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History of European Drama and Theatre

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History of European Drama and Theatre History of European Drama and Theatre This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered and individual concepts of identity. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s topics include: • Ancient Greek theatre • Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre; Corneille, Racine and Molière • The Italian commedia dell’arte and its transformations into eighteenth- century drama • The German Enlightenment – Lessing, Schiller, Goethe and Lenz • Romanticism – Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner and Nestroy • The turn of the century – Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Stanislavsky • The twentieth century – Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O’Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett and Müller Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information. Erika Fischer-Lichte is professor of theatre research at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and president of the International Federation of Theatre Research. Her numerous publications include The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (1997) and Semiotics of Theatre (1992). History of European Drama and Theatre ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE Translated by Jo Riley London and New York First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane,London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street,New York,NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. First published in German in 1990 as Geschichte des Dramas (vols 1 & 2) by A.Francke Verlag,Tübingen and Basel © 1990 Erika Fischer-Lichte Translation © 2002 Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fischer-Lichte, Erika. [Geschichte des Dramas. English] History of European Drama and Theatre/Erika Fischer-Lichte. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. European drama–History and criticism. 2.Theater–Europe–History. I.Title. PN1731 .F513 2001 809.2'0094–dc212001034969 ISBN 0–415–18059–7 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–18060–0 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-45088-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-75912-5 (Glassbook Format) Contents Acknowledgements ix INTRODUCTION 1 Theatre and identity: theatre as a liminal space 1 1 RITUAL THEATRE 8 The tragic hero 8 Theatre and the polis 8 From curse of the clans to political identity 11 Conditio humana 18 Relapse into barbarism 25 The magic body 33 Between religious and secular culture: the religious play 33 The vital body 35 The frail and tortured body 40 The end of the plays: the suppression of popular culture 46 2 THEATRUM VITAE HUMANAE 50 Theatre as laboratory – man as experiment 50 ‘All the world’s a stage’ 50 Creator and destroyer of the self 55 Transformation and discovering identity – from the rites of May to ‘rite of passage’ 63 The loss of identity in chaos: the end of the world 70 The seducer, the martyr and the fool – theatrical archetypes in the Siglo de Oro 80 ‘The great theatre of the world’ 80 Honour disgraced and the forfeit of mercy 86 The transitory social role and the eternal self 91 Popular theatre between religious and court theatre 96 Mask and mirror 97 The court as stage – the self-fashioning of court society 97 v CONTENTS L’honnête homme or the end of social intercourse through noble ‘amour propre’ 104 The gaze of the other and the gaze of the king 114 The stage world as mirror image of the court 125 From the theatrical to social role-play 129 Discovering the identity in transformation: commedia dell’arte 129 Theatre as a model of social reality 136 3 THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES AND THE THEATRE OF ILLUSION 146 The middle-class family 146 From strolling players to moral institution: theatre as one constituent of public life 146 The loving father and his virtuous daughter 155 The court as counterworld: the seducer and the mistress 161 The body as ‘natural sign’ of the soul – the reception of the bürgerliche Trauerspiel and the development of a new art of acting 165 The mutilated individual 170 ‘Nature! Nature! Nothing is so like Nature as Shakespeare’s figures’ 170 From the mutilation of the hand to the mutilation of freedom 171 The self-castration of creative nature 176 Symbol of the species 182 From fragment to whole 182 The ideal society of autonomous individuals 184 ‘The transition from man into God’ 190 Middle-class Bildungstheater 198 4 DRAMATISING THE IDENTITY CRISIS 202 The enigmatic personality 202 Personality as a social category in the nineteenth century 202 The discovery of the unconscious 205 Decaying values 211 The outsider: the noble robber and the artist 218 The demontage of ‘personality’ in the Vienna Volkstheater 225 Identity and history 230 The power of history to define identity 230 The dissolution of the self in history 233 The ‘fatalism of history’ and the concrete utopia of physical nature 238 The fall of the bourgeois myths 244 The stage as a public forum of the bourgeoisie 244 The family 247 The lie of family life 247 vi CONTENTS The battle of the sexes 252 The fatherless family 257 The great personality – the artist 264 The charismatic artist and the ‘femme fatale’ 264 The search for the self 271 Just ordinary people ‘like everyone else …’ 277 The completion and end of the bourgeois theatre of illusion 281 5 THEATRE OF THE ‘NEW’ MAN 284 The re-theatricalisation of theatre as negation of the individual 284 Theatre as art – the actor as Über-Marionette 284 Theatre as production – the actor as engineer 288 Theatre as ritual – the actor as hieroglyph 294 Beyond the individual 298 The dead as the curse of the living – repeating the Ur-performance 298 The multiplicity of roles in the theatre of life or the multiple personality 306 Dialectic of the Enlightenment: the ‘new man’ in the theatre of the future 314 Dismemberment and rebirth 324 End plays 324 The rebirth of human nature: the redeemed and redeeming body 332 ‘Men of new flesh’ 341 Notes 352 Bibliography 361 Index of dramatic works 372 General index 376 vii Acknowledgements Every effort has been made to obtain permissions to reprint all the extracts included in this volume. Persons entitled to fees for any extracts reprinted here are invited to apply in writing to the publishers. Permission given by the copyright holders for the following extracts is gratefully acknowledged: Aeschylus: from Agamemnon, trans. R. Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, eds D. Grene and R. Lattimore, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960. By permission of University of Chicago Press. © 1947 Richmond Lattimore. Aeschylus: from The Eumenides, trans. R. Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. III, eds D. Grene and R. Lattimore, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960. By permission of University of Chicago Press. ©1953 University of Chicago. Aeschylus: from The Libation Bearers, trans. R. Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. II, eds D. Grene and R. Lattimore, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960. By permission of University of Chicago Press. © 1953 University of Chicago. Georg Büchner: from Danton’s Death, in Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, trans. Victor Price, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. By permission of Oxford University Press. Anton Chekhov: from Three Sisters, trans. Elisaveta Fen (1951), by permis- sion of Penguin UK. © 1951 Elisaveta Fen. From The Seagull, in Anton Chekhov Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen, London: Penguin, 1954. By permission of Penguin UK. © 1954 Elisaveta Fen. Euripides: from The Bacchae, trans. W. Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. III, eds D. Grene and R. Lattimore, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1960. By permission of University of Chicago Press. © 1959 University of Chicago Press. Carlo Goldoni: from The Servant of Two Masters, trans. J.M. Dent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928. By permission of Cambridge University Press. Jerzy Grotowski: from Towards a Poor Theatre, London: Methuen, 1975. By permission of Methuen Publishing Ltd. ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Heinrich von Kleist: from Prince of Homburg, trans. Martin Greenberg, in Heinrich von Kleist, Five Plays, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. By permission of Yale University Press. J.M.R. Lenz: from The Tutor, in Lenz. Three Plays, trans. Anthony Meech, London: Oberon Books, 1993. By permission of Oberon Books. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: from Emilia Galotti, in Five German Tragedies, trans. and with an introduction by F. J. Lamport, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. By permission of Penguin, UK.Translation © 1969 F.J. Lamport. Heiner Müller: from Hamlet-Machine, in Theatremachine, trans. Marc von Henning, Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1995. By permission of Faber and Faber, UK. Luigi Pirandello: from Six Characters in Search of an Author, Collected Plays, vol. 2, trans. Robert Rietty, by permission of the Calder Educational Trust. Jean Racine: from Phaedra, in Jean Racine: Four Greek Plays, trans. R.C. Knight, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. By permission of Cambridge University Press. Friedrich Schiller: from Intrigue and Love, in Friedrich Schiller, Plays, ed. Walter Hinderer, trans. Charles E. Passage, New York: the German Library Continuum, 1984. Reprinted by permission of the Continuum International Publishing Group. © 1981 the Continuum Publishing Company. Friedrich Schiller: from Mary Stuart, trans. F.J.
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