the taste for theatrical performances has never been so strong and general, not only in France, but in many foreign countries» (Anonymous 1732, 775). A fury – and this is a term associated in the writings of the time with mania – for theater plays enraptured Enlightenment France, from the multiplication of public theaters to the widespread deployment of private stagings, the so-called théâtres de société. It appeared everywhere: at Court, in private schools, in the mansions of wealthy aristocrats, in Sceaux, chez the Duchess du Maine, or in Bellevue, chez Mme de Pompadour, and even in army camps, as in the one presided over by the Maréchal de Saxe, on the eve of the battle of Fontenoy, when the Marshal wrote to Favart that he needed him for a «new Tyrtaeus» (Anonymous 1856, 246) to lead his troops to victory. Or even in artisan workshops, such as at the watchmaker Caron’s, where a very young Beaumarchais, along with his sisters, played comedy roles under the guidance and advice of Préville, an actor of the Comédie-Française and a family friend. Everyone wanted to jouer la comédie: mimonanie, a derogatory term alluding to the mode of amateur actors, affected all levels of society. In his Mémoires sécrets pour serivir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres, Bachaumont writes: «The mania for putting on plays increases day by day, and despite the ridicule that the immortal author of Metromanie covered all these bourgeois ham actors with, there is no lawyer that in his modest country abode doesn’t want to erect a stage or hire a troupe» (Bachaumont 1783, III, 232). When Piron, in 1736, wrote his Métromanie,¹ the model for La Montagne’s comedy, the author’s harsh criticisms, which, in line with the general interest, had more to do with his rivalry with Voltaire, were not yet indicative of the centrality that this phenomenon would acquire from the second half of the century on. Rather, those criticisms authorize us to consider this type of mania as an eccentricity or a new kind of oddity.² But in Piron’s comedy, love for theater, or rather for

 We recall that Piron would write his play for the Marquis de Livry, his patron, and that before gaining the honor of being represented at the Comédie-Française, on January 10, 1738, it was staged.  Already in his novel-memoire, published in Amsterdam in 1741, Les confessions du comte de ***, Charles Duclos wrote: “La fureur de jouer la comédie régnait alors à Paris; on trouvait partout des théâtres” [“The passion for acting then reigned in Paris; there were theaters everywhere”]. And https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-010

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verse, is presented more as a “tic de famille” (Piron 1769, 11) and for Damis as a “slight and innocent madness”, a touch of piquant originality which was well suited to the age of frivolity and worldly pleasures of a French society still aping the aristocratic ideals of the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans. Without wishing to delve specifically into an analysis of the théâtres de société,³ which were directly linked to Theatermania, whose most basic meaning designated an obsession with stage practices that characterized the taste of the age, we will limit ourselves to acknowledging this context as the environment that the characters of Pierre de la Montagne’s comedy inhabit. Prior to the Revolution, Montagne distinguished himself as a man of letters, a translator and a correspondent of the Bordeaux Museum, and afterwards as a member of the Académie des sciences et belles lettres of the same city, more a fan of Voltaire’s than of theater. In fact, Scene 1 of Théâtromanie,⁴ (Montagne 1783), a two-act verse comedy that debuted in Paris at the Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes on December 27, 1782, opens on the castle of Florimont, property of a rich bourgeois, amateur de la déclamation, who has installed a private theater in his home and is rehearsing a new play to entertain his friends. In this scene La Fleur, valet of the main character Dorval, is in the castle’s living room, “bizarrely furnished” with tall columns, a temple, a tree, a house […] in short, a theater” (Théâtr. I, 1, 12). The maid Lisette strives with obvious difficulty to justify the poor judgment that has infected her home and her master’s mind: Vraiment de ce côté la folie est certaine. Tout lui sert de Théâtre ; il est toujours en Scène. Si l’on cite un endroit de quelque bon Auteur, Il se campe aussi-tôt, prend un air de grandeur, Ouvre une large bouche, et, malgré vos prières, Il vous déclamera douze scènes entières. Tantôt Amant soumis, puis Monarque irrité, Et se battant les flancs pour paraître agité. Pour moi lorsqu’à mes yeux sa verve se transporte, Je tremble, quoiqu’il ait la poitrine assez forte, Qu’en se passionnant pour pousser un hélas, Il n’aille en ce pays d’où l’on ne revient pas.

again in 1764, the actor and playwright Desforges, then an unemmployed medical student who “avidly sought” the noble company of an itinerant theater troupe, stated: “The spectacle mania was such that in and around Paris, during the summer season, there was not a single castle that didn’t have its own theater”.  I refer to Plagnol-Dieval 2003.  Henceforth quotes from this text will be marked as Théâtr. followed by act, scene and page number.

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LA FLEUR Ce n’est pas lui tout seul que cette mouche pique. C’est, ma foi, maintenant un mal épidémique⁵ (Théâtr. I, 1, 12)

The concept of illness applied to theater is a very well-known legacy of Christianity’s anti-theater stance. In the long controversy over the haîne du théâtre, the arguments in favor of theater were rejected, because of the belief that the performances were a source of contagion, in that passions infected audiences through the pleasure that their on-stage mimicry aroused. In his Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie, Bossuet offers us one of the first images of this epidemic contagion: Si les peintures immodestes ramènent naturellement à l’esprit ce qu’elles expriment, et que pour cette raison on en condamne l’usage, […] combien plus sera-t-on touché des expressions du théâtre, où tout paraît effectif : où ce ne sont point des traits morts et des couleurs sèches qui agissent, mais des personnages vivants, de vrais yeux, ou ardents, ou tendres et plongés dans la passion ; de vraies larmes dans les acteurs, qui en attirent d’aussi véritables dans ceux qui regardent ; enfin de vrais mouvements, qui mettent en feu tout le parterre et toutes les loges ?⁶ (Bossuet 1694, IV, 13)

The issue of contagion returns again in one of the founding texts of classical aesthetics, the Sentiments de l’Académie Française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid, published in 1638 and attributed to Jean Chapelain, where we read: “Les mauvais exemples sont contagieux, meme sur les théâtres; les feintes représentations ne causent que trop de veritables crimes, et il y a grand péril à divertir le peuples par des plaisirs qui peuvent produire un jour des douleurs publiques” (Civardi 2004, 937).⁷ This quote has the merit of clearly circumscribing our primary interest,

 [«In this place madness is certain./For him everything is a pretext for Theater, he is always on stage/If you quote a passage from some good author,/He promptly gets up, takes on an air of grandeur,/Opens the wide mouth, and, despite your every prayer,/He will declaim twelve full scenes to you./Submissive lover, then angry monarch/Beating his flanks to seem agitated./As for me, when his exuberance reaches my sight,/I fear that, although he has a vigorous chest,/Getting too excited to come up with a hélas,/He will go straight to that bourn from which no traveller returns. LA FLEUR: He isn’t the only one it happens to/In my opinion, nowadays, it’s an epidemic disease»].  [“If immodest paintings naturally call to mind what they express, and for this reason their use is condemned, (…) how much more will you be touched by the expressions of the theater, where everything seems effective; where it isn’t dead people and drab colors that are presented, but living characters, real or ardent eyes, or misty and immersed in passion; the actors shed real tears, which draw equally real ones in those who watch; lastly, real agitations [mouvements] that set the whole parterre and the boxes on fire?”].  [“Bad examples are contagious, even on stage; fake representations cause nothing but too many real crimes, and there is great danger in entertaining the public with pleasures that may one day lead to public pain”].

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namely the danger that theater presumably presented, and allows us to take a further step in analyzing a concept that was central in interpreting not only La Montagne’s comedy but also the broader phenomenon of Theatermania. The danger of theater, according to Chapelain, derives from the ability of theatrical fiction to trigger – to use René Girard’s well-known formula – a “mimetic desire” (Girard 1961), i. e., that theater, in addition to being the natural venue of mimesis, is a place where mankind experiences its ability to portray or imagine itself as other than what it is, and at the same time becomes a model to be imitated. The application of the concept of mimetic desire also allows us to undertake a dual hermeneutic operation, the first of which reveals the mechanics of the imitative process linked to stage practice as such, and the second which highlights the non-spontaneous but mediatized nature of this desire for the theater seen as a model or exemplum. As we shall see, La Théâtromanie, rather than being a comedy that speaks about theater, which posits the world of the stage with its methods and its actors at the center of the fiction, is above all a discourse on theater, which both underscores the distinction between identity process and social relationship within a culture of mimesis, and imposes a re-examination of the concepts of representation, theatricality, staging and role. The plot of La Montagne’s comedy is very straightforward: worried about the obsession – “bizarre manie” (Théâtr. I, 1, 13) as it is described in the text – that his son has for the theater, an obsession that has prevented him from completing his bourgeois education, Monsieur Dorval, now ill and close to death, decides to trick his son into believing, by means of a letter sent through his laquais, La Fleur, that he has died, in order to persuade his son to abandon his wish to become an actor. La Fleur, a rich bourgeois, arrives at the castle of Florimont with old Dorval’s letter, having hired a troupe of actors, including the young protagonist, to stage a new tragedy, Pyrrhus et Polixène. At the very moment when the news of his father’s death reaches him, young Dorval discovers that he has to play the role of Pyrrhus, saddened by the death of his beloved father Achille. The tragedy in the comedy begins: Pyrrhus/Dorval stands sorely aggrieved before Achille’s mausoleum, to make his last farewell to his father, when, coup de théâtre, Monsieur Dorval suddenly appears from behind Achille’s tomb. The illusion is broken. Dorval recognizes his father, who has come all the way to Florimont castle to convince him, where his alleged death had failed, to forever abandon his theatrical career. But since the young Dorval is determined to continue on his theatrical path, his father decides to disown and disinherit him. As previously mentioned, La Théâtromanie can be considered for all intents and purposes a reflection on imitative behavior and its capacity for propagation, which finds its fulfillment in the stage performance. In the character of Dorval, the principle of mimetic desire, i. e. the obsessive desire to absorb by imitation the in a certain sense mythologized model (the theatrical

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one), is clearly stated. The young Dorval is an empty “I” who takes on the behavior that he has learned from the study of stage types; he is Misanthropic, Foolish, Complacent or Arrogant and, like the Damis of Piron’s Métromanie, he pays for this identity ambiguity with a sort of exclusion or alienation from the community. He is, after all, an homme isolé qui vit en volontaire. ⁸ But the imitative quality that Dorval exacerbates and exhibits is always artificial, a sort of parody, a forgery. Dorval is a clumsy imitation of his models, whose features he alters by accentuating the ridiculous. In Act I, Scene 4, the meeting between Dorval and La Fleur is an example of this. Upon reading the letter informing him of his father’s death, Dorval reacts like a tragic hero, collapsing on a fauteuil and launching himself into a heavily pathetic tirade: DORVAL fils O terre, ouvre sous moi ton plus profond abime ! Quoi ! Mon père n’est plus, et sa mort est mon crime ! J’ai choisi le Théâtre ; il voulait le Barreau, Et la mélancolie a creusé son tombeau. Démons, accourez tous ! Déchirez mes entrailles⁹ (Théâtr. I, 4, 19)

Gripped by pain, Dorval blames himself for his father’s death, cursing the theater demon that guides him: DORVAL Théâtre, écrase-moi, pourvu que tu périsses ! Puissé-je voir tomber tes loges, tes coulisses, Voir tes Palais brillants qui fascinaient mes yeux, Comme celui d’Armide, éclipsés dans les Cieux, Sur tes murs embrasés voir serpenter la foudre, Et moi-même expirer sous tes débris en poudre !¹⁰ (Théâtr. I, 4, 20)

The inappropriateness of Dorval’s language, the emphatic and maniacal tone of his ranting to the point of hallucinatory ecstasy at the appearance of his father’s ghost, is in contrast to the language of La Fleur. In a caption, the author suggests that,

 For the dictionary of the Academy (ed. 1684) the term “volunteer” indicates a man “who does not want to subject himself to any rule, nor to depend on anyone, who only wants to do his will”.  [“O earth, open your deepest abyss beneath me!/How! My father is no more, and his death is my crime!/I chose Theater; he wanted the Law, /And melancholy dug his grave./Demons, hurry! Tear out my bowels!”].  [“Theater, annihilate me, on conditin that you perish!/May I see your loges and wings fall,/See your sumptuous palaces, which bewitch our sight,/Like Armide’s, eclipse into the Heavens,/On your burning walls may a lightning bolt appear/And may I perish to dust beneath your rubble”].

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faced with the hyperbolic pathos of Dorval’s reaction, La Fleur speaks with the tone of truest pain, offsetting Dorval’s fake tone. From here, it is a crescendo of tragic fury. Dorval grabs La Fleur by the collar, seeking revenge. The mimetic transfert is complete. Dorval is the furious Hercules, La Fleur the innocent Lycas: DORVAL fils Mais toi, qui m’as porté cette affreuse nouvelle, Sans doute je devrais te punir du trèpas, Qu’Hercule fit subir au malheureux Lycas, Ce triste Messager d’une épouse rivale, Qui lui vint apporter la chemise fatale Qu’infectait le poison du Centaure Nessus.¹¹ (Théâtr. I, 4, 21)

But Dorval’s language is completely dismantled and deconstructed by La Fleur’s illiteracy, his lack of culture that does not enable him to recognize the symbolic universe in which Dorval lives and acts: LA FLEUR, en tremblant Monsieur, je ne connais ni Lycas, ni Lycus, Et je ne vous ai point apporté de chemise ; C’est une lettre, hélas ! Qu’en vos mains j’ai remise.¹² (Théâtr. I, 4, 21)

Because of the semantic misunderstanding that has given rise to the bon mot, Dorval’s destructive delirium turns into sudden euphoria. Dorval paces anxiously, gesticulates, moves uncontrollably under La Fleur’s watchful gaze, and once again indulges in his passion for theater. He sees Melpomene appear, clutching a bloody dagger on Lekain’s tomb. No longer myths or heroes, he is the great French actor, the man in flesh and blood, who now becomes the model and mediator of his maniacal desire. However, the dominance of the mimetic mechanism does not stop at the sole issue of constructing Dorval’s identity, i. e., awareness of the inter-individual nature of the I – as in a sort of theatrical novitiate or sentimental education. The great models Dorval associates himself with – Hercules, Lekain, Achilles – while so many mirrors of his life and tragic destiny, also contribute at times to magnifying him in the eyes of others, and thus distancing and isolating him.

 [“But you, who gave me the terrible news,/Perhaps I should punish you with death,/What Hercules made the unfortunate Lichas suffer,/That sad messenger of a rival bride,/Who came to offer the fatal shirt/Infected with poison of the centaur Nessus”].  [“Sir, I know neither Lycas, nor Lycus/And have brought you no shirt;/ And this is a letter, alas! That I placed in your hands”].

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Taken within the stage fiction, the discourse on imitation becomes more complex. The metatheatrical element introduces a play of intertextual echoes based on the reflexivity between the fiction-frame and the fiction-framed, causing a confusion between the two levels of fiction. By a malevolent game of fate, Dorval will in fact find himself having to interpret a role, that of Pyrrhus weeping for the death of his father Achille, which parallels his situation. In Act I, Scene 5, faced with the news of the death of Dorval’s father, Florimont reacts with unexpected joy and, shaking his young pupil’s hand, exclaims: Ma foi, rien ne pouvoit venir plus à propos. Votre état est conforme à celui du héros ; Je suis de cette mort enchantée, je vous jure, Et cela vous fera jouer d’après nature.¹³ (Théâtr. I, 5, 26)

Now, by neglecting to stress Florimont’s pathological lack of empathy, which is also the result of a maniacal mind, this short reply introduces a new reflection that directly involves imitative behavior as the application of a method inherent in the actor’s work. In other words, the question that arises is to what extent Dorval’s personal situation affects and modifies his acting. In Act II, Scene 3 Dorval comes onstage as Pyrrhus and recites a long tirade on the theme of mourning and pain for the loss of his father Achille in perfect tragic-style declamation. In the preface to the edition of his play, La Montagne writes that the fact that Dorval plays the role of Pyrrhus in an ‘unnatural’ way testifies to his acting ability. This, he writes, is the verité de l’imitation (Montagne 1783, 6): Dorval keeps up the tragic tone, despite being overwhelmed by real pain. To strengthen his thesis, La Montagne gives the example of the painter Luca Signorelli, who in his Compianto sul Cristo Morto, a painting conserved in the Diocesan Museum of Cortona, portrayed, with the coldness or distance that befits an actor, the body of his own dead son.¹⁴ From this standpoint, the actor’s task is precisely that of perform with such “constancy” of character, associating the particularity of his own situation with the universal quality of the feelings that the character conveys, especially when it comes to arousing compassion, understood as a mimetic propagation necessary to per-

 [“Believe me, nothing could have come more appropriately./Your state is that of the hero/I am delighted with this death, I swear to you,/This will allow you to act according to nature”].  In Vasari’s account, inserted in Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, Signorelli had gone, though shocked by the loss, to see the body of his young son Antonio; he asked that his son be stripped naked so that he could portray him “with the greatest constancy of mind, without crying or shedding tears (…), to always see as he wished, through the work of his hands, what nature had given him and inimical Fortune had taken away”.

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suade the audience to identify with the character. However, Dorval confronts us with a substantial ambiguity. Maîtrise, Dorval’s skill – which recalls what Diderot theorizes in his Paradoxe – does not derive from a technical capacity, but rather from a pathological condition. The actor’s function – based on imitation – does not render, in Dorval’s case, a portrayal of the Other but rather a duplication of the Identical. Dorval is a madman, a fou because, in Focault’s words, he “alienates himself in Analogy”: Il est le joueur déréglé du Même et de l’Autre. Il prend les choses pour ce qu’elles ne sont pas, et les gens les uns pour les autres ; il ignore ses amis, reconnaît les étrangers ; il croit démasquer et il impose un masque. Il inverse toutes les valeurs et les proportions, parce qu’il croit à chaque instant déchiffrer des signes : pour lui les oripeaux font un roi. Il n’est le Différent que dans la mesure où il ne connaît pas la Différence ; il ne voit partout que ressemblances et signes de la ressemblance ; tous les signes pour lui se ressemblent, et toutes les ressemblances valent comme des signes. (Foucault 1966, 65)

Confusing theater for real life or, conversely, real life for theater, are two forms of madness that reveal the profound structural void of Dorval’s identity. It is no coincidence that La Fleur recognizes Dorval’s alleged acting skills precisely when Dorval is not acting. At the end of Act I, Scene 4, after his already mentioned delusional monologue, La Fleur exclaims: “Je me sens tout ému; sa douleur me déchire./ Malgré moi meme enfin je pleure, je soupire” (Théâtr. I, 4, 19).¹⁵ And conversely, when Dorval embodies the role of Pyrrhus, this mimetic contagion – which is the danger of theater – is interrupted by the appearance of Dorval’s father: a coup de théâtre that is again an intrusion of reality into theater. Truth and fiction intertwine and merge, and only Florimont, an incurable theater addict, manages to glimpse the emergence of a dernier sublime in Dorval pere’s bursting onto the scene in the middle of the performance! In the end, young Dorval is unable to recover from his mania, and will actually lose everything because of it: the possibility of a marriage with Florimont’s young daughter, Julie, fatherly love and economic stability. This paradox of theater, into which Dorval falls and which questions the truth behind the mask of a role, is the central node of La Montagne’s comedy. Every barrier between reality and fiction is overturned, to the point that Dorval, after being excluded from the circle of bourgeois relationships and condemned to absolute solitude, does not cease playing his role beyond the end of the play and the farewell of his father, but comments: “C’est l’adieu de Thèsée à son fils Hyppolite” (Théâtr. II, 6, 41).

 [“I am overcome by emotion, His pain tears me apart/in spite of myself, at last I weep and sigh”].

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Far from being confined to the sphere of individual passion, mimetic desire therefore becomes a crucial device in constructing the subject’s social identity and allows us to grasp the fundamental strategies underlying the process of structuring the I through the Other. In the character of Dorval there is no gap between his social and his theatrical role. Or rather, it is Dorval’s social image that is built on the basis of his theatrical doubles. In this way, starting from the explanatory principle of mimesis, there begins to emerge the possibility of identifying a sort of osmosis or contamination between social and theatrical practices, emblematic of the homological relationship between spectacle and society, which we find at the basis of eighteenth-century Theatermania. In fact it appears necessary to ascertain how the concept of Theatermania must extend to all those forms of theatricalization of social and cultural rites and of putting private or public life on display. Society, specifically eighteenth-century French society, is thought of according to the categories of spectacle. As opposed to the usual process, it is social behaviors that adapt to theatrical models. A large number of social and cultural practices appear to be closely associated with a new form of organization of the public sphere, in which the rules of sociability – it suffices to recall Norbert Elias’ works on the civilization des moeurs – are dictated by a process of theatricalization that involves both a representative (or mimetic) dimension than a fictional one. Montesquieu was not wrong when he wrote, in his Lettres Persanes, that comedy was performed in the hall and not on the stage: Tout le peuple s’assemble sur la fin de l’après-dînée et va jouer une espèce de scène que j’ai entendu appeler comédie. Le grand mouvement est sur une estrade, qu’on nomme le théâtre. Aux deux côtés, on voit, dans de petits réduits qu’on nomme loges, des hommes et des femmes qui jouent ensemble des scènes muettes, à peu près comme celles qui sont en usage en notre Perse.¹⁶ (Montesquieu 1873, 62)

Awareness of the theatrical nature of social relations, although it can be traced back to previous eras, from Calderon to Goldoni, passing through Shakespeare and Jacques’ famous line in As you like it (II, 7) “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, takes on in the French context an aspect that reveals what Martial Poirson (2014) has defined as les enjeux spectatoriels of eighteenth-century society,¹⁷ linked to the emergence of a scopic function in the subject’s identification process and the needs for emancipation of new individual behaviors not yet assimilated into the public space. Theater then becomes a  [“People gather in the late afternoon to act a kind of play I’ve heard called comedy. The main action takes place on a stage called a theater. On both sides, in small loges called boxes, we see men and women reciting mute scenes together, more or less like those customary in our Persia”].  See also Fried 1990, [1976].

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metaphor to indicate a society in which everyone plays at showing their disquieting ambivalence, and the concept of Theatermania insists in an unprecedented way on positing theater in a decisive relationship with society. This again is what Martial Poirson means when he adds the neologism theâtrocratie to the phenomenon of Theatermania: […] un régime de pouvoir qui non seulement emprunte les moyens du théâtre […] mais surtout reconnaît pleinement et célèbre le rôle crucial du spectacle en tant que type d’activité non-fictionnelle, absolument nécessaire au bon fonctionnement social, économique, juridique et politique. Cette société en spectacle est donc indéniablement une société de spectacle, c’està-dire parfaitement consciente de la dimension structurante du spectacle pour l’espace public. (Poirson and Spielmann 2017, 10)

It is no accident that La Montagne chooses to set his comedy in the context of the théâtres de société. Besides offering a direct testimony of the widespread theatrical practices, the private theaters were places where one could experience free role play – each spectator being able to take on the role of actor, and vice versa – and where theater began to free itself from the yoke of literature – more than the text it was the spectacle that became central – rediscovering the voyeuristic pleasure of watching and being watched. On an aesthetic level, a reassessment of image culture was already announced in the passage from Piron’s Métromanie to La Montagne’s Theâtromanie. Damis is a poet, a dramatic author, and Dorval is an actor. The mainstay for defining theatricality shifted from playwrighting to performing, or to spectacle. In La Montagne’s comedy there are several scenes intended as an exploration of this debate. In Act II, Scene 7 Florimont complains to Dorval about an accident affreux [dreadful accident] that has befallen his theater: the machine used to imitate thunder and make any threatening sound (le tonner) has shattered into a thousand pieces. It is Mercour, the author of Pyrrhus et Polixène, a tragedy in comedy, who heartens Florimont: a friend who has arrived from England has provided him with “merveilleux effets” able to represent any subject: Un de mes bons amis, arrivé d’Angleterre, Les a fait ce matin transporter dans ma terre. C’est un amas complet de coupes, de poignards, D’arcs et de javelots, de casques, d’étendards, D’armures, de tombeaux, de sceptre, de couronnes, De fauteuils tous dorés et de superbes trônes, Puis des palais, des mers, avec leur horizon, Un tonner tout neuf, une vaste prison, Un costume assorti dans le vrai goût antique, Tous les habits d’Europe et ceux de l’Amérique,

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En sorte qu’on pourra jouer avec plaisir Tous les sujets présents, et tous ceux à venir.¹⁸ (Théâtr. II, 7, 43)

Such scenes testify not only to the tendency of late eighteenth-century French theater to orient a play towards visual and sensational pleasures, but also to offer us an overview of the organizational methods and technical devices in vogue in the théâtres de société. And it is again no coincidence that the rivalry that opened up against private stagings – by virtue of that homology between reality and fiction that had contributed to canceling all distinctions between theater hall and stage – generated in official theater and in the French intellectual environment a new relationship with illusion, triggering the debate, which broke out precisely in the year that Pierre de la Montagne’s comedy was performed, on whether to equip the parterre with seats. On April 30, 1780, the actors of the Comédie-Française addressed a formal demand to the Gentilshommes de la Chambre – theater managers – that it be explicitly forbidden to the public to speak to the actors and actresses. In the same demand, a few years before Diderot pronounced himself on the same subject, the actors of the Comédie-Française were in effect requiring the erection of a fourth wall: Soit donc que vous composiez, soit que vous jouiez, ne pensez non plus au spectateur que s’il n’existait pas. Imaginez sur le bord du théâtre un grand mur qui vous sépare du parterre ; jouez comme si la toile ne se levait pas. Pour l’intérêt du Public et des acteurs, un mur impénétrable devrait séparer toujours et les acteurs et le Public ; ils ne devraient jamais avoir de communication ensemble dans cette enceinte qu’on appelle le théâtre. Ce qui n’a de mérite que par l’illusion, ce qui ne se soutient que par l’illusion, ne devrait jamais être subordonné à ce qui peut la détruire.¹⁹

The illusion could be achieved only by sedating the moods of that raucous multitude which were the parterre spectators, who from 1782 on were required to re-

 [“One of my friends, who arrived from England,/This morning had them carried to my house./It is a complete mass of cups and daggers,/ Of bows, javelins, helmets and banners,/Of armor, tombs, scepters and crowns,/Of golden armchairs and superb hues, /Palaces, seas, with their horizon,/A whole new tonner, a vast prison,/A costume made in true ancient taste,/All the garments of Europe and America,/So that/Any subject present, and all those to come/Can be delightfully portrayed”].  [“Whether you write or recite, don’t bother with the spectators, act as if they didn’t exist. Imagine a large wall on the edge of the theater that separates you from the parterre; act as if the curtain had not risen. For the interest of the public and the actors, an impenetrable wall should always separate the actors from the public; they should never communicate in that place they call theater. Anything that contributes to heightening the illusion, everything that supports the illusion, should never be subordinated to what can destroy it”], Réquisitoire adressé aux Gentilshommes de la Chambre par l’assemblée du 30 avril 1780, article 6, Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française.

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main seated in the hall of the Comédie. In Marmontel’s article on “Parterre” in his Éléments de littérature (1787), later reprised in the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie, he criticizes this decision: to favor the detachment between hall and stage by reducing the parterre to a passive set of spectators, would mean interrupting the mimetic contagion that arises from the dramatic situation and that is the natural disposition of theater. Agitated by a sort of “sudden, strong, and rapid electricity”, the parterre was ultimately, according to Marmontel, “the focus of the real emotion” (Marmontel 2005, 847): Ce que l’émotion commune d’une multitude assemblée et pressée ajoute à l’émotion particulière ne peut se calculer : qu’on se figure cinq cent miroirs se renvoyant l’un l’autre la lumière qu’ils réfléchissent, ou cinq cents échos le même son ; c’est l’image d’un public ému par le ridicule ou par le pathétique. C’est là surtout que l’exemple est contagieux et puissant.²⁰ (Marmontel 2005, 847)

To conclude, let us return to the idea of contagion as the danger but also as the great power of theater. A power that would develop its most radical consequences just a bit later during the years of the Revolution, which would open up in France new perspectives for society and theater. From there, that inchoate mass which was the public, often evoked by the image of Leviathan, reached, precisely by virtue of that “electricity” that propagates ideas and a collective consciousness which becomes peuple, as Pierre Frantz (2017) admirably puts it in speaking of theater during the revolutionary era. From there, the theatrical word would acquire the strength of political speech and witness the passage, as Jean-Claude Yon (2012) suggests, from eighteenth-century théâtromanie to nineteenth-century dramatocratie, which, unlike the former, had as backdrop a society marked by the legacy of the Revolution, in which audiences identified themselves first and foremost as citizens.

Bibliography Anonymous. “Spectacles.” Mercure de France 1 April 1732: 775. Anonymous. Revue française. Paris. 1856, Vol. 4. Bachaumont, Louis Petit (de). Mémoires sécrets pour serivir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres. Londres: Adamson, 1783.

 [“What the common emotion of a gathered, crowded multitude adds to an individual emotion is incommensurable; imagine five hundred mirrors that reflect light onto each other, or five hundred echoes reproducing the same sound; it is the image of an audience shaken by the absurd or the pathetic. It contains that example which becomes contagious and powerful”].

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Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne. Maximes et réflexions sur la Comédie, Œuvres complètes de Bossuet. Paris: Anisson, 1694. Civardi, Jean-Marc. La querelle du ‘Cid’ (1637–38). Edition critique intégrale. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des savoirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Frantz, Pierre. “Le peuple dans la théorie théâtrale des Lumières. Diderot et Mercier”. Théâtre et peuple de Louis-Sébastien Mercier à Firmin Gémier. Dir. Olivier Bara. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017, 30–49. Fried, Michael. La Place du spectateur. Esthétique et origine de la peinture moderne [Absorption and Teatricality, 1976]. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: éd. Grasset, 1961. Marmontel, Jean-Francois. Éléments de littérature, texte établi par Sophie Le Ménahèze. Paris: Desjonquères: 2005. Montagne, Pierre (de la). La Théâtromanie, comédie en deux actes et en vers. Amsterdam: Cailleau, 1783. Montesquieu. Lettres persanes, texte établi par André Lefèvre. Paris: A. Lemerre, 1873. Piron, Alexis. La Métromanie, comédie, Nouvelle édition, conforme à la représentation. Paris: Duchesne, 1769. Plagnol-Dieval, Marie Emmanuelle. Le théâtre de société : un autre théâtre ? Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Poirson, Martial. Politique de la représentation. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Poirson, Martial. “Le spectacle est dans la salle. Siffler n’est pas jouer.” Editorial. Dix-Huitième Siècle. Paris: La Découverte, 2017 (49): 57–74. Poirson, Martial and Spielmann, Guy. “Avant propos”. Editorial. Dix-Huitième Siècle 2017 (49): 5–25. Yon, Jean-Claude. Une histoire du théâtre à Paris. De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre. Paris: Aubier, 2012.

Pierre Frantz

Revolutionary Theatermania It is said that at the news of the storming of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789, PlancherValcour, the director of the boulevard Théâtre des Délassements-Comiques, tore the tulle curtain behind which he had been condemned to represent his pièces, the result of one of the absurd police regulations that the Ancien Régime had purposely enforced. A theatrical gesture that associated political and social intrusions with the destruction of privilege in an absolute unity of meaning, which conflated theater and social life. It was a liberation of theater that manifested itself even before the laws that would provide new foundations to freedom – January 1791 – and those that would throw up new obstacles – August 1793. This liberation was first of all that of the theater from its traditional scenarios and classical format. But that gesture was equally emblematic of another liberation of theatricality. It broke free of the stage, invaded the hall, and its audiences and wound up leaving the theater. To get a sense of the Theatermania of the French Revolution period we must therefore take into account both theater, its realia and practice, its audiences and its outbreak from the walls, included its spread throughout society. At bottom we must seek to specify its meaning and particularities, what of this phenomenon was innovative and often transient. History has rightly noted an important turning point: the liberation of theater as a commercial enterprise. This was closely linked to the abolition of privileges, especially for those who under the Ancien Régime had attended the Comédie-Française. This liberation responded to a social demand that was increasingly on the rise during the eighteenth-century. It took the concrete form of a January 1791 law that made theaters operate as free commercial enterprises. The Comédie-Française lost its monopoly. Any private individual could open a theater if it so pleased him and he had the money to back it up. There was no longer any preliminary censorship. Contractual relations between authors and theater companies were defined and protected by law. The almost immediate consequence of this law was to increase stage offerings in the Paris area. The number of theaters in the capital tripled, and the number of theatrical performances, dramatic productions included, multiplied exponentially. The public was democratized – especially since a substantial part of the traditional public, 140,000, had emigrated abroad – and imposed its tastes on the various companies, which now earned their livelihood on the proceeds. While the process of the Revolution’s Theatermania prolonged the theater of the Ancien Régime, its development in the last decade of the century was obviously the result of the political decisions of the National Assembly and can be evaluated in quantitative terms: at least 1600 new plays and 40,000 perhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-011

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formances in the century’s last decade. The difficulty is quantifying the audiences that attended the theaters, whether they were Parisians or from the provinces; a census of the archives is still ongoing. However, we can surmise that the economic survival of the various theatrical companies in itself implies a sufficient public, considering the economic fragility of many of these theaters, which at times opened for just a few months before shutting down. Quantitatively, the Empire’s authoritarian shift undoubtedly also reduced the demand and supply of plays. The repression of the theaters under the Consulate and the Empire, together with the significant return to an increasingly watchful censorship, testifies to the political dimension that theater had attained in the previous decade. This perception results above all from the deliberate exploitation of theater by the revolutionary authorities. During the early developments of journalism and public opinion, the idea that theater exercised a decisive influence on society was widely recognized, both by men of letters and the first actors of revolutionary political life. Marie-Joseph Chénier clearly supports this: “It is above all to his tragedies that M. de Voltaire owes his influence on all of Europe. A book, however good as it is, could not act on public opinion so quickly, and with the same force, as a play” (Chénier 1808, I, 88).¹ It was a matter of forming public opinion in keeping with the wishes of the revolutionary authorities. This didactic approach, the legacy of Enlightenment theorists, linked to the question of the “mission of theater”, was no longer, since the start of the Revolution, the sole purview of debates between intellectuals. The question of theater entered the political and institutional domain. Journalists and politicians appropriated it. The Revolutionary assemblies frequently discussed it. For example, the petitions of the sans-culottes themselves testify to the passionate interest in this issue. Though often in caricatural form, it gives us an idea of how, during the Revolutionary period, the reception and realization of the projects developed by the Enlightenment took shape. Theater was to be a school for adults. Even the illiterate could be educated by it. Chénier recognized in it an “école des mœurs et de la liberté” (Carlson 1970, 55). La Feuille du salut public backed their reform in such a way that “our theaters are the true école des moeurs”.² Projects aimed at achieving this goal multiplied – Romme, Boissy d’Anglas, François de Neufchâteau –. The question  The quote is taken from Charles IX, “Discours préliminaire”. [“C’est surtout ses tragédies que M. de Voltaire doit son influence sur l’Europe entière. Un livre, quelque bon qu’il soit, ne saurait agir sur esprit public d’une manière aussi prompte, aussi vigoureuse qu’une belle pièce de théâtre”].  [“nos théâtres seraient la véritable école des moeurs”], La Feuille du Salut public, n° 139, septembre 1793.

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of social interest, during the revolutionary decade, was taken up again on the political level and translated into the politics of the revolutionary assemblies and the Revolution’s leading personnel. A letter of a Comité de correspondance des jacobins to the Comité d’Instruction Publique of the Convention even proposed decreeing that there should be a theater in any town having at least 4000 inhabitants, and even turning churches into theaters: où les élèves des écoles publiques et autres personnes pourront s’exercer, et ne pourront néanmoins donner que des pièces sentimentales et dans le sens de la Révolution […] presque toutes ces villes ayant des églises vacantes, on peut éviter de bâtir. Je crois que rien ne serait plus propre à instruire le peuple, à lui faire oublier les singeries des prêtres, et enfin à régénérer les mœurs.³ (Schmitt 1867–1870, II, 135)

This letter, written in the autumn of 1793, is revealing. The revolutionaries expected that theater would replace the Church and take over both its didactic and its sacralizing role. It goes without saying that this mission could only be called into question by the commercial imperatives linked to the 1791 law. The public paid, first of all, to be entertained. At the start of the Terror, on August 3rd and 4th, 1793, the Convention, aware of this tension between business and political propaganda, decided to directly subsidize cost-free theatrical performances, Par et pour le peuple, indicating the repertory and the few plays it wished to see staged: À compter du 4 de ce mois, et jusqu’au 1er septembre prochain, seront représentées, trois fois la semaine, sur les théâtres de Paris, les tragédies de Brutus, Guillaume Tell, Caïus Gracchus, et autres pièces dramatiques qui retracent les glorieux événements de la Liberté. Une de ces représentations sera donnée chaque semaine aux frais de la République.⁴

To ensure the success of such measures, it also needed to oversee theatrical offerings and hence to re-establish a form of censorship. There could be no complete return to the Ancien Régime’s preventive censorship. It contented itself with threats and de facto repression. The climate of terror encouraged self-censorship and, in Paris, the theater directors themselves, worried about the threat to their

 [“where public school students and other people will be able to practice, and will nevertheless only be able to perform sentimental pièces (dramas), in line with the principles of the Revolution […] almost all these cities having empty churches, one can avoid building. I believe that nothing would be more suitable for educating the masses, making them forget the antics of the priests, and regenerating morality”].  [“From the 4th of this month and until next September 1st, three times a week, the Paris theaters will offer the tragedies of Brutus, Guillaume Tell, Caïus Gracchus and other dramatic works that retrace the glorious events of Liberty. One of these performances will be given every week at the Republic’s expense”].

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productions, which cost them a considerable amount and which could be aborted by the militants of the sections, consulted the Commune, which had appointed two censors to read the plays submitted by the directors themselves or by the authors, to correct them if necessary or to indicate those likely to be targeted at the time of performance. Nonetheless, the limitations of censorship soon became evident. The public, whatever the play, displayed great freedom of judgment and in its political interpretation of the works. And the Revolutionary audiences were in constant excitement. The power and influence of the claque, led by the enemies of an author or an actor, on performances had not been uncommon under the Ancien Régime. The orchestra section spectators, standing and pressed up against each other until 1782, were extremely voluble and would spontaneously intervene, whether to express raucous approval or to shut a play down. Likewise during the Revolution. Although the spectators were now seated, this raucous activity became politicized. On saisissait une application, i. e., a sentence, a verse, a word or a gesture was applauded out of the blue, often with the active complicity of an actor. Or the contrary, the audience quite often jeered the play, interpreting each word as they saw fit. Thus the play seemed to be making allusions not as the author had intended or imagined. The intended meaning was subverted by the meaning that the audiences viscerally experienced. During a repeat performance on October 6, 1793, of MarieJoseph Chénier’s 1792 tragedy Caïus Gracchus,⁵ a deputy, Albitte, reacted vehemently to the hemistich “Des lois et non du sang” [Laws not blood], a hemistich that had gone unnoticed during its writing and that denounced the “moderatism” of tragedy. The incident caused the tragedy’s immediate ban from the stage up to the time of the Directory. The newspapers of the day reveal a large number of actions of this kind, at times in an opposite direction depending on the specific moment, the theaters and their audience. Newpapers certainly also noted occasions of universal acclaim, such as the one that took place on November 13, 1793, at the performance of Voltaire’s Brutus and Dugazon’s comedy Le Modéré, when the entire audience wildly danced and sang hand-in-hand in a display of brotherhood.⁶ The censors might well attack the authors but were unable to keep the audiences in check. A host of topical pièces invaded the stages. Dramatic fiction offered audiences what for them was an unprecedented verbalization, a putting into words and images their own social experiences: the release of cloistered monks and nuns from monasteries and convents, the possibility of divorce, the sale of national assets, republican tutoiement with the social relations that it implied, war and mass revolt. Some plays

 On this tragedy and its political significance, see Gauthier Ambrus’ excellent article (Ambrus 2018).  Le Journal des théâtres, 13 novembre 1793.

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graphically dramatized recent events, such as the assassination of Marat and Le Pelletier, the heroism of Bara and Viala, the siege of Lille and Toulon, the funeral of General Hoche. Such pièces heroized the nation’s great men, offering a dramatic equivalent of the Pantheon: Abbé de l’Épée, Helvétius, Descartes, Voltaire, Cange and many others were subjects of hagiographic dramas. The opposite side of this moral, wise, didactic repertory were other theatrical forms handed down from old traditions, such as carneval, banned by the Revolution, a new if ephemeral mode of expression. It was above all at the height of the de-Christianization movement, in the autumn and winter of year II (1793–1794), that plays such as Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois or Lebrun Tossa’s La Folie de Georges brought to the stage the carnival rituals of desecration, overthrow of the king and the aristocrats. Comedy turned grimly menacing. The new, often inexperienced audiences were demanding strong emotions and the theaters were quite willing to comply. The dramas staged at the Théâtre de la Nation and the Théâtre de la République, and later the lyric opera productions in Paris at the turn of the nineteenth-century responded to this need. The starkly contrasted dramatic chromatism of the plots produced binary oppositions between the characters. The innocent victims, often women, and their villainous persecutors acted within the framework of powerful psychomachies, leading audiences to the climax of the dramatic action or operatic crescendos. Theatricality itself, namely the set of specific elements linked to theater, gestures, attitudes, the calculation of the stage effects or dramatic situations, were part of a profound process of change triggered by the quest for powerful and relatively simple effects, to the detriment of the more subtle elaborations of dialogue and language. The theatrical dialogue speeches were splintered. A fragmented style became pervasive and aposiopesis dominated. Pixerécourt’s (1798) earliest plays, offer excellent examples of this: MADAME GERMAIN, après avoir regardé le portrait. Se peut-il ! Ô ciel ! LE BARON. Qu’avez-vous, madame Germain ? VICTOR. D’où naît ce trouble ? MADAME GERMAIN. Ce portrait… Monsieur… LE BARON. Eh bien ?… Ce portrait…

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MADAME GERMAIN. Sachez… CLÉMENCE. Achevez donc… MADAME GERMAIN. Sachez que c’est… SCÈNE IV. Les Précédents, Valentin. On sonne l’alarme, des cris de aux armes se font entendre. Le jour baisse. VALENTIN, accourant. Eh vite ! Et vite ! Sauvez-vous ; Roger sera dans un moment au pied des murailles…⁷

This fragmented format opened the way to the most searing pathos. Suspense was at its peak with a cliffhanger effect that made it possible to bypass scene change, in the manner of the nineteenth-century feutilletons, an effect often realized by a spectacular optical illusion of set design: Le the´â tre repre´sente un lieu sauvage, connu sous le nom du Nant-d’Arpennaz ; dans le fond, entre deux rochers tre`s e´leve´s, est un pont de bois au-dessous duquel se pre´cipite un torrent e´ cumeux qui traverse le the´â tre et vient passer derrie`re un moulin, place´ a` droite au second plan : la porte du moulin fait face a` la coulisse, et les croise´es sont vis-a`-vis des spectateurs ; il y a un banc de pierre au-dessous des croise´es ; a` quelques pas du moulin, se trouve un petit pont tre`s frê le qui communique a` un sentier escarpe´ qui borde le torrent et me`ne au haut de la montagne. Des sapins re´pandus ça` et la`, semblent encore faire ressortir davantage l’aspe´rite´ de ce se´jour. A` gauche, vis-a`-vis du moulin, est une petite masse de rochers, couronne´e par deux ou trois sapins, et au-devant de laquelle on remarque une partie plate, taille´e pour faire un banc. Pendant l’entracte, on entend le bruit e´loigne´ du tonnerre ; bientô t l’orage augmente, et, au lever du rideau, toute la nature paraî t en de´sordre ; les e´clairs brillent de toutes parts, le torrent roule avec fureur, les vents mugissent, la pluie tombe avec fracas, et des coups de tonnerre multiplie´s qui se re´pe`tent cent fois, par l’e´cho des montagnes, portent l’e´pouvante et la terreur dans l’â me. Sce`ne premie`re TRUGUELIN (de´guise´ en paysan. Il arrive avec un air e´gare´, et parcourt le the´â tre comme un insense´) : Ou` fuir ?… Ou` porter ma honte et mes remords ? Errant depuis le matin dans ces montagnes, je cherche en vain un asile qui puisse de´rober ma tête au supplice… Je n’ai point

 [“Act II, end of Scene iii. MADAME GERMAIN (after looking at the portrait): It may be! Oh heavens. LE BARON: What’s wrong, Madame Germain? VICTOR: Why so troubled? MADAME GERMAIN: This portrait…Sir… LE BARON: Well?…The portrait… MADAME GERMAIN: You know… CLÉMENCE: Get to the point… MADAME GERMAIN: You know that it is …. Scene iv. The preceding, Valentin, (Sounds the alarm, shouts of “to arms” are heard. The day ends.) VALENTIN, (rushing): Quick! Quick! Save yourselves, Roger will soon be at the foot of the walls…”].

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trouve´ d’antre assez obscur, de caverne assez profonde pour ensevelir mes crimes.⁸ (Pixérecourt 1800)

The tableau comble of the bourgeois dramas was amplified with extra effects, in which the peripeteia of anagnorisis saw its effect doubled by the hero/heroine’s mortal peril and his/her last-minute rescue. Les deux amants s’embrassent, Victor se relève et tous deux se disposent à fuir lorsqu’ils sont de nouveau enveloppés par un corps d’Allemands. Victor se met au-devant de Clémence et pare tous les coups qu’on lui porte : enfin ils ont beau se défendre, ils vont périr. SCÈNE XIII. Les précédents, Le Baron, Valentin, Madame Germain, Un Officier général. VALENTIN, accourant. Les voilà !… Les voilà !… Sauvez-les… LE BARON. Arrêtez… Ce jeune homme est mon fils. VICTOR ET CLÉMENCE, se jetant dans les bras du Baron. Mon père !⁹ (Pixerécourt 1798)

 [“The theater is a wild place, known as Nant-d’Arpennaz; at the back, between two tall rocks, a wooden bridge under which a bubbling stream rushes through the theater and passes behind a mill, placed on the right in the background: the door of the mill faces the wings, and the windows face the spectators; there is a stone bench under the windows; a few steps from the mill there is a very shaky bridge that links up with a steep path running along the stream and leading to the mountain top. The spruce trees scattered here and there seem to bring out even more the harshness of the place. On the left, in front of the mill, there is a small rock cluster, crowned by two or three fir trees, and in front of which you can see a flat clearing for a bench. During the interval, the distant sound of thunder is heard; soon a storm blows up, and when the curtain rises, all of nature appears in disorder; lightning strikes everywhere, the torrent flows furiously, the winds roar, the rain falls with a roar, and the thunderclaps that multiply, repeated a hundred times by the echo of the mountains, strike fear and terror in the soul. Scene i. TRUGUELIN (disguised as a farmer. He enters disconcerted and walks around the theater like a madman): Where can I flee to, where can I take my shame and my remorse? Wandering these mountains since morning, I look in vain for an asylum that can save my head from this torture … I have not found a cave dark enough, a cave deep enough to bury my crimes”].  [“The two lovers kiss, Victor gets up and both prepare to flee when they are again surrounded by a corps of Germans. Victor stands before Clémence and parries all the blows that are inflicted on him: in the end their self-defemce is in vain, they prepare to die. Scene xiii: The preceding, The Baron, Valentin, Madame Germain, a generale. VALENTIN (hurrying): There they are!… There they are!… Save them… The BARONE: Halt… This young man is my son VICTOR AND CLÉMENCE, (throwing themselves into the Baron’s arms): Father!”].

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A particular sub-genre of Opéra, “rescue opera” (Charlton 1992, 1342), became popular: for example, Cherubini’s Lodoïska (1791) or Le Sueur’s La Caverne (1793). The clou of mélodrame, under the Empire, brought together all these effects into one often culminating moment. The traditional generic codes were old hat. Under the Ancien Régime, genres – and their reception by the public – were strictly codified. The Comédie-Française had the privilege, hence the monopoly, of five-act verse tragedies and comedies. From 1760, it began to leave space for a few prose or verse plays. The other official theaters each had its own specific repertory, with fixed genres, and the unofficial theaters shared among them what was left over, or tried to stealthily appropriate plays that were supposed to arouse interest and amusement in their audiences. Ever since the onset of the Revolution, and even more so with the 1791 law, this whole system crumbled and, alongside tragedies or great traditional comedies, there was a proliferation of theatrical works of an indistinct genre, ranging from pantomime to lyric drama. This phenomenon of sur-théâtralisation also involved acting styles, forcing players to exaggerate or highlight all their gestures and expressions. The French model of theatrical acting, that of the Comédie-Française, was marked, under the Ancien Régime, by a concern to respect the social codes of behavior and the forms inherited from the rhetorical actio, but from the century’s midpoint actors began to seek the naturel in their interpretations. In terms of effects, this was possible only in the absence of codes, namely in the onset of bodily gestures or differently codified social gestures that until then had been considered inappropriate for the stage. This was what the actors of this period masterfully did, starting with Talma. Theatermania, the proliferation of theaters and the arrival of new, inexperienced, lower-class actors amplified this phenomenon. At the Comédie-Française, Talma transfigured the natural, promoting it to the sublime (see Fazio 1999). The aesthetics of the sublime paved the way for the expressive originality of each artist, against the mastery of forms and codes. The theatricalization of public life, at the very moment of its actual birth, was a consequence of Revolutionary Theatermania. From Louis XIV on, the monarchs and the great nobility theatricalized court life. Likewise, the Revolution staged the bourgeoisie and the masses in an immense spectacle, by turns comic and tragic, carnivalesque, or terrifying, when the hero became the guillotine. Theater seemed to invade political life. David designed costumes for the people’s representatives, political rhetoric became extremely theatrical, often tragic, and a word could lead to death or silence. Great feasts were invented, which not only adopted the rituals of royal entrances, but also endowed them with an extraordinary theatricality, whether they were joyful feasts or funeral celebrations. The burlesque processions of dethroning, repeated on theater stages, functioned as a carnival coun-

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terpoint to serious ceremonies. The Revolution became theater from an opposite direction. Repertories and performances become politicized, audiences intervened, the separation between theater hall and stage was constantly shattered, the actors of the Théâtre de la Nation, the blacks, were arrested, and Talma with his revolutionary actors, the reds, leaped onto the stage of the Théâtre de la République. The Theatermania of the revolutionary era was therefore an indisputable phenomenon. The extent of this can be understood by observing the growth of the theater audiences, the incredible number of performances and the number of theatrical works published, the construction of many new theaters, the decisive involvement of the revolutionary authorities in undoing the constraints that the Ancien Régime still imposed on theaters. It was the birth of a true, democratically inspired, national cultural policy. Theatermania had opened the door to an unprecedented repertory and new dramatic forms, from agitprop theater to lyric opera, through the re-appropriation of old genres such as tragedy. Dramatic aesthetics, which had established itself in the second half of the eighteenth-century, was implicit in theatrical architecture and performative practices. The fourth invisible wall, which separated the stage from the theater hall, even if contested and subverted, ended up imposing itself. Theaters played the role of newspapers, schools and churches, participating in the birth of public opinion and contributing to shaping the nation’s collective emotions and imagination. In this sense, Theatermania can be considered a substantial access key to a historical understanding of the Revolution.

Bibliography Ambrus, Gauthier. “Voix politiques dans les tragédies révolutionnaires de Marie‐Joseph Chénier.” Littératures 62 (2010): 141–158. https://doi.org/10.4000/litteratures.929. Carlson, Marvin. Le Théâtre de la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Charlton, David. The New Grove Dictionnary of Opera. London-New York: Stanley Sadie, 1992. Chénier, Marie-Josephe. Théâtre de M. Chénier. Paris: Foulon, 1818. Fazio, Mara. François Joseph Talma, Primo Divo. Milano: Leonardo Arte, 1999. Pixerécourt, René Charles Guilbert (de). Victor ou l’Enfant de la forêt. Drame en trois actes, en prose, et à grand spectacle. Paris: Chez Barba, 1798. Pixerécourt, René Charles Guilbert (de). Coelina ou l’enfant du mystère. Drame en trois actes, en prose, et à grand spectacle. Paris: Chez Barba, 1800. Schmitt, Adolf Wilhelm. Tableaux de la Révolution française. Leipzig: Veit & Comp., 1867–1870.

Hansmichael Hohenegger

Goethe and Theater as “das zusammenbrennende, zusammentreffende Ganze” Goethe man of the theater Trying to account for Goethe’s relationship with theater is certainly a daunting task due to its vastness. Goethe was a playwright, director, actor, acting coach, theater director and spectator. This offers a variety of viewpoints that are difficult to unscramble, in part because what appears secondary or derivative sometimes turns out to be important and consequential for a true understanding of Goethe’s concept of theater. His way of being a spectator already provides an insight into what theater meant for him. As can be imagined, he was an avid spectator. Yet, when he resigned as Intendant des Hoftheater, (artistic director of the Court Theater) in 1817, he stopped attending performances, not only out of contentiousness, but also, and especially, because for him theater meant practicing theater. He was an active spectator, a critic who judged, an author who learned, a director who controlled the actors and an impresario who observed the reactions of his audiences. Goethe was not the naive, enthusiastic and almost childlike spectator whom he describes with affectionate and ironic condescension in a conversation with Eckermann.¹ Although he expresses hope for audiences full of childlike enthusiasm, when proudly writing a defense of the Weimar theater, he draws a portrait of the ästhetischer Beobachter (WA I 40, 36), the adult spectator that Goethe and Schiller desired for their theater: one who does not go “unprepared to the playhouse” and does not ask only for what is “immediately enjoyable”, does desire more than just “watching, wondering, laughing, crying” (WA I 40, 78). The “selected audience” (erwähltes Publicum) goes to the theater with more than the cost of the ticket (Legegeld), and if some segments of the work should seem obscure to him, he returns to the theater to better understand and let himself be taught (WA I 40, 79).² Hence  MA 19, 504; III Th., 22 März 1925: “Ihr seid eben ein verrückter Mensch, erwiderte Goethe lachend; aber so hab’ ich’s gerne. Wollte Gott, das ganze Publikum bestände aus solchen Kindern!” [“You are a madman – returned Goethe, laughing –; but that is what I like. Would to God that the whole public consisted of such children!”]. For the abbreviations, see the bibliography at the end of the article.  Goethe wrote this apology for the Weimar theater and its audience also in reaction to the flop of Schlegel’s Ion, which Goethe had staged. See GHb III, 561–562; MA 6.2, 693; GHbS I, 45. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-012

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although Goethe managed to be as accommodating with the public as he was with Eckermann, he thought that the public must be inspired, led aloft along with the author: “The greatest respect an author can have for his public is never to produce what is expected but what he himself considers right and useful for whatever stage of intellectual development he, or others, have reached” (WA I, 42.2, 116).³ His enduring commitment to theater already in and of itself shows the depth of his passion. From 1775 to 1784 he was in charge of the amateur theater of the Weimar Court and from 1791 to 1817 he was superintendent of its permanent theater. Only Faust, his Lebenswerk, which he began writing in 1775 and would continue working on almost up to his death in 1832, tops his long twenty-six-year stint as theater director. These long-term activities do testify to his passion, but they reveal neither the rationale nor the qualities behind this passion, which he himself thought of as Theatermania. Thus, while it is difficult to achieve a definitive understanding of Goethe’s relationship with theater, it is impossible to imagine what Goethe would have been without theater, what his development would have been if his grandmother had not given him, in 1753, the Christmas gift of a puppet theater, which made a deep and lasting impression on him (WA I 26, 18).⁴ His career as a lawyer might not have been so short lived, he might have won a few more lawsuits instead of letting himself be carried away in his addresses more by their dramatic embellishment than by his client’s interest. His diplomatic and political commitments in Weimar might not have taken a back seat, so to speak, to the activities of organizing costume parties and pantomimes. We would not have seen him swoop onto the stage like the devil impersonating pride on stilts and covered with peacock feathers as a tempter of Saint Anthony (GHb II, 23). Goethe’s heuristic talent might not have developed so significantly had he not been a playwright. The theater, as a mindset, permeated his logical passion in studying nature: Goethe believed that the animus of one who writes for the theater, who knows how to pass from one viewpoint to another without judging, requires the same versatility he considered essential for the Schaukelsystem, méthode de bascule, an essential tool for scientific research (WA II 10, 173).⁵

 Maximen und Reflexionen. Ed. Max Hecker. Weimar: Goethe Gesellschaft. 1907 (MuR) n. 77. To use Kantian terms, Goethe preferred in this instance coascendentia to condiscendentia.  Dichtung und Wahrheit (DuW) I, 1. In addition to DuW, this major event full of consequences is taken up in the main document of Goethe’s Theatermania, Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre (Lj) and Wilhelm Meister theatralische Sendung (ThS) (WA I, 21, 193; Lj II 9; WA I, 51, 23; ThS, I 7) both twin novels of Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser.  MA 18.2, 421: “Hiedurch mußte bei mir eine milde, gewissermaßen versatile Stimmung entstehen, welche das angenehme Gefühl gibt, uns zwischen zwei entgegengesetzten Meinungen hin

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By Goethe’s explicit admission this passion was all encompassing, undiscriminating, unconditional. When Eckermann asked him if his organizational commitment as a manager had not distracted him from his theatrical writing, he replied with great frankness: “Yes … I may have missed writing many a good thing, but when I reflect, I am not sorry. I have always regarded all my actions and achievements as merely symbolical; and, in fact, it has been rather indifferent to me whether I have made pots or bowls” (MA 19, 106; I Th; 2 Mai 1824). However, passion does not consider every theatrical activity to be a single indistinguishable thing. Even two functions that he himself performed in the theater, such as organizational direction and artistic guidance, are so different as to be hard to combine. In December 1797 he wrote to Schiller about how he missed his collaboration at the Hoftheater in Weimar, specifically his ästhetische Leitung (artistic direction). Usually, those who, like Goethe, have the task of governing and directing, that is, “keeping together political and economic form” (WA IV 12, 373 9 Dez. 1797; MA 8.1, 462, comment: MA 8.2, 380), often are not able to give the theater its necessary free aesthetic impulse: “I don’t know whether it is possible to combine free interplay and mechanical causality, at least I haven’t yet managed to do the trick” (Ibid.). Still, Goethe was totally given to theater and always thought of it as a whole (ein Ganzes). But for him the whole was not an ineffable mystical unity. Instead, it was a symbolic unity, with a constant awareness of incompleteness, of the risk of dispersion and fragmentation in the variety of its activities and the diversity of its aspects, not a unity that an amateur, no matter how impassionate, could achieve. In the theater world, things could only come together from reflection and discipline. In general, in the study of nature, society and the life of an individual, we must think of a precarious and conditioned whole, which we grasp as a unity that is both necessary and impossible, since we experience life as a Stückwerk, a fragmentary thing (WA II 11, 375; MuR 1154). Thus theater, like life, is always an unfinished enterprise that receives its unity precisely from the feeling of the lack of wholeness. Without this feeling there is no anticipation of a whole, nor any need to find the precarious human means to achieve it. In Goethe’s Lehrjahre Wilhelm reproaches Melina precisely for her lack of passion: “For you the stage is just a few boards: the parts assigned to you are just a schoolboy’s assignment. You consider the spectators in the same way that they regard each other on workdays. … und her zu wiegen, und vielleicht bei keiner zu verharren. Dadurch verdoppeln wir unsere Persönlichkeit”; [“This was to create in me a mild, in some ways versatile state of mind, which gives the pleasant feeling of swinging back and forth between two opposing views and perhaps without adhering to either. In doing so, we double our personality”].

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You feel not the conflagrant, harmonious whole [das zusammenbrennende, zusammentreffende Ganze], which only the mind can invent, comprehend and complete”. (WA I 21, 81; Lj I 14.). The actor is the focus of this conflagration of passion. He or she must feel the task of contributing to a whole. Yet even for the actor there is no contributing to everything without the passion being combined with discipline and reflection. If, alongside passion, we consider the “technical grammatical” (technisch-grammatisch) (WA I, 40, 168, § 90), viewpoint, which Goethe expounds in his Regeln für Schauspieler, the goal is always for theater to be a whole for the actor: “The stage and the hall, the actors and the audience – only combined do they make a whole” (WA I, 40, 166, § 82). To know how to move in space, actors must know what their space is, how they must move with respect to this whole: they must not stay too close to the backdrop, or too downstage; if they are alone on stage they must know how to hold it, be its ornament (die Bühne staffieren), as in a tableau vivant (WA I, 40, 168, § 85).⁶ In developing their craft, actors must always seek to understand the meaning of these rules, adapting them, for example, to the genre at hand. For tragedy the rules will be observed with extreme rigor, while in comedy or farce the popular, funny characters almost demand applying them in reverse. But even in this case the actor must not be naturalistic: “it should be a mimetic appearance, not flat reality” (WA I, 40, 168, § 91). Not only the actors, directors, theater directors and the public, but all those who practice theater, doing very different tasks, must think of theater as a whole, be bound by the same passion. The writer of theatrical prologues can also be included in this list. As court theater director, Goethe was responsible for writing many of them, as well as poet to insert three prologues in the Faust. On the occasion of Jakob Andreas Conrad Levezow’s prologue for the staging of Des Epimenides Erwachen in Berlin, Goethe thanked him for knowing how to: “present us with the great complex of a crowded theater, where stage, parterre, and loges are in constant interaction forming a great animated whole, which is per-

 The tableau vivant is a characteristic element worthy of being studied in all its aspects in Goethe’s poetics. Its role in “concluding and completing an action” is clear in his direction of Proserpina. WA I 50, 113 The last scene includes a tableau vivant that corresponds to the musical closure, which dissolves the melodramatic treatment in song: “dadurch erst die volle Befriedigung gewähren muß”, [“only thereby must be granted full satisfaction”]. The infinitely multiple stage movement of the individual figures and the motionless tableau of the finale correspond respectively to Proserpina’s declamation (melologue) and to the choir’s singing. The final scene of his Egmont is also a near tableau vivant for which music was also provided. On the role of tableaux vivants, see Agazzi 2000, cap. V, 153–214.

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haps the highest that art and the love of art can bring to life and enjoy” (WA IV 25, 260). Another instance – significant not only for its apparent marginality, but because it provides an insight into the symbolic valence of its very architectural structure – is that of a theater carpenter. The poem Auf Miedings Tod (1782), written in memory of Johann Martin Mieding, carpenter and Theatermeister of Weimar’s amateur Court Theater, was not just an occasion for memorializing a friend, but also for celebrating theater praxis. In his poem he summons the whole theater to the funeral of what could be called the theater demiurge. Goethe does not hesitate to call Mieding a statesman (Staatsmann), a wizard who builds the worlds of the imagination and then retreats to the sidelines: “The poet’s world came into being at his behest” (WA I 16, 136). He is called Nature’s director, Director der Natur, inspired by enthusiasm: “Dir gab ein Gott in holder, steter Kraft/ Zu deiner Kunst die ew’ge Leidenschaft” (WA I 16, 144).⁷ The poem ends with a tribute to their friend, assigned to the company’s leading actress, Corona Schröter, as if to combine the humblest job with its ideal coronation.

1 Theater as an aesthetic whole The problem of how a whole – ein Ganzes – is possible, what can give it a living unity, is a very general question that Goethe addressed on every subject of his extremely varied studies, including the philosophical ones, often inspired by his readings of Spinoza and later of Kant. Some aspects of his concept of a work of art, through the passionate imaginative whole that is theater, are contained in a short and often neglected text, Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke (On truth and verisimilitude of works of art) published in the first issue of “Propyläen” in 1798.⁸ Although the dialogue treats a traditional and very theoretical aspect of aesthetics, namely the nature of artistic imitation, and more specifically the difference between Kunstwahre and Naturwahre – what is true to nature and what is true to art – this dialogue was occasioned by something curiously particular, concerning a rather marginal matter, i. e., decor, but not so much stage decor as that of the theater itself: its loggias.  [“A God in loving, constant power/ Gave you the eternal passion for your art”]. To understand also the symbolic importance of this demiurge, suffice it to say that Mieding is referenced in both Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, WA I 17, 20; AlH 14. 20, and Faust I 4224.  Henceforth WWK with the pagination of the WA edition in the text indicated. WA I 47, 257–266. MA 4.2, 89–95.

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In a newly built theater, the architect painted, in trompe l’oeil, figures of spectators in their loggias, and this shocked the sensibility of some actual flesh-andblood spectators. The dialogue starts from this fact without offering any further explanation. One of those spectators asks the architect’s lawyer how he defends this absurd idea of spectators painted on the theater walls. The spectator declares that this unlikelihood disturbs him because at the theater only facts, true and real things should be represented (WWK 257). Curiously enough, this matter, which was the reason for the dialogue, would never recur in the dialogue, while what is instead examined quite extensively is the difference between the spectator’s claim that at the theater everything should seem true (wahr scheinen, be plausible) and the lawyer’s response that at the theater what should be sought is an appearance of truth (Schein des Wahren). The spectator’s first admission of the weakness of his assumption is that the implausibilities thus manifested in musical works do not disturb him.⁹ The lawyer’s argument then leads the spectator to recognize his own contradictions and the insuperable misunderstandings in which he is entangled – “Deceived? I would not use this word – but yes – and then no!” (WWK 260) – and eventually to accept that he is on his way to becoming a Kenner (connoisseur) of theater and not the mere ungebildeter Liebhaber (uncultured fan) he presently is (WWK 264). To achieve this awareness, the spectator will have to recognize that the naive naturalism and the immediate pleasure of perfect imitation, which he thought subsisted in a cause-effect relation, is only the result of conceptual confusion, a lack of reflection. But to achieve this result he must also acknowledge the need to radically alter his concept of imitation in order to start developing the judgment skills of a Kenner. The work of art pleads to be recognized as having its own laws. The reason for which the lawyer says that it is a product beyond nature (übernatürlich), without, however, being outside of nature (aussernatürlich). It is indirectly natural because it is artificial, though because it is produced by a human being who belongs to nature it is also a product of nature. Beauty thus manifests itself in “the ultramundanity of the small world of art” (WWK 265).¹⁰ By reckoning

 Schiller’s and Goethe’s idea that non-naturalistic opera might be a model for the classical theater they sought for, is well explained in Dieter Borchmeyer’s essay, which deservedly focuses on WWK: Weimarer Opernästhetik: Goethes Essay “Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke” (2016, 195–204; 204). See also Dirk Kemper’s well-informed article on the ideological program of Propyläen, in GHbS, 3, Kunst: 318. It effectively grasps the fact that the Propyläen’s articles, even those of Weimar’s friends of art [Weimarer Kunstfreunde] correspond to an aesthetic-didactic program [ästhetisch-didaktisches Programm].  A work of art is beyond nature when in its creation “die zerstreuten Gegenstände in eins gefaßt, und selbst die gemeinsten in ihrer Bedeutung und Würde aufgenommen werden” [“scattered objects, and even the most common, are grasped in unity in their meaning and dignity”] (WWK 265).

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with these needs, the spectator, though not yet a connoisseur of art, has at least become a true fan (wahrer Liebhaber): “he feels that, in order to enjoy the work, he must elevate himself to the level of the artist, that he must pull together his scattered life, live with the work of art, return to regard it, and thereby achieve and give himself a higher existence” (WWK 265). From this moment on the spectator would pay more attention to himself and to works of art (WWK 266). This is more or less the structure of argument in the dialogue. The main thrust of our interpretation is that, in order to grasp the deeper reasons, one must understand how to evaluate both the points of the arguments made and the biographical context. Regarding this last point, it must be recalled that the dialogue was undoubtedly inspired by the great impression that Giorgio Fuentes’ scenography for Salieri’s Palmira had made on Goethe in the last stopover in Frankfurt of his Switzerland trip in 1797.¹¹ Reconstructing this circumstance is no idle task, but serves not only to get an insight into Goethe’s creative process and his stated goals, but also, above all, to understand his concept of aesthetics. It is important to understand how Goethe creatively uses the contrast between the abstractness of his philosophical dialogue and the concreteness of the occasion. The dialogue is indeed, as we have seen, quite theoretical, but Goethe seems intent on disguising this abstractness. Already in 1772, in his scathing review – perhaps the tone also depended on the contribution of his friend Johann Heinrich Merck – of Johann Georg Sulzer’s article “Schöne Künste”, Goethe displayed his aversion to any abstract, arbitrary theory. He describes the aesthetic theory that would unify the various arts under a definition in this way: “a small philosophical lantern that with a magical light projects through a hole on a white wall all these arts dancing up and down multicolored in wonderful shine, to the enraptured jubilation of the breathless spectators” (WA I 37, 207).¹² Although even then he did not believe, and never would, in a doctrinal aesthetic, his many writings on art were always universal in scope, but they always start-

Beyond nature or ultramundane hence do not have any transcendent connotation but are the impossible aesthetic synthesis of what is noble with what is most common (gemein).  Fuentes’ painted spectators appeared perhaps on the backdrops but certainly not on the loggias. WA I 47, 432; HA 12, 602; MA 4.2, 89–94. The review of Palmyra in Reise in der Schweiz. MA 4.2, 621– 623. On his meeting with Fuentes: MA 4.2, 629–630. On Fuentes and his reception in Germania, see Anton Kirchner, 1818, 311. Quoted, along with other details, in Josefine Rumpf-Fleck, 1936, 57–58. It is interesting that the decor also included a “Circus der alten Roma”, plausibly not in Palmira but in Mozart’s Titus. Concerning above all the architectural aspects, see Adolph Doebber, 1908 74, 138–139.  “Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen” Leipzig 1772. In an essay very akin to WWK, Der Sammler und die Seinigen, the clearcut statement: “Theorie ist nie meine Sache gewesen” [“Theory has never been my thing”] WA I 47, 122. In this instance too, as in WWK, the aesthetic investigation proceeds by recounting tales and examples.

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ed from very particular circumstances or questions. These were either questions of artistic technique or, if they had a more or less declared philosophical ambition, they were presented as ästhetische Untersuchungen (aesthetic investigations), as he wrote at the very beginning of the manuscript version of the WWK dialogue, which presents few but significant variations with respect to the published version. In fact, Goethe wrote it with elegant cunning, though displaying great subtlety and solidity of philosophical argumentation. The dialogue’s style is, as we have seen, dialectical, one might say sophistic, but it has no destructive aims; the puns and antinomies he puts forth serve to show that the matter imposes itself as ein Bedürfnis des Geistes (a necessity of the spirit) (WWK 259).¹³ Goethe generally had no polemical bent, but while opposed to any esprit de système, was animated by a strong esprit systématique. He chose the Socratic argument style because the topic belonged to “a controversial field with limits that were not easy to determine” (WA I 47, 433). Precisely because the topic was so abstract and difficult, Goethe felt the need to anchor the aesthetic investigation to an occasion. This was not just a point of style or preference but such a fundamental a need for him that one is tempted to say that – as he often repeated in characterizing his poetry – his was an aesthetic of occasion.¹⁴ The idea of occasion has in itself both the scope of the moment (Augenblick), which must be grasped in order to connect beginning and end, and that of objectuality (Gegenständlichkeit) preserving the discourse from vacuous inspiration.¹⁵ But in addition to these two fundamental

 On the role of dialectics: “Die Dialektik ist die Ausbildung des Widersprechungsgeistes, welcher dem Menschen gegeben, damit er den Unterschied der Dinge erkennen lerne”, [“Dialectics is the cultivation of the spirit of contradiction, which is given to man so that he may learn to recognize the difference between things”] (WA I 42,2, 258; MuR 1202). It should be noted that Goethe cannot have the artist speak with such sophistical language. The mephistophelian language dictated by polemical necessity, the rhetorical, juridical, sophistic joke (rednerischer, juristischer, sophistischer Spaß) can only be assigned to a lawyer. WA IV 11, 299, letter to Schiller, December 27, 1796.  “Das Gelegenheitsgedicht, die erste und echteste aller Dichtarten, ward verächtlich auf einen Grad, daß die Nation noch jetzt nicht zu einem Begriff des hohen Werthes desselben gelangen kann”, [“The occasional poem, the first and most genuine of all types of poetry, has become contemptible to such a degree that the nation is still unable to formulate a concept of its high value”] (WA I 27. 295,12; DuW 10).  J.C.A. Heinroth had called Goethe’s method objectual thinking (gegenständliches Denken), and Goethe had greatly appreciated the characterization, to the point of adding, in his reply essay, that his poems were also gegenständliche Dichtung. WA II 11, 58. Bedeutende Förderniß durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort [“A significant advancement by a single clever word”] 1823. WA II 11, 60; WA 12, 307. Poetic writing also arises from an occasion, a thematic nucleus that perhaps had long remained in seed form before becoming fruit. Hence Goethe’s inclination for occasional poetry (Gelegenheitsgedichte): “Alle meine Gedichte sind Gelegenheitsgedichte, sie sind durch die Wirklichkeit angeregt und haben darin Grund und Boden. Von Gedichten, aus der Luft gegriffen, halte

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aspects of Goethe’s gnoseology and poetics there was the less evident aspect of the unexpected relationships it generated. In the passage from his Wahlverwandschaften that contains the long description of the type of chemical bond that gives the book its title, Charlotte objects to the word Wahlverwandschaft in the way chemists use it. According to her, it is not the result of a choice or election (Wahl), but rather it is the occasion that establish relationships: “In the end, it is perhaps only a matter of opportunity. Opportunity makes relations as it makes thieves” (WA I 20, 53; Wv I 4).¹⁶ The good-natured Charlotte in her mild protest against the teleological interpretation of affinities proposes an argument that if reversed becomes the theoretical heart of the rejection of final causes as Goethe thought of it from Spinoza and Kant. As he wrote in his famous letter to Zelter in 1830: “The merit of our old Kant […] that he […] concedes to both [art and nature] the right to act purposelessly out of great principles […] Nature and art are too great to proceed from purposes, and have no need to do so, because references exist everywhere and references are life” (WA IV 46, 223).¹⁷ Without getting too deeply enmeshed in this aspect, which, however, is one of the most important of Goethe’s philosophy, I will attempt to verify whether in the essay in question the universality of the aesthetic theme can be revealed through an investigation of the relationship that this text has with the occasions by which it came about, to discover why Goethe thought of a work of art as a whole of interrelations that make up a world.¹⁸ It is not without importance that Goethe saw Palmira with Fuentes’ decor in what was supposed to be his third trip to Italy; called off because of Napoleon’s Italian campaign taking place at the time. As we know, his two trips to Italy were an almost inexhaustible source of ideas and experiences for the ensuing years, especially for that felicitous twenty-year period (1786–1805) that Goethe called the age of the Barmecides.¹⁹

ich nichts)”, [“All my poems are occasional poems, inspired by reality, and they have ground (and soil) in it. Poems, taken from the air, I consider as nothing”] MA 19, 44; see Eckermann, 1823.  A few pages earlier, Charlotte has observed with lexical finesse: each element as it refers (bezieht) to itself, cannot fail to stay in a relation (to have a Verhältnis) with others. WA I 20, 50. Even the unity of a drop of water is a reference and relationship in dynamic transformation, according to elective affinities.  Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter of January 29, 1830.  Because of the importance of the idea of relation with respect to teleology in Goethe’s philosophy, via Kant and Spinoza, I may be permitted for the sake of brevity to refer to Hohenegger, 2019, 306. See also: Kant, 1787, 321; 1781, 265; and Spinoza 1663, II, chap. 6. An accessory hermeneutic result of an investigation like this on the WWK could be to understand how aesthetics itself can be thought of as non-doctrinal.  WA I 6, 3; WA I 7, 39.

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It should also be added that Goethe, more than a decade after that time, returned to the discoveries of those years as a historian of himself, framing them in a more systematic perspective. In 1817, in the midst of publishing his Journey to Italy 1816–1817 and 1829, Goethe wrote his Zur Morphologie notebooks, describing the fate of the manuscript, publication and reception of Morphologie der Pflanzen (1790). In that period he no longer needed to return to Italy, since he still had ample materials at his disposal from the previously gathered riches about art, nature and society, and continued working on reconceptualizing and enriching them in their systematic relationships. His WWK essay (1798) takes a central position with respect to these two texts and must be interpreted on the basis of these complex intertextual relationships. But before examining these relationships we must add information about the context with the closest reference of this essay, namely, his years of felicitous theoretical and effective collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. For it was to Schiller – with whom he conceived and designed the theater generally known as of the Weimarer Klassik – that Goethe wrote the day after the performance of Salieri’s Palmira, recounting this experience. He also promised him further descriptions and reflections, parts of which he would later include, along with the letter to Schiller, in his Reise in der Schweiz (MA 8.1, 390; MA 4.2, 622–633). WWK, written immediately after it, is certainly also a reworking in dialogue form of that experience and must surely have been used in his discussions with Schiller. Some curiously enigmatic elements can only be explained by the semi-private nature of a discussion note. In the letter, the relationship between truth and verisimilitude is not very present, if we exclude an interesting reference to the fact that Theaterarchitektur must be able to represent aesthetically the firmitas of true architecture, discerningly deviating from it so as to achieve an anmuthige Erscheinung (elegant appearance) (MA 8.1, 389). Further, in his letter Goethe writes that in Fuentes’ Palmira images of spectators were indeed painted, but on the backdrops. This fact certainly aroused no irritation in the Frankfurt audiences, who, like Goethe, adored the Milanese scenographer.²⁰ Thus, the idea of audience irritation is practically unmentioned in the dialogue, where, instead, the spectator is led by the lawyer to recognize the theo-

 In his letter to Schiller of August 14, 1797, Goethe speaks of “gemalte Zuschauer” WA IV 12, 233 (MA 8.1, 390). Only a few images of the sets are preserved, no drawings by Fuentes himself. See MA 8.1, 991. In a rare review of WWK by Christian August Michaelis the weakness of his arguments: “Alles, was Menschliches, auf der Bühne geschieht, muß durch den Menschen geschehen”, [“Everything that is human, happens on stage, should happen by the human being”] (Michaelis 1800, 176) is par to the inaccuracy of his interpretation. Michaelis criticizes the painted spectators on the stage, a misunderstanding that however occurs even in other more recent readers of WWK.

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retical weakness of his concept of imitation. The declared purpose of the dialogue, to justify the plausibility of the painted spectators, remains completely moot. In the end, the spectator himself explicitly says that the speeches strayed from what gave them inspiration. Although he almost immediately agrees with the lawyer about the inner truth [innere Wahrheit] of a work of art and its completeness (Vollkommenheit, WWK 261), the spectator does not understand how these speeches could be used in defense of the license that the architect took it upon himself in painting spectators in the loggias, nor under what heading (Rubrik) these painted participants (gemahlte Theilnehmer) should go (WWK 266). The lawyer does not respond, satisfied that the spectator will return the next day to attend the repeat performance of the opera and that they will meet again in a spirit of common interest. The spectator promises to return, unwilling to be put off by the loggia decorations. While the dialogue does not end with what the lawyer had promised, or to justify the architect’s choice, it has never been clearly stated why the spectators were offended. Painted spectators, if they are painted realistically – as they are in the trompe l’oeil – should please the spectator, who demands naturalistic imitation. The lawyer, who represents Goethe’s anti-naturalistic position, might have answered: you can only criticize if they do not seem painted in a perfectly deceptive or naturalistic way. In the dialogue, the lawyer compares the spectators who want to identify natural truth and aesthetic truth with the birds pecking at cherries painted by Zeuxis.²¹ The argument serves to point out that Zeuxis’ fooling the sparrows was not so much a proof of his mastery as that whoever relies on such proof is as gullible as a sparrow (WWK 263). If anything, then, it is being treated like sparrows that may have offended them, but this would have assumed, as the spectator seems to have understood at the end of the dialogue, that art is not naturalistic mimesis. The other tale, inserted in the middle of the dialogue, reinforces the criticism. The gluttonous monkey of an important naturalist, having found an illustrated book on zoology, clips out the illustrations of the beetles and eats them. The natu-

 Pliny 1952, book XXXV, 65–66; vol. IX, 309–311. The original text has grapes, not cherries. In the famous story that Pliny tells of the competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, it can be pointed out as a not insignificant detail that paintings are hung right on a stage-building (scaena). Even the rest of the story, which Goethe does not tell, can be important because it contains a hierarchy of value regarding the aesthetic quality of the deception, although certainly not what Goethe thought of. When Zeuxis asks Parrhasius to remove the cloth covering his picture, and he discovers that it is a painted one and that in this instance it is not the birds, but he himself who has been deceived, “yielded up the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist”. Ibid. 311.

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ralist, seeing the monkey hunched over the books, at first thinks it has begun to study his work. The criticism here is more subtle, as it is aimed at the rationalist aesthetic represented by the naturalist who takes the monkey for a scholar. Since the rationalist aesthetic denies autonomy to the aesthetic sphere, it takes for granted as a principle the confusion between logical truth and aesthetic truth. Those who support it are victims of the illusion that pleasure can be traced back to science, thus lapsing into the Wirkungsästhetik paradoxes (Costazza 1996, 127–164). For Goethe, on the other hand, aesthetic pleasure is also always linked to a judgment, always mediated by reflection, and is not a pleasure triggered by a representation, whether sensuous or conceptual. For Goethe beauty is neither conceptually nor sensuously determinable. While borrowing his terminology and problems from Baumgarten’s German scholasticism, he was as critical of rationalist and empiricist aesthetics as were Moritz and Kant. Completeness (Vollkommenheit), a central concept in WWK, refers to beauty as the baumgartenian perfectio cognitionis sensitivae (Baumgarten 1936, § 14) as such the inner truth of a work of art, whose coherence and unity is terminologically akin to veritas aesthetica, or verismilitudo,²² and, perhaps above all, the concept of what the ultramundanity of the small world of art (WA I 47, 265) is a clear reference to the “fictio poetica novum ita creans orbem” (Baumgarten 1936, § 518, 305).²³ This does not mean that Goethe fails to see the distance between the aesthetics of German scholasticism and that of Moritz or Kant; on the contrary, he stands as a critic of rationalism and elaborates an original rethinking of the rationalism of his contemporaries. With this I do not intend to broach a question so much discussed and so difficult to unravel in the history of aesthetics, nor go into the useless controversy over Goethe’s sources – whether Moritz or Kant. It is interesting that for all three, Moritz, Kant and Goethe, Baumgarten’s aesthetic was a starting point, but above all a polemical target. Karl Philipp Moritz centered his reflections on the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, the mediacy of aesthetic judgment, and the notion of completeness, freeing art from rationalist conceptuality (Moritz 1962).²⁴ Kant –

 See e. g. Æsthetica, § 437: “aesthetic truth requires a connection of the objects that must be thought of in a beautiful way with their reasons and their consequences in so far as it can be sensibly known by means of the analogue of reason”. This should be done also with reference to “the aesthetic unity of objects” or their “inner determinations”, § 439. See also, for a more defining context, § 483.  [“poetical fiction creating a new world”].  The aim of a work of art is not pure pleasure, rather the artist wants to enhance pleasure, to tune it up (hinaufstimmen) giving the possibility to the spectator to enjoy a disinterested pleasure in the work of art, which is the true confirmation of its completeness (Vollendung), its needing

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whether he knew it or not matters little here – borrowed some ideas from Moritz and, to the point at hand, he rethought Baumgarten’s fictio poetica as an aesthetic idea, or rather an inner intuition, a fiction that, as a product of the imagination, is capable of creating “another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it”, and which however is “into that which steps beyond nature” (Kant 2000, § 49, 192).²⁵ With extreme subtlety, Goethe takes up these questions to illustrate his very original concept of the aesthetic whole. The choice of theater as an exemplary work of art is very significant in itself; theater as an architectural structure, a spectacle, a tale recited by actors and enjoyed by spectators, can never be seen as an object denoted as beautiful, but in terms of praxis, an imaginative model, simultaneously object and subject.

2 Poetic spectators Once this dialogue of Goethe’s is placed in the correct theoretical context of aesthetics, according to the idea I offer here, the intertextual context still needs to be reconstructed in order to clarify the dialogue’s unresolved elements, to wit, what irritated the spectators about those paintings. In the first handwritten draft of the dialogue, Goethe calls the real spectators “prosaische (prosaic) Zuschauer” (WWK 433); in the published text “wirkliche (real) Zuschauer” (WWK 257). The painted spectators who look “as if they took part in what is happening down on the stage” (Ibid.) could therefore be called poetic. But in what sense are the real spectators not poetic? Are they unable to detach themselves from reality, rise to poetry, really take part in the creative process?

nothing beyond itself. Pleasure is, as it will be for Kant, always mediated: “Mein Vergnügen selbst muss ja erst aus dieser Beurtheilung entstehen”, [“My pleasure itself must first arise from this evaluation”], (Ibid. 16).  For Baumgarten aesthetic truth and logical truth refer to a common occult foundation (“in occultum latens”, § 479). Immediately evident aesthetic judgments based on vulgus assensum and voluptas aurium are philosophically traceable to a rational foundation, which allows us to pass from likelihood to probability. For Baumgarten it is reasonably possible to go “ultra verisimilitudinem” towards “notitia veri”, § 480. Kant on his part starts precisely from the assumption that neither empiricist sociology nor the rationalistic hypothesis that “aesthetic judgment is a concealed judgment of reason” accounts for the peculiar principle of taste (Kant 2000, Remark II § 57, 220). Certainly Baumgarten opens up to a certain autonomy of aesthetics since he thinks that scientia cognitionis sensitivae, as with gnoseologia inferior, ars analogi rationis (§ 1), must be considered qua talis, i. e. in its peculiar sensibility (§ 14). To distinguish some true things from all false ones, one can find “nonnihil completae certitudinis et conscientiae vera quaedam”, a certain something of certainty and complete consciousness”, § 480.

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Do they recognize that they cannot be what is demanded of them? In the dialogue the lawyer wants to raise the spectator toward a more conscious participation, perhaps by making him abandon the idea of immediate pleasures that rather suits the level of a gluttonous monkey. Painting a crowd of spectators seems to respond to the idea of the theater director in the prologue of Faust who believes that no reasoning can convince the public, that “Die Masse könnt Ihr nur durch Masse zwingen”.²⁶ If only they could be aware of it, spectators could take offense at being treated as a crowd and judged as children who just want “staunend gaffen”. Faust 92, to gape with astonishment. In addition to this non-explicit provocation, to convince the spectator to acquire a critical awareness of reflection, the lawyer basically gives him a terse but very pointed lesson on aesthetics. Goethe, with this representation of a painted audience, may simply have wanted to malign the audience of that German theater, taking revenge for the bad reception he had received on his return to Germany from his trips to Italy. His bluntly personal experience authorized him: his edition of the works published by Göschen had turned out to be almost an economic disaster for the publisher; his Iphigenia was not well received, and the public was completely absorbed by the rising star Schiller, who had not yet become his bosom companion. Not even his friends had given him the welcome he expected on his return from Italy.²⁷ Part of his disappointment can still be felt in the rather strong words of the text on the Zur Morphologie, written in 1817. The attack already gives us an insight into his state of mind on his return to Germany: “From Italy, so rich in form, I was dispatched back to shapeless Germany, trading a cheerful sky for a gloomy one, […] no one understood my language” (WA II 6, 131). As always in Goethe, the invective is only an emotional atmosphere that soon resolves itself into a desire to take stock of his Italian acquisitions and understand why friends and public had not understood their nature and importance. Perhaps the result would have been to make up his mind to ignore them if necessary. Regarding the public’s reaction to his works – “the public remained disconcerted” (WA II 6, 133) – Goethe proudly claims the right to be able to ignore it: “But the man of some vitality feels that he is there for his own sake and not for the public” (WA II 6, 135). Yet, these explanations are insufficient, and textual and constructive elements must be found. Now, the preference for exemplary stories over theory had already been declared in the dialogue, but this is to be expected in Goethe. What might be interesting is that Goethe also loved Parallelgeschichten, as a character of the Un-

 [“only by mass can you subdue the masses”] Faust 95 (Goethe 1994).  On the reception of his writings, see Zur Morphologie (1817); WA II 6, 133.

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terhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten declares, “I dearly love parallel stories. One points to the other and explains its meaning better than many dry words” (WA I 18, 190).²⁸ It is precisely in his journey to Italy that we find the description of the Verona amphitheater, which offers too many points of contact with German theater to be accidental. The German theater with the spectators painted on the walls of the loggias had been described as “an oval, somewhat amphitheatrical building” (WA I 47, 257). Verona’s Arena, the first significant ancient monument that Goethe saw in Italy, is described as an amphitheater that was already beautiful when it was empty, but it must have offered an extraordinary sight when crowded with the public – it must have surprised even the emperor, though he was used to crowds. This is all the more true in an era when “the people were even more people than they are now. For such an amphitheater is actually made to impress people with their own sheer mass, to have people make fun of themselves” (WA I 30, 59, September 16, 1786). Beyond any metaphor, for Goethe it was the audience that makes the theater. In a Vitruvian way, he thought that architecture originates from gestures, rituals. When many people find themselves wanting to witness an interesting scene in a square, they spontaneously arrange themselves in a circle at various heights, sitting, standing, on a barrell etc. Once the architect has taken stock of this crater form, all he has to do is respond to the need “in the simplest way possible, so that the decor of the theater becomes the people themselves” (WA I 30, 60). The people

 Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, WA I 18, 190. See also the letter to the Grand Duke Carl August, Weimar den 10. März 1825, WA IV 39, 134. These kinds of stories are compositional devices such as wiederholte Spiegelungen (repeated mirror reflections) WA I, 42.2, 56–57. Our understanding of the long novella Der Mann von fünfzig Jahren and Wahlverwandtschaften – both conceived as short stories within Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre – could benefit from considering them parallel stories. In both stories there are correspondences and mirrorings, inverse relationships of kinship – very vertical in the novella and very horizontal if not absent in the novel –, passions that intersect, a strong narrative role of waters – calm, rough, frozen –, in one case a tragic outcome and in the other a happy one. This has already been noted, but what if there were also an intertextual reference that made them parallel stories? In the passage in which Eduard reads from the chemistry book of elective affinities, at a certain point Charlotte gets distracted and stops listening, and then regains the sense of the text by reading behind Eduard’s back, making him so irritated. Charlotte apologizes and justifies her distraction as follows: “Ich hörte von Verwandtschaften lesen, und da dacht’ ich eben gleich an meine Verwandten, an ein paar Vettern, die mir gerade in diesem Augenblick zu schaffen machen”, [“I heard you speak of ‘affinity’, and straightaway there came to my mind my own affinity, a pair of cousins who happen to be troubling me at this very moment”] Wv I, 4; WA I 20, 47. Of these two cousins or distant relatives there will be no trace in the novel. If they were the two cousins Flavio and Hilarie, or their respective parents, the captain and the baroness of Der Mann von fünfzig Jahren, there would be an intertextual relationship to investigate that would shed light on both stories.

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themselves must have been amazed at seeing themselves gathered into a single noble body (edlen Körper), since they were a “many-headed, many-minded beast, wavering, wandering to and fro, destined to unity, bound and strengthened into a mass, as a single shape, animated by a single spirit” (WA I 30, 60). In his 1798 dialogue Goethe did not forget the idea of the oval, though Verona’s is motivated by aesthetics: “The simplicity of the oval is perceived by all eyes in the most pleasing way, and each head counts as a measure of how huge the whole is” (WA I 30, 60). With regard to its theoretically systematic nature, the 1817 text can at last be called into question. In it Goethe, to clarify by using the same approach as with his study of the morphology of plants, illustrates how and what he had collected, studied and thought about during the two years of his Italian voyage, and how this work had given him the hope of gradually succeeding in getting an overview of the whole – nach und nach das Ganze zu überschauen (WA II 6, 131–132). The literary fruits of this intense study are, again, according to the 1817 text, the three essays: Einfache Nachahmung der Natur Manier und Stil, 1788, Die Morphologie der Pflanzen, 1790, and Das Römische Carneval, 1789.²⁹ These texts contain, respectively, the answers to: what is an unprejudiced artistic pleasure (reiner vorurteilfreier Kunstgenuss); how nature works according to laws (wie Natur gesetzlich zu Werk geht); and how the customs of peoples are studied (Sitten der Völker).³⁰ The studies that he has undertaken thus place him before these three great regions of the world (drei große Weltgegenden) whose systematic nature one cannot fail to see (WA II 6, 132). The question to ask is whether this systematic nature is also found in the aesthetic investigation of the 1798 dialogue. The answer is obvious for the first of the essays on an aesthetic subject and even for the second, if we consider the question it poses, at least negatively (WWK 262)³¹ of scientific truth. The systematic idea pre-

 Respectively WA I 47, 77–83; WA II 6, 23–94; WA I 32, 223–271. All three essays are tools for his education, so that by writing about what lay most clearly before his senses (Sinnen), he manages to regulate his reflection (Nachdenken), order experience (Erfahrung) and hold still the moment (Augenblick); WA II 6, 132.  Goethe does not devote any specific writings to the study of the customs of peoples, which is certainly always indirectly present in what he writes. In his 1817 essay he states that he learned from this study how a third element derives from the meeting of necessity and will (Notwendigkeit und Willkür), instinct and (rational) will (Antrieb und Wollen), movement and resistance (Bewegung und Widerstand). WA II 6: 132. On the idea of Volk in Goethe, also in relation to architecture and theater, see Puszkar’s fine article (Puszkar 2007)  “Sollte nicht daraus folgen, daß das Kunstwahre und das Naturwahre völlig verschieden sei, und dass der Künstler keineswegs streben sollte noch dürfte, daß sein Werk eigentlich als ein Naturwerk erscheine”, [“Should not follow from this, that what is true to art and what is true to nature are completely different, and that the artist should by no means strive for his work to appear

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sented here is that the third “region”, the study of human society, which Goethe had dealt with in the Roman Carnival, concerns the topic that the dialogue sets out to discuss but that it neither treats nor resolves. It must be said that the study of society is a kind of synthesis of the first two. In fact, in it we learn “how from the concurrence of necessity and arbitrariness, of impulse and [rational] will, of movement and resistance, a third emerges, which is neither art nor nature, but both at the same time, necessary and accidental, intentional and blind. I understand human society” (WA II 6, 132). The carnival, by posing in all its exemplarity the problem of the relationship between order and freedom, is a privileged standpoint for studying society. In the Roman Carnival this relationship is presented from several viewpoints. From the most commonplace and descriptive one concerning road rules, up to its radical affirmation – we are precisely at the dawn of the French Revolution – of carnival awareness, “that freedom and equality can only be enjoyed in the throes of madness” (WA I 32, 270). In the theater this fantastic substitution of the usual civil laws with the laws of the upturned world of the carnival does not present itself as subversive. The fact that there is a distinction between spectators and actors already indicates that an external rule is in force. The carnival spectacle is from the start subversive, having no real direction or text, and its spectators and actors constitute such a unity that the public becomes its own spectacle. For this reason, one should harken to the fact that, in WWK, the shape of the newly built theater is an amphitheater. This very singular fact, which in the dialogue is only mentioned at the beginning, should have appeared even more disconcerting than the painted spectators. As in the description of the spontaneous genesis of the theater form inspired by Verona’s amphitheater, while describing the Roman Carnival, Goethe states how in Piazza del Popolo, during the preparation for the horse race the mass is ordered, but freely, as in a game, and the thousand heads facing the square

as a work of nature”]. The fact that Goethe apparently draws aesthetic considerations from his Morphology of Plants that seem to contradict the assumption would require a separate essay, but it is clear that where there is distinction regarding principles, there can always be an unknowable principle in common. For example: “Muß doch derjenige, der nachbilden, wieder hervorbringen will, die Sache verstehen, tief einsehen; sonst kommt ja nur ein Schein und nicht das Naturprodukt ins Bild”, [“Anyone who wants to reproduce, recreate, must understand the matter, deeply understand; otherwise only an appearance and not the natural product comes into the picture”] (WA II 6, 137–138). Art and science “auf höherer Stelle, gar wohl wieder begegnen könnten”, [“might very well meet again on a higher level”] (WA II 6, 139). “Der Künstler versicherte mich später: in Gefolg der Naturgesetze, wie ich sie ausgesprochen, sei ihm geglückt Natürliches und Unmögliches zu verbinden, und etwas erfreulich Wahrscheinliches hervorzubringen”, [“The artist later assured me: following the laws of nature, as I pronounced them, he had succeeded in combining the natural and the impossible, and in producing something pleasingly probable”] (WA II 6, 139).

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suggest “the image of an ancient amphitheater or circus” (WA I 32, 256). Now, Goethe’s Roman Carnival is not just a passionate folkloric description of a feast; it is the prototype of all spectacles, a social Urphänomen that in fact does not lack the characteristic traits of archetypal phenomena: it is enigmatic, surprising, and demands a totality that contains in itself antinomies. The Carnival makes it possible to see “life as a whole” (WA I 32, 271) and as such it is unrepresentable, frightening, unpleasant, indeed dubious, but through this carefree masked society it reminds us of the importance of all of life’s pleasures that are ephemeral and appear to us as scarcely consequential. In addition to these structural similarities, we can spy some signs of intertextuality between the examined texts, which allow us to establish possibly oblique relationships between the 1798 text and the “three great regions of the world”. Perhaps these can be seen more as problematic areas than regions, but secret correspondences exist between them, in spite of the fact that each of them refers to its own principles and applies exclusively to its own domain. We certainly cannot reconstruct all the relationships of the 1798 text with the three great regions of the world, but if we wished to enhance the picture without forcing our interpretation, we would understand how each of the three, while obeying its own principles, refers to a common source, which, however, is unknowable. It is precisely this unknowable common ground that spurns us to investigate each of them more deeply and try to comprehend our experiences more and more as a whole. In conclusion, it can be said that in the 1798 text it is no coincidence that Goethe chose theater, and specifically theater architecture, to reflect on the most enigmatic and perhaps also the most important feature of a work of art, its being a whole. A work of art, like a small world, is complete but has no fixed boundaries; having its own laws and inner consistency does not mean that it is reduced to them such an aesthetic whole must also have, albeit negatively, a relationship with science and society. A work of art is not an object among objects, but is a world, a passionate imaginative whole not made to have an effect of any kind on a spectator. By reworking and bending it also to his conception, Goethe considers Aristotle’s tragic catharsis, the alternation of pity and terror, not as the aim of tragedy but as compositional means “so tragedy must complete its work in the theater by compensating and reconciling these passions” (WA I 41.2, 248).³² The spectator is part of the work but, as we have seen, it is the spectator as people who shape the theater as place. Theater is an aesthetic whole that refers in various ways to the regions of the world of

 Nachlese zu Aristoteles’ Poetik (Revisiting Aristotle’s Poetics).

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knowledge and society. An unknowable common foundation is presupposed, each region has its own legislation, but unity is always provisional and has various relationships with the other regions. In WWK the painted spectators – and the amphitheater shape – seem to represent the secret relationship between the two regions of art and society. Just as the cathartic effect is a compositional means of the playwright and, as such, internal to the world of tragedy, so within the theater as a place the painted spectators are a reverse tableau vivant – not flesh-and-blood human beings enacting a painting, but paintings that portray flesh-and-blood human beings. Insofar as they are poetic and just like tableaux vivants, they complete the theater as a place. The tension between playwright and architect – whose only role is creating within a place the specific form that would naturally grant people spectator status – is represented by these poetic spectators who in the dialogue indicate only ironically a whole of the theater that cannot be stated and yet that is its life.

Bibliography Primary sources WA = Johann Wolfang von Goethe, Werke, 143 vols. Eds. G. von Loeper et al., Weimar: Böhlau, 1887– 1919; reprint: München: DTV, 1987. The Roman numeral indicates the section (I, works; II, scientific works; III, diaries and autobiographical material; IV, Goethe’s letters) followed by the volume number and page. MA = Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Münchner Ausgabe, 21 vols. Eds. Karl Richter et al., München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–1999, Taschenbuchausgabe 2006. FA = Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Frankfurter Ausgabe. 40 vols, Goethe Ästhetische Schriften, I Abt. Bd. 18. Ed. Friedmar Apel, Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1998. GHb = Goethe-Handbuch, 5 vols. Eds. Bernd Witte et al., Stuttgart-Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1996–1999. GHbS = Goethe-Handbuch. Supplemente, 3 vols., Musik und Tanz in den Bühnenwerken; Naturwissenschaften; Kunst, Eds. Gabriele Busch-Salmen et al., Stuttgart-Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2007–2009. MuR = Goethe, Johann Wilhelm. Maximen und Reflexionen. Ed. Max Hecker. Weimar: Goethe Gesellschaft. 1907.

Secondary sources Agazzi, Elena. Il corpo conteso. Rito e gestualità nella Germania del Settecento. Milano: Jaca Book, 2000.

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Baumgarten, Alexander. Aesthetica. Bari: Laterza, 1936. Borchmeyer, Dieter. “Weimarer Opernästhetik: Goethes Essay Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke”. Klassizismus in Aktion. Eds. Daniel Ehrmann, Norbert Christian Wolf. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2016. 195–204. Costazza, Alessandro. Schönheit und Nützlichkeit: Karl Philipp Moritz und die Ästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Bern: Lang, 1996. Doebber, Adolph. Lauchstädt und Weimar. Eine theaterbaugeschichtliche Studie. Berlin: E.S. Mittler, 1908. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. I Th. Sept. 18, 1823. Goethe, Johann Wilhelm. Faust I & II, edited and translated by Stuart Atkins, with a new introduction by David E. Wellbery, Princeton and Oxford 1994. Hohenegger, Hansmichael. “Vita e legge in Goethe”. “Nomos-Lex” Atti del XV Colloquio Internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo. Eds. Claudio Buccolini, Antonio Lamarra, Firenze: Olschki, 2019. 287–325. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the power of judgment. Transl. Paul Guyer, Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critik der reinen Vernunft. Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1781–1787. Kant, Immanuel. Critik der Urtheilskraft. Berlin-Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich, 1790. Kirchner, Anton. Ansichten von Frankfurt am Main, der umliegenden Gegend und den benachbarten Heilquellen. Frankfurt/M.: Gebrüder Wilmans, 1818. Michaelis, Christian August. “Sind gemahlte Personen auf dem Theater als Repräsentanten von wirklichen zu dulden? Einige Bedenken bei Gelegenheit der Lesung des Dialogs im ersten Stück von Goethe’s Propyläen”. Mittheilungen zur Beförderung der Humanität und des guten Geschmacks. Ed. Christian Friedrich Michaelis. Leipzig: Meisner, 1800. 175–181. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten. In: Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik. Ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962. Pliny. Natural History. Transl. by H. Rackham. Vol. IX, Loeb. London-Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1952. Puszkar, Norbert. “Goethes Volksbegriff und Habermas’ Begriff der ‘Lebenswelt’: Die Kultur der norditalienischen Städte in der Italienischen Reise”. German Studies Review 30, No. 1 (2007): 75– 96. Rumpf-Fleck, Josefine. Italienische Kultur in Frankfurt am Main im 18. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Petrarca-Haus Köln, 1936. 57–58. Spinoza, Baruch. Cogitata metaphysica. Amsterdam: J. Rieuwertsz, 1663.

Alessandro Gebbia

The novel of theater and the theater of the novel. Towards a definition of Theatermania in England from the age of Shakespeare to that of the Revolutions Talking about Theatermania in England involves venturing into a field of investigation that has been little studied to date. This lack of critical attention towards a phenomenon that resounded elsewhere, especially in France and Germany, does not mean that it was absent in England, actually quite the opposite, since we can hypothesize that, albeit in theoretically different form, it originated in the Elizabethan theater and its great success with the public. Under the Tudor dynasty and after the Act of Supremacy (1534), the theater, for political and religious reasons, replaced the Church liturgies, first becoming an alternative venue, and afterwards the main one of entertainment and indoctrination, whose attendance became one of the most habitual features of daily life and an increasingly enthusiastic activity that no one seemed willing to do without. This is certainly not the place to retrace the grandeur and complexity of Elizabethan Theater but just to recall that it was an exceptional laboratory in which, in the short span of hardly more than three decades, one of the most complex and varied sociocultural revolutions of the modern era came into being and flourished. And not only on account of the innovative quality of its dramaturgy or its equally innovative architectural inventiveness or its contribution to the evolution of a language that was undergoing massive changes on a daily basis, and that thanks to the Sunday Schools almost everyone was able to read; or even on account of the extraordinary participation of a transversal public made up of ordinary citizens and members of the aristocracy, who made theater and theatrical representations the pretext and place for a common and participatory enjoyment that broke down the consolidated divisions of class and of wealth, transforming – and this too was its uniqueness – the single event into the medium par excellence where increasingly pressing current topics were presented and discussed, whether politics, society or religion, which from time to time challenged the new British nation and stimulated its curiosity. A theater that, perhaps for the first time went beyond the spoken word to become, as Eduardo De Filippo said, an “ink word” (Lombardo 2004, 23) that soon was transformed into economical, more or less accurate editions of the success of the moment.

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Theater became the center of information, a tool used by opposing factions to present, guide and justify choices that were and remained essentially political. A theater that was therefore political and social and that would retain these features, not without conflict, until the end of the eighteenth- century, first generating and later interacting with that other peculiar genre which was an offshoot of it: the novel. Because – and we know this too – with the death of Elizabeth I and the end of the Tudor dynasty, the accession to the throne of James I Stuart and the return of the Catholic monarchy, together with the early emergence and triumph of the new merchant class and the Puritan bourgeoisie, the revolution we mentioned was accelerating exponentially, with immediate effects on theater. Within a few years, while maintaining intact its success with the public, theater began to turn from tragedy to comedy, losing its relationship with current events, which till then had been its mainstray, suffering and having to adapt to an increasingly pushy and invasive censorship, while the court theater with its masques created a hiatus that had to be duly reckoned with. At the expense of the protagonists of the London stage, first among them Shakespeare, always aligned with the choices of the previous monarch and immediately at loggerheads with the aspirations and new rules of the merchant bourgeoisie – as in The Merchant of Venice – and critical of a surging colonial activity, as we see first in Othello and, in 1610–1611, The Tempest, the last great dramaturgic undertaking in which Shakespeare did not hesitate to remove numerous pebbles from his shoe. After which the decline of theater, or at least its Elizabethan variety, seemed inevitable. This was marked not only by the architectural closing of the theater space and with a significant onset of separation between stage action and audience, and the already mentioned shift to comedy, but above all the publication in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, of the First Folio, entitled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the first printed publication of his 36 works, assembled by actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had served in his company, and with a preface by Ben Jonson, coincidentally the inventor, together with architect Inigo Jones, of the modern masque. Beyond the importance of this event, which made it possible to preserve and hand down the Shakespearean corpus, the publication of the First Folio effectively marked the end of an era, the definitive transformation of the theater of the spoken word into ink words, from stage script to literary text. Theatrical subversiveness did not mix well with the rigid rules of the now dominant Puritan merchant class in conflict with the monarchy, and at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 the Puritan majority in Parliament decreed the closing down of the theaters, a provision that remained in force until 1660. The conflict – apparently ideological and religious, actually fed solely by a power struggle – deprived Londoners of their greatest source of entertainment and information, certainly not about what was happening outside the island, in

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that new world – from the Americas to the Far East – which the increasingly intense commercial traffic was revealing day by day. Printed books, thanks to the progress of typography and hence to their low cost, were gradually replacing theater. They started out as collections of travel reports, documents of the East India Company, letters, anecdotes, and anything else having a true or false connection with the new geographical and mercantile reality, in addition to pamphlets on political debates and, in the latter half of the century, the first examples of that innovative genre, drawn from the Spanish picaresque, which was the novel. The first, in 1665, was The English Rogue, the tragicomic portrait of a middle-class man who, through a thousand ups and downs, becomes a merchant in India, written by Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, two members of the lower nobility, not surprisingly involved, after the reopening of the theaters, in drafting theatrical texts. Because the novel, at least in its infancy – well before the canonical 1719 year reported in literary histories in which Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe –, offered itself as a substitute for theater. The novel borrowed from theater its structure and development, stage directions and dialogues, masks and moral and didactic implications, and links with current events. What changed were only its settings: no longer Shakespeare’s “Wooden O” but the virtual stage of the printed page. And it was not yet accidental that all this coincided – and we are at the onset of the Restoration – with the flourishing of theater, generating a parallel path between the two genres and establishing a bond and a synergy that, as we shall see, from then on was indissoluble. A rebirth of theater surely not without its difficulties but flourishing and intense as never before, thanks also to Charles II’s edict which decreed the official debut of actresses in female roles, which until then had been the prerogative of young crossdressed actors. There were two formally licensed companies, Devenant’s Duke’s Men and Killegrew’s King’s Men, who performed, respectively, at Lislie’s Tennis Court and at the Redbull, before obtaining their own venues, the Dorset Garden and Drury Lane, as well as three smaller companies that soon folded. But parallel to the official theater, attended by the nobles and the rich bourgeois, there blossomed an illegitimate theater that upended all the rules and multiplied with incredible speed in a flurry of genres and sub-genres, in increasingly widespread forms of hybridization, and in a mixture of different stage traditions. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all of London became a stage. In the face of the authorized theaters that presented themselves in the new architectural guise inspired by European fashions, inns, public houses, taverns, courtyards, even warehouses hosted illegitimate theatrical events, most often as parodies or jests, sprinkled with obscene gags and exhibitions of female nudity, accompanied by musical or dance interludes that attracted the lowerclass audiences that were excluded from the authorized theaters.

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Here we see the birth of a real Theatermania that developed on two levels: on the one hand, that of the official theaters with their repertory of heroic costume tragedies and comedies that address fashionable themes, and on the other, that of illegitimate theaters, with their often improvised comic and farcical performances influenced of late by the Commedia dell’Arte. What they had in common was an enthusiastic public participation that was never passive but always active, albeit in a different way, such as the adoption of rhymed verse instead of blank verse. While in the illegitimate theater participation was purely spectatorial, but active, as in the Elizabethan theater, noisy and rife with jesting and catcalling, one attended the official theater to see and be seen, to stage oneself and become an integral part of the show. Consequently, this attitude to theatergoing became a mirror and a representation, fictitious as well as realistically reliable, of contemporary society. And not only through the introduction of the city/countryside binomial or the reproduction of an urban map, made up of streets, parks and places, but also of servants, shopkeepers, madams and whores, well-known to all – Etheredge’s The Man of Mode – but also through the characters that were masks of that society and, as in a play of mirrors, became a reflection of the spectators, with whom they interacted in their numerous asides, moments of complicity with the public in commenting on the stage action – Congreve – in adopting the “play within the play” (Dryden), and in the “rehearsal play” – Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. As Marisa Sestito writes (2002, 39): “the impression of closeness went beyond mimesis and offered interpretations that ranged from the microcosm of comedy to external reality, involving the audience”. The real acting took place in private homes, as Dorimant in The Man of Mode lucidly observes, and the insistence on domestic environments served to emphasize the aforementioned mirroring feature and to make the relationship between theater and its users even closer. Visiting the theater was like visiting a familiar home, like observing the world around you. It was, to use Royall Tyler’s metaphor, the first American playwright, like spying on a neighbor’s house, in that “devil’s parlor” where one is admitted to come up against that “resemblance” which, again in Sestito’s words, “transfers the fictitious and in many cases deceptive quality of the theatricality flaunted by comedy, to the reality portrayed, by highlighting its artificiality, a game of sophistication and even hypocrisy” (Sestito 2002, 39). In short, going to the theater became a way of being, of representing oneself as oneself and as a collectivity, in which all recognized and identified with each other, and this new mode was projected and multiplied in the novel, which, more than an alternative, turned out to be in a way subsidiary to theater. For it too was born as a claim to realism and became a place of fiction, presenting itself as a portrayal of reality, a fresco of contemporary society, whose protagonists – always modeled on theatrical ones – narrated themselves in a homodiegetic form and of-

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fered themselves to the reader as actors do to their public, multiplying the theatrical effect and expanding its enjoyment, becoming – pardon the stretch – a portable theater, accessible at any time of day, as a form of entertainment and instruction. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of stage plots and novel plots coincided, gradually focusing on the themes of education and the various forms of the male/female relationship, which were often configured as a metaphor for the class conflict that gentrification had created. The fictional framework of the novel therefore duplicated the theatrical one, and in so doing affirmed that everything contained therein was artificial. Novels, like plays, offered authors another theatrical frame. The fictional text, which announced a discrepancy between the author and the feelings he wanted to express, could function as a camouflage, and authorship could become a performative act. All this took place in the discursive field, in a clash between the written page and the stage action, in a competition that found further competitiveness in the fact that both texts, novelistic and theatrical, took their measure within a common and little emphasized economic context, that of an increasingly important and dominant publishing industry, where genres confronted each other and clashed, with mixed results, in pursuit of market dominance. The success of theater motivated novelists to be simultaneously playwrights, directors, actors and spectators, and the growing success of the novel to transmit facts, characters and situations into the realm of theater. A real “paper war of ideas” (Battaglia 2009, 221), which also played out within the new space of magazines, taking shape to demonstrate that, like theater, novels served to indoctrinate the reader/spectator and were always at it, even when they appeared to be just a harmless tool of entertainment. The most significant fact of much of the eighteenth-century was a further new phenomenon, what can be defined as the novel of theater and the theater of the novel. The novel increasingly welcomed references to the stage and to what was being portrayed there: the visuality linked to appearing, the theatricality of middle-class society, the advertising it needed, speech that became image, the use of time. Theater adapted and reflected the modes of the novel, accepting their conventions and relaunching the centrality of moralistic tales, whether small or large, that on a daily basis pursued each other in English society. Both needed a crowd of faithful and passionate devotees: the public. A dynamic relationship never before realized, made possible by the fact that most of the authors who alternated were contemporaneously playwrights and novelists. One thinks in particular of those writers, often also actresses, who embraced the legacy of Aphra Behn, from Eliza Haywood to Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald and Maria Edgeworth, but also Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne and Horace Walpole. All, men and women alike, contributed in their works to ensuring

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that this synergy produced yet another upheaval that characterized the late eighteenth-century. On the one hand there was a return to Shakespearean tragedy, remodelled on the revolution in acting that Betterton, Macklin and Garrick developed, the latter offering an original – often subjected to rewriting – interpretation and ushering in yet another new phenomenon, that of stardom. And on the other hand, jettisoning sentimental comedy as a tearful tool of edification, strongly desired by Oliver Goldsmith and completed by Richard Sheridan. Amid a thousand controversies that often involved both sides of the Channel, the reinstatement of comedy and satire, often through the parodic, metatheatrical element, restored to English comedy and theater its original function of pure entertainment and amusement. Both opened up to a totally different vision and enjoyment of theater, in keeping with what was taking place in the rest of Europe – and lately also North America – , and the theatrical monomania Sheridan talks of in his farewell play, The Critic, or A Tragedy Rehearsed, where he scrutinizes the whole theatrical system and its very activity, seems to introduce us definitively into late eighteenth-century European Theatermania.

Bibliography Battaglia, Beatrice. “La narrativa dell’Età delle Rivoluzioni (1780–1830).” Manuale di letteratura e cultura inglese. Ed. Crisafulli and Keir. Bologna: Bonomia University Press, 2009. Bertinetti, Paolo. Storia del teatro inglese dalla Restaurazione all’Ottocento. Torino: Einaudi, 1997. Braunmuller, Albert R., and Bulman, James C. (eds). Comedy from Shakeaspeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1986. Lombardo, Agostino, and Tarantino, Elisabetta. Storia del teatro inglese. L’età di Shakespeare. Roma: Carocci, 2001. Lombardo, Agostino. Eduardo e Shakespeare. Parole d’inchiostro e non di voce. Roma: Bulzoni, 2004. Rosenfeld, Sybil. The Garrick Stage. Theatres and Audiences in the Eighteenth-Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Sestito, Marisa. Storia del teatro inglese. La Restaurazione e il Settecento. Roma: Carocci, 2002. Sheridan, Richard. The Critic, or A Tragedy Rehearsed. London: Printed for T. Becket, Adelphi, Strand, 1791. Tyler, Royall. The Contrast. Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1790. Woods, Leigh. Garrick Claims the Stage: Acting as Social Embleme in Eighteenth-Century England. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Anna Scannapieco

Venetian Theatermanias

We will certainly have to talk about Theatermania in the plural form, given the specificity of its Venetian variety. Its first epiphany – which came about in a time span not containable within the confines of a single century, even if, as we shall see, it would only manifest its full force in the eighteenth-century – evolved from the endogenous character of Venetian civilization, due to its primarily urban morphology, which by its very nature led to distinct anthropological developments. Venice – unlike any other city – evolved its particular polymorphic, polycentric image in an uninterrupted continuity that rejected the isolated perception of single architectural and pictorial motifs, thus making it impossible to fix its physiognomy in a single, all-encompassing scenography. More than from the impression of a city that based its power on the mobility of water, the stunned admiration of foreign travelers who surrendered to this “magnet of Europe” – significantly, the title of a popular late seventeenth-century guidebook – were bowled over by the experience of an open urban space, inexplicably unwalled, which, in a flurry of images, vaunted one of the most ample architectural languages in structural contrasts and complexities. A plural city – and the toponym Venetie was by no accident plural, long reflecting the nature of a place made up of aggregates, a paradigmatic urban embodiment of experimentation, encounter and exchange – a city whose stage did not allow itself to be summed up by the abstractions of a perspectiva artificialis and founded the structural idea, which became so essential to modernity, that theater could and must take place everywhere, in a space that could only be perceived if explored and traversed. It was again Venice – its very special urban and architectural configuration whose structure seemed to place those who passed through it in a permanent condition of actors/spectators – that founded the equally disruptive idea of that spectator in scaena which Goethe could still describe memorably in his Italianische Reise. Among its many possible passages, let us consider this one: Gestern war ich in der Komödie, Theater St. Lucas, die mir viel Freude gemacht hat; ich sah ein extemporirtes Stück in Masken, mit viel Naturell, Energie und Bravour aufgeführt. Freilich sind sie nicht alle gleich; der Pantalon sehr brav, die eine Frau stark und wohlgebaut, keine außerordentliche Schauspielerin, spricht excellent und weiß sich zu betragen. Ein tolles Sujet, demjenigen ähnlich, das bei uns unter dem Titel Der Verschlag behandelt ist. Mit unglaublicher Abwechslung unterhielt es mehr als drei Stunden. Doch ist auch hier das Volk wieder die Base, worauf dieß alles ruht, die Zuschauer spielen mit, und die Menge verschmilzt mit dem Theater in ein Ganzes. Den Tag über auf dem Platz und am Ufer, auf den Gondeln und im Palast, der https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-014

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Käufer und Verkäufer, der Bettler, der Schiffer, die Nachbarin, der Advocat und sein Gegner, alles lebt und treibt und läßt sich es angelegen sein, spricht und betheuert, schreit und bietet aus, singt und spielt, flucht und lärmt. Und Abends gehen sie in’s Theater und sehen und hören das Leben ihres Tages, künstlich zusammengestellt, artiger aufgestutzt, mit Mährchen durchflochten, durch Masken von der Wirklichkeit abgerückt, durch Sitten genähert. Hierüber freuen sie sich kindisch, schreien wieder, klatschen und lärmen. Von Tag zu Nacht, ja von Mitternacht zu Mitternacht ist immer alles ebendasselbe.¹ (WA I 30, 118–119)

In short, Venetian society was constantly engaged in displaying itself on the urban stage, eager to see itself reflected each day in a second theater stage spectacle. Intimately connected to this was a second form of Venetian Theatermania, one whose theatrical performances in the strict sense it cultivated – as far back as the late fifteenth-century – in the precocious and flourishing forms – given its particular social and political structure – of a spontaneous decentralization. The performances were not limited solely to the court but were staged in the palaces of the major patrician families – Morosini, Bragadin, Pesaro, Foscari, Contarini – and even in the monasteries, capable of hosting the most original and daringly profane repertories – deservedly famous was the staging, in one of the Crociferi halls in Cannaregio, in 1522, of Niccolò Machiavelli’s disquieting theatrical masterpiece the Mandragola –. Nor is it surprising, in this context, that the birth of theater in the modern sense of the term took place in Venice, through the construction of public pay theaters – the first, intended for opera production in 1637 in San Cassiano; but public performances for pay were recorded from the very early years of the sixteenthcentury, as was the certain existence prior to 1581 of two theaters intended for drama performances. However, in evaluating the phenomenon we must bear in mind that the influence of Venice’s urban morphology, or the anthropological profile of its inhabitants, was part and parcel of the entrepreneurial ability of a ruling class able to find in the entertainment industry an effective compensation for the

 [“Yesterday I saw a play at the S. Luca theater, which greatly amused me. It was an impromptu performance of masks, full of spontaneity, energy and skill. […] But here too, once again, the people are the foundation on which everything rests. The audience participates in the show and the crowd merges into a whole with the performance. Throughout the day, in the squares and on the banks, in the gondolas and in the palace, buyers and sellers, beggars, boatmen, gossips, lawyers and their adversaries, everyone does nothing but move, trade, tinker: they talk and jabber, shout and offer wares, they sing and play, swear and make noise; and in the evening they go to the theater and listen to their very experiences of the day, artificially reconstructed, reproduced in a more seductive guise, enriched with inventions, alienated from life by means of masks, similar to life in uses and customs. And they enjoy it in a childlike way, shout back, applaud and jeer. From morning till night, indeed from midnight to midnight, it is always the same”]. Date of Goethe’s travelogue: 4 October 1786.

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political decline that the Serenissima faced on the international stage already from the last decades of the sixteenth-century. In other words, it was also thanks to the incidence of well-considered economic interests that over a few decades a theatrical network unique in all of Europe developed in Venice – a total of twenty theaters opened in the seventeenth-century, and fifteen in the eighteenth-century, many of which engaged in simultaneous and competitive activity, in seasons that enlivened urban life for about five months a year –, thereby nurturing both the professionalization of the various arts to participate in augmenting the entertainment offering –, from scenography to entrepreneurship, as well as codifying new genres – besides, of course, the development over about two centuries of an imposing lyrical and dramatic repertory, and the aesthetic evolution of an audience already imbued with theatricality. But let us focus on the century of our primary interest, when Venice’s Theatermania took hold with previously unheard of vigor and variety. The phenomenon – no surprise – especially concerned spoken theater, which in its consummate musical form could excite and gratify cognitive and hedonistic impulses that increasingly pervaded the society as the century progressed. This is what Carlo Gozzi, an aristocrat who, as a stalwart historical materialist, in 1772 analyzed as the theater factory: La perniziosa inclinazione del nostro secolo al lusso, e alla voluttà, fece divenire la materia Teatrale, materia di conseguenza nell’opinione. Si eressero nuovi Teatri, si abbellirono i vecchi. In Venezia, dove non si aprivano, che due Teatri di Commedia, nel giro di venticinqu’anni se ne sono aperti quattro, e spesso se ne aprono cinque.² (Gozzi 2013, 370)

Let us skip over what the opening of the quote suggests, easily attributable to the misoneist moralist mask that Gozzi sometimes likes to put on for tactical reasons of self-representation. Let it suffice to point out that in a passage of the same text he remarks how: “Infiniti son quelli che hanno stabilite le campagne loro, per aver sussistenza, sulle passioni degli uomini. […] tra questi agricoltori si devono certamente registrare i Comici; schiera, che si rende tanto più grande, quanto più si dilata la voluttà” (Gozzi 2013, 359).³  [“The pernicious inclination of our century to luxury and pleasure has made theatrical matter a matter of consequence in the public’s eye. New theaters have been built and old ones embellished. In Venice, where once there were only two Drama Theaters, in the space of twenty-five years four have opened, and at present often five open”], quote taken from Ragionamento ingenuo, 1772. All translations into English, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.  [“Infinite are those who have hoed their plots, for subsistence, upon the passions of men. […] Among these farmers the Comedians must certainly be noted; a host that swells all the more as hedonism gains ground”].

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Where the term hedonism, hinging on human passions and the need to portray and criticize them, loses all negative connotations, and rather seems to allude to a sort of voluptas noscendi. In any case, the most important points of the previous quote undoubtedly concern the multiplication of Venetian theater halls around mid-century, to keep pace with the surge in demand in a supply sector that until then had been marginalized by the imperious hegemony of musical theater. The phenomenon is easily ascribable to the “neither sudden nor rapid” (Zorzi 1977, 266) appearance on the Venetian stage of Carlo Goldoni, and to the Copernican revolution⁴ that in the repertories of theater companies produced his prodigious experimentalism, nourished by the Books about the World and about Theater. Goldoni, very attentive – on the model of Lope de Vega, to whom he explicitly declared himself indebted – to his audiences’ expectations, was able to intercept and at the same time nurture a new sensitivity. The success of his operation of increasing demand, resulting in the proliferation of new theater writers, among them Pietro Chiari, his antagonist par excellence, was just the tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, the multiplication of authors went hand in hand or was to some extent concomitant with the multiplication of actors. In this too Carlo Gozzi offers a precious testimony: Infiniti uomini stanchi delle professioni, nelle quali i padri loro gli avevano allevati; infinite femmine annoiate della soggezione famigliare, affidando in quelle tante rappresentazioni scritte, che correvano per i Teatri dell’Italia, alla loro memoria, al loro coraggio, o ad altro, si abbandonarono al mestiere dell’arte Comica. Divennero innumerabili tra noi le Comiche truppe con un tale fondamento.⁵ (Gozzi 2013, 370)

In fact, during the eighteenth-century, in addition to the increase in the Comic troops, there was also a somewhat contrary phenomenon to what can be called the âge d’or of the Italian acting tradition. While great talents of the stage such as Flaminio Scala, Tristano Martinelli and Pier Maria Cecchini tried to anchor if not finalize the theatrical profession in other kinds of work, later there was a growing number who did not take up the art of acting automatically by being born into a family of professionals, but individuals who purposely abandoned, ac-

 Oh Galileian, to say it with De Sanctis, who acutely defined the Venetian Goldoni as the “Galileo of our new literature” (De Sanctis 1970, 795).  [“An infinite number of men, weary of the professions in which their fathers had raised them; and an endless number of women, bored with family duties, confiding in those many written representations that filled Italy’s theater stages, by memory, courage or whatever, threw themselves into the vocation of writing plays. The theatrical troops of such foundation became legion among us”].

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cording to Gozzi, a previous activity and as amateurs attempted to join the professional troupes – many examples could be adduced precisely by analyzing the composition of the companies active in Venice in the second half of the eighteenth-century. From Gozzi’s viewpoint, the increase in authors and the consequent prevalence of a slack dramaturgy, contributed significantly to the increase in actors, especially actors untrained in the exacting artistic tradition, precisely because they confided in the widespread accessibility to a vast ready-made repertory, such that it sufficed for them to have the memory and courage to succeed in a profession that actually required the much more complex interpretive virtues of improvisation. It seems quite evident that, while this interpretive line – even in its bias – contained an undoubted kernel of verisimilitude, it was nonetheless insufficient to explain the breadth and complexity of the phenomenon, which was at least largely traceable to that idea of theater as a privileged means of acquiring self-awareness, as Lessing had theorized as far back as 1742,⁶ and which in later decades found a paradigmatic expression in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister theatralische Sendung (1777– 1785) or in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–1790). And while in Italy there were no such works and no explicit equation between acting and poetry, the idea of the actor-artist creator of a second reality, which in the German area had found expression since 1750, for example in Lessing and Christob Mylius,⁷ the appearance in 1782 of the Notizie istoriche de ‘Comici italiani, “an erudite, curious, pleasant and certainly completely new work” (Bartoli 1782, iii) in the words of the author Francesco Bartoli, Bolognese by birth but Venetian by theatrical training, a former actor in Antonio Sacco’s company: “certainly completely new”, and perhaps unique in the European panorama, the work, although mainly aimed at “Theater Amateurs” and in particular at the “Professors of the Dramatic Art”⁸, “institutionalized” the cultural and artistic profile of actors, placing them resolutely in the ranks of “Men of Letters” by virtue of their – at least theoretically necessary –

 See Lessing’s letter to Justina Salome of January 20, 1742 (Bellavia 2020, 92).  Thus in an article by Mylius that appeared in the first monthly edition entirely devoted to theater, Beyträge zur Theorie und Aufnahme des Theaters, which Lessing founded (Bellavia 2020, 96).  Recurrent declarations in the work’s programmatic manifesto: A pamphlet by the actor Francesco Bartoli, addressed to the Amateurs of the Theater and to the Italian Play Companies, besides being a curious in itself in the context of serving as a Prospectus for a Work to be published in print, entitled: Notizie Istoriche de’ Comici più rinomati italiani, che fiorirono intorno all’Anno MDL fino ai giorni presenti, Piacenza: Stamperia Regio-Ducale di Andrea Bellici Salvoni, s.d., p. 5.

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dramaturgical prerequisites, and portraying the “Comedian worthy of admiration” on the basis of his creative and not merely performative abilites.⁹ The emulator competitions, the stage harangues that Bartoli inevitably often refers to in tracing the life stories of eighteenth-century actors, introduce us to the latest form of Venetian Theatermania. This was the collective fanaticism, of unusual offerings that characterized Venetian theater audiences in the second half of the eighteenth-century – audiences, it should be noted that were socially transversal, because of the decidedly lower ticket costs that compared to other European contexts, which was the norm in the Italian theater market, as Riccoboni, Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi well attest. Various documents register this fanaticism – such as the famous Cicogna codex, preserved in Venice’s Correr Museum Library and containing about ninety writings on the Chiari-Goldoni rivalry in the 1753–1756 seasons – or the numerous meta-theatrical comedies reflecting the public’s assiduous and enthusiastic participation in the theatrical offerings, such as to make the public itself the subject of theatricalization – starting with what was perhaps Carlo Gozzi’s first work, which remained in the drawer and is significantly entitled Le gare teatrali. ¹⁰ However, I prefer to focus on two lesser known, but perhaps more eloquent, testimonies. The first is that of Antonio Piazza, a novelist and subsequently a successful journalist, but also an intimate of the theatrical world and himself a playwright. It is taken from a novel published in Venice in 1770, La virtuosa ovvero la cantatrice fiamminga: La mia Nazione [Venezia] è tutta in due partiti divisa e ci sono pochi neutrali. […]. Questo fanatismo accese delle guerre civili nelle Famiglie; convertì le Tavole de’ Caffè in tante Cattedre di Poesia comica, e destò anche i Legnajuoli e i Fabbri ferrai a parlare di Commedie, di Tragedie, e di Drammi. Sino le garrule Artigianelle vogliono decidere del bello poetico. Ciascuna ha il suo genio e ciascuna ingegnasi di mostrarlo ragionevole e buono. Chi porta Tizio alle stelle, chi lo profonda negli abissi. Chi dice che Sempronio non à al Mondo l’eguale, e chi lo deride come come un verseggiatore da Colascione. Tutto tocca l’estremo e non ci sono strade di mezzo. Si comincia a parlare d’una commedia un mese prima che vadi in iscena, e la si vuole da chi buona e da chi cattiva, avanti d’averla veduta. Si concorre in folla alle prime Recite, si fa cadere dagli applausi il Teatro, si decide in Piazza nelle mattine seguenti, si quistiona, si disputa, si strapazza, e intanto i due Emoli fortunati s’approfittano di queste gare senza le quali, qualunque sia il loro merito, non ricaverebbero certamente un così grosso

 “An actor (…) who plays his role with a truthfulness and naturalness necessary for the character he is playing, who invests himself in passions, who clearly expresses his feelings, who knows how to paint the inner movements of the soul (…) will always be an actor worthy of admiration, and will be able to attract the applause of the entire audience” (Ibid. 4).  Unpublished work. Hypothetical date of composition: early 1750s.

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guadagno. I Torchii non si logorano che sull’Opere loro, i Libraj non fanno altro commercio che quello delle medesime, non si vuol leggere che le cose uscite della penna d’uno o dell’altro, e tutto risuona del loro nome glorioso.¹¹ ([Piazza] 1770, 67–68)

Beyond the retrospective reference to the legendary and by now chronologically distant supporters linked to the names of Chiari and Goldoni, and beyond the contemptuous air with which some participants in the disputes are branded – carpenters, blacksmiths, craftsmen and plebeian scum who dare to dispute on poetic beauty – , the picture we get, once stripped of its topical satirical coloring, shows a socially transversal, feverish ferment over what theater could offer and what could be demanded of theater, such as a place par excellence where one could question the plurality of destinies contained in each individual, and where it was possible to experience shared processes of formation and sociality. The second testimony is contained in a letter that the exuberant and fascinating Elisabetta Caminer, journalist and avant-garde theater writer, wrote on February 1, 1772, to Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, the authoritative director of Florence’s Novelle letterarie. She gives an extremely lively description of the city’s theatrical life – the carnival season is underway –, which she experienced with intense and assiduous participation: vò tutte le sere al Teatro per cui ho una vera passione … Tutti questi teatri fanno a gara per divertire il Pubblico, quindi le cose nuove s’hanno a furia, e tradotte dal francese, e italiane, e tratte dallo spagnuolo, e di mille altri generi. Fra queste ve ne son molte di cattive, ma ve ne son anche di buone. Non vi parlo delle gare fra’ Comici, delle rivalità tra gli autori, de’ partiti fra il Popolo; questo è il più bel divertimento del mondo. E chi scrive, e chi strilla, e chi decide, e chi dà legge; e chi critica, e chi sotto al manto della verità copre il fanatismo che scappa fuori dopo una lunga diceria: io per me ho date al teatro cinque cose tradotte e accomodate, e

 [“My nation [Venice] is entirely split into two parties and there are few neutrals. (…). This fanaticism has ignited civil wars in families; it has converted café tables into so many Professorships of Dramatic Poetry, and also roused the carpenters and blacksmiths to discourse on comedies, tragedies and dramas. Even garrulous scullery maids want to have their say on poetic beauty. Each has his or her own genius and each claims to be reasonable and just. One praises Tom to the stars while another casts him into a ditch. One declares that Harry has no parallel in the world while another taunts him like a Colascione rhymester. Everything touches the extreme and there is no middle way. We start talking about a play a month before its debut, and we already know who is good and who is bad even before we’ve seen it. You push your way through the crowd at the premiere, the applause brings down the House, you decide in the square the mornings after, you question, dispute, scramble, and meantime two lucky imitators take advantage of these competitions without which, whatever their merits, they would certainly not make such handsome profits. The printers only sweat over their own works, the booksellers sell nothing but themselves, one will only read what issues from this or that one’s pen, and everything resounds with their own glorious name”].

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ne darò un’altra. Tutte hanno avuto un esito fortunato ed io contenta di non essermi ingannata nella scelta, me ne sto tranquilla a vedere le cose altrui e a ridere di chi vuol mordere pazzamente.¹²

It is a testimony that sheds a very different light from what we usually imagine on the virulence of theatrical competitions in eighteenth-century Venice, here presented to us in its contemporary terms of exciting amusement, a sort of second spectacle that increased the enjoyment of theatrical performances proper, and almost replaced them.

Bibliography WA = Johann Wolfang von Goethe, Italiänische Reise. Weimarer Ausgabe Abt. I, Bd. 30. Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919. Bartoli, Francesco Saverio. Notizie istoriche de’ Comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno MDC fino a’ giorni presenti. Padova: Conzatti, 1782. Bellavia, Sonia. “La vocazione teatrale di Karl Philipp Moritz.” Acting Archives Review. Rivista di studi sull’attore e la recitazione X.19 (2020): 76–101. De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della letteratura italiana. Introduction by Luigi Russo, ed. Maria Teresa Lanza. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1970. Gozzi, Carlo. Ragionamento ingenuo: dai “preamboli” all’“Appendice”. Scritti di teoria teatrale. Ed. Anna Scannapieco. Venezia: Marsilio (Carlo Gozzi, Le Opere, Edizione Nazionale), 2013. Anonimo [Piazza, Antonio]. La virtuosa ovvero la cantatrice fiamminga. Avventure scritte per suo trattenimento da lei medesima. Venezia: Modesto Fenzo, 1770. Zorzi, Ludovico. Il teatro e la città. Saggi sulla scena italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1977.

 [“every evening I go to the theater, for which I have a real passion (…) All these theaters compete to entertain the public, so new things are rife, translated from the French, as well as Italian, and taken from the Spanish, and a thousand other kinds. Among these there are many awful ones, but there are also good ones. I’m not talking about the contests between comedians, the rivalries between authors, the wrangling among the common folk; this is the best entertainment in the world. Those who write, and those who scream, and those who decide, and those who lay down the law; and those who criticize, and those who under the mantle of truth defend the fanaticism that escapes from a big lie. As for me, I’ve given the theater five translated and reworked things, and will give more. All have had a fortunate outcome and I’m pleased not to have made the wrong choices. I calmly observe the works of others and laugh at those who want to bite like rabid dogs”]. From: Florence State Archive, Lettere a Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, f. XVII, n° 4057.

Stefano Locatelli

Theater and the arts in the treatises on political economy of eighteenth-century Italian reformers: population, public, spectator 1 The art of governing peoples The eighteenth-century, and especially its second half, saw the emergence of theater as a fundamental subject of study or of discourse. In Italy, too, men of culture (Taviani 1969, CXII) increasingly considered it high on the list of both aesthetic and moral values. In short, even theater began to find its place in the firmament of the Arts. For the so-called Italian reformers, this attention often originated from the studies they systematically carried forward on the principles of public economics. Antonio Genovesi, Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri, Gian Rinaldo Carli – to name only the best known and most influential – were above all scholars of this discipline, often with professorships – variously defined as of Commerce, or Chamber Sciences, or Civil Economics – in the universities and monastic centers of their cities. We highlight in particular the example of Pietro Verri, whose studies of economics were central, alongside those of morality. His Meditazioni sull’economia politica (Verri 2007 [1771], 391–570) were the culmination of about a decade of research, and made him one of the eminent voices among those who, in the second half of the eighteenth-century, formalized in economic terms the golden principle of “maximum happiness divided among the greatest number” (Beccaria 1984 [1764], 23),¹ a moral principle that became the centerpiece of modern political economy. While the general interest was, for Verri, the fundamental value to be defended and promoted, in economic terms it could only be promoted on condition that it guarantee the freedom and autonomy of individuals, starting above all with the freedom of exchange. The government must not regulate every aspect of economic life, it must not impose artificial constraints; it will be effective, as a government,

 For Pietro Verri’s contribution to European economic thought, see Groenewegen 1999. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110759266-015

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only if it leverages economic principles and natural principles or, more precisely, economic principles as natural principle.² For Verri these were basic principles, borrowed first of all from Helvétius’s De l’Esprit – but also fundamentally from Locke, Condillac and Henry Lloyd,³ essentially of two kinds: avoidance of pain and search for pleasure. They had already constituted one of the foundations of Verri’s Meditazioni sulla felicità (1763), though we also find them in Cesare Beccaria’s Elementi di economia pubblica and, among Italian economic treatises, in Antonio Genovesi’s Lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile. (Genovesi 2005 [1767]). Genovesi argued that pain and pleasure are the driving principle of both persons and political entities (they constitute the energy of the nation, which varies from nation to nation as do climates and education), and that political economy is to be considered above all a study of human nature, and that, therefore, introducing artificial pains and pleasures is the most suitable tool for stimulating or discouraging behaviors and activities that are useful – or harmful – to power. Closely connected to Genovesi’s thoughts on the principles concerning pleasure and pain was the fundamental attention that Italian reformers also paid in their treatises to the category of population. Genovesi devotes about ten pages to it in the manuscript of his Elementi di commercio, datable to 1757 (Genovesi 2005, 57–66). In the printed edition of his Lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile, of ten years later, the chapter on population has at least a triple extension closely linked to a new chapter on education (Genovesi 2005, 324–356). Cesare Beccaria himself devoted a notable chapter (the third) of his Elementi di economia pubblica to population (Beccaria 2014 [1804]),⁴ while Pietro Verri devoted to it several sections of his Meditazioni (Verri 2007 [1771], 491–507). Cantillon’s Essais sur la nature du commerce en général make fundamental references to the discussion on the Population category, as do in general the French physiocratic school – albeit Verri objected to many aspects of physiocracy – primarily Quesnay (Extrait des économies royales) and Mirabeau (L’ami des hommes). The analysis of population was formulated starting from the typically physiocratic notion of the naturalness of population, as a phenomenon of nature that

 See on this Quadrio Curzio and Scazzieri 1992 and Bognetti 2014.  On his similarities to Henry Lloyd, whom Pietro Verri frequented during Lloyd’s stay in Milan, see Silvia Contarini’s introductory note and comment in Verri, 2014 [1781], 30–31, 65n; see also Capra 2002, 147–152; Hotta 1999.  Cesare Beccaria wrote his Elementi di economia pubblica while he held the chair of Scienze Camerali at Milan’s Scuole Palatine. It circulated in manuscript form, probably from 1771 (and was later first published, edited by Pietro Custodi, in 1804).

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does not coincide with the simple sum of individuals in a geographical area, but depends on numerous variables – including education and moral values – that inevitably shield the population from the willful action of the sovereign. As a phenomenon of nature, population cannot be changed by decree; however, its very naturalness makes it accessible to transformative actions, provided that such action leverages factors seemingly distant from the immediate behavior of the population – for example, monetary flows, exports and imports. Hence it is only thanks to the preliminary knowledge of the naturalness of the population – through the precise observation of the constancy of a series of phenomena, albeit apparently variable, that characterize it – that procedures can be applied for governing the economy, and so for governing tout court in the physiocratic perspective, in nature and thanks to the nature of the population.⁵ The influence of the physiocratic matrix, and especially of the theorists of population, beginning with Mirabeau, also allowed Genovesi, Verri and Beccaria to focus on the basic notion of desire as an engine of a population’s action, and of the extent to which action on the naturalness of that population must be based on the production of collective interest through the play of individual desires. Thus Pietro Verri wrote in his Discorso sulla felicità: Nella vita selvaggia può dirsi che l’eccesso dei desiderj oltre il potere sia poco, perché quelli sono limitati ai soli bisogni fisici […]; nello stato di società i desideri sono infiniti, perché nascono dalla fecondissima opinione, sovrana degli uomini sociali, e il potere si accresce dal canto dell’industria e si scema da quello delle forze fisiche, ma se in questa società spira la barbara diffidenza, se l’esistenza e la proprietà diventano precarie, se dalla fonte dell’equità e della giustizia sgorga il terrore e la devastazione, il potere di ogni uomo è vacillante e l’eccesso de’ desiderj diventa sommo.⁶ (Verri 2014 [1778], 271–272)

If the escape from pain and the search for pleasure are the engines of man’s individual action in the state of society, then it is precisely the introduction of artificial pains and pleasures, as Genovesi had already observed, that public economy could

 See on this, and for a discussion of his affirming the category of population during the eighteenth-century, and its centrality in his studies of political economy, Foucault 2004, in particular pp. 49–69.  [“In the wild life it can be said that the excess of desires beyond power is little, because those are limited only to physical needs; in the state of society desires are infinite, because they arise from the very fruitful opinion, typical of social men, and power grows from the side of industry and diminishes from that of physical forces; but if barbaric mistrust blows in this society, if existence and property become precarious, if terror and devastation flow from the source of equity and justice, the power of every man falters and the excess of desire becomes supreme”].

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use as an instrument to activate or deactivate individual desire as an engine of action for the population. There is a compelling coherence on these issues in the more mature Verri of the 1770s, to the point that the concept of public economy as an art of governing peoples can be clearly deduced in his economic writings, and hence the definition of an art of government configured primarily as government of the population, to be achieved with the tools of political economy. Pietro Verri was notoriously reluctant, despite the progressive force of much of his thought, to openly challenge certain traditional systems of power of his time, so that he left unpublished writings such as Le osservazioni sulla tortura (1777) (see Capra 2014). However, it should be noted that, as was already the case with his French and English models, the idea that the art of government substantially coincides with political economy, and therefore must first of all be government of the population – and precisely of and through the naturalness of the population – is, from a political viewpoint, potentially disruptive, since it questions the traditional idea of sovereignty. The need to develop disciplines, as Foucault points out, is a direct consequence of this (see Foucault 2004, 86–90). There is also a closely related urgency to acquaint onself in depth with the population, at all levels, from the purely statistical about its number and geographical distribution, to the apparently more difficult components to grasp of culture and the arts.

2 Arts and public economy: from population to public So it is not surprising that the Arts are also defined as a subject of interest proper to political economy, strictly linked to the notions of desire and imagination. Thus Beccaria: [Le Belle Arti] insegnano a coltivare la nostra immaginazione, la quale se non ha l’alimento del bello e del vero, precipita nel tenebroso e nel fantastico, e se non è ricreata da spessi adombramenti della sospirata felicità, si rovescia fra le malinconiche e dubbie larve del fanatismo e della superstizione. … Le scuole di disegno, le accademie di pittura, di scultura, di architettura, i pubblici monumenti, i viaggi dei giovani studiosi, saranno un oggetto di pubblica economia sempre interessante e sempre utile, e a noi insegneranno a rispettare la succinta modestia di coloro che lontani dagli studii comuni e pecuniosi soffrono i rimproveri e la derisione di quelli, che con imponente sopraciglio alla contagiosa aura popolare si fanno belli di una

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scienza inutile e dannosa sovente alla nazione, quantunque utile talvolta ad alcuni particolari.⁷ (Beccaria 1804, 311–313)

It is no coincidence that precisely the eighteenth-century, and exponentially its second half, saw the emergence of topics of study hitherto substantially neglected – at least officially – by Italian men of culture, and among them theater played an increasingly important role, even with the theoretical foundation of theatrical aesthetics. However, on closer look these are not only aesthetics, but true physics, aimed at tracing the fundamental laws that regulate the functioning of the Arts, also in terms of their reception. It suffices to note how important here are the principles of pleasure and pain, unhappiness and the consequent notion of desire. Pietro Verri: La lettura continuata ed estesa ci porta nelle scienze tanto lontani da noi medesimi quanto gli spettacoli e le rumoreggianti società. Molti hanno bisogno di un libro per allontanare la noja di essere con loro medesimi, e il pregio maestro dell’uomo è appunto la capacità di ripiegarsi in sé stesso, conoscersi e farsi spettacolo interessante delle proprie osservazioni. Il saggio coltiva le scienze, le lettere e le arti per gloria, o per diletto, o per vivere; ma coltiva le interessantissime cognizioni del suo animo, l’esame dei suoi desiderj, lo sviluppamento del proprio potere per allontanarsi quanto è possibile nelle sue circostanze dalla infelicità.⁸ (Verri 2014 [1778], 275–276) Beccaria: Finalmente premetteremo che la causa impellente ed immediata d’ogni nostra azione si è il dolore, perché non agiremo giammai, anche in vista d’un piacere o di un utile grandissimo, se

 [“(The Fine Arts) teach us to cultivate our imagination, which if it does not have the nourishment of beauty and truth, falls into the dark and the fantastic, and if it is not recreated by the dense overshadowings of the desired happiness, it overturns among the melancholy and dubious larvae of fanaticism and superstition. The schools of drawing, the academies of painting, sculpture, architecture, public monuments, the travels of young scholars, will be an object of public economy that is always interesting and always useful, and they will teach us to respect the humble modesty of those who, far from common and pecuniary studies, suffer the reproaches and derision of those who, with a proud eyebrow at the contagious popular aura, boast themselves of practicing a useless and often harmful science for the nation, although sometimes useful for some people”].  [“Continued and extended reading takes us, in the field of science, as far from ourselves as the spectacles and the noisy societies. Many people need a book to remove the boredom of being with themselves, and the most important characteristic of man is precisely the ability to withdraw into himself, to know himself and make an interesting spectacle of his observations. The sage cultivates sciences, letters and arts for glory, or for pleasure, or for living; but he cultivates the very interesting knowledge of his soul, the examination of his desires, the development of his power to distance himself as far as possible, in his circumstances, from unhappiness”].

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prima non nasce in noi una inquietudine, prodotta da quel piacere o da quell’utile, che vivamente si presenta all’animo, e ci cagiona un dolore analogo a tutti gli altri dolori.⁹ (Beccaria 2014 [1804], 355)

Terms such as uneasiness and disquietude are explicitly taken from Locke, for whom uneasiness is at the basis of the definition of those unnamed pains which, in Pietro Verri’s Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, are essential to applying the principle of pain in the Arts (see Verri 2014 [1781], 107).¹⁰ Hence we understand why the principles of pleasure and pain – including those of opinion – are essential, not without a certain originality on Verri’s part, even in the ambit of political economy. There is a fundamental subset of the naturalness of the population that extends the reach of public economy as an art of government: the fact that the population can also be identified as a public (Foucault 2004, 65–66 and passim). Ho accennato poco fa che i sensi nostri vengono modificati dalle usanze, e che dall’esempio e dalla educazione impariamo a dimostrare dolore o piacere talvolta per convenzione […]. Una distonazione clamorosa fa contorcere l’appassionato per la musica e lo fa dolorosamente sentire, lo crede egli stesso; un bel trillo granito e mordente lo tocca deliziosamente, così dice, e lo crede; io non ho trascurato questa bell’arte, l’amo, ed ho un orecchio sensibile, mostro le stesse apparenze.¹¹ (Verri 2014 [1781], 140)

If the typology of pleasure and pain largely depends on education, it will therefore differ from nation to nation, as determined by the opinions formed within specific cultural traditions, with their peculiar patterns of behavior, habits, fears and prejudices.

 [“Finally we will premise that the compelling and immediate cause of all our actions is pain, because we will never act, even in view of a pleasure or a very great profit, if a restlessness is not born in us first, produced by pleasure or by something useful that presents itself to the soul, and causes us pain analogous to all other pains”].  See especially sections 8 e 9. It is an essential passage of Pietro Verri thought, which enabled him, in his treatment of the fine arts, to transcend mere aesthetic reflection and to make systematic connections with the the economic and social component of his thought, so that we could say, though with a certain anachronism regarding the foundations of the discipline, of a true philosophical anthropology of Verri’s. It suffices to recall the Verri’s influence on Kant, who favorably cites his thoughts on pleasure and pain in his Lectures on Anthropology (see Giordanetti 1998).  [“I mentioned earlier that our senses are modified by customs, and that from example and education we learn to show pain or pleasure, sometimes by convention. A sensational dystonation makes the music lover contort and it makes him feel painfully; he believes it himself; a nice loud and biting trill touches him delightfully, so he says, and believes it; I have not neglected this beautiful art, I love it, and I have a sensitive ear, I show the same appearances”].

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This typology, which makes it possible to subdivide the population into a public, since it too is the result of education, could be the privileged subject of government action, understood as the art of governing peoples, and so a subject of political economy. This principle of the public as a subset of the population is well delineated in Pietro Verri’s thoughts on theater, such as in his long unpublished Lettre à Monsieur Noverre (1776). In keeping with his theory of pleasure and pain, Verri writes that music, painting, poetry, the fine arts, ballet – and theater in general – though true imitations of nature, can, through the imagination, distract the viewer from his/her uneasiness. However, his letter to Noverre is especially interesting when it addresses the matter of portraying an act of murder on the theater stage: Monsieur, je vous prie, seroit-il vrai qu’une nation sensible ne purroit pas souffrir un excès d’horreur ? […] On aime le spectacle tant qu’il nous chatouille l’ame, mais dès qu’il cause un vrai tourment, on cherche à se distraire; on aime a etre emu, mais non pas tourmenté […]. Des semblables atrocités, Monsieur, peuvent etre hazardées chez une nation froide, et dont les sentimens ont peu de vivacité; mais chez un peuple qui a moins de flegme et une plus grand portion des sentimens, Monsieur, cela ne sauroit reussir. C’est de la moutarde trop forte pour un palais delicat. Il faut menager les sentimens du spectateur en bon oeconome, on peut frapper un grand coup, mais il le faut preparer, il faut menager l’attention du spectateur. Il faute de preparer l’attention, d’inspirer un interet, de l’echauffer par degrés, de ne choquer pas chemin faisant: vos coups de Theatre manquent son effet. ¹² (Verri 2014 [1776], 633– 634, 634, 651) [emphasis mine]

Verri refers in particular to the tragic epilogue, with the explicit murder scenes that Noverre had staged in his Agamemnon vengé (1774) – four in all, including a matricide and a homicide. Verri states that they needed to respect a precise dramaturgy: a dramaturgy of the spectator, or rather a dramaturgy of the public, understood as a subset of the population as regards its opinions, habits, behaviors, quirks, prejudices, sensibility and traditions. These are the “pains and pleasures of

 [“Sir, I pray you, would it be true that a sensitive nation could not suffer an excess of horror? […] We love the spectacle as long as it tickles our souls, but from what causes real torment, we try to distract ourselves; we like to be moved, but not tormented […]. Similar atrocities, sir, can be risked in a cold nation, whose feelings have little vivacity; but among a people who have less phlegm and a greater portion of feelings, sir, that cannot succeed. This is too strong a mustard for a delicate palate. You have to manage the spectator’s feelings as a good economy, you can strike a hit, but you have to prepare for it, you have to manage the spectator’s attention. You have to prepare the attention, to inspire an interest, to warm it up by degrees, not to shock along the way: your theatrical hits lack its effect”].

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opinion” which Verri fully theorized in his Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore: Quanto mai sono alcuni piaceri indigeni d’un regno, e affatto diverrebbero insulsi col trasporto! Il cinese ti dipinge la sua Venere con una immensa fronte, con due occhietti schiacciati, un naso maccato e largo, un ventre enorme: eccoti la più voluttuosa donna per lui; s’inganna egli, ovvero s’ingannò quel greco incomparabile che scolpì la Venere medicea? Io non parlo sulla idea del bello, ma su quella del piacere, che gli uomini in nazioni diverse collocano sopra oggetti diversi. ¹³ (Verri 2014 [1781], 141) [emphasis mine]

For Verri the flaw in Noverre’s ballet was not due just to the bad attitudes of Italians – as Noverre claimed – but that it was the particular sensibility, education, disposition to the pleasures and pains of the Italian public which decreed the non-success of certain of his ballets; so much so that Verri defines the substantial difference between German and Italian theaters primarily in relation to the substantial difference between the two audiences: “Le theater en Italie est plus republicain [= free] qu’en Alemagne”. In a letter, dated 28 December 1774, to his brother Alessandro, Verri notes a similar difference in comparison to the British public: “Forse noi italiani siamo troppo sensibili ovvero troppo poco lo sono gli Inglesi; noi vogliamo un solletico al cuore, non una lacerazione, non siamo palati per pascerci di senape o di kren”¹⁴ (Greppi and Giulini 1923–1942, VII, 93–94). And he writes to Alessandro again in June 1775: Erano colpi quasi impensati che sbigottivano, e per non sentirsi squarciare l’anima appunto una nazione troppo sensibile si distrae e cerca avidamente se v’è un canto sul quale ridere. A Stuttgard mi dicono che [Noverre] giunse persino a far scannare sul teatro quaranta mariti ad un colpo dalle loro mogli […]. A una nazione stupida fa bisogno di una macelleria simile per muoverla, è senape a un palato incallito; noi siamo più capaci di solletico e perciò troviamo una sensazione disgustosa in così aspre rappresentazioni¹⁵. (Greppi and Giulini 1923–1942, VII, 176)

 [“How many pleasures are typical of a kingdom, and they would certainly become insipid elsewhere! The Chinese paints his Venus with an immense forehead, with two squashed eyes, a bruised and wide nose, an enormous belly: here is the most voluptuous woman for him; is he deceived, or was that incomparable Greek who sculpted the Medici Venus deceived? I am not speaking about the idea of beauty, but about that of pleasure, which men in different nations place on different objects”].  [“Perhaps we Italians are too sensitive or the English are too insensitive; we want a tickle in the heart, not a laceration, we have no palates made for mustard or kren”].  [“They were almost unexpected and astounding blows; in order not to feel its soul being torn apart, a nation that is too sensitive gets distracted and eagerly searches for something to laugh about. They told me that in Stuttgard Noverre even managed at once to have forty husbands

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There seems to be an apparent contradiction in these observations: Italians, so used to witnessing bloody public executions, a matter of deeply distraught criticism in those same years – not only Beccaria’s – have very sensitive palates, which need to be adequately prepared for the acting of a murder scene on stage; on the other hand, the Germanic peoples, as well as the English, “the freest people in the world”, according to Montesquieu – a fundamental model for Verri, who also makes reference to Montesquieu’s theory of climates – are by comparison too little sensitive. Why should the Italian public be, as Pietro Verri argues, so particularly squeamish about the portrayal of executions on the theater stage? The reflection cannot fail to shift onto what was probably the most popular public spectacle, the most present in the collective imagination of the ancient regime: public torture.

3 From public to spectator There is no doubt that from the end of the eighteenth-century there was also an increasing phase-out of public torture in Italy, in line with the broader process of assimilation – in a physical and mental sense – of a whole series of public aspects that since antiquity dealt with the passage from life to death (see Bernardi and Bino 2010). But the Italian context is peculiar and, especially in the case of public torture, hardly compatible with some of Foucault’s well-known theses, especially in the first part of his Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1975). Adriano Prosperi has clarified how in the Italian tradition on the death penalty there is none of the disorderly violence that is often found in the rest of Europe, and that instead it was characterized, by virtue of the brotherhoods of comforters to whom the organization of public torture was delegated throughout Italy, by the ritual’s restraint and its solemn tones of devotion (Prosperi 2013, 155). The ritualistic models that the brotherhoods put in place were those of conversion and martyrdom, with both canonical objectives – the act of individual repentance of the condemned – and education of the people, or rather of the public, understood precisely as a subset of the population.

slaughtered on the scene by their wives […]. A stupid nation needs such a butchery to be moved, it is mustard for a hard palate; we are more likely to be tickled and therefore we find a disgusting feeling in such harsh representations”].

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In ritualistic and even dramaturgical terms, the peculiar Italian tradition of executions was a model that continued to act, though at times unconsciously, on the minds of Italian reformers, and in particular on Pietro Verri’s. From this perspective, the analysis that Adam Smith makes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is undoubtedly fundamental,¹⁶ even in the context of Pietro Verri’s moral reflection and its almost immediate political-economic application. Smith, in addressing the problem of the difficult convergence of judgments between two observers looking at the same object, introduces the idea of the internalization of the spectator – an impartial spectator, a term borrowed from Addison and Steele, instead of the more common bystander – and analyzes in particular the relationship that develops between them and an unhappy man. It is above all a political problem, since the absence of a convergence of judgments in the face of the pain of others risks provoking disagreements that are difficult to settle on a collective level. Hence Smith defines the impartial spectator as one who, not directly involved in the fact and in the action, expresses a universal viewpoint representing all observers endowed with normal, or rather average, sentiments and moral virtues (see Raphael 2007). Luc Boltanski, referring in particular to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, has clearly highlighted how in eighteenth-century thought the introduction of the notion of spectator – but we could also say of the root notion of public – was an essential juncture: its connotation in spectatorial terms defined, in the theatrical terms of an ostensible distancing, the relationship with a pain-stricken individual (Boltanski, 2000 [1993]). It was a physical distance bridged through the faculty of imagination: The spectator offers himself the portrayal of the sufferer’s feelings and sensations. He does not identify with him and does not imagine himself in the same situation […] The mediation of imagination is important because it supports the moral edifice and the stability of society without resorting to community identification or Edenic fusion. (Boltanski 2000 [1993], 60– 61) [emphasis mine]

In theatrical terms, the rejection and outstripping of the Aristotelian principles of catharsis is evident, possible when, coinciding with a subordination of emotions to logos, a sympathetic balance is reached between the spectator’s imagination and the demands for attention of the tormented individual (Boltanski 2000 [1993], 62).

 Verri was perfectly familiar with his Theory of Moral Sentiments, though only in French translation, and it clearly influenced his Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, cfr. Verri 2014 [1781], 70–79 and nn.

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As Boltanski stresses, Smith is able in his analysis to describe the mechanism that makes possible the spectator’s reflexivity by introducing an additional actant, called introspector, into the tormented/spectator relationship (Boltanski 2000 [1993], 70). Smith pays special attention to the justice/benefit dynamic, identifying as a necessary component a third agent who acts on a tormented individual. The way in which the qualification of this actant/intermediate agent operates is obviously essential; the imagination and therefore the feelings of the spectator depend on it. I believe that this dynamic, first defined in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, corresponded perfectly to the peculiar Italian tradition regarding executions. For instance, the tablet painted with devotional images and examples of martyrdom that the comforters held before the eyes of the person awaiting execution, along the entire way through the city and up to his last moments at the gallows, hid him from the view of the crowd – the condemned person could not observe the public, just as the public could not directly observe the condemned person –; the litanies and psalms sung by the comforters throughout the public phase of comfort regulated what the people, public, heard; on the scaffold, the executioner would ask the patient’s forgiveness and he would reply with words of forgiveness. Hence a ritual of reconciliation and not of revenge, entirely mediated by the brotherly third agent (Prosperi 1993, 162). The comforter’s function in the public phase of torture therefore coincided with that of Smith’s benefactor, so that the Italian tradition of public torture took on, through its comfort ritual, the guise of charity rather than that of justice. The system of brotherly comfort for those sentenced to death introduced, with these mechanisms, a passionate configuration in the community; however, it was not limited to forming a common sensibility and morality, but also made it possible to effectively extend the ritual of pity to the political level. If we interpret the function of public punishment in this way, it is not surprising that Italy, and especially Milan, furnished the most ground-breaking thought in Europe on the issue of capital punishment. Further, executions as public spectacle could not be easily underestimated. From the quantitative data available on the number of death sentences in Milan in the eighteenth-century, there was a particular peak in executions between 1730 and 1770, especially in the two decades 1740–1760, a period that saw a total of 299 sentences, for an annual average of about fifteen public tortures per year (Mereu 1988, 43–44). It should be emphasized that these were the same years that saw, from the very onset of the 1760s, increasingly explicit signs of decadence in the brotherhood – the Congregation of San Giovanni Decollato alle Case Rotte – that for centuries

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had managed the entire ritual of public torture in Milan. Hence they were fundamental years that manifested a growing disaffection with the artistocratic order historically involved in the brotherhood’s work, and its progressive phasing out – a trend dating at least from 1749 until its definitive suppression in 1784 – by the Austrian authorities (Ceruti 1874; Biffi 1884; Benvenuti 1882). The brotherhood’s progressive decline during the second half of the eighteenth-century led directly to progressively debasing the function of the third-brother agent, with the repercussion of also radically undermining the political appropriation of the pity ritual which had traditionally characterized public torture in Italy; a trend that more and more frequently caused discord and disorder in the community. This dynamic can also be documented thanks to the Verri brothers’ correspondence. On 27 September 1775 Pietro wrote a well-known letter to his brother Alessandro, in which he described in detail the torture of Carlo Sala, an event that shocked public opinion in Milan and that later inspired him to write his Osservazioni sulla tortura (Capra 2002, 432–433; Lischetti 1997). However, I cite an earlier exchange of letters, in September 1770, between the two brothers. Alessandro gave his brother news of the executions in Rome of two murderers: a murderer of a woman – crime of passion – and a surgeon – murder of a thieving housemaid. L’esecuzione ha fatta grande impressione, perché è molto che non se ne fecero. Morirono tutti e due con somma fermezza: andarono al patibolo con aria sicura, guardando il popolo e alle finestre; e l’omicida della donna, giovine di ventidue anni, se incontrò per istrada suoi conoscenti, gli dava l’addio, e loro raccomandava l’anima sua, pregandoli di pregare per lui. Al patibolo poi, già sulla scala, pregò l’esecutore a lasciargli un momento; chiese ad alta voce silenzio al popolo; e, tutti tacendo, disse: “Io son figlio di buon padre e di buona madre; non amai né il giuoco né il vino, né ebbi altro vizio che le donne; e queste mi hanno qui condotto; onde, fratelli cari, vedendo la mia fine, imparate a vivere bene; ed io moro giustamente, e contento”. E dopo di che, si prestò alla esecuzione, lasciando lagrime agli occhi di tutti, ed un fremito universale.¹⁷ (Greppi and Giulini 1923–1942, III, 448)

 [“The execution made a great impression, because there have not been any for a long time. They both died with great dignity: they went to the gallows with a confident air, looking at the people and at the windows; and the murderer of the woman, a young man of twenty-two, if he met his acquaintances on the street, bade them farewell, and he recommended them his soul, begging them to pray for him. At the gallows then, already on the staircase, he begged the executor to give him a moment; he asked the people for silence in a loud voice; and, all keeping silent, he said: ‘I am the son of a good father and a good mother; I loved neither game nor wine, nor did I have any other vice than women; and these have brought me here; therefore, dear brothers, seeing my end,

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The first describes what seems like the typical rituality and dramaturgy of Italian executions. Alessandro briefly touches on all the elements of the usual model of religious conversion applied to death sentences: confession, penitent devotion, compliance – the just punishment imposed – , exemplarity and public emotion – he speaks of a shudder, certainly not of torment or horror. The typically confraternal comfort is implied, whose Italian prototype derives from the Roman brotherhood of the Compagnia di San Giovanni Decollato, alias the Florentines (Prosperi 1993, 190–211). But in the above passage the ritual form actually already seems somewhat compromised, with no real mediation of the comforters, as a third agent, along the path leading to the gallows, and with the executioner seeming free to meet the gaze of the bystanders, and even trading goodbyes with his relatives. Alessandro continues with the description of the surgeon’s execution: Poi fu eseguito il chirurgo, e avvenne del disordine. Il concorso era grandissimo, per esser questa una causa famosa, a motivo della somma arte, con cui si difese ne’ processi. Quando fu posto in atto di esser eseguito, il che fu colla mazzola (giacché devo descriverti questi orrori per raccontarti il tutto), il metodo de’ confortatori è che non si venga al colpo, prima che il confortatore sia a una certa distanza di qualche passo, il che fa, allontanandosi poco a poco, e, nello stesso tempo, rinforzando proporzionalmente la voce, acciocché il paziente non si accorga che lo abbandona. L’esecutore, prima del tempo, fece il suo officio: il confortatore, per l’orrore della vicinanza, sbalzò dietro; il palco gli mancò, cadde da esso, che mi dicono assai alto, e si ruppe il capo, e si ferì altrimenti. Si eccitò gran tumulto; nessuno sapendo che fosse, si pose in iscompiglio: l’esecutore credette che il furor del popolo fosse per lui, e fuggì dal palco; ognuno fuggì, e le persone si ammucchiavano l’uno sull’altro; i borsaroli fecero saccheggio; spade, fibbie, fazzoletti, cappelli, orologi si depredarono; alcuni furono feriti, ed un bambino fu soffocato. Il vicino quartiere di soldati si pose subito sull’armi, ma troppo tardi. Il paziente, per altro, era già eseguito. Fatto è che non so se sia, o mi sembri, ma questa esecuzione mi pare abbia fatta tanta impressione, che si sente minor rumore per le strade. Perdonami la materia poco amena, ma le circostanze mi parvero singolari.¹⁸ (Greppi and Giulini 1923–1942, III, 448–449)

you learn to live well; and I die rightly, and happy’. And after that, he got ready to be executed, leaving tears in the eyes of all, and a universal shudder”].  [“Then the surgeon was put on the scaffold and the disorder occurred. The crowd was huge, for the fact that this was a famous cause, for the supreme art with which he defended himself in the process. When the execution was started, which was with the mallet (since I have to describe these horrors to tell you everything), the method of the comforters is that there is no blow, before the comforter is at a certain distance of a few steps, which he does by gradually moving away, and at the same time proportionally reinforcing his voice, so that the condemned person does not notice that he is abandoning him. The executioner did his duty before the right time: the comforter, feeling horror at his proximity, jumped back; he missed the dais, fell from it, which is very high up, and broke his head, and was otherwise wounded. A great tumult was excited; nobody knowing what he was, got into confusion: the executioner believed that the fury of the people was against

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While Alessandro deems the first execution as normal in following the canons of public torture, he clearly considers the second execution to be extraordinary, since it involves a torture that is sensationally less the work of the comforter. When the rituality and dramaturgy of the torture break down – Alessandro notes the solemn expectation of the comforter’s voice – it has a devastating effect on the public, inciting horror, dismay and rioting. Pietro’s response, on 8 September 1770, is as follows: Felici voi che rare volte avete l’orrore di vedere i supplizi! Noi quasi ogni settimana ne vediamo, e quasi non se ne parla. Il ribrezzo è affatto cancellato nel popolo, a forza d’abitudine. È terribile il fatto che mi scrivi; e il carnefice avrà avuta una gran paura; a misura del caso, il male seguito della morte d’un solo bambino è il minimo.¹⁹ (Greppi and Giulini 1923– 1942, III, 450)

We note that the incident does not seem very remarkable to Pietro, since he observes that similar and even worse things take place more frequently in Milan. This, as mentioned earlier, was the period in which the company of San Giovanni Decollato – of which Verri himself had been a member – was in the thick of its crisis. An official 1764 report attests to the difficulty of finding new confreres and the failure of members to participate in its life, rites and emblems, and even to appear in public as members of the brotherhood. Not coincidentally I think, the same period, and especially starting in 1764, documents the debased methods of execution, which became increasingly violent, taking on the features of a grand guignol, with atrocious afflictions more and more frequent even along the way to the gallows. According to Italo Mereu, it was precisely this cruelty that underscored the educational purpose of public torture (Mereu 1988, 29). However, I also believe, in line with the above analysis, that a precisely opposite dynamic took place; that the harshening of punishments undermined the traditional educational function for the public. him, and fled from the scene; they all ran away and the people piled on top of each other; pickpockets plundered; swords, buckles, handkerchiefs, hats, watches were plundered; some were injured, and one child was suffocated. The nearby quarter of soldiers quickly prepared for arms, but too late. The condemned man, moreover, had already been executed. The fact is that I don’t know if it is, or if it seems to me, but this execution seems to have made such an impression that there is less noise in the streets. Forgive me for the unpleasant matter, but the circumstances seemed unusual to me”].  [“Happy are you who a few times have experienced the horror of seeing torture! We see them almost every week, and we hardly talk about them. The disgust is completely erased from the people, by force of habit. It is terrible what you write to me; and the executioner must have been very afraid; given the case, the death of a single child is the minimum”].

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Evidently, the progressive weakening of the brotherhood’s ritual, its reduction and, in extreme cases, its failure, more and more often left the task of mediating between the condemned individual and the spectators only to another public agent: the executioner. On those occasions indignation, if not horror, became the public’s prevailing sentiment. The result was the loss of the restrained drama of public torture typical of Italy, and with it also the public’s dramaturgy, or in Smith’s terms, the dramaturgy of the spectator who witnessed death sentences. For these reasons the problem of torture, beyond the issue of criminal justice, also became in those years especially a problem of public order, crowd management. Now they increasingly disturbed and horrified the crowd, making it ungovernable, becoming an instrument of bad governance. Almost all at once, after centuries, they seem to have become unmanageable and ineffective as a means of governing the population. And in those same years Beccaria speaks of spettacolo orrorifico e senza logos in chap. 28 of Dei delitti e delle pene. For the same reasons Pietro Verri considered Noverre’s ballets a spectacle of horror and without logos, because their dramaturgy was incapable of managing or moderating the attention of the audience, the public as fundamental subset of the population, the main concern of his studies of public economics: not the general public, but the Milanese public, an Italian public for centuries educated in the restraint of the ritual of public torture. This also explains why Verri’s concept of art, which he expressed, among other things, in his Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, became more and more centered on the aesthetics of theater. His discourse implies a totally new orientation, not only of the spatial organization of theater but of an overall, detailed regulation of theatrical representation, which begins with regulation of image – this too clearly derived from the idea of Diderot’s tableaux ²⁰ – affirming the idea of the naturalness of acting – of a stage action based on naturalness and on the harmonious asymmetries of the actor’s body – , with an insistence on seeing to all the conditions for its fruition, to

 It is certainly true that the Salon de 1767, especially because of his contact with the psychology and aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque, was the work Verri refers to, as well as obviously to Burke, who influenced Diderot himself in this sense (see Verri 2014 [1781], 119n). However I believe Diderot’s Essais sur la peinture pour faire suite au salon of 1765 and, in particular, his article Sur la composition (readable in Diderot 1996) are above all fundamental. Equally fundamental, in addition to his Fils Naturel and his Entretiens, is his De la poésie dramatique, especially the section De la pantomime (Diderot 1996, 1342–1343)

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make desirable the audience’s constant, silent attention and imagination (Locatelli 2010). It is an aesthetic – if not a philosophical anthropology – which first of all implies the public as a preliminary focus – in the sense we repeatedly refers to – in order to arrive at the definition of a true spectator’s dramaturgy. So it should not be surprising that precisely in the decades in which a secular model of public dramaturgy – that of the ritual of torture – was progressively disappearing, it became urgent for Italian reformers, starting from the acquisition of the Enlightenment principles of public economy, to invent – or better yet, to retrieve – a dramaturgy appropriate for the spectator inside theaters. A dramaturgy that was the correlative, at least as concerned disciplining the emotions and imagination of the spectator, of the one developed over the centuries by the Italian comforters for the ritual of public torture.

Bibliography Beccaria, Cesare. Dei delitti e delle pene (1764). Ed. Gianni Francioni. Milano: Mediobanca, 1984. Beccaria, Cesare. “Elementi di economia pubblica.” Scritti economici. Ed. Gianmarco Gaspari. Milano: Mediobanca, 2014. 97–390. Bernardi, Claudio, and Bino, Carla. “Ragionevoli culti. La fine delle follie carnevalesche e delle devozioni drammatiche a Milano nel Settecento.” La cultura della rappresentazione nella Milano del Settecento. Discontinuità e permanenze. Ed. Carpani et al. Roma: Bulzoni, 2010. 445–493. Benvenuti, Matteo. “Come facevasi giustizia nello Stato di Milano dall’anno 1471 al 1763”. Archivio Storico Lombardo IX (1882): 442–482. Biffi, Severino. Sulle antiche carceri di Milano e del Ducato Milanese e sui sodalizi che vi assistevano i condannati a morte. Milano: Bernardoni, 1884. Bognetti, Giovanni. “Governo dell’economia e teoria della politica economica.” L’illuminismo delle riforme civili: il contributo degli economisti lombardi. Eds. Luigi Porta e Roberto Scazzieri. Milano: Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, 2014. 137–170. Boltanski, Luc. La souffrance à distance. Paris: Métailié, 1993. [tr. it] Lo spettacolo del dolore. Morale umanitaria, media e politica. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2000. Capra, Carlo. Pietro Verri e il suo tempo. Bologna: Cisalpino, 1999. Capra, Carlo. I progressi della ragione. Vita di Pietro Verri. Bologna: il Mulino, 2002. Capra, Carlo. “L’Accademia dei Pugni e l’illuminismo lombardo.” Da Beccaria a Manzoni. La riflessione sulla giustizia a Milano: un laboratorio europeo. Ed. Giorgio Panizza. Milano- Cinisello Balsamo: Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense-Silvana, 2014. 46–47. Ceruti, Antonio. “La chiesa di S. Giovanni alle Case Rotte in Milano”. Archivio Storico Lombardo I. n°. 1 (1874): 148–185. Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres, T. IV: Esthétique-Théâtre. Édition établie par L. Versini. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996. Foucault, Michel. Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. [tr. it.] Sicurezza, territorio, popolazione. Corso al Collège de France (1977– 1978). Milano: Feltrinelli, 2010.

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Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard 1975. Genovesi, Antonio. Delle lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile. Con elementi del commercio. Ed. Maria Luisa Perna. Napoli: Istituto Italiano per gli studi filosofici, 2005. Giordanetti, Piero. Sul piacere e sul dolore. Immanuel Kant discute Pietro Verri. Milano: Unicopoli, 1998. Greppi, Emanuele, and Giulini, Alessandro. Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri. Milano: Cogliati, 1923–1942. Groenewegen, Peter. “The Significance of Verri’s Meditazioni in the History of Economic Thought: the Wider European Influences.” Pietro Verri e il suo tempo. Ed. Carlo Capra. Bologna: Cisalpino, 1999. 693–708. Hotta, Seizo. “European Sources of Pietro Verri’s Economic Thought.” Pietro Verri e il suo tempo. Ed. Capra. Bologna: Cisalpino, 1999. 709–726. Lischetti, Angela. Vita e morte di Carlo Sala (1738–1775), ladro sacrilego e miscredente, in Milano nella storia dell’età moderna. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1997. 89–138. Locatelli, Stefano. Tra libro e scena. Pratiche di lettura del teatro nel Settecento milanese, in La cultura della rappresentazione nella Milano del Settecento: discontinuità e permanenze. Edd. Annamaria Cascetta, Roberta Carpani, Danilo Zardin. Roma: Bulzoni, 2010. 265–295. Mereu, Italo. La pena di morte a Milano nel secolo di Beccaria. Milano: Neri Pozza, 1988. Prosperi, Adriano. Delitto e perdono. La pena di morte nell’orizzonte mentale dell’Europa Cristiana. XIV– XVIII secolo. Torino: Einaudi, 2013. Quadrio Curzio, Alberto, and Scazzieri, Roberto. “Dall’economia politica al governo dell’economia: riflessioni sul contributo di Cesare Beccaria e Pietro Verri sulla teoria e pratica della moneta.” Saggi di politica economica in onore di Federico Caffè. Ed. Acocella et al. Milano: Franco Angeli, 1992, II. 141–181. Raphael, David Daiches. The Impartial Spectator. Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Taviani, Ferdinando. La Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca. La fascinazione del teatro. Roma: Bulzoni, 1969. Verri, Pietro. Scritti di economia, finanza e amministrazione. Ed. Bognetti et al. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007, II. Verri, Pietro. “Discorso sulla felicità” [1778]. I “Discorsi” e altri scritti degli anni Settanta. Ed. Panizza. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014. Verri, Pietro. “Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolorie” [1781]. I “Discorsi” e altri scritti degli anni Settanta. Ed. Panizza. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014. Verri, Pietro. “Lettre à Monsieur Noverre” [1776]. I “Discorsi” e altri scritti degli anni Settanta. Ed. Giorgio Panizza. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014.

Index of names Abbé de l’Épée [Charles-Michel de l’Épée] 131 Addison, Joseph 180 Aristotle 49–51, 154 Alembert, Jean-Baptiste Le rond (d’) 103, 106 Argental, Charles-Augustin Ferriol (d’) 33, 110 f. Ayen, Duke of [Louis de Noailles] (d’) 34 Bartoli, Francesco 167 f. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 148 f. Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron 15, 113 Beccaria, Cesare 171–176, 179, 185 Behn, Aphra 161 Betterton, Thomas 162 Bianchi, Giovanni Paolo Simone 70, 100 Boccaccio, Giovanni 70 f. Boileau, Nicolas 36 Boissy d’Anglas, François-Antoine 128 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 115 Braunschweig, Philippine Charlotte von 69 Brecht, Bertolt 45 Brizard, Jean-Baptiste 111 Büchner, Georg 45 f. Burney Frances 161 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 121 Calvin [ Jehan Cauvin] 25 [nt. 8], 104 Caminer, Elisabetta 169 Cange [Charles du Fresne] 131 Cantillon, Richard 172 Carli, Gian Rinaldo 171 Cecchini, Pier Maria 166 Chapelain, Jean 115 f. Chabanon, Guy (de) 108 Cubières, Michel (de) 32, 35 f. Chénier, Marie-Joseph 128, 130 Cherubini, Lorenzo 134 Chiari, Pietro 166, 168 f. Clairon, Hyppolite 109 Clodius, Christian August 61 Cramer, Gabriel 104, 106 f., 110 Cumberland, Richard 4, 85 f., 88–95 Custodi, Pietro 172

Damilaville, Etienne Noel 109–111 Davenant, William 159 De Filippo, Eduardo 157 Defoe, Daniel 90, 159 Descartes, René 131 Desmarets, Léopold 102 Devrient, Eduard 55 Diderot, Denis 31, 34 f., 38–41, 47, 64, 87 f., 103, 110, 120, 123, 185 Döbbelin, Karl Theophil 57 Dorat, Claude Joseph 36 Döring, Theodore 93 Dufresny [or Du Fresny], Charles [Charles Rivière] 101 [nt. 10] Edgeworth, Maria 86 f., 161 Ekhof, Conrad 15, 56, 77 Elizabeth I 158 Etheredge, Sir George 160 Fenouillot de Falbaire, Charles-Georges Fielding, Henry 85, 161 Focault, Michel 120 Fuentes, Giorgio 143, 145 f.

35

Garrick, Davis 13, 86, 88–90, 162 Genovesi, Antonio 171–173 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von 12 Gentils, Philippe (de) 105 Gibbon, Edward 105 Girard, René 50, 116 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 4, 15–19, 22, 24, 27 f., 45 f., 62 f., 89, 137–154, 163, 167 Goldoni, Carlo 121, 166, 168 f. Goldsmith, Oliver 162 Göschen, Georg Joachim 150 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 71, 74 Gozzi, Carlo 165–168 Graffigny, Françoise (de) 101–103 Grandval, Nicolas Racot (de) 103 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 35, 38 Haywood, Eliza

161

190

Index of names

Head, Richard 159 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 131, 172 Henry IV 104 Herbigny, Henry Lambertb (de) 109 f. Hermences, Constant (de) 104 Herrnhuter 79 Hertaux [or Heurtaux], Louis [AKA: Dancourt] 103 Herz, Marcus 12 Hesnault [?] 103 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 66 Iffland, August Wilhelm 11 f., 14–16, 18, 56 Inchbald, Elizabeth 161 Kafka, Franz 75 Kant, Immanuel 21, 54, 141, 145, 148 f., 176 Killegrew, Thomas 159 Kirkman, Francis 159 Klischnig, Karl Friedrich 57, 63 König, Eva 74 f., 80 La La La La La

Chaussée, Pierre-Claude Nivelle (de) 33 Montagne, Pierre (de) 3 f., 113 f., 123 Tour, Charles Jean-Baptiste (de) 103 Roche, Johann 76 Vallière; Louise Françoise La Baume Le Blanc (Mlle de), 103 Ligne, Charles Joseph (de) 108 Loutherbourg, Philip James (de) 88 Lavater, Johann Caspar 60 Le Cornier de Cideville, Pierre-Robert 100 Le Sueur, Jean-François 134 Leblanc, Abbot 104 Lekain, Henri-Louis 102–104, 107, 118 Lenz, M. R. Jakob 3, 45–52 Lepeletier, Louis-Michel 36 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 4, 12, 47, 51, 53–57, 59, 61, 69–81, 167 Lewezov, Jakob Andreas Conrad 140 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 13 Livy, Titus [Titus Livius] 55, 69, 71, 77 Lloyd, Henry 172 Louis XIV 99, 104, 134 Machiavelli, Niccolò 76, 164 Macklin, Charles 86 f., 162

Marat, Jean-Paul 36, 131 Marcus Claudius 77 Maréchal, Sylvain 113, 131 Marie Antoinette [Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna] 99 Marlowe, Christopher 87 Marmontel, Jean-François 103, 107, 124 Martinelli, Tristano 166 Matthaei, Johann Friedrich 17 Mauchart, Immanuel David 65 Maudron [?] 103 Maurer, Friedrich 57 Mendelssohn, Moses 56, 78, 92 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 32, 38, 70 Mesmer, Franz Anton 62 Mieding, Johann Martin 141 Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti 172 f. Mme d’Aubonne 105 Mme de Fontaine-Martel 100 Mme de Pompadour [ Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson] 99, 113 Mme Denis [Marie Louise Mignot] 102 Mme d’Hermenches 104, 105 [nt. 16], 110 [nt. 28] Mme du Châtelet [Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil] 101 [nt. 8], 102 [nt. 12] Mme du Deffand [Marie-Anne de Vichy Chamrond] 111 [nt. 31] Molière [ Jean-Baptiste Pouquelin] 39 [nt. 16], 40, 42 [nt. 24], 102, 108 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 121, 179 Moore, Edward 40 Moritz, Karl Philipp 1, 3, 9–18, 21–29, 53, 56– 66, 138, 148 f., 167 Mudford, William 85, 90 f. Murphy, Arthur 89 Mylius, Christlob 167 Neufchâteau, Nicolas-Louis François (de) Nicolai, Friedrich 70 f. 2, 71 Nicolai, Karl 71 Noverre, Jean-Georges 177 f., 185 Panpan [François-Antoine Devaux] 101 Pelli Bencivenni, Giuseppe 169 Piazza, Antonio 64, 66, 153, 168 f.

128

Index of names

Piron, Alexis 36, 113 f., 117, 122 Plancher de Valcour, Philippe, A. L. Pierre Plato [Platone] 32, 110, [nt. 30] Porée, Charles 100 Préville [Pierre-Louis Dubus] 114 Quesnay, François

127

172

Ramler, Karl Wilhelm 75 Raynal [?] 103 Regnard, Jeran François 101 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 78 Reinhardt, Max 66 Reiser, Anton 1, 3, 9–11, 14 f., 17, 21–29, 56 f., 60–63, 65 f., 138, 167 Richardson, Samuel 40, 47, 161 Richelieu [Armand-Jean du Plessis] 103 Rillet, M[?] 110 Romme, Charles Gilbert 128 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste 2 f., 24, 31, 47, 106 f. Sacco, Antonio 167 Sala, Carlo 182 Salieri, Antonio 143, 146 Sauvé de la Noue, Jean-Baptiste 100 Scala, Flaminio 166 Schiller, Friedrich 1, 11, 14, 17, 57, 137, 139, 142, 144, 146, 150 Schlegel, Friedrich 61, 78, 137 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig 56 Schröter, Corona 18, 141 Sedaine, Michel-Jean 35 Shakespeare, William 2, 51, 57, 75, 85, 87, 94, 121, 157–159 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 85, 88, 162 Signorelli, Luca 119

191

Smith, Adam 180 f., 185 Sonnenfels, Joseph von 76 Spinoza, Baruch 77–80, 141, 145 St’Augustine 63 Steele, Richard 161, 180 Stephanie der Ältere 75 Sterne, Laurence 161 Sulzer, Georg Johann 14, 80, 143 Talma, François-Joseph 134 f. Thieriot, Nicolas-Claude 107 [nt. 19] Thomasius, Christian 53 Tossa, Lebrun 131 Townley, James 88 Tyler, Royall 160 Verri, Alessandro 178 Verri, Pietro 171–180 f., 182, 184–185 [171 nt. 1, 172 nt. 3, 176 nt. 10, 180 nt. 16, 185 nt. 20] Villars, Honoré-Armand (de) 107 [nt. 21] Villiers, George (Duke of Buckingham) 160 Voisenon, [?] 103 Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] 3–4, 33–34 [nt. 7], 99–112 f Walpole, Horace 161 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 2 Williams, Stanley Thomas 85, 88–93 Wolfenbüttel, Duke of [Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand] 78 Wolff, Christian 56, 65 Zelter, Carl Friedrich Zeuxis 147

145