Making an Entrance: Appearing on the Stage from Racine to Nietzsche 9783110754384, 9783110754490, 9783110754551

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Juliane Vogel Making an Entrance

Paradigms

Literature and the Human Sciences

Edited by Rüdiger Campe and Karen S. Feldman Editorial Board Paul Fleming ‧ Eva Geulen ‧ Rüdiger Görner ‧ Barbara Hahn Daniel Heller-Roazen ‧ Helmut Müller-Sievers William Rasch ‧ Joseph Vogl ‧ Elisabeth Weber

Volume 14

Juliane Vogel

Making an Entrance Appearing on the Stage from Racine to Nietzsche Translated by Michael Thomas Taylor With Benjamin R. Trivers

ISBN 978-3-11-075438-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075449-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075455-1 ISSN 2195-2205 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938177 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. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Commodore August Keppel, 1752, oil on canvas, 239 x 147 cm, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

For my mother Ilse Vogel

Acknowledgements I have many people to thank who supported me during my study of entrances; my debt of gratitude is large. Paying it in full would require such a wide range of thanks that I can only make a start here. First, I would like to thank the University of Konstanz and especially the Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Integration,” which generously supported the project “Cultural Poetologies of Entrances” that I directed together with Christopher Wild. The university community was consistently engaged in their support for this project. I am especially grateful for the funding to establish a research group where it was possible to discuss entrances as an approach to studying drama and theater. The intellectually open form of our work allowed me to develop a new perspective on dramatic literature. I would also like to thank the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz for hosting my study of entrances with a year-long fellowship. I am indebted to my colleagues Albrecht Koschorke, Matthias Schöning, Ulrike Sprenger, and Bernd Stiegler for their friendship, inspiration, and support during a period of work that ended up a bit longer than expected. I would like to thank Gerhart von Graevenitz, with whom I immensely enjoyed discussing entrances and whom I miss very much. I owe thanks to all the friends and colleagues with whom I read and discussed texts together, and for their wonderful suggestions that helped establish the main arguments of this book: Stefanie Dieckmann, Eva Esslinger, Christoph Gardian, Claude Haas, Bernice Kaminski, Bettine Menke, Christopher Wild, and Claus Zittel. I thank Inka Mülder-Bach for her feedback, which helped me to conceptually penetrate a topic that in the end seemed impenetrable. I would especially like to express my gratitude to Saskia Haag, whose smart editing was in no small part responsible for the fact that a German book did indeed take shape. I also owe thanks to Anna Maria Post for her help with researching images. For this German translation, I am grateful to Michael Thomas Taylor for his wonderful and sensitive translation of a very German text, and to Lara Dix and Carolin Eppinger for their help with bibliographic research. Most of all, I would like to thank my terrific secretary Ingeborg Moosmann for her tireless support, composure, and drive, along with my excellent assistants and PhD students for their dedication, the precision of their thinking, and their many suggestions: Sylvia Gschwend, Anita Martin, Annette Kappeler, Viktor Konitzer, Hanna Vielberg, and Lucia Wunsch. I thank my family for their forbearance and friendly teasing. And finally, I thank Mitchell Ash for his confidence, unflagging interest, incorruptible criticism, and patience. Konstanz, 2017 and 2022

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-202

Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures

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Chapter 1 Introduction 1 “Look at him walk”: Entrances and Their Evidence 1 Tragic Entrances: The Hubris of Taking a Step 12 Chapter 2 Tragedy in the Court Space of Appearance 29 Preliminary Remark. Entrée Specifications of the Court Protocol for Making an Entrance 29 Linear Perspective as the Unity of Interaction 41 The Darkening of the Court Space of Appearance: Racine’s Theater of profondeur chiaroscuro 54 Tragic Perspectives: The Stage of the Galli Bibiena 68 Out of Step: Structures for Making an Entrance in the “liaison des scènes” of Schiller’s Don Carlos 85 Chapter 3 Wavering Shapes: Goethe’s Theater of Entrances 103 Preliminary Remark. The Suspension of Tragedy: Entrance Protocols of Life 103 “Nebulistic Sketches”: Figure and Ground in Goethe’s Weimar Dramas 111 Surrounded: The Embedding of Entrances 126 Staffage: Entrance Protocols of Landscape Painting 142 “HELEN (stepping forth)”: Homecoming from the Deepest Ground 165 The Management of “Arrivance”: Goethe’s “Masquerade” 182 Chapter 4 Triumph and Rending Movement 203 Preliminary Remark. Amid the Energies of War 203 Disenchanted Triumph: Kleist’s Guiskard Fragment and the Plague Victims of Jaffa 208

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The Pomp of Terror: Antitriumphalism in Kleist’s Penthesilea 227 Dionysian Stirrings: From Rousseau’s Pygmalion to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy 243 Bibliography Index

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List of Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17 Figure 18 Figure 19 Figure 20 Figure 21 Figure 22 Figure 23 Figure 24 Figure 25 Figure 26 Figure 27 Figure 28

Henri Gissey, Louis XIV as the rising sun in Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit (1653) 34 Guido Ubaldo del Monte, Construction of a perspectival stage, beginning with point of sight A (1600) 45 Giacomo Torelli, stage design for Andromède, Act I (1650) 47 Giacomo Torelli, stage design for Andromède, Act II (1650) 48 Charles Le Brun, Phèdre et Hippolyte, frontispiece depicting the death of Hippolytus in Act V (1678) 68 Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, Scena della festa teatrale, n.d. 71 Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, Prospettiva con scena di convito (1721) 74 Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, design for the fifth scene in Britannico (1751) 75 Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, design for the first scene in Semiramide (1754) 79 Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, detail studies (1754) 80 Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, atrium with grand staircase, n.d. 82 Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, colonnade, n.d. 83 Lorenzo Quaglio, stage design for the premiere of Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Munich (1781) 84 Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, stage design with ballet, n.d. 85 Thomas Gainsborough, The Mall in St. James’s Park (1783) 138 Georg Melchior Kraus, Goethe as Orestes and Corona Schröter as Iphigenia (1779) 141 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus (1649) 156 Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea (1512) 161 Raphael, The Sistine Madonna (1512/13) 163 Karl von Eckartshausen, Aufschlüsse zur Magie, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, 1626213-C.Neu 177 Daniel Rabel (attrib.), Entrée du Grand Can et ses Suivants in Ballet royal du grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626) 187 Anon, Nine Men Dancing (1660) 187 Andrea Andreani after Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar (1484–94/1599) 201 Antoine-Jean Gros, General Bonaparte with Soldiers Stricken by the Plague at Jaffa (1804) 215 The Brandenburg Gate without its quadriga (1813/1814) 237 The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, April 10, 1814 239 Ferdinand Hartmann, Phoebus above Dresden, design for a theater curtain (1808) 240 Joseph Anselm Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo: Eine Reihe archäologisch-ästhetischer Betrachtungen (Nuremberg: Friedrich Campe, 1833), frontispiece 248

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-204

Translator’s Introduction An Auftritt—the central term of this book—is an entrance. It is also a performance and an appearance in public, a stepping up, out, and onto. The upward “stepping” of this “Tritt” (from “treten,” to step) embodies a vertical physicality that is the main focus of Making an Entrance. Or to quote the nineteenth-century definition from the dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, which Juliane Vogel takes as the title for an earlier essay that can be read as a proleptic sketch of the concepts in this book, an Auftritt is a “sinnliches aufsteigen”—a physical or even sensual rising up, climbing, or mounting, and specifically, “a stepping up [Auftritt] to the pulpit, the stage, or a raised elevation.”1 The verb aufsteigen has its own entry in the Grimms’ dictionary, where it is defined as “ascendere, elevating oneself,” with three intransitive senses. First, it signifies a “climbing up by foot”—though the textual example provided, of Jacob’s ladder, reaches far beyond the steps of human beings: “and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.”2 Second, the word can be applied to physical objects “that are seen to be ascending”: the sun rising “splendidly” into the sky, an air balloon, a mountain rising “before us,” or “more gently,” a “hill covered in the shadows of bushes and trees.” And third, it denotes the upward movement of inner, abstract states: “my heart rose within me”; or anger, thoughts, spirit. As defined here, an Auftritt is thus a movement that can bridge heaven and earth, that begins in one’s feet but semiotically cuts across a subject’s inner and outer worlds. It is a splendid rising up that can be observed in both nature and human ingenuity or artifice, in things that naturally ascend and things that are made to do so. It not only claims a visible position in a high place but also posits a concrete position of spectatorship—and of this spectatorship as an “us,” a shared experience of seeing. Only after these senses of the word, concerned with physical bodies, does the Grimms’ dictionary then point to a specific development in eighteenth-century German theater, in which “Auftritt” came to mean “scene” in the sense of the separate parts of a play, or even an event or happening outside the theater in the sense of a “single, variable picture or adventure.” The relationship captured in this shift

1 See Juliane Vogel, “Sinnliches Aufsteigen: Zur Vertikalität des Auftritts auf dem Theater,” in Auftritte in Raum und Zeit, ed. Annemarie Matzke and Jens Roselt, 105–119 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015); and “Auftritt,” in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854), column 765, www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=A07240, accessed November 10, 2021. 2 “Aufsteigen,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, https://www. woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=A07118. The biblical passage quoted by the Grimms’ dictionary, namely Genesis 28:12, is cited here from the King James Version. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-205

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constitutes the central question of Juliane Vogel’s book: the ways in which an entrance, as a rising or stepping up and out onto the stage, functions as the crucial act for establishing a space of theatrical representation. Making an entrance in this sense means establishing presence and visibility before an audience of spectators, crossing a threshold, and emerging from what this book calls the Grund. The Grund in this sense is concretely the background of the stage, often furnished with painted back cloths, or the ground in the visual sense of a field from which a figure can detach and become visible as an individual in coming forward into a setting or scene. It is, Juliane Vogel writes in chapter one, a “medium of figuration.” In stepping forth from such a ground, the entrances examined in this book strive to constitute a “successful theatrical articulation” that would endow a character with “recognizability, sovereignty, and the stability of a form.”3 They function as the foundation for a persona’s dignity and control over a space, performed through a purposeful placing of their step. In the triumphal splendid entrances of the sovereign that developed in the court theater of seventeenth-century France, where Making an Entrance begins, such an entrance figures as the rising of a “guiding star” that radiates light.4 A celestial body of this kind makes the scene visible in the first place and gives it a point of orientation. Understood in this way, a successful Auftritt articulates the beginning of theatricality itself, as an appearance made in a space it claims and opens up, before spectators it intentionally addresses and thus presupposes. That is to say: Making an Entrance argues that theatricality as a form of representation is predicated on an act of entering—and thus positing—the theatrical space and its spectators. Entrances pose questions about what makes this appearance visible, what holds a site together as scene, how different actions hold together as a plot, and what constitutes the theater as shared semiotic space of performance and spectatorship. And writing a history of entrances means studying the history of forms in which they are made. Shifted into the sphere of dramatic discourse, the topic of this book is thus the beginnings, coherence, and history of drama as a genre and form of representation. One of the main claims of the book, however, is that an Auftritt never entirely escapes the Grund out of which it originates, and that this Grund, too, remains as a structuring force within the theater. The perspective scenery developed during the Renaissance, for instance, not only establishes a space that appears to be structured in three dimensions: as a Grund, it also creates an illusion of depth toward the back that can open into an abyss. Here, the horizontal becomes vertical and depth becomes a chasm or the deeps of the sea.

3 Vogel, “Sinnliches Aufsteigen,” 107. 4 Vogel, “Sinnliches Aufsteigen,” 109.

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The Grund of the dramas examined in this book can also be a diffuse field such as haze, smoke, waves, or foliage. Or it can be a source of violent, rending force—as the Kriegsgrund or “ground of war” that destroys the very figures it surrounds. In its most compact (though not always solid) sense, found in some of the stage directions and settings of these dramas, the Grund can mean a chasm, cliff, or ravine. When used less literally, however, it can mean “at root” or “essentially,” or it can denote a metaphysical ground or grounds as reasons. Making an Entrance also asks what kind of a foundation this Grund concretely provides for the theater as space of performance. And in dramatic theater, the ground always encompasses the text with which characters inexorably remain entangled. It is telling that in a final sense of Auftritt the Grimms’ dictionary points to a sixteenth-century meaning that predates the term’s specifically German application to the theater and is wholly independent from this context: namely, as “a fraud, deceit.” At the root of this word, then, even before it generates a theatrical scene, we find that the movement it denotes and the claims it makes to presence are marked by the threat that comes with all forms of representation: that a sign is not what it appears to be, perhaps even intentionally so; that it might be motivated by secret powers and purposes; that it holds dangers unseen and untold. When the “magic” or “illusion” of a splendid entrance is aimed against nature, as Juliane Vogel writes, it also risks a hubris that can mean its own downfall.5 It is this reversal in the movement of drama and its entrances that the book traces in the history of tragedy from Racine to Nietzsche. At stake is the integrity of a form that undoes its own foundations in the act of positing itself. This single word, too, exemplifies the challenge of translating Juliane Vogel’s text and its way of thinking—the shape of its arguments and the language it employs. This is language that often operates, as one sees in Auf-tritt, through roots and suffixes that cannot always be rendered in English, or that are not always immediately apparent as such because their parts have no independent meaning. Or, as with the word Grund, the book’s vocabulary unfolds across a range of meanings that cannot be captured within a single term or even family of terms in English. Tracing shifts and tensions across these terminological relationships, Making an Entrance fashions a conceptual framework constituting a theory of drama, performance, subjectivity, and political representation. This can be followed, for instance, in the book’s pithy discussion of Don Carlos, the heir to the Spanish throne, as a crisis of entering caught between court forms of ceremonial and familiar forms of intimacy shared by father and son. Here the book captures the play of these tensions in its own play with Auftritt, Vortritt,

5 Vogel, “Sinnliches Aufsteigen,” 111.

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and Rücktritt—of a stepping up and out as an entrance; a stepping forward as a right or privilege to take precedence over others; and a stepping back as a resignation.6 These analyses develop a conceptual precision that never veers into jargon, but remains concretely attuned to the language in which these dramas themselves articulate the dazzling, weakened, wavering, or diffuse entrances made by the figures who appear on stage. To put it another way: the language of the book amplifies and makes explicit valences implicit within the language of the works the book examines and the critical discourse about theater and art that these works spurred. It consequently reflects a constant tension between moving, seeing, and speaking. Operating within a single semiotic space encompassing the physical movements of the figures on stage, the visibility of their actions, and the performative power of their words, the book aims to develop theoretical insight into how all three interact. Thinking this way, writing this way, about dramatic texts also means taking seriously the performativity at the root of what the comparatist and literary critic Peter Szondi called “absolute drama,” as a discourse that generates a (dialogic) space of representation within dramatic speech.7 Making an Entrance aims its critical attention precisely at the tensions between drama as a literary genre, its performance on stage, and the visual setting in which it takes place. In addition to Auftritt and Grund, other key terms include Evidenz, Protokoll, and Plastik or plastisch. Rather than denoting the foundations or conditions of figuration, they derive from rhetorical, aesthetic, and political vocabularies used to articulate a figure’s significance. It is worth noting that they come from Latin and Greek, and that their cognates in English diverge semantically from their usage in German. Evidenz is not evidence, a Protokoll is not exactly a protocol, and it is only in an obsolete sense that “plastic” in English is related to the art of sculpture. Evidenz in German stems from the rhetorical tradition of evidentia, a physical and convincing representation in language that makes something appear to be present before the eyes.8 But the word has come to mean both the 6 See the section of “Impotent Impulses” in chapter 2, “Tragedy in the Court Space of Appearance.” 7 Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hayes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7–10. 8 For a broad overview of the term’s origins and the issues its poses in the study of culture, see Auf die Wirklichkeit zeigen: Zum Problem der Evidenz in den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Helmut Lethen, Ludwig Jäger, and Albrecht Koschorke (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015). For an earlier examination of “evidence” in the English sense of the term as a proof, sign, or indication, see Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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quality of being evident, in the meanings of “immediate and completely comprehensible [Einsichtigkeit] clear, and certain” and as an “incontrovertible fact or factual givenness.”9 The German word Einsichtigkeit is nevertheless more visual than my translation here of “comprehensible”—more about “seeing into” something or having insight. The English “evidence” reflects this visual quality but is narrower than the German Evidenz in denoting an “outward sign” or “token” in the sense of “furnishing proof” or “bearing witness.”10 Moreover, the meaning of the English word “evidence” as the “state of being evident” is now archaic, while its legal sense is conversely absent from the German. And to my ears at least, a “protocol” is more official than its German cousin: to call the minutes of a meaning or a set of instructions for a situation a “protocol” in English is to elevate this discourse to the formalized language of diplomacy or administration, often comically so, whereas the German usage is free of these qualities. In some cases, the “entrance protocols” described in this book are certainly those of court ceremony. But they are also just textual directions or instructions for steps to be taken, and expectations to be fulfilled for an entrance to be received and apprehended by spectators—rules, routines, or scripts that “formalize the moment of joining the scene and [that] generate presence under conditions regulated by convention,” as Juliane Vogel writes in the first chapter of this book. My intention in pointing out these etymological layers is not to follow any sort of linguistic fetishism, which might privilege the Germanic roots as primary or more semantically flexible. I highlight them, first, because they reflect a practical difficulty in translation, and moreover because they mark the particular, historical linguistic texture between French, German, and English in which the works this book examines were written, performed, and discussed. Etymological tensions that exist in the German often become more structurally pronounced in translation to English. For English, with a vocabulary suspended between a dominant Germanic base and layers adopted from French and Latin, augmented by Renaissance coinages modeled on Greek, this hybridity is a constitutive feature of the language. I have thus accepted that certain displacements occur in English from the German that nevertheless reflect the cultural and linguistic context with which the book is concerned. Fortschreiten generally becomes progress, and vorschreiten usually becomes advance, rather than go, move, or step forward. Yet in the dramatic tradition being discussed here, vorschreiten is itself a “translation” of the French avancer. Such terms themselves 9 “Evidenz” in Duden, https://www.duden.de/node/43286/revision/484155, accessed December 20, 2021. 10 “Evidence,” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://unabridged. merriam-webster.com/unabridged/evidence, accessed December 20, 2021.

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travel back and forth between languages, countries, and traditions, as do plots, motifs, and other dramatic forms. Synonyms coexist in my translation when called for by context. Evidenz is often translated simply as presence or manifest presence, or even as evidence when employed as an attribute (“Entrances and Their Evidence”). Other renderings include vivid clarity, visual evidence, or the rhetorical term evidentia. The tugging and stretching of these terms in slightly different directions is representative of the discourse from which they come. For similar reasons, I have only very rarely opted to reproduce the original German words or phrases in square brackets. The aim has been a text that is primarily readable in English, for an English-speaking readership. Rather than a commentary, it is a translation in the sense of a transposition from one linguistic and cultural context into another. One boon of translating this book has been a sharper awareness of how the shared, shifting etymologies of this dramatic language remain inherent within the changing contexts in which it was employed—that is to say, how each linguistic tradition has its own productivity that is situated in different historical moments, and how these different traditions mutually constitute each other. This can be seen, for instance, in another term—Verkehrseinheit—that Juliane Vogel borrows from the seminal book, Renaissance and Baroque, by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. On its face, this term could mean the unity as a totality, and/or a discrete unit of, traffic, intercourse, or interaction. In Making an Entrance, it denotes perspective as a new principle for structuring the stage—a standard for measuring and ordering a theatrical space and for defining its overall coherence, spatial composition, and visibility. In Wölfflin’s book, it appears in a discussion of baroque villas: The baroque element of the complex [Anlage] is expressed not so much in the buildings as in the fact that the area surrounding it [or: its grounds, Areal] has been significantly enlarged in comparison with architecturally structured gardens, and that it is conceived as a Verkehrseinheit and thus as a dynamic composition [bewegte Komposition].11

This passage—and the meaning of Verkehrseinheit—turns on another term that is central to both Wölfflin’s book and Making an Entrance: bewegt, or moved. In describing something as moved, the German word bewegt often carries the idea that something is, or appears to be, moved from within, and I have most often

11 Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien, 4th ed. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1926), 158: “Das barocke Element der Anlage äußert sich nicht so sehr in den Gebäuden als darin, daß das Areal, im Vergleich mit den architektonischen Gärten bedeutend vergrößert, als Verkehrseinheit und somit als eine bewegte Komposition aufgefaßt ist.”

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translated term as dynamic or sometimes even restless or agitated.12 When applied to a composition or work of art, bewegt points to a representational conceit: the idea that a work fashioned by human hands could itself appear to come to life, could be animated or vivified and appear to be truly present and alive before spectators. In this passage from Wölfflin’s book, this conceit becomes literally physical: the Verkehrseinheit of this baroque complex is the unity allowing the movement of everything that travels along its paths to be apprehended as part of a larger, intentionally composed whole. The word is historically out of place, though, with a rub of anachronism that can be felt in Making an Entrance, too. For this reason, a brief detour along the word’s history may illuminate how Making an Entrance often appropriates terminology—and how this poses difficulties for translation. Verkehrseinheit was in fact a later addition to Wölfflin’s book, introduced to the expanded fourth edition published with his “permission, but not under his supervision” in 1926, nearly forty years after the first edition of 1888.13 The advent of the automobile and airplane in the time in between as technologies that accelerated revolutions in global transportation and traffic makes the friction of applying this word to early modern villas especially jarring. But the seeds for this anachronism are older than the 1920s, or even the first edition of Wölfflin’s book: the term itself comes from the technical yet grandiose language of nineteenthcentury railway logistics and public administration—and as far I can tell, it is a translation from the French.14 Alphonse Belpaire’s 1847 Traité des dépenses

12 This a tension illustrated strikingly in the German phrase bewegte Bilder, i.e., images that have been made to move, to denote film and earlier techniques of combining still images into an animated stream. Here, images set into motion generate the illusion of inner movement, and bewegte Bilder become what in English are called moving images or moving pictures. Or as Duden defines, “bewegt” can mean both “characterized by movement” and “evidence/testimony of movement”—or, more literally: “generative” of movement (“von Bewegung zeugend”). Duden, “Bewegt,” meaning 2. 13 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1964] 1966), “Translator’s Preface.” Wölfflin’s book was originally published as Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien, 1st ed. (Munich: T. Ackermann, 1888). For a publication history of the book into this fourth edition, see Andrew Hopkins, “Reprinting and Republishing Wölfflin in the 1920s,” Journal of Art Historiography 14 (June 2016): 1–7. 14 Alphonse Belpaire, Traité des dépense d’exploration aux chemin de fer (Brussels: Départment des Travaux Publics de Belgique, 1847); translated by Leopold Kastner as Handbuch über die Leistungen und Fahrbetriebskosten der Eisenbahnen (Vienna: Bei Mörschner’s Witwe & J. Gress, 1849). I found no earlier instances of the term in a search of hits in Google books: the search engine does suggest several earlier publications, but on closer examination I only found versions of “Verkehr” or “Einheit,” and not the compound term. An n-gram search

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d’exploitation aux chemins de fer, translated into German in 1849 as Handbuch über die Leistungen und Fahrbetriebskosten der Eisenbahnen, begins by presenting the “development of the railways on the European continent” as one of the “epoch-making . . . facts . . . in our age’s history of Enlightenment,” and as a “precursor and first cause of a great social transformation.”15 Situating the railways in a single line of development with gunpowder and book printing, the book grandly announces the frame for its arguments: “Whoever studies history from its most sublime point of view cannot help but recognize something providential in the logical sequence of events, in the continuous tendency of humanity toward a greater community of ideas, interests, and relationships, toward social unity.” The German translation is tendentious in exaggerating impulses from the French, rendering “son point de vue le plus élevé” as “its most sublime point of view” (“von ihrem erhabensten Gesichtspunkte”). This sublime perspective of a social unity taken to be embodied in an increasingly networked human community resembles something like the perspective of Hegelian spirit that sees human endeavors as the realization of a “providential” and “logical” tendency—forged here, though, by a technological fantasy of communication and control. The measure of this new network and its mode of traffic, intercourse, and interaction is what the term Verkehrseinheit is meant to capture: it denotes both the “unity” of this network and/or the “units” of the “work” that makes it move. Like all instances of the sublime since Kant, it is faced with the difficulty of finding a measure for something that exceeds measured comprehension, and of grasping a point of view that perceives the whole from a finite series of representations. Regarded from the unity of this sublime perspective, observed and measured with this new unit, the doings and workings of human beings become manifest as part of a grand social enterprise beyond any individual intentions or activities. This is yet another sense of the word auftreten, articulated when the term is used as a verb: to appear as a manifestation; to become manifest or occur. History functions here as the stage—one is tempted to say the Grund—for the entrance of a more profound movement. At the same time, it is hardly surprising that Verkehrseinheit quickly took on a more political, nationalist cast, as a word denoting the unity of transportation systems among the German states. And long before Wölfflin’s book employed the term, its semantic slipperiness—or

indicates the first appearance and then an explosion of the term’s frequency in 1844 to 1850, so Kastner’s use of the word perhaps reflects its emergence in a wider context rather than a coinage, though this could also be an artifact of the algorithm or the OCR and it’s not possible to be sure. 15 Belpaire, Traité des dépense d’exploration, 1; Belpaire, trans. Kastner, Handbuch über die Leistungen und Fahrbetriebskosten, 1.

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overdetermination—had motivated at least one author to complain that that it was “one of those buzzwords that creates more confusion than enlightenment.”16 The appropriation of Verkehrseinheit in Renaissance and Baroque projects this unit(y) of traffic back onto baroque architecture as a threshold historical moment poised between organic and technological structure. Indeed, an Anlage— the word used to describe the unity of the baroque villa with its grounds—is also a machine or technological device; a work, a draft or outline of a work yet to be completed; and a naturally inherent aptitude or tendency. All three senses can be read into the word in Wölfflin’s book: as a rational tendency, conception, and technology for organizing a space that anticipates industrialization. It is only when “significantly enlarged” from a “natural garden,” the book writes, that this “Anlage” can function as measure and frame of unity for its “Verkehr.” Belpaire’s treatise used the term Verkehrseinheit to imagine the construction of the railways as part of a grand historical development encompassing the power of guns and the printing press. The use of the word in the 1926 edition of Wölfflin’s book not only echoes this fantasy in a new historical moment in which these developments had been raised to new heights. It also retrospectively plants an aesthetic seed for this history in the structural composition of sixteenth-century architecture and garden design. Juliane Vogel’s application of the term to the space of the perspectival stage further amplifies this tension in a “unit/unity” of traffic conceived as organic, rational, or technological, and between a unity that claims to capture a point of view that is the highest or most sublime and a unit that could pervade and measure all parts of a space or network. In Making an Entrance, the term locates the comings and goings of figures on the stage within a mathematically measured and rationalized space whose unity is grounded in the sovereign’s gaze. As a form of unity and unit of measure, it thus expresses both coherence and power. On the stage, as perspective, it produces an illusion of depth and life—but it does so through utterly artificial means, i.e., through painted backdrops and other dramatic techniques that align a space to match the measure of the monarch’s rule. In harking ahead to the industrialized and technological shape that this rationalization will take, the Verkehrseinheit of this dramatic space similarly foreshadows the new infrastructures that will weld streams of traffic into an imagined or desired single space of interaction and political unity. The English term traffic would reproduce some of this anachronism, but it has a number of connotations that prevent me from translating Verkehrseinheit

16 H. B. v. Anruh [?], “Die Erwebung der deutschen Eisenbahnen durch das Reich,” in Die Gegenwart: Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben, February 5, 1876, 82.

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as unity or unity of traffic. According to Oxford English Dictionary, traffic enters English from French (the first instance listed is from 1339) in the sense of “commerce, trade, especially long-distance trade,” with usage becoming more widespread in the sixteenth century “with reference to dealing or bargaining in something which should not be made the subject of trade, e.g. (in Calvin) the sale of indulgences, intrigue, scheming.”17 And even in all of its current meanings—ranging from the commercial transportation of goods or commodities to “dealings, communication, social interaction” and the circulation of vehicles or information—traffic almost never entirely loses this taint of illicit exchange. When used as a verb, the neutral sense of the word as commercial trade or exchange has largely become historical in English, replaced only by illegal trade or dealings.18 One traffics only in illicit or disreputable goods, in slaves, or with an enemy; conversely, the injunction is often to have no traffic with a person or thing. And, of course, there is the particularly modern misery of getting stuck in traffic. One could even argue that the “traffic of the stage” found in one example given by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary precisely reflects an antitheatrical prejudice aimed against, or at least acknowledging, the artifice, i.e., the feigned or contrived quality, of theatrical “communication or dealings between individuals or groups: intercourse, business.”19 And certainly, the “two hours traffic of our stage” announced in the opening monologue of Romeo and Juliet draws from these negative senses in casting its shadow. I have thus translated “Verkehrseinheit” in Making an Entrance as “unity of interaction.” This is the most straightforward rendering of its sense, even if the physicality of Verkehr and its specific historical anachronism more or less disappear. As a demonstration of the historical layers in the vocabulary of this book, however, this consideration of the word Verkehrseinheit can also serve as a hinge for thinking about the movements of the study’s terms. In its various senses, the word itself operates as a site of traffic exchange, illustrating how the movement of vocabulary across languages, traditions, and times is not always a matter of linear transmission. The genealogies of these forms of representation are sometimes productive in ahistorical or counterhistorical directions; in breaks and leaps; in imagining new futures or reimagining the future of the past. These are genealogies in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s untimely understanding of the word, necessarily motivated by current concerns and seen from a contemporary point of view. 17 “Traffic, n.,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press. 18 “Traffic, v.,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press. 19 “Traffic,” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://unabridged. merriam-webster.com/unabridged/traffic, accessed December 20, 2021.

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It is in this sense, too, that we can understand the term I have used in English for Auftritt, namely entrance. No other word, really, even comes into question as a translation for what the Auftritt means here in German—though at times this equivalence starts to reach its limits and show cracks, as when the word comes to denote the scenes of eighteenth-century German theater. Its use in this context itself marks a shift from earlier terms: from Abhandlung or Aufzug (“treatise” or “procession”) in the baroque works of Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, to the Handlung and Auftritt (“action” and “entrance”) of Johann Christoph Gottsched and the Auftritt of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s first dramas. Other words that then appear in German works of theater, such as Bild or Szene, reflect English and French influence. Conversely, the English word entrance opens a different, yet complementary field of meanings and movements. And although it shifts the focus, it is no less fitting as a catchword for the book’s analyses. Entrance enters English in the late fourteenth-century with the meaning of both “admission, right of access” and an “opening that allows access to a place.” Its verb root enter comes from “classical Latin intrāre to go into, to penetrate, to take possession of, to become a member of, to look into, to begin,” with the suffix “ance” denoting a quality, state, or condition.20 Like Auftritt, then, entrance also captures an act that expresses a state or condition—though here the meaning is more political, concerned with power and control. But Making an Entrance traces the splendid entrances of French neoclassical theater directly to the triumphal entry staged by Roman emperors after a victory to manifest their power. The original title of the book, Aus dem Grund: Auftrittsprotokolle von Racine bis Nietzsche, points to the emergence of figures as they step up and out of a ground. Making an Entrance points, from the opposite perspective, to the complementary act of stepping in that comes with this emergence. Both perspectives are concerned with the fashioning of this act, the setting and place in which happens, and the characteristics or qualities of its performance. Similar dislocations apply to the translations of primary texts discussed in Making an Entrance, which are mainly works by Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Wherever possible, I have cited versions published in English, with my own translations in cases where none exist. However, the decision was also made to keep the original passages of this primary literature in the footnotes. This seemed appropriate, even nonnegotiable, for a book that is as much a work of literary criticism as it is a history of performance practice. The English texts are meant to make the book readable for an audience who

20 Entries on “entrance” and “-ance, suffix,” Oxford English Dictionary.

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may not understand French or German, whereas the original text is the basis for any close reading. In the latter case, when necessary, the original language is introduced directly into the argument. This occasionally produced new points that go beyond the original text of Making an Entrance but are necessary to explain the German or French being cited. Rather than mark these sentences with a translator’s note, I have integrated them into the text. Often enough, they further underscore the translinguistic scope of the dramatic discourse being analyzed. The brief gloss in chapter three on the word Getreibe, for instance, takes recourse to the definition provided in Grimms’ dictionary, which itself points back to a definition given in English by an eighteenth-century German-English dictionary as an “urging or pressing.” Like the vocabulary employed by Making an Entrance, the translations of the literary sources thus also amplify the tension and exchange that exists between the French, German, and English traditions. Not surprisingly, the decision of which translations to cite posed some difficulty. There are no less than eight translations of Faust I from the last fifty years, for instance, that could serve the purposes of this book—and a recent bibliography of translations of Goethe’s texts into English from just the twentieth century runs to almost 350 pages!21 Like the wavering shapes that continually emerge and metamorphose amid Goethe’s hazy grounds of mist and smoke, their variability allows us to recognize translation as hermeneutically and poetically productive in its own right. This can be exemplified by the opening line of Faust I, which is also the opening line of a poem, “Zueignung” or “Dedication,” that Goethe wrote long before the drama was completed. As the most important contemporary editor of the texts, Albrecht Schöne, writes, “Dedication” begins the Faust tragedy by breaking the theatrical illusion in marking what follows as a “poetic creation . . . a play of poetic imagination.”22 What’s more, this poem is but the first of three “creative instances” that precede the tragedy, framing it in a staggered series of distancing gestures—not to count the two further layers of plays within a play that inwardly continue these framings, almost as a vanishing point that is explicitly not within the theater, but within the structure of the drama’s parts. The effect, Schöne concludes, quoting Goethe, is to remind the spectator that the “whole theatrical business” is “nothing but a play, above which a spectator must remain in an elevated

21 Derek Glass, Goethe in English: A Bibliography of the Translations in the Twentieth Century, Modern Humanities Research Association, Bibliographies, vol. 2 (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2005). 22 Albrecht Schöne, Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Faust, Kommentare (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2003), 151.

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position, if it is to be of aesthetic or moral use to them.”23 This poem can be read, then, not as the first Auftritt of the work, but as a beginning that specifically aims to counter the theatrical movement of entering which would rise above and subjugate the spectators.24 This is, in other words, as Juliane Vogel analyzes in chapter three, an “entrance from a middle ground” that she identifies as characteristic of Goethe’s dramatic works. Goethe’s theater, she explains, rests upon a “paradoxical conception of theatricality that operates without emphasizing the entrance.” And here, too, the poem’s opening lines explicitly name an entrance that is not an entrance but rather an approaching, a coming closer that never becomes an arriving: Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten! Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt.

Here are eight translations, in chronological order of publication:25 Walter Kaufmann (1963) You come back, wavering shapes, out of the past In which you first appeared to clouded eyes.

23 Schöne, Kommentare, 152. 24 The three frames that follow likewise resist any kind of entrance. The “Vorspiel auf dem Theater”—or “Prelude in Theater” (from Latin “praeludere to play beforehand,” entry on “prelude,” Merriam-Webster’s), begins without any entrance whatsoever, at a strangely unlocalizable site (the “auf” in “auf dem Theater” literally means “on” but in fact cannot be located in anywhere in space; it is an idiom that generally designates “theater” as a place of activity). The subsequent “Prologue in Heaven” then opens with three archangels “stepping forward,” but not necessarily up, or “auf.” And when the curtain finally opens on Faust for his famous opening monologue, as the “First Part of the Tragedy,” he is simply seated in a chair before a desk in a Gothic room. 25 Goethe’s Faust: Part One and Sections from Part Two, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1963); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1976), 3; Faust I & II, with a new foreword by David E. Wellbery, trans. Stuart Atkins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 [1984]); Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Faust: Part I, trans. Randall Jarrell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [1976] 2000), 3; Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy, trans. David Constantine (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), Faust: A Tragedy. Parts One & Two Fully Revised, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Faust: A Tragedy. In The Essential Goethe, ed. Matthew Bell, trans. John R. Williams, 249–370 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016 [version first published in 1999]). All translations of the primary sources that were consulted are listed separately in the bibliography.

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Walter Arndt (1976) Once more you near me, wavering apparitions That early showed before the turbid gaze. Randall Jarrell (1976) Again you come to me, faltering shapes Who once at morning met my somber gaze— Stuart Atkins (1984) Once more you hover close, elusive shapes my eyes but dimly glimpsed when I was young. David Luke (1987) Uncertain shapes, visitors from the past At whom I darkly gazed so long ago. John R. Williams (1999) Once more I sense uncertain shapes appearing Dimly perceived in days of youth long past. David Constantine (2005) Unsteady shapes, who early in the past Showed in my clouded sight, you approach again. Martin Greenberg (2014) Come back, have you, you figures shifting, spectral, Who first appeared to me when I was young?

A kind of vertigo sets in if you try to read all these versions together. It seems almost a fool’s errand to compare this word here to that one there, while keeping in mind the differing textures of syntax across all eight translations. It gets exponentially worse if you try to do this across multiple passages. This is perhaps the wrong kind of elevation above the text! Alternatively, it would be possible to engage more directly with the different contexts, audiences, and purposes of each translation, developing a historical landscape for each to inform a selection. But my decision to use Walter Kaufmann’s venerable translation is motivated above all by his choice of two words in these opening lines—“wavering shapes”—to render “schwankende Gestalten.” This phrase has special significance. In Goethe’s natural-scientific, morphological terminology, as Albrecht Schöne comments, it specifically denotes “organic shapes constantly transforming through metamorphosis.”26

26 Schöne, Kommentare, 152.

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And in Making an Entrance, where the phrase appears in the title of chapter three, the terms are crucial both as a pair and individually. What matters to me is both the physicality of “wanken”—“wavering”—and the consistency of “shapes” as a distinct synonym to “form.” The words “uncertain” and “elusive,” by contrast, both move away from this embodiment; they are synonyms that operate with different roots and registers. “Unsteady” could have worked here, too, for the same reasons, as could have “faltering”—though this last choice is too strong an interpretation to suit the range of senses that “wanken” has in Juliane Vogel’s analyses. Martin Greenberg’s translations stands out as a freer rendering that has a powerful impact of its own, but his version is often too far from the original to be of use for the present book. To further see why I have cited Kaufmann’s translation, we can look at the passage where Mephisto transforms into a hippopotamus, or “Nilpferd” (literally: a “Nile horse”) after having entered the scene “circuitously” as a poodle (in a movement that Juliane Vogel analyzes in chapter 3): Aber was muß ich sehen? Kann das natürlich geschehen? Ist’s Schatten? ist’s Wirklichkeit? Wie wird mein Pudel lang und breit? Er hebt sich mit Gewalt, Das ist nicht eines Hundes Gestalt. Welch ein Gespenst bracht’ ich ins Haus! Schon sieht er wie ein Nilpferd aus . . . (lines 1247–1254)

I think Greenberg best captures the direct cadence and crispness of Goethe’s lines: But what’s that I’m seeing, A shadow or real thing? It beggars belief— My poodle’s swelled up huger than life! He heaves up his hulk— No dog has such bulk! What a spook I have brought In my house without thought. He looks, with his fierce eyes and jaws, Just like a hippopotamus— (45, lines 1277–1286)

But what matters to me most in this passage is etymology. All of the translators I consulted differ from Kaufmann in rendering Goethe’s verses here with range of terms that derive from Latin or Greek: “real” in Greenberg’s text; or in the other versions: “metamorphosis,” “apparition,” “occurrence,” “illusion,” “reality,” or

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“fantasy.” These registers are missing in the German—though of course they belong to the fabric of English in a way they do not in German. So it might seem like fetishizing Germanic roots or hair splitting to say that I don’t like these choices here, were not the etymological texture of Goethe’s text so striking. Among these eight lines of Goethe’s text, but a single word appears that is not of Germanic origin: natürlich. This Latin cognate is very old in both German and English, as a derivation from the root verb nasci, to be born.27 It denotes, to quote Grimms’ dictionary, “the creating, forming, changing, preserving, and structuring [or: ordering] force and the resulting constitution [Beschaffenheit] of nature as a whole, its parts, or creatures.”28 In Faust’s description here of what he is seeing, it points to a level of reality that is ostensibly separate from or beyond the language in which it is being spoken—a “natural” world born of becoming that might “happen” outside the scene being conjured up by these lines and the generation of fantastical figures embodied by Mephisto. This “natural” world functions as a point of reference that might allow one to see through the illusion of this magical appearance and its creation here in dramatic language. Such an intention to generate figures through dramatic language is especially crucial to these lines. Strictly speaking, they paint a picture that is impossible to represent on stage except as a vision of what the characters are seeing, or rather doubting to see. Both Juliane Vogel and Albrecht Schöne note Goethe’s interest in the special effects produced at the time by the laterna magica, which was an early kind of image projector. Goethe used this device to project “shadow images” or “haze images” onto clouds of smoke, in order to represent the dynamic, oversized “phantasmagoria” of his dramatic texts.29 With this single word, “natürlich,” Faust thus voices doubt that the “happening” unfolding on stage is a coming into being of life that is anchored in birth, in the natural generation of a body, in a way that differs from both the creative power of poetic language and the technical production of images. There is thus something ironic about the function of this particular word here. All human language is arbitrary; no word or root is more “natural” than any other. And yet in a historical sense, “natürlich”—like its English cognate—is a borrowing that has been “naturalized” into the language to such an extent that

27 “Natürlich,” in Wolfgang Pfeifer et al., Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen (1993), in Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/nat%C3% BCrlich, accessed November 24, 2021. “Nature, n.,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press. 28 “Natürlich, adj.,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 13, column 455, www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/natürlich, accessed December 20, 2021. 29 Schöne, Kommentare, 247.

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there is no other term for what it denotes.30 Reaching for such a word would in fact take us into the realm of the supernatural, into a world of deities and magic forces,31 or to other senses of “nature” as “kind” or “birth.” Linguistically, then, the word reflects the relative invisibility of Latin roots that have become so naturalized as to disappear as such. It refers to a common heritage of Latin that predates and transcends all European vernaculars, and that has come to structure a shared understanding of reality in a way that also seems to transcend language itself. I like that Kaufmann largely keeps this etymological texture in his translation, because it reflects a crucial aspect of what the German is doing—what it is saying—about the creative power of language and theater. And here again, my preference is guided not by any blind adherence to the German original, but by a critical take on the German combined with my sense of English. In the context of Mephisto’s appearance, certainly, this Latinate vocabulary in English (“fantasy,” “illusion,” “apparition”) has a specific valence: terms of this kind mark both the realm of (learned) magic and theories of representation and imagination. They belong equally to the language of philosophical aesthetics and to the made-up world of hocus pocus and Harry Potter’s spells. Kaufmann avoids making such a shift until the very end of this transformation, with the word “specter”: But what must I see! Can that happen naturally? Is it a shadow? Am I open-eyed? How grows my poodle long and wide! He reaches up like a rising fog— This is no longer the shape of a dog! Oh, what a specter I brought home! A hippopotamus of foam . . . (153 and 155, lines 1248–1254)

For me, it’s simply hard to beat Kaufmann here. It’s the little things: the slightly off-kilter cadence and rhyme of “sehen / geschehen,” echoed in “I see / naturally.” Or the way the passage flies off the tongue with its series of rhymes and rhythms, climaxing in the riotously ridiculous creature of the final line. Mephisto goes up here not in smoke but in bubbles. And, of course, the German word for hippopotamus more plainly names the strange hybrid that this shapeshifter has

30 The translation of the Greek phusis into the Latin natura was first problematized by Heidegger, who renders the Greek as “Aufgang” in the sense of “emergence.” See David Pascal, “Nature,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 703–705. 31 See the box on “Supernatural” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, 705.

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become: a Nile horse, which could not only be a horse made of water (a “plastic” form hard to contain within itself), but also a river as a horse. For the first readers or audiences of Faust, such a current would have seemed both exotic and ancient, flowing through an entire cultural landscape of Egypt that had seized Europe’s imagination and drawn Napoleon’s armies. Its specific resonance cannot be kept in English, but the “hippopotamus of foam” does work of its own. The phrase is so hilarious precisely because it is etymologically mismatched: in the context of Faust’s speech, and taken at face value without a learned knowledge of its Greek roots, or of the outlandish natural creature the word names, this sixteenth-century coinage looks and sounds like gibberish. Quite an entrance from a frothy ground! Finally, to return to the opening line of the passage: only Kaufmann translates Goethe’s “muß” as “must I see.” The modal verb shifts the entire register of the scene: Faust is being compelled to see something that cannot be seen. But it can be said. And the “that” of the following line (“Can that happen naturally?” / “Kann das natürlich geschehen”) could refer to the figure, to its emergence as an event, or to the action of seeing itself. Language here is capacious in a different way than images, both more precise and less figural in the sense of designating a shape with clear or even shifting contours. Another detail: Kaufmann changes Goethe’s quotation mark to an exclamation point (“But what must I see!”)—not only underscoring the character of the line as a command but also shifting it more toward amazement. This, too, I read as a productive interpretation, a slight change in perspective that also betrays or even acknowledges the work being done in translation. And speaking of exclamation points: it is worth noting that none of Goethe’s modern translators renders the punctuation to the first line of “Dedication” that is found in the Ausgabe letzter Hand, the final edition authorized by Goethe, from 1828: “Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten!”32 No doubt this reflects the edition they were using, because the exclamation point is also missing in several modern critical editions of Goethe’s works.33 But here, too, contemporary

32 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand, vol. 12 (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1828), 5. 33 Albrecht Schöne’s edition includes the exclamation point, as does the Münchner edition; neither the Weimar nor Hamburg editions include it. See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe), vol. 14, Faust I (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887), 5; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe), ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 3, Dramatische Dichtungen I (Hamburg: C.H. Beck, 1968), 9; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe), 21 vols., ed. Karl Richter et al. (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1985–1999), vol. 6.1, 535.

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translations of Goethe are productive in their own way, reflecting and even amplifying this discrepancy. Perhaps this calling out to the approaching shapes simply feels different now, after some two centuries of witnessing them emerge and reemerge in so many ways—less excited, less like an act of invoking or hailing a spirit as muse, more like Greenberg’s “come back, have you?” Such little differences and choices are close-up details that disappear into the fabric of a reading. Like shapes in the fog, they make up a shifting texture of possibilities. Other translators might have different preferences, pursue different purposes, see or hear different things. My aim, always, has been to convey the arguments of this book by producing a readable text in English. In choosing translations, it has been to maintain a sense of consistency for each individual work, while recognizing that no one translation will be ideal for all citations. For each primary text, I have thus settled on one translator, but I have not forced myself to stick with this translator if they translated multiple works. For Faust II, then, of which Walter Kaufmann only translated certain scenes, I chose David Luke. But this did not necessarily entail citing David Luke for Faust I. And I did not decide to use Kaufmann’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, which now sounds a bit dated with its verbal flourishes (“needs be”) and other vocabulary choices. Nietzsche’s style is sometimes shot through with biblical language—but more in his later works, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Applying it here seemed to me like the wrong kind of historicization. For Kleist, the choice of Joel Agee was really beyond discussion.34 In very select instances, I have pointed to multiple translations to unfold the meaning of a word or phrase, or choice of syntax, in the original German. These same principles applied to my selection of other translations. I will let the demonstrations offered above stand as illustrations, rather than address each work individually. Finally, my special thanks go to Benjamin R. Trivers, who collaborated with me in producing this translation. His critical acumen and sense of language are reflected in every sentence of the book. I am also very grateful to Lara Dix and Carolin Eppinger, who were extremely helpful in finding versions in English for many of the secondary sources cited in the book, or for clarifying other questions about publications. Getting terminology “right” is also a real difficulty given the range of discourses mobilized by Juliane Vogel and the fact that some but not all of the main critical texts have been translated into English, with afterlives of 34 Agee’s own New York Times review of the 1982 translation by Humphrey Trevelyan gives a good indication of why. “Kleist never wrote this badly,” Agee suggests, pointing to “clumsy approximations” and “gratuitous . . . antiquated formulas.” See Joel Agee, “An Unhappy Heaven Stormer,” New York Times, July 24, 1983, section 7, page 3.

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their own. I am indebted in particular to Sabine Kriebel and Kate Bredeson for advice with terminology in the visual arts and in theater. It goes without saying that mistakes or infelicitous choices are entirely mine. Michael Thomas Taylor Berlin, November 2021

Chapter 1 Introduction “Look at him walk”: Entrances and Their Evidence The history of drama begins, for this study, with an entrance. The book analyzes the act of making an appearance as an event that is structurally significant for dramatic forms. In contrast to readings that follow Aristotle in seeing drama’s “life and soul”—its “psyche”—in its plot or action, this study focuses on an intermeshing of dramatic structure and the act of entering the stage.1 Specifically, it turns to tragedy from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the relationship between procedures for making an entrance and the unfolding of a drama’s action. Breaking with earlier work that has primarily regarded theatrical figures as agents, it no longer asks how these characters enter into a “‘web’ of human relationships.”2 It seeks them out in their arrival on the stage, where they develop a theatricality that interrupts the course of the dramatic action.3 This entrance is a presenting-to-be-seen and thus the moment in which characters make themselves visible and are permeated by their being-seen by others. “Making an entrance” means entering into a “a space of appearance.”4 And by directing that an entrance take place, drama secures its own theatrical preconditions. Entrances take place not only in the text but also on the théatron—the site of seeing— that is present in every stage direction for a character to “enter.” These preconditions are usually overlooked or ignored. The entrance is a “purloined object” and thus a hidden factor;5 its fate is to be overlooked precisely because it is obvious and omnipresent. The fact that a drama can progress only by having its characters literally enter into its events—that it mainly stages a coming and going and imitates actions only insofar as it directs its agents to arrive on stage, to pause, and then to exit—has played only a minor role in the history of the form’s poetics. Studies dealing with the history of 1 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 1450a. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 183. 3 See Annemarie Matzke, Ulf Otto, and Jens Roselt, eds., Auftritte: Strategien des In-Erscheinung -Tretens in Künsten und Medien (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 9 (“Einleitung,” 7–16); here, we find the pithy formulation that in the act of entering a “system of interaction is transformed into a system of spectatorship and display [Schausystem].” 4 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199. 5 See Juliane Vogel and Christopher Wild, eds., Auftreten: Wege auf die Bühne (Berlin: Verlag Theater der Zeit, 2014), 6 (“Einleitung,” 7–21). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-001

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dramatic form usually neglect entrances,6 and scholarship in theater studies has likewise been slow to register the central operation for generating presence in the theater.7 Only occasional individual studies have properly considered the “significance” of entrances,8 and it is only through examining individual cases that these studies have probed the conditions under which the act of making an entrance occurs in drama.9 What remains entirely lacking is a reconstruction of the forms of interaction on stage that govern entrances and exits. Hence it is necessary to generally examine the functions and forms of entering beyond the semantic space of individual plays so as to uncover the “purloined” dramaturgy structuring the entrances of a drama’s characters. This book accordingly attempts a new structural description of drama, from the point of view of the entrance, that regards the specific theatricality of entering as part of the dramatic progression. It seeks to illuminate the relationship between how characters advance, and the plot progresses. A generic restriction has proven necessary in this endeavor. Only by concentrating on a single, albeit central, generic protocol has it been possible to avoid the problems arising from the sheer variety of forms for making entrances and the

6 Exceptions include Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49–60. Taplin emphasizes the structural function of these moments: “The particular elements in the action which may help to articulate the structural form are, of course, entrances and exits” (53). His study focuses on the “act-dividing” function of entrances (ibid.). See also his book Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Methuen and Co., 1978), 31–58. Peter Pütz, too, recognizes entering and exiting to be a basic pattern of dramatic form in general. See Peter Pütz, Die Zeit im Drama: Zur Technik dramatischer Spannung, 2nd edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), 27–31. In his book Das Tragische (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2009), Karl Heinz Bohrer reads appearing in tragedy as a “theatrical excess of emotion.” In his view, entrances are forms for the appearance of terror, or moments of being overpowered. This accords central significance to the nature of the hero’s appearance. 7 On this point, see also the volume edited by Annemarie Matzke et al., Auftritte, as well as Doris Kolesch, “Auftrittsweisen: Überlegungen zur Historisierung der Kategorie des Auftritts,” in Auftreten, ed. Vogel and Wild, 38–54, here p. 38. One exception is found in the works of Ulrike Hass, such as her essay “Woher kommt der Chor?” Maske und Kothurn 58 (March 2012): 13–30. 8 David Maskell, Racine: A Theatrical Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 44. 9 See Rüdiger Campe, “Erscheinen und Verschwinden: Metaphysik der Bühne in Hölderlins ‘Empedokles,’” in Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel, ed. Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007), 53–72; Erika Greber and Annegret Heitmann, “Folgenlose Auftritte: Ankunftsszenen im Drama der frühen Moderne,” in Ankünfte: An der Epochenschwelle um 1900, ed. Aage Hansen-Löve, Annegret Heitmann, and Inka Mülder-Bach (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009), 189–211; Harry T. Barnwell, “‘They have their exits and their entrances’: Stage and Speech in Corneille’s Drama,” Language Review 81, no. 1 (1986): 51–63; Maskell, Racine, 44–61.

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overdetermination of their structures. The following analyses therefore refer to the complex of forms designated, in the period between Racine and Nietzsche, as tragedy. The book proceeds from the assumption that tragedy’s protocol for making an entrance prepares the way for other generic protocols, and that the challenges of entering onto the stage become clear here in a way that is pertinent to other dramatic genres. This assumption does not presuppose any fixed generic form. And we should keep in mind the problems associated with a generic designation that undergoes a process of differentiation precisely in this historical period—not least of all because during the dramatic epoch chosen for this analysis, tragedy as a form is affected by major changes and crises of legitimacy.10 In the span of time between Racine and Nietzsche, the foundations of Aristotelian tragedy, which cannot be separated from aristocratic court culture in early modern Europe, erode. What results are new and experimental forms for making entrances that not only allow a tragedy’s characters to enter the scene under new conditions, defining their place in the world, but also orient the genre of drama toward the very act of entering the stage. Both in discourse on tragedy and in tragedy itself, the emphasis shifts away from the plot and onto the act of stepping forth. Johann Gottfried Herder introduces his account of Attic tragedy in the journal Adrastea with a question about entrances: Aeschylus was the inventor of tragedy; it is to him, that brave man, that we owe the true concept of his art form. Why did he direct his characters to come forth? For what purpose did he create the stage?11

Image and Movement Only by more closely examining the structures of entrances, and by identifying the features that transform entering into a theatrical moment subject to a law of its own, can we adequately describe the interplay between dramatic form and 10 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Routledge, 2016), 118. 11 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Adrastea,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 10, Adrastea (Auswahl), ed. Günter Arnold (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000), 9–961, here volume 2, piece 4, 1802: Früchte aus den sogenannt goldenen Zeiten des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, no. 10, “Das Drama,” 321. See also Herder, “Von deutscher Art und Kunst,” in Herder, Werke, vol. 2, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 443–562, here 500: “Greek tragedy emerged as if from one entrance, out of the improvisation of the dithyramb, of the mimic dance, of the chorus.” English in Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 292.

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the act of entering the stage. Conceiving the entrance as a moment of beingseen is not enough. As strong as this visual component may be, it is only one part of the many devices that enable a character’s presence on stage. The persona making an entrance only gains manifest presence by means of the step that carries the figure forward. It is only in actively stepping forth that a character creates the impression of living, “irrevocable presence,”12 which serves on stage as proof of its being; and it is only through bodily movement—through the spirited motus corporis—that the persona appearing on stage compellingly impresses itself upon the spectator’s perception. The entrance gains persuasive power through the power of this stepping forth. In his comedy L’illusion comique, Corneille gives an example to illustrate the idea that only an image in motion will capture the spectator’s gaze, and that the spectator will perceive this image in its full splendor only when it physically advances in space: Hope, rather, that he come out and advance toward you. Look at him walk: his countenance so grave, Whose rare knowledge makes nature its slave.13

This “Look at him walk” becomes even more persuasive to the extent it describes a movement that happens not by chance but in a controlled form. In taking an artful step, the character making an entrance liberates itself from its “physical subjugation” to nature. The execution of a controlled movement creates an artificial theatrical body that symbolically overcomes the frailty of the human being. And with the avancement of the magician announced in these words, self-enhancing powers are set free that endow the natural body with a magisterial form and perhaps even divine attributes.14

12 Hans Blumenberg, Die Beschreibung des Menschen, aus dem Nachlass, ed. Manfred Sommer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 10. 13 Pierre Corneille, “L’illusion comique,” in Corneille, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 612–688, here 619 (lines 80ff.): “Espérez, mieux, il sort, et s’avance vers vous. / Regardez-le marcher: ce visage si grave, / dont le rare savoir tient la nature esclave.” A contemporary adaptation for the stage translates the entire passage delivered by Dorante freely as: “You’re wrong – the end to your despair is here: / Alcandre has left the cave – he’s drawing near. / See how his art, in its effects sublime, / Has not been used to check the work of time: / Sinew and bone are all that’s left of him – / And yet, the movements light, the carriage straight, / Advancing easily, with even gait, / A hidden force informing every part, / Making each step a miracle of art.” See Pierre Corneille and Ranjit Bold, Corneille: Three Masterpieces (London: Oberon Books, 2000), 87. 14 On the concept of avancement in the dramaturgy of the ancien régime, see the discussion of perspective as a “Verkehrseinheit” or “the unity of interaction” that is provided in chapter 2.

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The character making an entrance accordingly attains sovereignty at the very place and moment it counteracts the frailty of its body in its exposure to time, vertigo, and chance—through a brilliant visual composition in which the threat of stumbling that arises upon entering a new terrain is refashioned, transformed into a step with the power to posit its own conditions. Having the power to make an entrance means being capable of forcefully projecting a compelling conception of the self into a space. Only in boldly stepping forth, with performative power, can a character making an entrance take decisive control of this dangerous moment. And it is only the consummate and balanced interaction of vivid clarity and movement, of detail and animation, that will produce a presence with the power to catch the eye, to speak to and impress the audience. The rhetorical production of evidentia also requires an interplay of enargeia and energeia—of visibility and energy.15 An entrance, too, requires “actus, actio, actualitas, [and] motus” in order to animate a static persona.16 Here, too, manifest presence can be attained only if the simultaneity of a description can be translated into the succession of a movement. Generated by a rhetorical operation, a body making a perfect entrance becomes a product of art. And a successful entrance begets a splendor that the human figure cannot generate from its own potential. In order to enhance a character’s theatrical effect, a prosthetic or even rhetorical element must come into play that elevates the body above its natural constitution, sanctifying it by means of theatrical accoutrement.17 Erving Goffman chooses the apt term “face work” to describe the effort required to produce figures capable of appearing in public.18 A character’s clothing, jewelry, and entourage amplify its presence by producing a dazzling splendor and other effects that suggest at least the possibility of divinely exceeding natural human endowment. The concept of éclat as the art of creating splendor will therefore play a central role in the reflections that follow.

15 See Jan-Dirk Müller, “Evidentia und Medialität: Zur Ausdifferenzierung von Evidenz in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Auf die Wirklichkeit zeigen: Zum Problem der Evidenz in den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Helmut Lethen, Ludwig Jäger, and Albrecht Koschorke (Campus: Frankfurt am Main/New York 2015), 261–290, here 266ff. See also Davide Giuriato, “klar und deutlich”: Ästhetik des Kunstlosen im 18./19. Jahrhundert (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus, 2015), 44. 16 Müller, “Evidentia und Medialität,” 268. 17 See David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4. I owe the reference to Wills to the DFG junior researcher network “Szenografien des Subjekts,” directed by Céline Kaiser. 18 On the concept of face work, see Erving Goffman, “On Face Work,” in Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (London: Penguin, 1967), 5–47.

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Seizing Space/Dividing Space Sovereignty can only be attributed to the figure who is entering if the entrance both occupies and opens up a space.19 A strong entrance is an act of seizing space.20 It challenges the existing order of the scene by claiming a place that is not necessarily afforded to the character. It forces a “concession”—the emptying of occupied space and a retreat of those present.21 Successful entrances alter the existing spatial situation; they restructure it and create possibilities of entering where none initially seem to exist. Strong arrivals on stage open up these kinds of congested situations; they divide the crowd and establish order amid confusion. What distinguishes such acts is the structure they employ to make an appeal. Whether spoken or unspoken, they are bound up with a demand. Exclamations such as “Make way!” are intended to compel an entrance. The cry “A clearing! / Space for us, please!” renders visible the violent aspect of this seizing of space.22 It is no coincidence that these words are shouted by the “hewers of wood” in Goethe’s “Masquerade” (“Mummenschanz”), who depict their own entrance with metaphors of clearing a forest—that is, as a clear cut through the thicket of the scene. Whether latent or manifest, strong entrances are coded as potentially bellicose acts that occupy and subjugate territory, driving others out and thereby allowing a self who rules over the space to take center stage. In Schiller’s Bride of Messina, for example, one reads: “Upon the entrance of Don Caesar the chorus moves to flee as it divides itself before him. He remains standing alone in the center of the stage.”23 The very name of this figure emphasizes the imperial

19 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 288ff. Here, we are talking about the intensification of degrees of appearance. 20 I use the concept here in reference to Carl Schmitt’s concept of “land appropriation” (Landnahme): a taking possession of the stage analogous to military conquest. See Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, ed. Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2015), 60. On the relation of power and space in the entrance of the conqueror (using Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great as an example), see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 193ff. 21 Haß, “Woher kommt der Chor,” 14. 22 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, in Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe), ed. Karl Richter (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1997), 18:1, 103–351, here 122 (line 5199): “Nur Platz! nur Blöße! / Wir brauchen Räume.” 23 Friedrich Schiller, Die Braut von Messina, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 5, Drama IV, ed. Matthias Luserke (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996), 279–384, here 370: “Beim Eintritt des Don Cesar zerteilt sich der Chor in fliehender Bewegung vor ihm, er allein bleibt in der Mitte der Szene stehen.”

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qualities of his entrance. The ideal type of sovereign entry brings an idealized symbolic body into a position from which it can order and subjugate the world upon which it comes in the theatrical scene. Émile Benveniste defines kingship as the power “to draw up rules, to determine what was in the proper sense ‘right’ (‘straight,’ droit)”—that is, to organize a terrain according to the monarch’s own sovereign position, to impart the force and direction of his own will as ruler upon the measurement of this terrain, and to derive, from this will, all authoritative spatial lines.24

Protocols for Making an Entrance Not even sovereigns, though, have unrestricted power over the form of their entrance. Their appearance only has an effect when it can be read by the company who receives them. Even the jubilant entrance of powerful characters—and perhaps precisely of these characters—must move within pregiven horizons of form and interpretation. However exaggerated, the self-projection of one who is arriving can succeed only if it fits into a conventional framework that enables social recognition.25 Entrances are arrivals that have been furnished with form: the “displacement-into-form” of beings who arrive by crossing the threshold of the stage.26 Both the actors and those present are involved in such form-positing emplacements, though not always in equal parts or with equal mental and physical effort. It is only through such a tension-filled interplay between a personal desire for recognition, on the one hand, and social or political scripts, on the other, that an entrance gains its contour. For both the character who is arriving and the company who receives them, a protocol is required that formalizes the moment of joining the scene and generates presence under conditions regulated by convention.27 This protocol must ensure that an initially indeterminate being who appears at the edge of the 24 See Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press/Hau Books, 2016), 312. 25 See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 34ff. 26 David E. Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” in Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel, ed. Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007), 199–212, here 204. 27 On the concept of an “Auftrittsprotokoll”—a protocol or script for an entrance, performance, or appearance—see Vogel and Wild, eds., Auftreten, Wege auf die Bühne, 10ff. See also Vogel, Sinnliches Aufsteigen, 108ff.

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stage is transformed into a recognizable persona according to certain rules dependent on the situation, society, or dramatic genre. It writes the rules governing how a stranger who is initially located beyond the threshold of the stage shapes their own arrival and secures their recognition. Such a protocol provides “established routines for processing and interacting” that make it possible to cope with the sudden emergence of “the unexpected and of surprise.”28 Protocols for making an entrance formalize acts of arrival both in society and on the stage, thus reducing the risk that each new arrival might threaten the scenic status quo. They generate predictability and enable the character who is arriving to be recognized by the company receiving them. In protocols, an individual’s desire to assert themselves and be recognized is confronted with the expectations that a given social system and its institutions place on the character who is making an entrance. An entrance thus forms a “point of intersection between what a person wants to be and what the world allows them to be.”29 Cognizant of this dynamic, the present book postulates that dramatic entrances in general, and tragic entrances in particular, are characterized by protocols for entering that are not solely determined by the dramatic action or plot and the context of its motivation. Their forms follow religious, political, military, or social models and are accordingly diverse. Among many other things, they cite forms of adventus and triumph, processions and ceremonial entrances into cities or public spaces, reception protocols, appearances at fairs or markets, diplomatic protocols, the conjuring of spirits, or revues. They activate ritual templates such as Dionysian maenadism, or they adopt formalized routines such as the comings and goings of a marketplace. This sometimes requires that informal processes for making an entrance be formalized. Works of drama thus take recourse to forms of entering that endow an individual’s arrival with symbolic meaning and confer upon it ritual, ceremonial, or even merely conventional features. At the same time, these works follow protocols derived from generic norms. Hence tragedy, at least in its early modern form, will develop rules for making an entrance that differ from those of comedy, which is a dramatic form that takes up

28 See Rudolf Stichweh, Der Fremde: Studien zu Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte (Berlin: Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2010), 75: “There is always talk of strangers when social others appear who are connected with the moment of the unexpected and of surprise, or when no established routines for processing and interacting with these strangers are initially available for this surprise.” See also Inka Mülder-Bach, “Ankommende Erregungsgrößen: Zur Einführung,” in Ankünfte: An der Epochenschwelle um 1900, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, Aage A. HansenLöve, and Annegret Heitmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag), 2009, 9–18, here 16. 29 Richard Sennett, Verfall und Ende des öffentlichen Lebens: Die Tyrannei der Intimität, 2nd edition (Berlin: Verl. Taschenbuch, 2013), 196.

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the accelerated modes of interacting characteristic of a mixed urban public and allows human beings to appear on stage as creaturely. Tragedy will instead make use of restrictive or solemn protocols based on the rules of conduct of court society, and it will accord particular importance to aspects of social etiquette. The rules for making an entrance that were based on French neoclassical tragedy from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—themselves formulated according to rules of bienséance, that is, of propriety or decorum—will play a crucial role for the analyses of this book. These rules demanded that a character step onto the stage in a different way than in the genre of comedy, which also granted drunkards the right to make an appearance. However, we will also find that it is possible for disruptions of events in a protocol to themselves become entrenched as dramatic formulas. Especially the loss of form in emotionalized entrances that are derived from strong affective situations is capable of generating new entrance routines. Societies with a strongly hierarchical structure and strong mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion seem particularly invested in formalizing the act of entering. The entrance protocols for these societies reflect gradated forms of social recognition, distinctions between estates, court hierarchies, and allegorical structures of meaning that are also characteristic for tragedy. They allow us to conclude that entrances acquire significance especially where a political or social order legitimizes itself through the effects of presence.30 For forms of government whose functioning presupposes direct personal communication, emphatically staging presence and Da-Sein, being-there, is of crucial significance. The functional formalization of entrances is even more explicit in Christian theater. Unlike Aristotelian theater, with its obligatory link to a plot, theatrum mundi consists of regular sequences of entrances made by exemplary figures. Shakespeare’s theater of the world, for instance, is structured by “exits and entrances.”31 Calderón’s Gran teatro del mundo offers invaluable insight into the entrance protocol that defines this type of theater. In Calderón’s play, the divine master serves as director or “author,” and the allegorical figure of the world is appointed as master of ceremonies tasked with arranging the entrances

30 On communication among those present in court society, see Rudolf Schlögl, Anwesende und Abwesende: Grundriss für eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014), 258ff. 31 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975), 55 (II/7, lines 139ff.).

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according to the hierarchy of roles of the Christian estates.32 Here, being created means being capable of making an entrance and of entering the stage through a certain door and at a time determined by the author.33 It means no longer being “not yet born” and standing “unformed” before the author, as the “dust at [his] feet,” but rather stepping, in the guise of a fixed and recognizable role, into the visibility of a theatrical space defined by higher powers.34 Calderón’s direction responds to the agitatio of an unregulated coming and going with strict precautions.35 By setting up two doors, calling the characters forth, equipping them with attributes, and setting a fixed period for their appearance on stage, this theater ensures that its characters’ entrances take place in an orderly manner and within the framework of Christian duties. Yet drama is more than a mere form of executing social protocols for making an entrance. The achievement of Calderón’s world theater—the complete control of all stage entrances by a divinely sanctioned ceremonial protocol—is contested in plot-based Aristotelian drama. When characters enter into “passionate and entangled situations,” as Schiller writes, entrances also become a precarious challenge for both the person who is arriving and the company receiving them.36 Conflicts between the desire for recognition and social norms, 32 See Hans-Christian von Herrmann, “Das Theater der Souveränität,” in Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne: Eine Archäologie des Theaters und seiner Wissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 68ff. 33 See Christopher Wild, “‘They have their exits and their entrances’: Überlegungen zu zwei Grundoperationen im Theatrum Mundi,” in Theatrum Mundi: Die Metapher des Welttheaters von Shakespeare bis Beckett, ed. Björn Quiring (Berlin: August, 2012), 89–136, here 93: “Entering means gaining earthly existence and exiting means losing it again. In the theatrum mundi, for example, coming into form or becoming a figure [Gestaltwerdung] coincides with making an entrance. Every entrance is a birth and every birth is an entrance.” 34 Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Great Theater of the World, trans. Rick Davis, Theater 34, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 128–151, here 132. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El gran teatro del mundo, ed. Domingo Ynduráin and John Jay Allen (Barcelona: Critica, 1997), 12 and 13 (lines 279 and 296): “Mortales que aún no vivís” and “polvo somos de tus pies.” See also Juliane Vogel, “Kommen und Gehen: Notizen zu einer Verkehrsformel der Bühne,” in Ein starker Abgang: Inszenierungen des Abtretens in Drama und Theater, ed. Franziska Bergmann and Lily Tonger-Erk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016), 35–47, here 35ff. 35 On the disciplining and control of chaotic movement within the framework of religious ceremonial arrangements, as guided by the principles of orden and compostura, see Ulrike Sprenger, Stehen und Gehen: Prozessionskultur und narrative Performanz im Sevilla des Siglo de Oro (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013), 89ff. On the contingency of entrances in general, see Pütz, Die Zeit im Drama, 28ff. 36 Friedrich Schiller, “Vorrede zur Pitaval-Ausgabe von 1792–1795,” in Oliver Tekolf, Schillers Pitaval: Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Menschheit, verfaßt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Friedrich Schiller (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2005), 75–79, here 75.

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between performance and expectation, can become acute even in the situation of entering, causing the arrival to fail. Unsuccessful entrances can accordingly be read as social disturbances: they indicate status problems, they point to crises of perception and recognition, and they reveal manifold varieties of unachieved or insufficient presence. In many cases, the relationship between enargeia and energeia also becomes unbalanced. In the absence of energeia, entrances can fall below the threshold of clarity and render the arriving characters imperceptible. However, entrances can also unleash energies that transform the arriving figure into an unreadable image of movement, devastating the stage they invade.

Entrance and Entanglement This book deals only indirectly with the theatrical conventions of making an entrance, even if this might initially seem to be an obvious point of reference for its questions. Without a doubt, forms of entering the stage, with all that they entail, are part of a performance practice. They can primarily be read from the circumstances and conventions of the stage, and from its architecture—from the sets that mark where an entrance is to be made and sketch the path it is to take. They touch upon the role of the curtain that rises and falls or opens and closes in front of the characters, and which thus partly takes over the body’s action in making an entrance;37 they concern the role of the cue that signals to an actor it is time to enter, as well as the ways in which actors carry their bodies, to the extent this posture is dictated by the theatrical staging and not the drama.38 Inasmuch as theatrical conventions are relevant to the perspectives explored here, they will be taken into consideration. The path chosen for this book, however, runs primarily through the form of drama, and specifically, through the genre of tragedy. The focus will be on the highly fraught relationship between action and entrance, with the caveat that “action” does not designate something performed by the agency of a subject, i.e., “the exemplary visible affirmation of a self [Ich] capable of acting, endowed with will, accountable for its actions and self-possessed.”39 Making such an affirmation would be the task of a sovereign entrance in command of the

37 See Gabriele Brandstetter, “Lever de Rideau – die Szene des Vorhangs,” in Szenen des Vorhangs – Schnittflächen der Künste, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2008), 19–41. 38 See Francis Lang, Dissertatio de Actione Scenica/Abhandlung über die Schauspielkunst, ed. and trans. Alexander Rudin (Bern/Munich: Francke, 1975), 189f.; Kolesch, “Auftrittsweisen,” 45. 39 Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 242.

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situation, with the capacity to stage this kind of ideal self-fashioning. In a drama, however, what stands in the way of this entrance is a situation of entanglement that exceeds the dramatic subject’s ability to act, dangerously limiting this ability. What diminishes the luster of a character’s appearing and curtails its need for recognition—often drastically and to the point of death—is the web of actions inscrutable to the subject. But this entanglement develops in the text of the drama or tragedy; it is not to be found in the theater alone. To have a fate is to be entangled in a text.40 The relationship between making an entrance and tragic entanglement is the topic of this book.

Tragic Entrances: The Hubris of Taking a Step The First Stepping Forth The history of tragedy, too, begins with a step—with the leader of the chorus stepping forth from the group.41 The words “[tragedy] originated with [those who led] the dithyramb” found in the fourth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics, open the history of tragic drama with the figure of this leader who, in enthusiastic excitement, leaves the chorus of those worshiping Dionysus to stand and face those he has left.42 Even if this reading remains contested, it has become a successful origin story—what the philologist Karl Otfried Müller has called an uncertain but justified hypothesis. In Müller’s Geschichte der griechischen Literatur (History of Greek literature), published in 1841, we read: “Aristotle’s claim that tragedy began with the singers of the dithyramb at least gives reason to assume that the leader of the chorus stepped forth to appear as an individual.”43 If we follow this assumption,

40 See Christoph Menke, Die Gegenwart der Tragödie: Versuch über Urteil und Spiel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 52f.: “The specific way, however, in which a dramatic character has a fate, is that they are entangled in a text, that their fate is produced and determined by a text. For a dramatic character, to have a destiny is to be a figure in a text; their being, doing, and suffering are determined by this interweaving.” 41 This introductory argument draws on Juliane Vogel, “‘Who’s there?’ Zur Krisenstruktur des Auftritts in Drama und Theater,” in Auftreten, ed. Vogel and Wild, 22–37, here 23ff. 42 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Barnes, 1449a10, translation modified. On the history of this scholarship, see Albin Lesky, Die griechische Tragödie, 5th edition (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1984), 17–48; Joachim Latacz, Einführung in die griechische Tragödie, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: UTB GmbH, 2003), 56ff. 43 See Karl Otfried Müller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexanders, ed. Eduard Müller (Breslau: Max, 1841), 29. Regarding the critical views of this position, see Arbogast Schmitt’s commentary in Aristoteles, Poetik, 294. Even in more recent translations, the

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tragedy thus begins with an initial, form-generating individuation. As a genre, it first becomes palpable where an individual emerges from the chorus to be exposed in public. From both a historical and systematic perspective, then, tragedies begin with a coming forward that also opens up a space in which one or more actors can enter into relation with each other. Conversely, every entrance in a tragedy reminds us of this origin. Beyond that, however, only a limited number of connections can be made between Aristotle and a theater of entrances. In the provisions of Aristotle’s Poetics, the process one could call “having an entrance” or “making an appearance” plays no further role. On the contrary: our deficient understanding of entrances can be traced to the fact that, with his focus on myth, Aristotle addresses neither the performance of tragedy nor the dramaturgy of its entrances. He is interested in the imitation of an action, not in the presentation of the characters who participate in performing it.44 And in this regard, Aristotle did in fact set a course that essentially shaped modern Aristotelean theater, establishing a perception of tragedy that is primarily based on plot. What is crucial for this tradition is establishing a coherent context. The art of tragedy consists in linking different lines of plot in order to necessarily precipitate a tragic reversal. Until the end of the rulebased poetic systems of the early eighteenth century, a playwright’s status was measured by his ability to tie a dramatic or tragic knot that brought about a change of fortune. His art consisted in the artful weaving together of connections between events: “The most important of the six [elements of tragedy] is the

interpretations of this passage vary significantly. Stephen Halliwell, for instance, renders the passage as “Ar. probably assumes that the Athenian Thespis took the crucial step, c. 534, of adding an individual voice (the first actor) to the traditional chorus of dithyramb”; Aristotle’s Poetics, 2nd edition (London: Duckworth, 1998), 41. W. H. Fyfe translates: “the one came from the prelude to the dithyramb and the other from the prelude to the phallic songs which still survive as institutions in many cities,” with a note: “before the chorus began (or in pauses between their songs) the leader of the performance would improvise some appropriate tale or state the theme which they were to elaborate. Thus he was called ὁ ἐξάρχων or ‘the starter,’ and became in time the first ‘actor’”; Aristotle. Poetics, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 23 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1932), quoted from the Perseus Project, http:// data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg034.perseus-eng1:1450a. See also the commentary by Manfred Fuhrmann in Aristoteles, Poetik, 107: “Aristotle indicates that the improvised texts, which the leaders of the chorus had inserted into the chorus’s songs, were the germ of the dramatic dialogue.” But all translations assume that the leader of the chorus posits a difference between himself and the chorus when he steps away from collective and speaks with an individual voice. Wolfgang Schadewaldt translates exarchein as “Strike up a song, begin, leader [Vorsänger]”; Die griechische Tragödie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 35. 44 Aristoteles, Poetics, trans. Barnes (1450b): “The spectacle [opsis], though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry.”

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combination of the incidents of the story.”45 The characters of a tragedy are subordinated to this purpose. Neither Aristotle nor his successors have any doubt that the tragic hero’s existence is justified solely in terms of the plot. The hero is part of an all-encompassing execution of the dramatic action and significant only in this context. From the perspective of Aristotelian dramatic theory, the characters serve only to advance the plot. Even so—without continued entrances, the dramatic pace threatens to falter. These events are what introduce news and give rise to new situations.46 They provide impulses for action and maintain flows of information. Every “Here comes” or “There comes” revises the situation and draws the dramatic knot tighter. These phrases serve to imbue dramatic time in the Aristotelian universe with rhythm, structure, and emphasis.47 High frequencies of entrances increase dramatic tension, which is why they are deployed to accelerate and conclude a plot. Conversely, when an entrance and thus a decisive impulse is delayed or fails to materialize, dramatic time is transformed into a time of expectation. And when there are few or no entrances, the energetic level of a plot drops. By contrast, a plot can sometimes pick up speed and get ahead of itself when dense sequences of entrances generate a high frequency of impulses. Setting the sequence and frequency of entrances is one of the essential tools for shaping dramatic, and specifically tragic, time. Under these conditions, however, which clearly emphasize the progress of the plot, entrances themselves remain unaccentuated. From an Aristotelian perspective, entrances cannot be events in the sense of an emphatic presenting-to-be-seen. Yet even Aristotelian tragedy does not eliminate the theatrical potential of the moment in which a character enters. The subordination of appearance to plot does not prevent its suppressed dramaturgy from also making itself noticeable in the action, and its functionalization never goes so far as to completely extinguish the theatrical potential of its moment. It is precisely the entrance’s punctuality that produces an intensification. The phrases “Here comes” and “There comes” that announce an entrance not only provide an impulse of information; they also denote an energetic moment of becoming visible. Even though we can only speak here of optical residual forms that constitute a short moment at best within the dramatic process, they are what theatricalizes the event in relation to the characters. They very briefly direct the attention of those present to the appearance of the

45 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Barnes (1450a). 46 On “announcement” as a constitutive element of tragedy, see Schadewaldt, Die griechische Tragödie, 50. 47 See Peter Pütz, Die Zeit im Drama: Zur Technik dramatischer Spannung, 2nd edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), 29.

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newcomer. They announce, with ceremonial succinctness and precision, an optical event that interrupts the continuum of the plot at certain points and turns the attention of the audience to the visibility of the actors. With every note for an entrance to occur, the actor is inscribed into the dramatic text; with every announcement that an entrance will take place, the character who is arriving is “penetrated by being-seen.”48 This language speaks of coming, not of beingthere, of Da-Sein; and the phrase “Il vient,” or “Here comes,” predominates in the European dramaturgy of tragedy compared to mere declarations of existence. This fact also makes it clear that this arrival is not necessarily a sudden event but a process with temporal extension. Announcing an entrance emphasizes the fact that a character is approaching, rather than the character’s presence. It emphasizes that a character is not present on stage but in fact only takes shape in a movement of coming near. In the context of tragedy, entrances also link image and movement, enargeia and energeia. When Aristotle addresses the characters of a tragedy as energountes and thus as bearers of power,49 he names, in addition to this power to act, the power that allows the character to step out of its envelopment by the chorus into the light of the public.50 Hence Corneille’s “Look at him walk”—the ancien régime’s phrase for making a splendid entrance—is also the indispensable condition of entering for tragedy. And tragic individuation is bound to a step. In tragedy, too, a character must first come forward to be present, and the character can be fully recognized only if it articulates itself in a movement of entering. It only acquires form with the help of a force it develops in advancing.

The Entrance as Hubris The hallmark of tragic forms is not, however, the triumphant and assertive realization of this step but rather its retroactive suspension. Entrances in tragedies summon tragic counterforces into play. Their precarious status results from the fact that they trespass not just a spatial threshold but also a prohibition. Tragic

48 Hans Blumenberg, Die Beschreibung des Menschen, aus dem Nachlass, ed. Manfred Sommer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 778. See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Theater und Mythos: Die Konstitution des Subjekts im Diskurs der antiken Tragödie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 130. 49 See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Barnes (1448a). See also Rüdiger Campe, “Vor-Augen-Stellen: Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung,” in Poststrukturalismus: Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Gerhard Neumann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 208–225, here 215. 50 Hannah Arendt places this powerful movement with which the energountes enter at the center of the theory of the public sphere she develops in The Human Condition. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199.

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circumstances occur whenever the subject’s stepping forth also represents a transgression that calls for a potentially lethal punishment.51 In tragic entrances, a subject actively asserts itself with the physical expression of a presumption that is immediately punished and countermanded by unrecognizable powers. Entrances thus play a central role in constituting tragic form. And it is one central thesis of this book that the becoming-visible of the tragic character—the triumph of the character’s appearance—already sets the character’s annihilation into motion. Even before any dramatic action, it is the human desire to appear that courts catastrophe.52 Entrances acquire tragic features when they presuppose the transgression of a boundary and compel an appearance that holds the seeds of hubris. The stepping forth of the subject is itself an act of tragic hubris;53 it is an expression of “supposed sovereignty of the self”54 and thus tragic wrongdoing.55 The very fact that it takes place challenges fate. Accordingly, the characteristics that define hubris can also be attributed to the step that dares to advance. Like other manifestations of hubris, this, too, can be described with Nietzsche as an “excess of courage and hubris,” that emphatically articulate the subject’s claims to assert itself.56

51 Hans-Thies Lehmann describes transgression, hubris, and downfall as a tragic structure in Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 61ff. On page 9, he writes aptly of “the quasi-Icarian figure of trespass.” See also David Wellbery, Goethes “Faust I”: Reflexion der tragischen Form (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2016), 73ff. 52 Rüdiger Campe has explained this idea using Hölderlin’s Empedocles as an example. See Rüdiger Campe, “Erscheinen und Verschwinden: Metaphysik der Bühne in Hölderlins ‘Empedokles,’” in Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel, ed. Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007), 53–72, here 57. 53 Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Die Anfänge der Philosophie bei den Griechen: Die Vorsokratiker und ihre Voraussetzungen, Tübinger Vorlesungen, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 110: Accordingly, hybris is “literally an ‘encroachment,’ a too much, an encroaching into a foreign legal sphere.” On hubris in Homer and Hesiod, see Kurt Latte, “Der Rechtsgedanke im archaischen Griechentum,” in Zur griechischen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Erich Berneker (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 77–98, here 78f., 92f. See Uwe Herrmann, Zur Rolle der Gewalt in der griechischen Archaik im Spiegel der epischen und lyrischen Dichtung (Münster: LIT, 2014), 53ff. See also the entry on “Hubris” in Metzler-Lexikon für Philosophie, ed. Peter Prechtl and Franz-Peter Burkard, 3rd edition (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2008), 249; Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 71ff. 54 Manfred Leber, Vom modernen Roman zur antiken Tragödie: Interpretation von Max Frischs “Homo faber” (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 104. 55 Seelter F. Otto, Die Götter Griechenlands: Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes, 8th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vottorio Kllostermann, 1987), 172. 56 Friedrich Nietzsche to Heinrich Köselitz on October 27, 1887, in Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. III.5: Briefe Januar 1887–Januar 1889, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984) 178–180, here 178.

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Tragic fate, however, counteracts the driving energies of individuation that become manifest in an entrance. This fate is antitheatrical in that it seeks to break the power and joy of this step and to reveal the core of suffering that lies in every entrance. To put it pointedly: fate turns against the making-an-appearance of the subjects who have been sent out onto the stage. The entrance itself thus becomes a tragic device in its own right. In its ideal form, the entrance can be said to highlight an individual, to mark them clearly and endow them with a splendor that distinguishes them in the eyes of others. Tragedy strives to revoke this distinction. Entrances in tragedy always take place before a horizon of existential danger; they refer semiotically and socially to a loss of distinction that is expected in the future or has already occurred. Since its beginnings, tragedy has been a scene for crises of appearance.

Tragedy as an Antitriumphalist Genre For this reason, too, whatever shape it takes tragedy deals with forms of triumphant appearance.57 It may be nothing new to say that tragedy negates its characters’ claims to existence; and it is certainly an Aristotelian commonplace to say that tragedies bring about a change of fortune resulting in the downfall of a supposedly great figure. Nevertheless, by examining the concrete execution of the entrance that builds up this great figure at the very moment of the character’s appearance, we can shed new light on the constitution of tragic form. Tragic entrances refer to already existing court or even military protocols for making an entrance that are designed to produce a triumphal glorification of the subject. Tragedy is thus focused on protocols for making an entrance that aim to jubilantly enhance the natural body. Specifically, tragedy is concerned with forms of self-fashioning that elevate the natural body beyond human dimensions and stage its physical ascent as a sublime object (a “sinnliches Aufsteigen,” to use a phrase from the Grimms’ dictionary).58 If these solemn protocols lend clarity, splendor, and power to the character who is entering, then tragedy functions as an instrument of critique. The studies that follow are thus concerned with the concretization of what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called the “broken” theatricality of tragedy59—it is 57 See Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 7ff. 58 “Auftritt,” in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854), column 765, www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=A07240; see also “Aufsteigen,” meaning 2a, https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=A07118. 59 See Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 168.

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this brokenness that manifests itself in tragic entrances. Tragedies rework the court ceremonies that allow an individual to appear in splendor, and they destroy the differences that set splendid individuals apart from others. They intervene in the triumphal protocol establishing the unfettered power that persons of high status—emperors, sovereigns, and generals—have to make an entrance, and they are directed against the triumphal core contained in every presumption of entering. In short: the following investigation is guided by the idea that tragedy can be described as antitriumphalist genre. It is antitriumphalist in that it allows the theatrical body granted to a human being to make an entrance only in damaged form— in that it turns an individual’s triumph into pathos and exposes them to the effects of an action that usually brings ruin. In the splendor of the entrance, the moment of exposure and surrender is already being prepared. Hans-Thies Lehmann writes that the tragic subject “is faced with the experience that the die is cast on its fate when it takes its first step.”60 This study takes his remark literally. Such an antitriumphalist tendency can already be observed in Aeschylus. Even in his first surviving tragedy, The Persians, he proves to be a master in staging a critique of the entrance, inscribing the signs of the coming downfall onto a splendid entry. From the outset, Aeschylus’s tragedies relativize the grand entrance of sovereign characters in the light of tragic events. After losing the battle of Salamis, King Xerxes appears as a “rag king.”61 In the place of the expected triumphator, a destroyed symbolic body appears. The same applies to the eponymous character of Agamemnon. When Agamemnon returns as victor at the beginning of the Oresteia to Mycenae via Troy, he is furnished with tokens of honor befitting his triumph. But the purple of the carpet unfurled before him only continues the uncertain sea that has left him staggering, as he enters the house where the preparations for his assassination have already been made. In the The Libation Bearers or Choēphóroi, the part the Oresteia trilogy that follows Agamemnon, Orestes’s opening words “I have come to this land and returned from long exile” cannot generate any space-creating power.62 The phrase marks the 60 Lehmann, Theater und Mythos, 136. 61 Siegfried Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie. Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides auf der Bühne ihrer Zeit (Munich: DTV, 1974), 73: “Lumpenheld.” See also Christopher Wild, “Royal Re-entries: Zum Auftritt in der griechischen Tragödie,” in Auftritte: Strategien des In-Erscheinung-Tretens in Künsten und Medien, ed. Annemarie Matzke, Ulf Otto, and Jens Roselt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 33–61, here 37. 62 Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers, in Oresteia, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, Loeb Classical Library 146 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 208–253, here 211; Greek: “heko . . . kai katechomei.” See also Aristophanes, Frogs, in Aristophanes, The Complete Plays, trans. Paul Roche (New York: New American Library, 2005), 590: “I have returned to this land and am back again.”

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arrival of a character who remains unrecognized, who can take his steps only in secret.63 Oedipus’s grand entrance before the people of Thebes, who have been struck by plague, is also broken in two senses: first, by his ignorance—his agnoia64—of his own origins; and second, by the mutilation of his feet, which were pierced when he was a baby, giving him the name Oidipous (“swollen foot”) and making it difficult for him to walk.65 In the Bacchae, too, a triumph remains unrealized. And in the last tragedy of Euripides, it is the epiphany of the god Dionysus that takes place on the tragic stage, but only with a caveat. The power of the word heko—“I arrive”/“I have arrived”—with which the tragedy begins cannot unfold under the conditions of an entrance that is itself furtive.66 The god whose arrival is triumphantly celebrated in the Athenian Dionysia appears as a stranger, unrecognizable to those who are present.67 The prologue of the piece describes the prolonged and uncompleted entrance of a god who never stops arriving and appears only in the indecipherable mask of xenos—the stranger. The tragedy dedicated to this god and his cult has him appear here only in his concealed, not in his epiphanic, might. This double language of entering is of interest here. It seeks out the pathos inherent in the triumph of the persona. Entering in tragedy is not only the seizing of space but, by the same token, “suffered power.”68 It is a form of active voice: it functions as a self-positing subject who appears, speaks, and acts in potentially triumphant aggrandizement. Yet it is also a form of passive voice— of suffering, pain, and loss—and hence, in this sense, the tragic “exposure of the one who is present.”69 Triumph and suffering, presence and privation, combine to form an indissoluble unity that is threatened by reversals. Entrances

63 On the relationship between anagnorisis and entrance, see Vogel, “Who’s there?,” 202ff. 64 On agnoia, see Schadewaldt, Die griechische Tragödie, 27. 65 See also Wild, “Royal Re-entries,” 44. Wild also discusses the way in which power is stripped from entrances made by rulers and gods in Aeschylus and Euripides. 66 On the temporality and significance of the word “heko,” which marks the first entrance in many Greek tragedies, see Susanne Gödde, Das Drama der Hikesie: Ritual und Rhetorik in Aischylos’ “Hiketiden” (Münster: Aschendorff, 2000), 38. 67 See Latacz, Einführung in die griechische Tragödie, 43. 68 Lehmann, Theater und Mythos, 63. 69 Walter Benjamin, “Theater und Rundfunk: Zur gegenseitigen Kontrolle ihrer Erziehungsarbeit,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II.2: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 773–776, here 775. On Benjamin’s concept of “Exponiertheit,” or “exposure,” see Samuel Weber, “Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality,” in Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 97–120, here 111f.: “The term exponiert has to do with being ‘exposed,’ but in a variety of senses: here, the term suggests risk, taking chances, uncertainties . . . ”

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must accordingly be examined in these various manifestations: as triumphal and restrictive, as active and passive; in instances where they generate form and where they undo it. In the splendor of appearing, one can read the traces of impending peripeteias. This book thus attends to the ways in which entrances have been rhetorically and aesthetically formulated in the tragic process— which entails considering the means used to stage tragic individuation together with the crises that threaten the theatricality of the characters.

Figure and Background Yet if in its own execution the entrance already summons the counterforces that seek to undo it as appearance in the emphatic sense, it can never be fully realized. It is further beset by crisis inasmuch as it cannot be completed, and the full presence it promises ultimately remains lacking. Its step is always an unfinished passage, just as the persona it advances ultimately remains unclear; faced with the resistance that builds up against its appearance, the entering character can only achieve partial articulation. In neither drama nor tragedy does the goal of complete individuation and unconditional liberation of the character on stage appear to be within reach. As Friedrich Nietzsche notes in an astute remark about Aeschylus, every entrance leaves an unrealized remainder: And here he encountered something which can come as no surprise to anyone who has been initiated into the deeper secrets of Aschylean tragedy: he perceived something incommensurable in every feature and every line, a certain deceiving definiteness, and at the same time a puzzling depth, indeed infinity, in the background. Even the clearest figure still trailed a comet’s tail after it which seemed to point into the unknown, into that which cannot be illuminated. The same twilight covered the structure of the drama, particularly the significance of the chorus.70

70 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 58. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, vol. 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1980), 9–156, here 80–81: “Und hier nun war ihm begegnet, was dem in die tieferen Geheimnisse der äschyleischen Tragoedie Eingeweihten nicht unerwartet sein darf: er gewahrte etwas Incommensurables in jedem Zug und in jeder Linie, eine gewisse täuschende Bestimmtheit und zugleich eine räthselhafte Tiefe, ja Unendlichkeit des Hintergrundes. Die klarste Figur hatte immer noch einen Kometenschweif an sich der in’s Ungewisse, Unaufhellbare zu deuten schien. Dasselbe Zwielicht lag über dem Bau des Drama’s, zumal über der Bedeutung des Chors.”

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The crisis of entering that becomes manifest in this observation is a crisis of figure and ground. It is provoked by a lack of individuation. In tragedy, determinate forms remain bound to what is indeterminate, what is bright remains bound to what cannot be illuminated, and what is clear, to what is mysterious. The hallmark of the tragic entrance is thus a liminality that has been made permanent, suspending the energetic step at the threshold. This suspension leaves it unclear whether the person who is poised to appear is not also disappearing, and whether what is becoming manifest will not immediately recede again into indifference. Under the conditions of tragedy, it does not seem possible to make a definitive distinction between stepping forward and stepping back.71 The divide between figure and ground remains unstable. No form can be permanently stabilized against a tragic ground, as the ground remains present even at the moment of individuation. This study uses the concept of the ground or background—in German: Grund or Hintergrund—to designate the form by which theatrical phenomena refer to what is boundless, endless, or open in what lies before them. In this context, it is difficult to pin down the meaning of the German word “Grund.” It denotes both the practical, background space of the theater, which extends from the background scenes of the set to the imagined realm of the backstage, and the unlimited, indefinite ground that cannot be contained within the framework of the stage yet also holds a generative potential and functions as a medium of figuration. Because of its indeterminacy, the ground or background continues past the concrete spatiality located beyond the stage that is associated with the concept of backstage72—although this, too, is bound up with what is “unformed [and] shapeless” and, like the ground, can never be completely separated from the scene.73

71 The repertoire of concepts I am developing here will attempt to comprehend these processes of perception. See Jan C. Bouman, The Figure-Ground Phenomenon in Experimental and Phenomenological Psychology (Stockholm 1968), 92, as well as 85ff., where Bouman also discusses the inability to distinguish between “protruding” and “receding.” Bouman provides an introduction to the figure-ground contrast in Gestalt theory: “The primary distinction between figure and ground is limitedness versus unlimitedness” (97). This he contrasts to the “primary distinction” of figuration: “The figure is finite, limited, circumscribed, bounded, ending. The ground is infinite, unlimited, unbounded, endless” (231). See also Stefan Neuner, “Figur und Grund,” in Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft: Hundert Grundbegriffe, ed. Stefan Jordan and Jürgen Müller (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012,) 112–116; James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially the section “Figure and Ground,” 78–129. 72 See Annette Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince: Auftrittsformen in der Oper des Ancien Régime (Paderborn: Wilhlem Fink Verlag, 2016), 20ff. 73 Bettine Menke, “Off/On,” in Auftreten, 180–188, here 185: “What is present always relates to what is absent, the theatrical figure [die theatrale Gestalt] always relates to the shapelessness

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The concept of ground or background, however, aims at a more diffuse and unlimited zone of the in-between that cannot be grasped in terms of dichotomies. It therefore remains unclear whether this zone is still on- or offstage, or whether it is not rather a kind of “shifting of scenery” that produces the transition between the two.74 In any case, the ground or background is in play when one speaks of the contouring of an “anthropomorphic figure” on the stage.75 In contrast to the space of backstage, which presupposes a spatial division of the stage even as it calls this division into question, the ground and background gain their significance from the fact that they refer primarily to the spectator’s field of vision. Although they also convey notions of something unformed and indeterminate, they are linked to a process of perception that is susceptible to crisis and deception. This process traces how a figure separates itself and emerges from indeterminacy. In Shakespeare’s dramas, entrances are primarily reflected in the observations they elicit in a beholder. At least beginning with the fog of Elsinore in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s protocols for making an entrance pay heed to the initially diffuse visual field in which a perception becomes apparent. Fundamental for the appearance of the figure in Shakespeare’s tragedies is the gaze that follows the transition from “nothing” to “something” and registers the gradual fabrication of a figure.76 Since Shakespeare, this task of shaping a character who is arriving has been assigned to a spectator located on stage. It is only with the spectator’s eyes that we see a figure approaching, and only in the spectator’s

[das Ungestalte] from which it attempts to separate itself by entering.” Every theatrical event, Menke argues, smuggles in its own backstage, questioning the separation that constitutes the scene as a place of figuration: “If I began by asking how we wish to read the ‘On/Off,’ the typographical arrangement of the title, it has now become apparent that the slash is not only the mark of the cision and excision [Scheidung und Abscheidung], or additionally of the relationship, between what is given. The exclusion that sets up the space of the theatrical event in which the dramatic action unfolds establishes no binary distinction; rather, the on is—indissolubly—bound to the off. Being theatrically “on-site” [Das theatrale Vor-Ort-Sein] is negatively determined by the off, which is not only meant to be cut off but already obliviated by the figuration of the excision [Abscheidung].” See also Stefanie Diekmann, Backstage: Konstellationen von Theater und Kino (Berlin: Berlin Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013), 17. Backstage is defined here as an “exclusive, constitutively shielded place” (21). 74 Gottfried Boehm, “Der Grund, oder das ikonische Kontinuum,” in Der Grund: Das Feld des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm and Matteo Burioni (Munich: Verlag Wilhlem Fink Verlag, 2012), 29–95, here 75. 75 Menke, “Off/On,” 186. Bettine Menke also speaks in this case of “background” [Hintergrund]. 76 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 166 (I/1), line 25, 169 (I/1), line 57. On Hamlet, see Vogel, “Who’s there?,” 33; Stefan Laqué, Hermetik und Dekonstruktion: Erfahrung von Transzendenz in Shakespeares Hamlet (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), 149ff.

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fallible interpretation does this figure take shape: “My hopes do shape him for the governor,”77 it is said as Othello emerges from the stormy background of the sea to land on the beach of Cyprus, which is also a “strand of visible appearance.”78 Accordingly, descriptions of entrances can be adequate only if they also factor in the ground from which the entrances begin. Tragedy actively takes part in setting backgrounds. Tragic protocols for making an entrance do not cleanly cut away the ground. They always leave it to play a part when they send a figure to cross the threshold and advance. In tragedy, too, one feature of the ground is its unlimited mutability. For Gottfried Boehm, the ground in art opens up “a rich spectrum of colorings,” ranging “from descriptive vividness to extreme abstraction, from a phenomenon of the world to an inner quality of human beings.”79 One central concern of the present study is to investigate the specific colorings of tragic backgrounds and the crises of entering that become visible in them. The aim is to explore the different spatial, architectural, atmospheric, psychological, and social realizations of the background from which the figure emerges without ever entirely leaving it behind. In the beginnings of tragedy, it is initially the chorus that primes the ground for the actor’s entrance and affords the tragic character with space to enter.80 Modern variants are the indefinite forms of the masses, the crowd, or the entourage. The background can also be a convoluted palace with a monstrous, despotic power raging in its back rooms; it can be given in the sublime form of a landscape, a sea, or the

77 William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Maurice R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1979), 50 (II/1), line 55. 78 Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer: Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher, 4th edition (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 32. 79 Boehm, Der Grund, 29f. 80 Hans-Thies Lehmann’s conception remains tied to a strong individuation: “The material reality of that ‘solitude born in and of form’ [formgeborene Einsamkeit] in the discourse of the theater is nevertheless the isolation of the physically present voice of the protagonist . . . in the emptiness of this space, which also visibly contours the body and irrevocably separates it from the surrounding world” (Lehmann, Theater und Mythos, 58). On the notion of Gegend (area, region, vicinity), see Jörn Etzold, “Gegend ohne Könige: Zur Bühne in Hölderlins Empedokles,” in Bühne: Realität, Geschichte und Aktualität raumbildender Prozesse, ed. Norbert Otto Eke, Irina Kaldrack, and Ulrike Haß (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014), 305–328. Ulrike Haß has previously described the relationship between the collective of the chorus and the individual as a relationship of figure and ground. See her essay “Woher kommt der Chor?” in Maske und Kothurn 58 (2012): 13–30, here 13ff. Theater studies has pursued this recourse to an indeterminate referent in relation to the tragic chorus. The very etymology of the word “chorus” points to a ground or arché that literally remains in play in tragedy. Haß uses the quite beautiful concept of “founding energy” [Gründungsenergie]: “This founding energy, however, can only be articulated as something conceded” (15).

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sky, and it can shift the entrance into the boundlessness of the elements. It can materialize in weather conditions, as mist or fog that further imperils the already-faint outline of the human being. It can, however, also become manifest in the tragic subject’s ignorance of itself, encompassing everything that is beyond that subject’s ken but nevertheless has a determining influence on its fate. And finally, it can be an affective ground—the uncontrollable force field of affects that tears the subject out of the ground, as well as a past or a turbulent nothingness in which what arises, perishes. In all its manifestations, as in tragedy, the ground is what exceeds the boundaries of any individual to shift their form into indeterminacy even as they arise. It is a space-filling haze that “heightens the degree of indeterminacy” and decomposes what it grounds.81 The ground at issue here is thus more than an imprecise metaphor for tragic fatality. It is being taken seriously in its theatrical and textual phenomenality. To quote Max Scheler, in tragedy we constantly “see darkly beyond the occurrence itself that appears to us as tragic.”82 This study will look more closely at what surrounds such occurrences. If the entrance itself takes place in stepping forth from this ground, then through it we can also perceive the power of the continuum that persists as active behind and between the characters.83 On stage, the ground that the philosophy of tragedy has called tragic manifests itself spatially or textually. A landscape, a field of fog, or a palace each steer tragedy’s “work of figuration” in respectively very different directions.84 They alter the clarity of an outline, modulating the process of individuation in oscillating between various forms for physically advancing or retracting the figure. Tragedy’s milieu differs from that of other genres in that it is taken to be dark and obscure, regardless of whatever colorings it may acquire. Comedy, by contrast, creates other, more world-encompassing backgrounds. We might even call them background worlds, since they allow the world to cross over the boundaries to which the characters

81 Boehm, Der Grund, 42. 82 Max Scheler, “Über das Tragische,” Die Weißen Blätter 8 (1914): 758–776, here 761. See Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 168. 83 See Menke, “Off/On,” 182: Martin Seel, “Ereignis: Eine kleine Phänomenologie,” in Ereignis: Eine fundamentale Kategorie der Zeiterfahrung; Anspruch und Aporien, ed. Nikolaus MüllerSchöll (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2003), 37–48, here 38ff. Martin Seel speaks of the “manifesting” or “entering” [Auftreten] and the “occurrence” [Vorkommnis] of events. His formulations point to a theatrical core in the concept of event by including the step into visibility as part its definition while also, in consideration of this movement, capturing the event’s theatricality. 84 See Erving Goffman, “On Face Work,” in Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (London: Penguin, 1967), 5–47; Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

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have accommodated themselves, without exposing those figures to doom. The higher the share of world in the background, the lower the share of tragedy.85 The following analyses are devoted to dramatic and tragic texts that actively include the ground in their dramaturgy. They begin with Racine’s profondeur and end with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Retracing changing cultural conditions, they examine the relationship between ground and entrance and ask which crisis of entering can be observed against which grounds. The historical fulcrum is nevertheless not ancient tragedy, however much its entrance protocols might determine the genre’s afterlife. Rather, it is the tragedy of the neoclassical period in its dual historical significance: the tragedy of French neoclassicism under the rules of the doctrine classique, and the tragedy of what Rainer Koselleck termed the “threshold period” or “saddle period” around 1800, which organized the genre and its modes of appearance and action in fundamentally different ways. This book will mainly focus on the dismantling—and transformation—of court and military pageantry in tragedy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, it is tragedy itself that loses ground during this period. Its forms for making entrances reflect not only the loss of legitimacy experienced by court protocols in the tragic universe, but increasingly also the loss of legitimacy of a leading aristocratic genre that bourgeois society was able to adopt and renew only with restrictions.

Summary The studies in this book are grouped into three chapters. The second chapter deals with the relationship of tragedy to the court protocol for making an entrance and the court space of entering. The starting point is the robust court culture of entering under Louis XIV, in which splendid entrances furnish proof of existence. This serves as a foil for the relativization of entrances by tragedy. The focus is on the basic tension between triumphant entrances and tragic profondeur. Titled “Tragedy in the Court Space of Appearance,” this chapter traces the tragic deconstruction of sovereign forms of entering to illustrate the consequences that come from extinguishing princely splendors on the court stage. It turns to the tragedies of Racine to examine the darkening of the stage under the impact of withdrawn presence. Racine’s tragic plays are set against arcane

85 Similar to Shakespeare’s conception of background. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 327. See also the section “Surrounded: The Embedding of Entrances” in chapter 3.

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backgrounds posing a threat that is at once shapeless and deadly, and that decomposes court forms of appearance. An analysis of the scena per angolo then allows us to imagine a model of the stage that transforms the illuminated perspectival space of the court into a labyrinthine enigmatic architecture, thus vividly revealing the repercussions of tragic depth on representative publicness. The material for this analysis is found in the stage designs that the stage engineers of the Galli Bibiena family created from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries for the opera stages of European courts. By tilting the central visual axis, these engineers transformed the stage into a space of surveillance in which actors move about anxiously before a hidden but omnipotent eye. The section on Schiller’s Don Carlos is devoted to the shattering of the liaison des scènes, the chain of scenes or entrances that seamlessly connects the semantic space of the drama. Visibly losing control of the ceremonial that governed entrances, Philip II is able to maintain his power only by withdrawing from the court scene and moving into the background and onto the side of the obscure officials of the Inquisition, who operate in the dark. Hence the third chapter and middle part of the book, “Wavering Shapes,” is devoted to Goethe’s antitragic protocols for making an entrance. Under the sign of life, Goethe develops alternate forms for making an entrance that are deployed in tragedy against tragedy. Goethe’s theater is not a plot-based theater but emphatically a theater of entrances in which these actions are realized in dynamic relationships between figure and ground. As tragedy forces the figure to return to the background, the entrance conversely becomes the transitory moment of a generative, creative, and inexhaustible process of bringing forth. It is the stepping forth of the character that realizes this entrance protocol of life, which ceaselessly produces new and varied shapes and thus participates in the formal processes to which Goethe’s texts are generally committed. This can be seen not only in a reading of Goethe’s unfinished Pandora drama but also in an analysis of the Helen act (Act III) in the second part of his Faust tragedy. Goethe’s entrances are entrances embedded within their surroundings— they take place not out of something, but rather into something, and they remain constantly surrounded by the medium in which they are realized. Concrete architectural spaces for making entrances are transformed ever more distinctly into media for making entrances, as we will see in the example of the Helen act of the play. The chapter thus devotes individual analyses to the key concepts of surroundings, atmosphere, and landscape that play a role in this context. It concludes with an analysis of the “Masquerade” of Faust II, returning to the transformation of court protocols for making an entrance, but this time within the framework of Goethe’s concepts of form. What we find here is the dissolution and mediatization of the masquerade as a court genre based on

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the entrance of a court body, along with the transformation of its fixed formulation via strict allegorical distinctions into a theater of ghostly crowds in which entrances loses both their function of articulating distinction and their physical foundation. The fourth chapter of the book, “Triumph and Rending Movement,” focuses on the military entrance protocols of triumph to trace the failure of triumphant entrances in Heinrich von Kleist’s war tragedies Robert Guiscard and Penthesilea. The guiding thesis of this chapter is the interminability of war—the prolongations of its “ground(s)”—which sooner or later leads to the breaking off, delay, or complete weakening of spectacular forms of entrance. Upon the ground of war, a force field is encountered in which the energies of life that were articulated in a regulated form in Goethe’s theater of entrances now make a destructive appearance. Entrances amid the energetic field of war succumb to iconoclastic violence. The book thus concludes with an attempt to reveal the antitriumphalist tendency of tragedy in the concrete scenario of war, and to make visible the destructive activities of a ground that endangers the process of figuration from the outset. The focus will ultimately lie on a protocol for the entry of unleashed forces—that is to say, on the empowerment of an iconoclastic energy that directs the ground itself to come forward while simultaneously tearing apart the figure it implicates. This last chapter aims to demonstrate that Kleist’s dramas tell a prehistory of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Nietzsche’s treatise on tragedy poses the question of how the energeia that initially serves to enliven the figure becomes a rending force that takes control of the stage under the name of Dionysus—and how, conversely, the dynamics of such an iconoclastic entrance are redirected toward life to beget new entrances. This will require a detour via Rousseau and Joseph Anselm Feuerbach.

Chapter 2 Tragedy in the Court Space of Appearance Preliminary Remark. Entrée Specifications of the Court Protocol for Making an Entrance Levers/Entrées As Norbert Elias shows in The Court Society, the entrée is the ceremonial form that decisively structures the court’s culture of representation. Analyzing the frequently cited example of the grand lever of Louis XIV, Elias strikingly demonstrates how the sovereign’s day began with a sequence of entrées in which court society presented itself, ranked hierarchically, before the eyes of the king.1 The very word “lever” refers in this context to a movement of entering: it describes the impressive rising up of the monarch, as the sensual ascent of a sublime object—“ein sinnliches Aufsteigen,” in the sense defined by the Brothers Grimm— along with the entrances of his subjects and satellites that this sunrise makes possible.2 Here, the members of the court society, including the king, exist only insofar as they have made an entrance,3 and it is only when they have crossed

1 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 78ff. On the function of visibility and salience at court, see the work of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Höfische Öffentlichkeit: Zur zeremoniellen Selbstdarstellung des brandenburgischen Hofes vor dem europäischen Publikum,” in Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte, ed. Johannes Kunisch, vol. 7 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 145–176; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des alten Reiches, 2nd edition (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2013). On the preconditions and forms of court socialization see Rainer A. Müller, Der Fürstenhof in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 41; on the exemplary character of the French court: see Markus Hengerer, “Hofzeremoniell, Organisation und Grundmuster sozialer Differenzierung am Wiener Hof im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Hofgesellschaft und Höflinge an europäischen Fürstenhöfen in der Frühen Neuzeit (15.–18. Jh.), ed. Klaus Malettke and Chantal Grell (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001), 337–368; Rudolf Schlögl, “Der frühneuzeitliche Hof als Kommunikationsraum: Interaktionstheoretische Perspektiven der Forschung,” in Geschichtswissenschaft und Systemtheorie: Exemplarische Fallstudien, ed. Frank Becker (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2004), 185–226. 2 See “Aufsteigen,” meaning 2a, in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854), column 748, https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=A07118. 3 See Annette Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince: Auftrittsformen in der Oper des Ancien Régime (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016), 32. What matters at court is to appear at the right time and in the right place: “A parc at Versailles is, like the parquet halls of the palace, a stage where one does not necessarily move or stand about, but rather makes entrances and exits.” See also https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-002

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the threshold of visibility that they are in the world. This entrance protocol dominates the daily life of the court; it decides who is admitted when and where, and which announcements these admissions require. The entrée integrates individuals into the framework of the court’s semiotic cosmos and secures the power of any person’s court-sanctioned role over their drive for self-representation. Louis Marin, too, structures The Portrait of the King, his famous study on the politics of representation during the ancien régime, into “entrées”: he, too, chooses this first, elementary, and supremely dominant representational unit of the court as the key concept of his analysis.4 Entrées also structure performances on the court stage.5 The various kinds of court festivals that are at home in this space are also structured by entrées and clearly marked as ceremonial forms. And in the same way as daily life or festivities at court, the ballet performances, operas, and comedies that accompany these celebrations take shape as a series of ceremonial entrances made by individual persons or groups. Sarah Cohen aptly speaks of a “stream of entrées” characterizing forms of court ceremonial.6 In the theater, too, the spectacular entry of a character into the illuminated space of the court becomes a formgenerating principle. Whether it is in the royal bedroom, the tragédie en musique, or the ballet de cour: entrées emphasize the dynamic-energetic moment of arrival; they impart the information necessary for a person or a character to be recognized, while also guaranteeing that the one making an entrance be received and respected. As both image and movement, they lend weight to the person entering and situate them within the court hierarchy. At the same time, entrances presuppose rigorous scrutiny by the court system of gatekeeping, which tolerates neither surprises nor unknowns coming into the proximity of the court and imposes strict requirements for admission to its scene. One the one hand, then, there is daily life at the court, the cosmos of Versailles, and the political reality of the ancien régime; and on the other, the ballet de cour, the court opera of tragédie en musique, and the court’s ceremonial processions and masked pageants. But all of them follow the very same entrance protocol devoted to representing the court’s hierarchy.

Doris Kolesch, Das Theater der Emotionen: Ästhetik und Politik zur Zeit Ludwigs XIV. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006), 113. 4 “Entrées” are accordingly rendered as “entrances” in the English translation; see Louis Marin, The Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), v. 5 On the proximity of theatrical and ceremonial forms of representation see Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 38. 6 Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18.

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Spoken tragic theater, too, is bound to the requirements for admission, albeit with limitations. It is subject to the rules of the court in that it demands of those who appear that they first and foremost be recognizable. In the universe of the court, none are admitted who are unknown.7 Rather, entrances are to ensure that a character approaching the stage can be clearly identified. French tragedy differs from Greek tragedy in that it allows neither masked entrances nor an anagnorisis. At the very latest when the character arrives, the indeterminate nature of the stranger is transformed into an identity with a name. In the Abbé d’Aubignac’s 1657 treatise Pratique du théâtre, which continually emphasizes the proximity of tragedy to the court in formulating essential rules for the doctrine classique, we find the following instructions for making an entrance: The second [observation necessary in practice] is that the poet must not send any actor on stage who is not immediately known to the spectators, not only in terms of his name and characteristics, but also of the feeling he brings to the scene. Otherwise, the spectator will be baffled and all the beautiful speeches that are made on stage will be lost, because those who listen to them will not know to whom they should be assigned. Hence it has often occurred that twenty or thirty excellent verses have gone by useless and cold, because the spectator did not know who was speaking them, or what motive the character had for speaking them in this way. . . . We will see that the ancients never fall short when it comes to this rule, as the choruses, who never leave the stage, are very useful to the characters in allowing them to be known; for as soon as a new character appears on the stage, he is named by the chorus, accompanied by expressions of fear, astonishment, or joy.8

Arguing from the perspective of a court performance practice, d’Aubignac also attributes a ceremonial function to the chorus of Greek tragedy: he retroactively assigns to the chorus the important office of announcing those who enter, as the office that makes it possible to unquestionably establish a character’s identity the moment they arrive. This directive brings the rules of tragedy into alignment

7 See Elias, The Court Society, 131ff. 8 Abbé d’Aubignac, La Pratique du Théâtre, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: chez Jean Frederic Bernard, 1715), 251: “La seconde [observation nécessaire dans la pratique] est, Que le Poëte ne doit mettre aucun Acteur sur son Theatre qui ne soit aussi-tôt connu des Spectateurs, non seulement en son nom & en la qualité; mais encore au sentiment qu’il apporte sur la Scène: autrement le Spectateur est en peine, & tous les beaux discours qui se font lors au Theatre, sont perdus; parce que ceux qui les écoutent, ne sçavent à qui les appliquer. Et de là souvent est-il arrivé que vingt & trente vers excellens ont passé pour inutiles & froids, & parce que le Spectateur ne connoissoit point celui qui les proferoit, ni quel motif il avoit de parler ainsi. . . . Or on ne verra point que les Anciens manquent jamais à cette regle, à quoi les Chœurs, qui ne sortoient point du Theatre, leur étoient fort utiles pour les Personnages qui leur pouvoient être connus; car si-tôt qu’il en parroissoit un nouveau sur le Theatre, le Chœur le nommoit avec quelques paroles d’un sentiment de crainte, d’étonnement, ou de joie.”

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with the protocols of the court. In both scenes, the goal of all ceremonial endeavors is to guarantee that an individual can be recognized and distinguished from all others, while at the same time attuning the individual to the affective situation associated with their entrance. Similarly, Julius von Rohr’s 1733 treatise Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft Der Großen Herren (Introduction to the science of the ceremonial of great lords) indicates for entrances at court: “The spectators must immediately be able to see, from just a few steps or gestures of a character, and without a word being spoken, the kind of person they should imagine.”9

The King as the First Actor Nevertheless, this clarity can only be achieved if the room in which the entrance takes place is already illuminated. Only in the light can one tell from steps and gestures who is appearing on stage. The task of providing this light belongs to the prince, who is introduced by court ceremonial as the central figure, the one who brings illumination and creates space. The entrée of satellites must be preceded by that of their ruler; and his appearance lights up the space and makes these figures visible. The lumen of the courtier, like that of all other subjects, can only shine forth if it has been preceded by the shining of princely splendor. Louis Marin declares the king to be an “archactor”10 whose entrance makes other entrances possible: “As source producing all light the king’s portrait is not only the sun in the central place of the narrative . . . but also the light that spreads everywhere and that lands in bursts on all and on everyone and makes them be seen.”11 Through the power of his light, the king endows the shadowy outlines of his satellites with clarity and transforms the unreadable world of the night into a completely legible universe of signs concentrically arranged around one central star.12 We find this union of actor and prince, ceremonial and theater, in the very first texts written to accompany the appearance of Louis XIV in the representative publicness of the court. Isaac Benserade’s libretto to the Ballet royal de la

9 Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft Der Großen Herren (Berlin: Berlin bey Joh. Andreas Rüdiger, 1733), 802. 10 Marin, Portrait of the King, 66. 11 Marin, Portrait of the King, 67 (emphasis in the original). 12 See Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 42ff.

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nuit from 1653, in which Louis XIV made his first major appearance as a dancer,13 culminates in the entrée of the “Roy representant le Soleil levant;14 it presents, before the eyes of court society, the sovereign in the role of the sun, as part of a performance of a ballet de cour (Figure 1). The genre of the ballet de cour combines ceremonial and theater: it is at once a presenting-to-be-seen in dance and a ceremonial self-description of the court society, a performance in which court society itself participates by watching and by dancing.15 The verses declaimed as the king appears paradigmatically announce the structure of an entrance made by a ruler who brings light, deploying all rhetorical features that can serve to secure the power of the entrance. The ballet, composed of individual episodes, executes a transition from the “feeble clarity” of the night through dawn to the spectacular sunrise in the morning.16 The royal sun turns night into day, separating light from darkness, and with his first step onto the stage, the king divides the indeterminate sphere of twilight into areas of light and dark, which now stand harshly opposed to each other. This step is conceived as a world-making act of separation: the verses accompanying it present an analogy between the entrée royale and the act of creation. Hence as a consequence of its “particular quality of dazzling majesty, which marks it as unique,” the entrée royale introduces a decisive difference into a preworld ruled by twilight.17 The verses written to be spoken by the king proclaim unequivocally that the “greatest day” commenced by his appearance creates new temporal and spatial structures whose center he clearly occupies.18 Defined by his entrance, the solar sovereign defines and dominates the illuminated space of representation, ordering the hours that structure each day at court: “It is incumbent

13 See Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 49ff.; Albrecht Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007), 197ff.; Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 134ff. 14 Isaac de Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, divisé en quatre parties, ou quatre veilles: Et dansé par sa Majesté le 23 février 1653 (Paris: R. Ballard, 1653), 66. 15 See Cohen, Art, Dance and the Body, 18. 16 Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 65. 17 Anonymous, “De Paris, le 1 Mars 1653,” Gazette 28 (1653), 222–224, here 223: “caractère particulier d’éclatante Majesté, qui en marquoit la différence.” See also Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 43ff. 18 See also Aurore’s récit in Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 65: “Depuis que i’ouvre l’Orient / Iamais si pompeuse & si fiere, / Et iamais d’un air si riant / Ie n’ay brillé dans ma carriere / Ny precedé tant de lumiere.”

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Figure 1: Henri Gissey, Louis XIV as the rising sun in Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit (1653), akg-images no. AKG329992.

on me,” he declares, “to rule my time and my seasons.”19 The king’s entrée is thus understood as a commencement—as a form of movement that posits a beginning. “Beginning to shine over the mountain peak / I have already begun to arouse admiration.”20 The entrée royale achieves a performative effect by creating the very space into which it enters. It creates space, bestows life, and generates form—and thus enables the existence of all other players.21 Benserade, too, clearly states that it is only in the reflection of this sovereign light that these characters take on form and color: “I come to give objects form and color / And those who do not recognize

19 Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 67: “C’est à moy de regler mon temps & mes saisons.” 20 Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 66: “Sur la cime des monts commençant d’éclairer / Ie commence déja de me faire admirer.” 21 See Marin, Portrait of the King, 68: “[H]e envelops them in the unity of his field, in the brilliance of his light. [H]e is that stage itself, the luminous space of their [the others of the history] representation.”

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my light / Will feel my warmth.”22 The assertion of power made by the royal entrance is perceptible here in a moment of unreserved success. The form of the steps assigned to this entrance carries a corresponding weight: in the discourse on dancing at court, the solemn step of the king possesses a positing, shaping power. Entrances of the solar monarch take place as an entrée grave—executed in a tempo of andante—in opposition to faster forms of movement.23 And the presence of this entering unfolds not in mere visibility, but in a powerful, grave manner of stepping forward that measures out and takes possession of a space. Indeed, this step constitutes the royal power of entering, as is still clearly evident in the grand state portrait painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud in 1701, which presents Louis XIV not only in a magnificent coronation robe but with his left foot turned out in the fashion of a ballet master’s step—a pose the king had employed to stage himself since his youth, as we find here with his appearance in the Ballet royal de la nuit.24 This “look at him walk”25 is indispensable for the production of the ruler’s presence in the space of the court.

Triumph The triumphant features of this entrance protocol are unmistakable: the conquering gesture of the entrée royale continues the triumphal traditions that have shaped the entry of rulers since antiquity.26 The court’s forms of representation and, in particular, the form of the ruler’s entrance that developed at the courts of the early modern period derive from the Roman triumphal forms, which were 22 Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 66: “Ie vien rendre aux objets la forme, & la couleur, / Et qui ne voudroit pas avoüer ma lumiere / Sentira ma chaleur.” 23 See Fiona Garlick, “Dances to Evoke the King: The Majestic Genre Chez Louis XIV,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 15, no. 2 (1997): 10–34, here 23. The monarch’s entrée possesses a certain gravity: its heavy and musically timed step dictates the meter of court space and time. Its cadence can be read from the striding figures and tempi of the overtures that govern the step of the entering prince. Robert North (1651–1734) noted a contrast here between a “solemn” and “jerky” gait: “What is more relevant than a solemn dancer’s entry, with his lofty cuts and no trifling steps, which soon follow fast enough?” Quoted from Garlick, “Dances to Evoke the King,” 16. On the entrée grave, see Garlick, “Dances to Evoke the King,” 14. 24 See Rainer Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel, 1975), 20. 25 Pierre Corneille, “L’illusion comique,” in Corneille, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 612–688, here 619 (line 80). 26 See George Kernodle, From Art to Theater: Form and Convention in the Renaissance, 4th edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 70ff.; Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 32–37.

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rediscovered by the Humanists in the fifteenth century and then, via sources in Latin, entered the semiotic repertoire used to represent Europe’s princes.27 The Roman triumphal emblems became resources for representing the ruler on a majestic stage of court ceremony.28 The European princes saw themselves less in the succession of Roman commanders who triumphantly entered Rome after victory in battle than of the Roman Emperor Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE), who made the triumph an integral part of imperial representation even as it became less important to celebrate any specific military victory. The entry of the “Roy representant le Soleil” into the Ballet royal de la nuit also follows the model of the ceremonial ingressus (entry) of Roman triumphators, which was conceived as a symbolic act of conquest that exhausted all rhetorical and theatrical possibilities in order to demonstrate, through this entrance, an unfettered power over the space. Making an entrance accordingly means appearing in the pomp of a victor who has vanquished all his enemies.29 The triumphal entrance, especially in a solar form, is an unchecked penetration into subjugated terrain; it is a swift avancement that meets with no resistance. This entry is bound up with a claim to a triumphant seizure of space, with a grant of unrestricted dominion at the moment the ruler appears, and with a recognition of his unlimited power to assert his will and impose his presence.30 At the same time, understanding the ways in which the entrance was privileged in the ceremonials of the early modern period also requires considering the influence of the Christian adventus tradition, which linked the event of arrival with the expectations of salvation history. The entry of the ruler as God’s representative on earth always came with a promise of divine salvation in human history. It took place within a metaphysical scheme of order that interpreted the ancient triumphal forms

27 See Jörg Jochen Berns, Höfische Festkultur in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, 1590–1666 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), 702ff. 28 Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 13: “‘Triumphalism’ transforms the military triumph from a celebration and a site of contestation into a mystifying instrument of absolutism.” 29 See Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 66: “En montant sur mon Char i’ay pris soin d’écarter / Beaucoup de Phaëtons qui vouloient y monter.” The ballet celebrates the victory over the Fronde; see Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 136. 30 See Miller, Roman Triumphs, 13. A triumphal carriage is used in the Ballet royal de la nuit, as well, which immediately identifies the sovereign as a “maistre” or “cocher” (coachman); Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit (13 and 20). The sun chariot bearing the horae, which bears the king as he enters and is borrowed from the story of Phaeton in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, shows the sovereign in the role of the triumphator from the Roman tradition. At the same time, the absolutist courts enhance this Roman model as they reinterpret it, transforming it from an expression of military triumphalism into a ritual form celebrating unrestricted rule.

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through a Christian lens. Framed against this background, the triumphator was a coming God whose arrival took place before a religious horizon of meaning. But he was potentially also the Christ of the passion crowned in thorns, or the Christ who entered Jerusalem in genus humile upon a donkey on Palm Sunday.31 As Ernst Kantorowicz has shown, Christianity transposes the Roman ritual of triumph into the rhetorical framework of plain style: to guard against profane hubris, it presents the ruler in the figure of a servant. It cannot be said with any certainty whether the prince’s splendor will bring life or death, form or destruction. The sovereign’s light may dazzle or warm those upon whom it shines, and the one may easily turn into the other, just as it can also blind those to whom it has given warmth. What must be noted here in any case is the connection between light and power that is realized in a triumphal entrance. This crystallizes in the term “éclat,” which the entrance produces as both the highest splendor and a potentially deadly attack of light.32 Louis Marin describes the luminous intensity of Louis Quatorze as the bursting of an unimaginable brightness, which also carries the danger of blinding the king’s beholders and thus obliterating them in a flash.33 The life-giving offerings that the sovereign brings with his entrance can turn fatal.

Amplification The characteristics of this solar entrance protocol, which was first articulated during the Renaissance and then flourished in absolutist France, can be found in all ceremonial entrances that symbolically consolidate the authority of the sovereign. To succeed, it is crucial that these entrances amplify the ruler’s persona—that they intensify the power of its entrance and increase the force of its displacement. This enlargement, which pursues the aim of flectere and serves to overpower the spectator, is achieved by embellishing the body making an entrance with attributes that increase its splendor.34 Such splendor is meant to 31 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “The ‘King’s Advent’ and the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin Publisher, 1965), 37–75. 32 See Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat, 199; Marin, Portrait of the King, 66. 33 See Marin, Portrait of the King, 66–67. “From among all these characters, that of His Majesty must burst forth [éclater]. . . . [T]he king’s portrait must ‘strike, with the intensity of its light, the eyes and minds’ (quoted from Paul Pellisson, 1624–1693).” 34 See Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), especially the chapter: “The Art of Representation,” 143–187; Ernst Künzl, Der römische Triumph: Siegesfeiern im antiken Rom (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), especially the chapter “Triumphator und

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place those present under a yoke,35 while its attributes are meant to make visible a symbolic political body upon the natural body of the king. They include the metallic costume worn by the figure, its exaltation by means of buskins, wreaths, or carriages, its enclosure by an entourage, and the erection of vestibules and portals—everything that might expand the scope and radius of this appearance beyond the natural measure of a human being. Yet amplification also has a temporal aspect. Making the audience wait for an entrance can enhance its impact, for instance. The hesitation of the sovereign intensifies the phase of anticipation; it stretches the time of his approach and prolongs the path of his entry. Not least, amplification is also evident in a grand entrance’s need for both a vanguard and a rearguard. Being preceded and followed by something increases the volume of an entrance’s time and space. In the case of the Roman triumphal procession, it is the booty brought back from the war and the prisoners that announce the triumphator’s appearance;36 for the medieval ruler’s adventus, it is heralds or cursores who create space for the king and proclaim his arrival;37 and in the case of the Ballet royal de la nuit, it is the morning star Aurore that heralds the rising of the sun in verses of praise. These dispositions are neither mere ornaments nor decorative additions; rather, they establish a framework that gives the entrance its form.38 From Shakespeare, we are familiar with the “flourish” as a court and military form of announcement. In this context, Henry Fielding recommends using “Method[s]” that attune the spectator or reader to an entrance in order “to prepare the Mind . . . for [its] Reception,” while also giving it a setting.39

Gott,” 85–108. See also Miller, Roman Triumphs, 6, here specifically in reference to the plays of William Shakespeare: “Monarchs . . . sought to interpret triumph according to their political priorities.” On the goal of outdoing Rome (and the papacy), see Miller, Roman Triumphs, 9. 35 See the entry “Triumph,” in Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, vol. 45 (Leipzig/Halle: Zedler, 1745), columns 948–958. 36 In his res gestae, Augustus boasts that his triumphs featured nine monarchs or children of monarchs being “led before my chariot” (ante currum); Beard, The Roman Triumph, 120. 37 See Kantorowicz, “Des ‘Königs Ankunft,’” 116. 38 See the sections in this chapter: “Linear Perspective as the Unity of Interaction” and “Out of Step: Structures for Making an Entrance in the ‘liaison des scènes’ of Schiller’s Don Carlos.” 39 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, vol. 1, ed. Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 152: “Here, therefore, we have thought proper to prepare the Mind of the Reader for her Reception, by filling it with every pleasing Image, which we can draw from the Face of Nature. And for this Method we plead many Precedents. First, this is an Art well known to, and much practised by, our Tragic Poets; who seldom fail to prepare their Audience for the Reception of their principal Characters. / Thus the Heroe is always introduced with a Flourish of Drums and Trumpets, in order to rouse a martial Spirit in the Audience, and to

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The court entrée and the form of triumphal entry constitute the measure and benchmark for Fielding’s subsequent reflections, even if it must be noted from the outset that he initially sketches an ideal model of entering upon which the reality of court society placed various conditions and restrictions. Like the king himself, the sun of the Ballet royal de la nuit was embedded within circumstances of politics and protocol that limited the striking power to make an entrance granted to him by the Ballet de cour and court ceremony overall.40 Even though Louis XIV refashioned etiquette as a personal instrument of his power, expressing his sovereignty above all in the execution of its forms, he too is interwoven into court society and is also part of a complex court “figuration” in his entrances as the sun.41

Corneille vs. Racine This chapter has examined the protocols for making an entrance in the French court not only because they can be considered a prototype for a vigorous culture of entering in early modern courts, but also because the rules at the French court decisively governed the forms of tragedy that were created in its sphere. The tragic space of appearance, as structured by absolutist courts in the seventeenth century and articulated in the orbit of the doctrine classique, is designed with an eye toward the court space of appearance. It is the stage wholly occupied by the sovereign and organized to meet his gaze, along with its spectacular protocols for making an entrance, on which tragedy, too, is modeled. At the same time, there are two references in the dramas of Corneille and Racine that interpret this obligation different ways. For Corneille, what is crucial is the emphatic-triumphant form of the court’s protocol for making an entrance. As Jean Starobinski has noted, in tragedy as in other dramatic genres, Corneille’s dramaturgy is a dramaturgy of éclat. Corneille’s regular tragedies, comedies, and machine tragedies are dominated by the model of a heroic power to enter that is geared toward astonishing, dazzling, and subjugating its spectators.42 The epic-heroic character of Corneille’s

accommodate their Ears to Bombast and Fustian, which Mr. Locke’s blind Man would not have grossly erred in likening to the Sound of a Trumpet.” 40 This is the thesis of Norbert Elias. See also Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 136. Isherwood quotes Madelaine de Scudery, who compares the dancing Sun King in the Ballet royal de la nuit to a bird in a cage: “[He] makes me remember those little birds who sing so well and who are enjoyed while imprisoned in their cages.” 41 Elias, The Court Society, 17–18. 42 See also Wolfgang Matzat, Dramenstruktur und Zuschauerrolle: Theater in der französischen Klassik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982), 81: Matzat finds an incompatibility between

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protagonists is also imprinted upon the forms for entering that we find in his tragedies, which bring to the stage the splendor of heroic deeds done off-stage: What is omnipotence if not the privilege of needing only to show himself in order to be obeyed? The word éclat so frequent in Corneille perfectly expresses this active splendor. It is victorious surprise, a lightning conquest, a triumph without a fight. Such are the victories of Louis XIV: “Louis need only appear,” and walls come tumbling down, squadrons flee, nations bow.43

Things are different in Racine. Although his tragedy is also bound to the conditions for making an entrance that are defined by court ceremonial, it is through their negation. For Racine, the sphere of tragedy requires that the possibility of a splendid entrance and its derivative forms be denied. Here, then, one should speak instead of the tragic inversion of the court’s protocols for making an entrance. Racine begins with the premise that tragedy confronts the spectacular mise en scène of court characters with forms for entering that are beset by crisis, and that tragedy consequently formulates a critique of power focused on the arcane inversion of entry as a court spectacle. Racine’s tragedy thus revisits the fractured forms of tragedy described in the introduction to this book in a concrete historical context. The following sections begin by examining the form of the perspectival stage, which can be regarded as an ideal visual articulation of the court space of appearance in that it depicts the space-creating power of the ruler from the dual perspective of both the spectators and the entrance. The book then turns to the tension between the splendor of court entrances and tragic plot. Analyzing the model developed by Racine’s tragedies, it deals with the darkening of the court space of appearance that occurs when the sovereign light withdraws from the stage. In Racine, the background becomes a threatening arcanum. The tragic characters appear before a dark and opaque ground, unescapably related to the profondeur from which they emerged. This fact consequently transforms the central perspective of this space, which previously provided the perfect setting for court entrances, into a labyrinthine, enigmatic space. A section on the painted perspective scenery produced by the Galli Bibiena family then shows how tragic concepts have an impact on court perspective and how the transparent space defined by central perspective is transformed into a labyrinth. The concluding section on Schiller’s play Don Carlos deals with the disintegration of the liaison des scènes. It

dramatic and theatrical perspective in Corneille, which he traces in a rivalry between “admiration” and “action.” 43 Jean Starobinski, L’oeil vivant: Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère, Rousseau, Stendhal (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 32–33.

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shows the dissolution of the closed chain of rule-bound entrances, which entails the decomposition of court space and court time and relegates the ruler from the foreground into the background. Princes no longer reign through spectacular entrances replete with splendor; they become powers in the background, leaving behind an orphaned space in which the actors move about in uncertainty.

Linear Perspective as the Unity of Interaction “The Correctness of Perspective” The perspectival construction of the baroque festival stage establishes an ideal frame for entrances.44 Festivities at court take place in a spatial order that is transparent and founded on mathematical principles. Its dancers and actors, whether mortals or gods, encounter conditions for entering that guarantee their appearance will be splendid, visible, and distinct. Heinrich Wölfflin aptly describes the perspectival space of the baroque stage as establishing a “unity of interaction.”45 To Wölfflin, this manifests itself not only as a linear structure, but also as an arrangement of paths that guides the movement of the figures along predefined courses and ensures that they are received. On stage, too, linear perspective created a “plausible and unified pictorial space . . . in which the figures were able to move elegantly, in accordance with the harmonious rhythms of geometry.”46 Linear perspective makes it possible to clearly determine the movement and position of those making an entrance within a bounded area of the stage, and for the entry to take place according to fixed forms established by protocol.47 The happenstance of coming and going on stage is restricted, rendered subject to control, by the coherence of the perspectival space. Within this closed

44 See Richard Alewyn, Das große Welttheater: Die Epoche der höfischen Feste, reprint of the 2nd, expanded edition (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989). See Hans-Christian von Herrmann, “Das Theater der Souveränität,” in Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne: Eine Archäologie des Theaters und seiner Wissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Verlag, 2005), 35–90. 45 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien, 4th ed. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1926), 178. This passage is not translated in the English version produced by Kathrin Simon, Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1964] 1966), which is based on the first edition of Wölfflin’s book. 46 Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 31. 47 See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (NY: Zone Books, 1997), 52ff. See also George Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the

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space, the figure can be clearly directed to take up a specific position and given precise commands for when and where to move.48 This promise of order also affects dramatic texts, which come to be tailored to these spatial conditions. Corneille’s 1660 machine tragedy Andromède was written in collaboration with Giacomo Torelli, an Italian stage engineer responsible for introducing new technical and conceptual ideas to the perspectival stage. This tragedy specifically addresses the power of linear perspective to structure space and create order, referring explicitly in its precise stage directions to this perspectival framework. The process of paraître, of appearing, takes place with constant reference to the structuring spatial axes of the stage. The entrance of Queen Cassiope at the beginning of the tragedy, for instance, emphatically inserts itself into the perspectival space: The two sides and the background of the theater consist of magnificent palaces, all of which have a different structure, but which admirably preserve the equality and correctness of the perspective . . . . Queen Cassiopeia appears to be on the cusp of entering the temple via this square.49

The position of Andromède’s entrance is also derived directly from the perspectival design of the stage: From each side, a row of orange trees in similar vases stands out, forming an admirable arch reaching the center of the theater, where they divide into three avenues that appear, by virtue of the ingenious art of perspective, to be more than a thousand steps long. This is where one sees Andromède and her nymphs picking flowers.50

Yet these entrées are to be seen only insofar as they take place in a field of perception that is created, structured, and bounded by the gaze of the prince.51 The

Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 179: “Scenery was no longer a nucleus but began to enclose the actor.” 48 See Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 158. 49 Pierre Corneille, “Andromède,” in Corneille, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 441–525, here 463: “Les deux côtés et le fond du théâtre sont des palais magnifiques, tous différents de structure, mais qui gardent admirablement l’égalité et les justesses de la perspective . . . . la reine Cassiope paraît comme passant par cette place pour aller au temple.” 50 Corneille, “Andromède,” in Œuvres complètes, 475: “De chaque côté se détache un rang d’orangers dans de pareils vases, qui viennent former un admirable berceau jusqu’au milieu du théâtre, et le séparent ainsi en trois allées, que l’artifice ingénieux de la perspective fait paraître longue de plus mille pas. C’est là qu’on voit Andromède avec ces Nymphes qui cueillent des fleurs.” 51 See Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1981), 51: “Le courtisan est une créature monarchique; il parle du roi

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“correctness” and “equality” of linear perspective is founded in the power of the princely gaze:52 license to enter is granted by the superior authority of the ruler who is positioned in the royal box in the auditorium, from where he lays out the lines defining the space of the stage.53 Characteristic for the power of this gaze, addressed here in the generalizing formulation “one sees,” is the projection of virtual spatial depth.54 Corneille’s directions describe this projection in terms of a thousand steps: “more than a thousand steps long.” Along the perspectival lines of sight, the spatially limited stage on which actors can move appears to extend backward to a distant vanishing point, which in turn extends the ruler’s sphere of power to infinity. This depth—though it would be more accurate to speak of an effect of depth—can be suggested in two ways: first, by a staggering of the painted cloths at the sides of the stage that directs the eye toward the back;55 and second, by the painted scene at the back wall of the theater, which also guides a spectator’s gaze to a vanishing point by means of perspectival lines.56 At the point where the eye “expects the space to come to an end, it is surprised by a vision” extending the space to infinity (see Figure 2).57 The painted scenery transforms the space of the stage into an image-space in which the spatial axes of perspective exert their power to visually establish structure. At the same time, the alignment of the orthogonals in the visual center of the painted scenery generates the illusion of an unrestricted perspicuitas. Stage, theater, and drama open themselves to a “looking through” that penetrates into infinity. This results in clear parameters for the theatrical space of machine tragedies, as well as for these tragedies themselves. No matter what transpires on stage:

seulement parce que le roi l’a créé à son image et lui accorde une pseudo-existence. L’homme de cour ne peut pas dire le spectacle avant que le spectacle ne soit dit en lui.” 52 See Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 179; Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 55. See also Günter Schöne, Die Entwicklung der Perspektivbühne von Serlio bis Galli-Bibiena nach den Perspektivbüchern (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1933), 40. 53 See Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 179: “An exact relation . . . was established between audience, actor and setting, when the eyepoint from which the stage picture was viewed was fixed at a definite point (the duke’s box). The vanishing point for all lines of depth was fixed opposite that eyepoint, at the center of the picture.” 54 See Alewyn, Das große Welttheater, 75; Ulrike Haß, Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Bühnenform (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 351. 55 See Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 53ff. 56 See Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 51: “In the virtual space of the painted scenery placed at the back of the stage, the princely gaze continues to infinity.” 57 Alewyn, Das große Welttheater, 77.

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human confusion and misfortune, along with the miracles that court theater has to offer, take place in a mathematically ordered sphere.58 The “principe dei razzi,”59 the princely ray of vision, exercises a sovereign power to create order as it moves through the disorderly world that, as one reads in the Ballet royal de la nuit, is illuminated only by “feeble clarity.”60 This princely ray energetically penetrates not only the space of the stage but also the dark sphere of “obstacles” and “situations” in which the actors become entangled.61 The theater, too, is ruled by the “impérialisme oculaire” of the monarch. “Like the sun’s star, the gaze of the king provides order and illumination: it scatters chaos and allows the truth to emerge.”62 On all levels of representation and into the very depths of the perspectival construction of space, the princely theater aims to dissipate and disperse darkness. By remaining, even in tragic moments, within the “ingenious art of perspective,” Andromède’s fate is also traversed by the clarifying gaze of the ruler.63

Via regia: Linear Perspective as a Court Space of Arrival The affinity of linear perspective for acts of entering is furthermore expressed in the fact that the central visual axes of the festival stage were decorated as

58 See Claudia Müller, “Ferdinando Galli Bibienas ‘Scene di nuova invenzione,’” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 49, no. 3 (1986): 356–375, here 363. 59 Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 83. The center of the visual pyramid was dominated by what Alberti, the “Prince of the rays of vision,” called the central ray, with the rest dominated by the “middle rays.” See Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 84–85. 60 Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 65. On the world as violent materiality, see Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Malcolm Waller Thody (London: Routledge, 1964), 336. 61 Jacques Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 62ff. 62 Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine, 47. “Comme l’astre solaire, le regard du roi met en lumière et ordonne: il dissipe le chaos en faisant émerger la vérité.” The text continues: “[L]es individus sont mis en perspective par le regard monarchique; aucun obstacle ne résiste à l’œuil qui éclaire en même temps qu’il dévoile.” (“Individuals are placed into a perspectival arrangement by the monarchical gaze; no obstacle resists the eye that simultaneously illuminates and unveils.”). 63 See Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture, Volume One, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), Book II, “On Perspective,” “Treatise on Stage Scenery,” 83 (64r[44r]). See also Hermann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 63. The interaction of epiphany and perspectival depth brings about a miraculous theatrical space, in which the rules of probability are broken even as rational principles of spatial design remain in force.

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Figure 2: Guido Ubaldo del Monte, Construction of a perspectival stage, beginning with point of sight A (1600), in Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne: Eine Archäologie des Theaters und seiner Wissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 53.

triumphal avenues.64 The stage constructed according to central perspective is essentially a space of arrival. In the painted scenery Torelli designed for Corneille’s

64 Kermodle, too, observes the proximity between the perspectival imagination and the layout of the streets or the scene; see Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 47. See also Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 86.

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Andromède, the vanishing lines dominating the scene manifest themselves as magnificent boulevards. Torelli’s designs translate the visual structures of linear perspective into triumphant streetscapes, allowing the spectator’s gaze to converge in alignment with the layout of the streets. That is to say, these designs interpret the principe dei razzi, which guarantees the unity of the theatrical space and penetrates into the depths of the space from the prince’s point of view, as a via regia that not only leads through the painted scenery at the back and out into infinity, but conversely also returns from infinity to the stage. These boulevards are so demonstratively integrated into the scene that during the play they generate increased expectations for an entrance. As the play proceeds, a spectacular arrival appears to take shape in the artificial depth of the painted scenery—or more precisely: in the vanishing point of the perspective itself. Seen in this way, the stage not only lies in the monarch’s field of vision, defined from his seat in the audience; it also presents itself as the sphere of appearance claimed by a grand royal entrée. The paradox of the spatial staging to be observed here consists in the fact that the sovereign who is positioned in the royal box looks with anticipation upon the scene of his own arrival on the stage. In the virtual depth of the painted scenery, and via the magnificent boulevard that presents itself to his eyes, he comes toward himself. And in the field of oscillation between the point of sight and the vanishing point of the perspective, between the power of the gaze and the power of the entrance, the stage is opened up to allow the sovereign to occupy and traverse both the beginning and the end of the line of sight. This impression is confirmed if we consider that Torelli’s painted scenery incorporates images of actual architecture used to make entrances. As Thomas Lawrenson demonstrates in his study of stages from the ancien régime, Torelli adopts pictorial motifs from real city and palace complexes that were in fact designed, through a series of gates and passageways, for entrances.65 When integrated into these painted cloths, triumphal avenues from Versailles and Paris refer the fictive action of the play to real triumphal settings of the time. These fictive events take place in a world that is co-opted and ordered by the sovereign. The intention of staging entrances is underscored by the construction of triumphal gates spanning the streets. On the baroque festival stage, such an arch accords the princely “image solaire” a privileged position.66 Torelli designs the via regia to pass through one or more triumphal arches, providing a virtual frame for the arriving ruler while also

65 See Thomas E. Lawrenson, The French Stage and Playhouse in the XVIIth Century: A Study in the Advent of the Italian Order, 2nd ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 188. 66 Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine, 59.

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multiplying the thresholds67 the ruler crosses as he arrives (see figures 3 and 4).68 Triumphal arches along the central perspectival axis of the stage mark one or several royal sites of entry,69 which constantly renew the energetic-epiphanic impulse of the arrival so that the arches attain a splendor-enhancing significance over and beyond their constructive function. Architecturally, they anticipate a grand entrance en face—a sovereign stage movement through the center, toward the front,

Figure 3: Giacomo Torelli, stage design for Andromède, Act I (1650), in S. Wilma Holsboer, L’histoire de la mise en scène dans le thèatre français (Gevena: Slatkine Reprints 1976), plate XX.

67 See Ulrich Schütte, “Stadttor und Hausschwelle: Zur rituellen Bedeutung architektonischer Grenzen in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Die Grenze: Begriff und Inszenierung, ed. Markus Bauer and Thomas Rahn (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 159–176, here 165ff. Schütte also discusses the construction of successive triumphal gates along a straight line. 68 On the significance of arch structures in the adventus ritual and their transfer to the stage, see Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 180ff. Here, however, the emphasis is on the effect of depth achieved by a staggering of triumphal gates. 69 On the role of the arcade in the history of the perspectival stage, see Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 193ff. On the visual motif, see “King Seen through the Arch”; see also Lawrensen, The French Stage, 186. The arch or arcade structure, which was initially used as a means to lend the image depth, is enhanced in the painted scenery of the court theater.

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Figure 4: Giacomo Torelli, stage design for Andromède, Act II (1650), in S. Wilma Holsboer, L’histoire de la mise en scène dans le théatre français (Gevena: Slatkine Reprints 1976), plate XXI.

and via the direttissima—that is deemed to have the power to cut through and overcome the sphere of obstacles in which the stage action takes place.

Entrances of the Gods First and foremost, however, the perspectival space of the stage is the gateway for the miraculous.70 It is the space of entering not only for the human actors, but also for the machine gods, who, with great technical effort, fly, ascend, or descend onto the stage.71 As the history of the perspectival stage shows, this serves to regulate not only the stage’s earthly traffic but also the traffic of the

70 See Nicola Gess, “Oper des Monströsen – Monströse Oper: Zur Metapher des Monströsen in der französischen Opernästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Monströse Ordnungen: Zur Typologie und Ästhetik des Abnormalen, ed. Achim Geisenhanslücke and Georg Mein (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009), 655–667. 71 See Christian Quaeitzsch, “Une société de plaisirs”: Festkultur und Bühnenbilder am Hofe Ludwigs XIV. und ihr Publikum (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010), 265. See also the contributions in Nicola Gess, Tina Hartmann, and Dominika Hens, eds., Barocktheater als Spektakel:

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gods. The closed space of linear perspective offers the ideal site for supernatural powers to descend upon the earth and make an entrance, where they intervene into the progression of events as dei ex machina. As the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius noted in the second book of De architectura, where he laid the foundations of the early modern perspectival stage: the scene must be ready “when [the machines], on the appearance of a god, are moved round with sudden claps of thunder.”72 Sebastiano Serlio, who is responsible for a scientific or mathematic conception of the early modern stage, praises in his Trattato sopra le scene the “uncovering of a scene set on stage . . . created with the art of perspective” primarily because it provides a framework for the gods to appear: “With this artifice . . . a god can be seen descending from heaven.”73 Accordingly, no contradiction results when the rules of probability are broken in a space constructed according to mathematical-geometric principles. One characteristic of the “theater of sovereignty” is thus a continued, even epidemic, occurrence of entrances.74 These events open the stage for the miraculous and prepare the scene for divine interventions.

The Aristotelian Reshaping of the Festival Stage: The Éclat of the Entrance and Tragic Progression Corneille’s Andromède represents an attempt to combine tragedy and the court spectacle of the gods’ arrival. The aim is to introduce the exalted genre of tragedy, which on Aristotle’s definition is built around a tragic reversal of fortune, into the ceremonial sphere of court festivities, which is entirely determined by the spectacle of its entrées. Corneille’s task, as a poet famous for his tragic dramas in verse, was to harmonize the Aristotelian form with a theater of the machine gods.75 The new mixed genre was intended to equally balance éclat and tragic plot, the splendor of an entrance and the tragic cours du soleil, giving

Maschine, Blick und Bewegung auf der Opernbühne des Ancien Régime (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015). 72 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Gwilt (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 144. 73 Serlio, On Architecture, 83 (64v[44r]); see also Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 63. 74 See Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 35. 75 See Alison Calhoun, “Corneille’s Andromède and Opera: Practice Before Theory,” Cahiers du dix-septième 16, no. 1 (2015): 1–17; Perry Gethner, “Andromède: From Tragic to Operatic Discourse,” Papers on Seventeenth Century French Literature 12 (1979): 53–65; see also Étienne Gros, “Les Origines de la tragédie lyrique et la place des tragédies en machines dans l’évolution du théâtre verses l’opéra,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire da la France 35, no. 2 (1928): 161–193.

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each its due. In the preface to Andromède, Corneille initially seems concerned with legitimizing the use of machines within Aristotelian doctrine. As justification he argues that he has placed the stage machinery exclusively at the service of the plot, employing spectacle only where it is dramatically necessary.76 At the same time, however, Andromède is constructed so that entrances are clearly foregrounded. All attention is given to the entrées, which make it possible for each god to successively approach in a spectacular fashion. The preface explicitly suggests that the machine tragedy must aim to appeal primarily to the eyes, and not to the mind or passions of its spectators: “For my main aim here has been to satisfy the eye by the splendor and variety of the spectacle, not to stir the spirit by the power of the mind or the delicacy of the passions.”77 This shift of emphasis from the plot to the spectacle is demonstrated by the fact that the ceremonial prologue of Andromède proclaims none other than Melpomène, the muse of tragedy, to be the steward, champion, and trustee of the éclat. The prologue thus achieves no less than the self-suspension of Aristotelian tragedy in the name of the gloire du Roi.78 The function of the muse is not to demand the observance of the tragic cours on the festival stage, but rather to generate splendor and, for its heroes, radiance: “And all shall burst forth brightly where I make them appear.”79 Melpomène stands for pomp, not for what tragedy precipitates; her task is to interrupt the cours du soleil that for Aristotle marks the inexorable measure of tragic time.80 At her request, the sun

76 See Bettine Menke, “Was das Spektakel möglich macht: Theater-Maschinen,” in Archäologie der Spezialeffekte, ed. Nicola Gess et al. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 113–144. 77 Corneille, Andromède, 452. “[P]arce que mon principal but ici a été de satisfaire la vue par l’éclat et la diversité du spectacle, et non pas de toucher l’esprit par la force du raisonnement, ou le cœur par la délicatesse des passions.” He continues: “Il n’en va pas de même des machines, qui ne sont pas dans cette tragédie comme des agréments détachés, elles en quelque sorte le noeud et le dénouement, et y sont si nécessaires que vous n’en sauriez retrancher aucune, que vous ne fassiez tomber tout l’édifice” (Andromède, 452). English: “The same cannot be said of the machines, which are not part of the tragedy as detached enjoyments; they are the tragedy’s knot and denouement, and are so necessary therein that you could not eliminate any of them without bringing down the entire edifice.” 78 See also Wolfgang Matzat, Dramenstruktur und Zuschauerrolle: Theater in der französischen Klassik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982), 99. 79 Corneille, Andromède, 461 (line 55): “Et tout ce haut éclat où je les faits paraître.” 80 See Juliane Vogel, “Solare Orientierung: Heliotropismus in Tragödie und Tragédie en musique,” in Barocktheater als Spektakel, 80. See also Menke, “Was das Spektakel möglich macht”: “The ceremonial opening in the prologue of Andromède is another time-space, where gods and other fictitious beings appear via machines, like allegories; it stages itself by means of the explicit stopping and staying for which Melpomène arrests the course of le soleil to enable the great scene of homage.” See Ulf Otto, “Auftritt der Sonne: Zur Genealogie

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comes to a halt as it approaches in its chariot, so that together they may sing a hymn of praise in honor of the king. Tragic time is transformed into ceremonial entrance-time. For a moment, the course of the sun becomes a jubilant Now lifting itself out of the temporality of tragic entanglement and allowing the entire world to partake of the sovereign’s presence. The same applies to all spectacular entrances following that of the king in the course of the tragedy. When the text declares: “the sky opens up,”81 and the machine appears, the course of the tragedy is interrupted for the moment of the entrance, and paraître, appearing, becomes the prevailing principle.82

“Avancer”: Progression and Continuation With this, the conditions are created for a genre that joins tragedy and festival in a distinctive genre of court theater. In the years following 1670, at the request of the king, the composer Jean Baptiste Lully developed the musical-dramatic form of tragédie en musique, which united these opposing elements into a specifically French form of the court opera.83 Its form-generating element is the interplay between the splendor of the entrance and tragic progression. The appeal of tragédie en musique is that it punctuates the progression of tragic time through the éclat of spectacular arrivals, which proceed completely unaffected by the catastrophic developments of each tragedy. Even as the catastrophe advances, the stage remains a space for the arrival and intervention of flying gods. Étienne Gros aptly refers to the “celestial interventions” or “continual interventions of the gods”84 as determining the structure and rhythm of the tragédie. The genre systematically intertwines entrée and completed action. This tension is reflected not least in the double meaning of the words avancer or avancement, which are used in opera or in relation to opera for two different directions of movement. Because of their frequency in the livrets and

des Scheinwerfens und Stimmungsmachens,” in Auftritte: Strategien des In-ErscheinungTretens in Künsten und Medien, ed. Annemarie Matzke, Ulf Otto, and Jens Roselt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014), 85–104. 81 Corneille, Andromède, 470: “le Ciel s’ouvre.” 82 Writing specifically of Andromède, Bettine Menke speaks of the incursion of “another artificial time” of the spectacle: Menke, “Was das Spektakel möglich macht.” 83 On the history of the tragédie in music, see Annette Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 15–20; Silke Leopold, Die Oper im 17. Jahrhundert (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2006), 193–238; Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de l’Opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991); Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 204–248. 84 Gros, “Les Origines de la tragédie lyrique,” 166, 175.

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their double meaning, they can be considered the central concepts of movement in the discourse on tragédie en musique. They denote both the progression of the action, in the sense of advancement, and the stepping forth of a figure in a movement that ceremonially interrupts this action. An example of this tension can be found in an opera that aroused particular interest in Versailles because of its rapid progression. This is the tragédie en musique titled Atys, written in 1676 as a collaboration between the poet Philippe Quinault and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, which deals with the tragic fate of a sun priest with whom the sun goddess Cybèle falls madly in love.85 One reason for why opera garnered the special favor of Louis XIV may have been its strict regulation of duration, since the king generally attempted to limit the increasing demands on time being made by forms of court theater. Atys is undoubtedly more oriented toward endings than other such works for the stage. To a much greater extent than in other tragedies en musique, this piece intensifies dramatic qualities:86 in a way that is untypical for the machine stage, the structure of their progression is dominated by what Frank Kermode has termed “a sense of an ending.”87 An anonymous source emphasizes this advantage: “Everything is conceived, calculated, measured so that the drama progresses [avance] without ever losing strength.”88 In the course of the piece, a veritable power struggle develops between appearance and completion. By introducing new, shortened aria forms, Lully thwarts the ambitions of all the characters who may have wanted to appear in splendor: “Everyone wants to shine in Atys, and there is no opportunity to shine in this work of Lully’s.”89 The singers forced to submit to this new regime of dramatic time conversely protest through their singing: in order “to remain on stage longer,” they add ornaments to their arias and “slow down the beat.”90

85 See Leopold, Die Oper im 17. Jahrhundert, 211–216. 86 See Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 207. 87 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 30. 88 Anonymous letter from someone in Lully’s circle, published by Jean Duron in the booklet accompanying a recording of Atys conducted by William Christie, ed. harmonia mundi, Arles, 1987, 21; electronic edition: https://www.arts-florissants.org/media/livrets-cds-pdfs/livret_ hmc-901257-59.pdf, accessed November 8, 2021; emphasis J.V.: “Tout est fait, compté, mesuré, pour que le drame avance sans jamais s’affaiblir.” 89 Booklet to Atys conducted by Christie, 21: “Chacun veut briller dans Atys, et il n’y a rien pour briller, dans cette œuvre de Lully.” 90 Booklet to Atys conducted by William Christie: “pour paraître plus longtemps” . . . “ralentit la battue.”

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At the same time, it should be noted that the avancement of the plot in the tragedy, especially in Atys, is both overlaid and reshaped by the ceremonial avancement of its figures. In the text of the opera, the verb “avancer” denotes, with equal justification, both the movements with which the figures enter, and those that initiate a ceremonial interruption: the “advancing” of the figures and the “progression” of the plot establish a constitutive tension that pervades the entire piece and is communicated immediately at the beginning of the opera.91 On the one hand, the indications of a divine entrance of the sun grow more numerous right at the outset: “Come, come, let us hurry to come together, for Cybèle will descend,”92 are the first words of the tragédie, followed by statements such as: “Upon these fields, one can see / all of our Phrygians advancing.”93 And on the other hand, a tragic intrigue begins to unfold—every indication precipitating a catastrophic completion as the piece rushes rapidly toward its bloody end. Atys directly intertwines the preparation of action and the announcement of entrances; it interweaves progression and sinnliches Aufsteigen, acceleration and ceremonial appearance. Even as it moves toward tragic catastrophe, the gloire of the splendid entrance asserts its prerogative. For even if the tragic entanglement ensnarls every single actor, and not least of all the goddess herself who allows herself to be affected by human passions, the ceremonial act of entering the scene remains unaffected by the tragedy. In the opera, one constantly hears the cries: “Come, Queen of the Gods, come; come, benevolent Cybèle.”94 “In fact, they [the gods] seem ready to intervene any time someone mentions their name.”95 Despite the unfortunate events that the opera depicts, what asserts itself here is the spectacular space of appearance, in and out of which the gods splendidly fly unhindered.

91 Goethe used the terms “Fortschreiten,” “Vorschreiten,” “Einherschreiten”—literally: “striding forth” or “striding forward,” “striding ahead,” and “stepping or strutting along,” all of which can mean “progressing,” “advancing,” “proceeding,” or “moving along/forward”—to describe dramatic and theatrical structures. See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Zu Phaeton des Euripides,” in Sämtliche Werke, Münchner Ausgabe (MA), vol. 13:1 (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1992), 313–316, here 315; see also Goethe’s text “Die tragischen Tetralogien der Griechen: Programm von Ritter Hermann 1819,” in MA 13:1, 317–323, 318–319. 92 Philippe Quinault, “Atys: Tragédie en musique,” in Quinault, Théatre de Quinault, contenant ses tragédies, comédies et opéras, nouvelle édition, vol. 4 (Paris: chez la veuve Duchesne, 1778), 271–342, here 282: “Allons, allons, accourez tous, Cybèle va descendre.” 93 Quinault, “Atys: Tragédie en musique,” 288, emphasis J.V: “On voit, dans ces campagnes / Tous nos Phrygiens s’avancer.” 94 Quinault, “Atys: Tragédie en musique”: “Venez, Reine des Dieux, venez; / Venez, favorable Cybèle.” 95 Gethner, Andromède, 59.

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The announcement “The goddess Cybèle appears” is not touched by these tragic developments.96 As in Corneille’s machine tragedy, the court forms for entering in tragédie en musique remain magically impervious to tragic darkening. The spectacle of the entrées, of the sunrises and grand, splendid entrances, continues even as the entanglement advances and the catastrophe takes its course. On the level of the stage machinery, which is superordinate to the action and keeps open the possibility of a ceremonial intervention in every dramatic moment, the principle of entering as a supporting structural moment remains untouched. Only in the course of the eighteenth century do entrées disappear from the stage, replaced by other forms that call into question the epiphanic violence of the splendid entrance.97 The space of entering that is euphorically traversed from all sides then becomes a labyrinth.

The Darkening of the Court Space of Appearance: Racine’s Theater of profondeur chiaroscuro In contrast to the court’s brilliantly illuminated sphere for making an entrance, Racine’s tragedies consist of scenes whose depths are dark and impervious to the gaze. His theater is a theater of profondeur. It counters the imperial alignment of the court’s central perspective with a twilight that gradually blots out the forms and colors lent to subjects in the sovereign’s theater. Tragic entrances take place in a sphere of chiaroscuro, where light and shadow are locked in conflict and shadow dominates: “Nothing is closer to the Racinian hallucination than a painting by Rembrandt.”98 While the court actors appear in a transparent and maximally ordered world of appearance, those of Racine move about on the edge of darkness.99 This marks the beginning of a complete inversion of court stage conditions, which affects all levels of representation in the tragedy. This arrangement negates the representative publicness that was generated by the court’s entrances, whether large or small. If it is true that Racine’s

96 Quinault, Atys, 292f.: “La Déesse Cybèle paraît.” 97 See Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 141ff. 98 Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 18. 99 See Roland Racevskis, Tragic Passages: Jean Racine’s Art of the Threshold (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 171. Racevskis draws attention to the dominance of twilight in Phaedra, which is predominant even in full sunlight. See also Pascale-Anne Brault, “Thresholds of the Tragic: A Study of Space in Sophocles and Racine,” Theatre Research International 14 (1989): 229–241.

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tragedy is a ceremony, as Jacques Scherer claims, then it is also an anticeremony that abjures the great effort made by court culture to impose form on its stage, and that renders uncertain the human figures this effort prescribes.100 This is evident even from its treatment of light: in contrast to the solar regime of Versailles, which staged the ruler as a benevolent bringer of illumination, here radiance presents itself as a hostile and potentially violent force that compels the figures of the drama to exit their cover in the background and move toward the front and onto the stage.101 Characteristic of Racine’s stage is the reversal of solar forms of representation, in that it is not light but shadow that shapes entrances.102 From the perspective of theater history, this impression is reinforced by the fact that the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where Racine’s tragedies were performed, did not have a perspectival stage.103 Its rooms lacked the spectacular alignment of the court theater’s painted scenery. “The irruption of perspective was halted” is how this was put by Thomas Lawrenson,104 who notes in his study on the stage design of the ancien régime that constructions of perspectival illusion were absent in Racine’s theater: there was “no space extending backwards.”105 The performance was thus limited to a narrow strip, without the perspectival illusion of depth encroaching into the representation. The stage on which Racine’s tragedies were performed was instead closed off at the back by a row of doors that directed the spectator’s gaze to the stage’s width, not its depth. It is therefore the power of dramatic speech to create space that mainly shapes the background in which the figures of the tragedy appear. In Racine, it is words that create profondeur; words beget the twilight in which the tragic events take place. Profond and profondeur are among the core elements of Racine’s notoriously small vocabulary; and as his tragedies progress, they establish an unclear sense of depth that fundamentally limits the opportunities characters have to distinctly step forth on stage.106 Where they are spoken, they counter the brilliant perspectival projections of space characterizing the court

100 See Jacques Scherer, Racine et/ou la cérémonie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982), 13. 101 See Barthes, On Racine, 20. 102 See Barthes, On Racine, 21. 103 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (London: Routledge 2016), 263. 104 See Thomas E. Lawrenson, The French Stage and Playhouse in the XVIIth Century: A Study in the Advent of the Italian Order, 2nd ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 188. 105 Lawrenson, The French Stage and Playhouse, 188. 106 For references to the semantic field of profondeur, see Robert W. Hartle, Index du vocabulaire du Théâtre classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1964), 1003. See also Charles Joseph MartyLaveaux, Lexique de la langue de J. Racine: Avec une introduction (Paris: Hachette, 1888).

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sphere of representation with a sphere of impenetrability. As can be gleaned from Racine’s texts, the mise-en-scène of space and light in his dramas is evidence of their origin in an antiperspectival impulse—and a reminder that the palaces of tragedy are not only splendid pieces of architecture but also arcane installations shot through by secret zones. This intimacy and seclusion of Racine’s scenes has been pointed out many times. Racine’s tragedies take place not in exposed spaces but rather in interior rooms or small, private chambers that are opened up to the spectator’s gaze only by exception and are not designed as sites for making an appearance—or if so, then only in broken form.107 Racine’s stage is moreover surrounded by concealed spaces, whether landscapes or architectonic forms, lacking any clear structure. His scenes are encircled by a kind of dark cordon that the actors can cross only with difficulty. In contrast to the court spaces of arrival, which stage their entrances as spectacles that are highly charged symbolically, Racine’s dramatic characters encounter resistance as they enter the scene. “A thousand obstacles I had to face,” the messenger Osmin reports upon arriving at the beginning of the tragedy Bajazet.108 Corneille, as noted in the previous section, quantified the depth of Andromède’s stage with “a thousand steps”109 and thus emphasized the robust power to structure the scene that is inherent in the vanishing line of linear perspective. Here, however, we find the exact opposite indication: “a thousand obstacles.” The transparency of a court theater constructed along axes of linear perspective is countered here by concealed depth. Still, it must be noted that Racine does associate concrete conceptions of space with the word “profondeur.” In Bajazet, it is the seraglio that provides the ground for the plot of the tragedy—a building whose boundaries and pathways remain indeterminate and whose interior is crisscrossed by “byways,” by places “set

107 Ethel Matala de Mazza draws attention to the fact that the private chamber, or cabinet, in Bérénice, which has the features of a secret room, also bears signs of a state apartment and thus simultaneously belongs to both zones. See Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Die leere Kammer: Zur Exposition in Racines Bérénice,” in Der Einsatz des Dramas: Dramenanfänge, Wissenschaftspoetik und Gattungspolitik, ed. Claude Haas and Andrea Polaschegg (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus, 2012), 277–297, here 278ff. 108 Jean Racine, Bajazet, trans. Geoffrey Alan Argent, in The Complete Plays of Jean Racine, vol. 2 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 36 (I:1, line 27). The next line continues: “And I may not know all that’s taken place.” Jean Racine, Bajazet, Tragédie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 557–622, here 562 (line 27): “Mille obstacles divers m’ont même traverse.” 109 Pierre Corneille, “Andromède,” in Corneille, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 441–525, here 475.

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apart” and “secret ways.”110 The seraglio is a place where characters are kept who are either unable or unwilling to advance out of its confines—“Whom these capacious palace walls enclose.”111 It is a “shadow” world that does not voluntarily surrender those it traps, continuing to hold them captive even when they step onto the stage.112 In Iphigénie en Aulide, Racine’s tenebrum is realized by a ring of woods in which those who arrive lose their way before they make an entrance. “She’s coming. / In the woods that hide from view / The entrance to the camp, she went astray. / With difficulty in the forest gloom / We found the way back to our path again.”113 Here, the text clearly states that the stage entrance is not to be found in the shadow of the woods that lie in the depth of the scene: it is caché, hidden. The opening scene of Phaedra also conjures a dark background—in addition to the forests of Hippolytus, in this scene this is the underworld where Theseus is suspected to be, and the labyrinth of the minotaur. Both are located in the depths of the stage and represent, in the words of Gustav René Hocke, the “antithesis of all that is transparent.”114 The cachement, the place of hiding, is the proper location of the figures in drama. Because of this affinity to darkness,

110 Racine, Bajazet, trans. Argent, 91 (IV:7, line 60); 42 (I:1, lines 209 and 211). Racine, Bajazet: “détours,” 609 (lines 1424f.); “endroît écarté,” and “chemin obscur,” 567 (lines 209 and 211). The lines in IV:7 (page 91) read in full (57–64): “A fearless troop of friends and soldiers waits / For us to join them at the palace gates. / Besides, Roxane believed my words. Raised here, / Through the Serail’s dark byways I can steer; / I know which room belongs to Bajazet. / It’s time: let’s go. And if I die today, / Then, dear Osmin, let us two meet our end, / I, like a vizier, you, like his true friend.” And in I:1 “She herself chose this spot, so set apart, / Where we two could commune with eyes and heart. / By secret ways, with some slave as my guide.” For a general discussion of these spaces, see Wolfgang Matzat, Dramenstruktur und Zuschauerrolle: Theater in der französischen Klassik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982), 164. 111 Racine, Bajazet, trans. Argent, 50 (II:1, line 16). Racine, Bajazet, 574 (line 436): “Peuple que dans ses murs renferme ce palais.” The lines read in full: “And I, you know, have subject to my rule / The guards, the slaves, the eunuchs and all those / Whom these capacious palace walls enclose.” 112 Racine, Bajazet, 609 (line 1420): “à l’ombre de ces murs.” Argent translates: “Abject slaves, that’s all, / Raised far from war, within the palace wall” (91, IV:7, lines 51–52). 113 Jean Racine, Iphigenia, in Iphigenia—Phaedra—Athaliah, trans. John Cairncross (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), 33–125, here 67 (I:4, lines 342ff.); Iphigénie: Tragédie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Théâtre – Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 695–813, here 713 (lines 342ff.): “Elle approche. Elle s’est quelque temps égarée / Dans ces bois qui du camp semblent cacher l’entrée. / À peine nous avons, dans leur obscurité / Retrouvé le chemin que nous avions quitté.” 114 Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der europäischen Kunst (Hamburg: Rowohlt 1961), 7.

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Roland Barthes called them tenebrosi,115 creatures of darkness who only reluctantly wrest themselves from the shadow by which they are embraced.

Tenebrosi With this, we have measured the distance between Racine’s tragedy and the sphere of entrances comprising the representative publicness of the court.116 In contrast to the sphere of court ceremonial, which understands entrances as moments of splendor and distinction, it is cloudiness and shadows that now modulate appearances. Racine’s tenebrosi resist entrances and therefore enter the stage only hesitantly, with a delay. On the level of dramatic speech, his tragedies stage entrances in which the articulating function of court entrées operates only in a highly attenuated form. The performative power of the entrance peters out when the ground precedes the figure, leaving the scene’s presence thoroughly tied to its profondeur. At least on a communicative level, the character’s appearing loses its salience continually and unrelentingly. Compared to the triumphant phrase “Look at him walk,”117 which attested to the power of Corneille’s figures to make an entrance, Racine’s figures step forth in a damaged state. David Maskell aptly speaks of an “inversion of majestic entrances.”118 Racine counters the ceremonial announcements of Corneille’s héros with reports of weakness: “This way and that, she wanders aimlessly.”119 Entrances in Racine’s tragedies are a matter of pathos, of appearing unwillingly in a world whose laws

115 See Barthes, On Racine, 21. 116 For a general consideration of how entrances are fashioned in Racine, see David Maskell, Racine: A Theatrical Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 44–60. 117 Pierre Corneille, “L’illusion comique,” in Corneille, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 612–688, here 619 (line 80): “Regardez-le marcher.” 118 Maskell, Racine, 48. 119 Racine, Phaedra, in Iphigenia—Phaedra—Athaliah, trans. John Cairncross (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), 129–214, here 208; Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte: Tragédie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Théâtre – Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 814–904, here 871 (line 1475): “Elle porte au hasard ses pas irrésolus.” C. H. Sisson translates more literally: “She paces here and there, irresolutely,” in Racine, Phaedra, in Britannicus, Phaedra, Athaliah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 73–135, here 130. Friedrich Schiller’s translation of these lines—“Sie schweift umher mit ungewissem Schritt” or “She staggers about with uncertain step”—uses a verb, “schweifen” (to ramble, roam, wander about, drift, move circuitously), that is discussed in more detail in the following chapter in the context of the “fond vague” in painting, the poodle that appears in Faust I, and the entrance of Plutus in Faust II; see the sections on “Fond vague,” “A Rambling Entrance: The Poodle,” and “Fast Money: Plutus.”

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one does not accept, despite having no means of escape.120 Hans-Thies Lehmann uses the term “décomplétude” to denote this incompleteness.121 To summarize, then, we find in Racine the rules for an antitheatrical entrance protocol whose guiding question is not “How can I shine?” but rather “Where can I hide?” Racine’s tragedies have accordingly been described as dramas that play out on thresholds—that leave their characters to stumble and hesitate upon entering the stage, where they step into the light only against their will.122 As the characters enter, one can usually observe them gripped by a form of emotion indicating they are impelled by hostile forces. Their entrances are connected in various ways with abductions, with the characters being overpowered, with external violence or destructive passions displayed by the actors as if in a state of raptus, that is to say, as if enraptured by inner or outer emotion. In the tragedy Andromaque, Racine has the eponymous Trojan woman enter only in the second act, with the hesitation and inner wounds of one who has been abducted. Junie, the tenebrosa of Britannicus, has also been stolen away and taken to the palace of Nero, where she enters into the light only with great reluctance. Monime in Mithridate was removed from her homeland under the despised diktat of a dynastic marriage and likewise enters the scene against her will.123 Bérénice must suffer the question: “And you would appear to him in such extreme confusion?”124 In the raptus of a wanton passion, Phaedra violates the decorum of a court regime that equally applies on stage.125 These auspices make entrances in this sphere highly significant: it is precisely under these unfavorable conditions that Racine gives special attention to the damaged theatricality of the character’s physical advancing. His tragedies prove that entrances are endowed with significance in the Aristotelian-dramatic universe of action, too:126 they reveal the extent to which tragic entrances are

120 This is the argument made by Lucien Goldmann in The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge, 1964), chapter “The Tragic Vision,” 3–88. 121 Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 269–270. 122 See the introduction to Racevskis, Tragic Passages, 15–37. 123 See Matzat, Dramenstruktur und Zuschauerrolle, 141. 124 Jean Racine, Bérénice, Tragédie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Théâtre – Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 447–509, here 489 (line 957): “Mais voulez-vous paraître en ce désordre extrême?” 125 See also Erich Auerbach, “Racine und die Leidenschaften,” in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie, ed. Gustav Konrad (Bern: Francke, 1967), 196–204, here 200ff. On the role of passions in entrances see Maskell, Racine, 48ff. 126 Maskell writes aptly of “significant entrances”; Racine, 44.

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beset by crisis, and just how precarious the status of visibility has become in the world of appearance that constitutes tragedy.

The Burden of the Knot: Phaedra’s Entrance The theatricality of this damaged state is particularly evident with Phaedra. Her character demonstrates that in the progression of their movement, tragic crises precipitate simultaneous crises of avancement deciding whether a character will appear or disappear at all. As Phaedra makes her entrance, she is anything but present. Torn between a desire to retreat and a compulsion to appear, she hesitates on the threshold of the stage.127 As her nurse Oenone notes, her éclat is darkened from the start by profondeur. Phaedra appears as a denizen of the depths who shuns the light, not as the queen of Athens whose right to a grand entrance cannot be denied. The very announcement of her arrival adds a moment of crisis to the conventional phrase “But here she comes”:128 she desires to see the light, but the pain holds her back. The depth from which she emerges is the depth of pain, of “douleur profonde”: “She longs to see the light, and yet, distraught / With pain, she bids me banish everyone . . . But here she comes!”129 Undecided between coming and going, between illumination and darkness, Phaedra does not advance beyond the front of the stage: PHAEDRA: No further. Here, Oenone, let us stay. I faint, I fall; my strength abandons me. My eyes are dazzled by the daylight’s glare, And my knees, trembling, give beneath my weight. Alas! [She sits down].130

127 See Racevskis, Tragic Passages, 15: “Time and again, Racine places his characters in positions of limbo, between the self and the other, between what is on stage and what is offstage, between existence and oblivion. . . . Racine’s tragedies play out on thresholds.” Racevskis, however, emphasizes the moment of “becoming,” while here it is the process of “unshaping” that is foregrounded. On the destructuring of the space, see Racevskis, 165, where he speaks of “intermediary spaces.” See also Joseph Vogl, On Tarrying, trans. Helmut Müller-Sievers (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 81–117. Vogl makes a connection between the act of tarrying and a labyrinthine spatial order. 128 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 154. Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 825 (line 151): “Elle vient.” 129 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 154. Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 825: “Elle veut voir le jour. A douleur profonde / M’ordonne toutefois d’écarter tout le monde / Elle vient.” 130 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 155; the stage directions are not included in this English translation. Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 826 (lines 153ff.): “PHEDRE: N’allons point plus

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The movement Phaedra makes to enter thus comes to a standstill at a point decided by the physical exhaustion induced by her passion, and not by the court protocol for making an entrance. Its full realization founders on a dearth of vigor: “my strength abandons me.” Her monologue laments the absence of all features defining an entrance as an emphatic advance. Vacillating between a placing-into-form and a withdrawal of form, Phaedra’s approach ends midway. A stage direction that is incompatible with the demands of court decorum illustrates her loss of strength: “She sits down.” Seen from the perspective of protocol, this action on stage signals the loss of control over her body and a violation of the rules of bienséance. The energetic actio of crossing the threshold becomes an act of self-betrayal and surrender. What appears at the beginning of the tragedy is thus the damaged symbolic body of a queen. Tragic exposure takes the place of ceremonial composure, and the spoken message underscores the mute performance of the body and the deficiencies of its appearing. The verses that Phaedra delivers upon entering forge a multilinked chain of semantic and grammatical negations that invariably weaken her entrance: she cannot continue; she must linger; she can no longer stand; her eyes are blinded; her trembling knees drop to the ground. Roland Barthes points to the particular meaning of the word dérober in Racine’s vocabulary.131 In Phaedra’s case, it transforms an entrance that ideally should be an act of symbolic dressing (an investiture) into an act of divestiture. Finally, this entrance portends a tragic course of events that will ultimately send the figure to vanish within the piece’s profondeur. Not least, the entrance possesses an emblematic dimension, paradoxical in that the ornaments adorning Phaedra already point to her tragic end. PHAEDRA: How these vain jewels, these veils weigh on me! What meddling hand has sought to re-arrange My hair, by braiding it across my brow? [literally: by tying up these knots] All things contrive to grieve and thwart me, all.132

avant. Demeurons, chère Œnone. / Je ne soutiens plus. Ma force m’abandonne. / Mes yeux sont éblouis du jour que je revois, Et mes genoux tremblants se dérobent sous moi. Hélas! Elle s’assied.” 131 See Barthes, On Racine, 15. See also the verses spoken by Bérénice as she enters, in which she describes herself as derobée the moment she appears: Racine, Bérénice, 460 (lines 135f.): “Enfin je me dérobe à la joie importune / De tant d’Amis nouveaux, que me fait la Fortune.” 132 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 155 (I:3, lines 158–162). Phèdre et Hippolyte, 826 (lines 158ff.): “PHEDRE: Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent! / Quelle importune main, en formant tous ces nœuds, A pris soin / sur mon front d’assembler mes cheveux? / Tout m’afflige, et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire.”

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The knot of Phaedra’s hair immediately and emblematically indicates the hopeless situation that builds up with her entrance.133 Even her hair, in its elaborate braiding, reflects the dramatic knot that entangles her in an inextricable and inscrutable situation. Nœud, one of the key poetological terms of the doctrine classique, describes the planned construction of obstacles to the fulfillment of human wishes, in addition to the artful entanglement of a character in a network of actions beyond their comprehension.134 In Phaedra’s entrance, the tragic course of events is anticipated by a complex decorative metaphor, and the dragging weight of the knot counteracts the sovereignty of her entrance. As her spine bends downward, the convincing theatrical form bound to an upright posture disappears. Even as Phaedra enters, then, the tragic potential inherent in the human desire to appear is revealed, preparing the entanglement that the tragedy holds for her. Her entrance is as much an expression of splendor as it is “power” she has suffered, and will yet “suffer.”135 From the moment she enters the stage, states of “incertitude, la curiosité, l’impatience, l’inquiétude”136 announce themselves that French dramatic doctrine, too, associates with a tragic knot, and which it employs to foretell misfortune.

The Monster in the Chamber The darkness of the scene and the blurring of the images wrought by these entrances further stem from the fact that the ruler’s sun has retreated from the tragic stage. The central inversion of the solar composition of the court stage consists in transforming the presence of the king—whose entrée had also set framework for the entrances of all other subjects—into absence. The illuminating, splendid entrance of the sovereign is opposed here in tragedy by the retreat of light.137 Scholars have commented at length on this absence. Lucien Goldmann

133 See Juliane Vogel, “Verstrickungskünste. Lösungskünste: Zur Geschichte des dramatischen Knotens,” Poetica 40 (2008): 269–288; Timothy M. Scanlan, “Racine’s ‘Bajazet,’ ‘Noeuds’ and ‘Denouement,’” South Atlantic Bulletin 42, no. 4 (1977): 13–20. 134 See Jacques Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique en France, 62–91. 135 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Theater und Mythos: Die Konstitution des Subjekts im Diskurs der antiken Tragödie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 63. 136 Jean-Francois Marmontel, Elements de littérature (Paris: Firmin- Didot, 1892), vol. 2, chapter on intrigue, 298ff. Quoted from Scherer: La Dramaturgie classique en France, 62, note 2. 137 Here, I can only briefly note that Theseus, the actual king of Athens, has no power to make an entrance in the face of the all-too-powerful gods in the background. The king who enters is no king at all. See Leo Spitzer, “The ‘Récit de Théramène,’” in Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 87–134, here 93.

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reads it in theological-sociological terms, while Roland Barthes reads it politically, in observations that justify placing the roi caché138 of political tragedy alongside the dieu caché of Jansenist tragedy.139 But both readings permit one to conclude that the arcane gains the upper hand over the spectacular, and that the stage begins to lose its function as a sphere of visibility under the growing pressure of its secret zones. Instead of employing solar light in the court space of appearance, ruling power now operates from the background, from an extralegal area removed from the eyes of the audience. This is a space from where the happenings onstage can be surveilled and punished. Its place is once again the profondeur—albeit, with Roland Barthes, now as the depth of a chambre where a monstrous creature with despotic features is raging, working with all its might to draw into its spell the actors who dare to come into the light. Stepping into the light does not mean appearing in splendor but being exposed, caught in a trap.140 Racine’s stage is not an open scene but a “blind alley”141—a corridor without windows in which the actors try in vain to assert themselves before they are overtaken by the chamber’s terror. Nero in Britannicus, Neptune in Phaedra and Amurat in Bajazet, as well as Mithridate, Titus in Bérénice, and Athalie bear characteristics of such a roi caché who reaches out from invisible depths to seize control. This is precisely what political thinkers took to be signs of despotism; Montesquieu, for instance, noted that one of the characteristics of the despot is precisely that he does not show himself to his subjects.142 In Racine’s tragedy, the sovereign who rules the stage steps back into shapelessness, while abandoning the scene he was expected to endow with light and life. The backstage of the chambre thus becomes a site of murderous activity. In the secret areas of the backstage, in small chambers, the seas, or the underworld, Racine unleashes a depersonalized force that has been become unrecognizable—

138 Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 94ff. 139 Scherer (Racine, 138) points out that Nero and Neptune have the same monstrous structure: “The God of Phèdre behaves like Nero. Like Nero, he is a monster.” Scherer refers here to Michel Butor: “Racine et les Dieux,” in Butor, Repertoire I: Études et conférences, 1948–1959 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1960), 28–60, here 29. The same holds for both Scherer and Butor: “un chaos qui se prétend ordre” (Scherer, Racine, 138). Spitzer, too, notes the potential to sow chaos possessed by the background violence described in Neptune (“The ‘Récit de Théramène,’” 90). 140 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217. 141 Barthes, On Racine, 4. 142 See Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 59.

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an energy that, even without form, sets deadly limits to the dramatic characters’ desire to appear. Phaedra’s entrance can be regarded as representative for the general threat to the figure posed by a despotic background. Racine’s profondeur is accordingly no passive hinterland but rather an active field of forces that reveals the violent flip side of court forms of representation. The presence of the entrée royale, heightened to éclat, stands opposed to eruptions of despotic violence that can no longer be symbolized in forms of entering. Instead, the chambre’s power is allegorized in the figure of the slave Orcan who operates with murderous intent in the backstage of the tragedy Bajazet. As an emissary, henchman, and slave of the Sultan Amurat, Orcan no more advances to the proscenium than does his master whose offshoot he is. The massacre he carries out in the seraglio takes place unseen: “[He] kills by being invisible.”143 His name is doubly telling. First, in that it contains the concept of the arcanum, which attributes to him the hidden sphere of the raison d’état, in which the ruler acts legibus solutus, that is, without being bound by law; this first meaning also refers to an elementary destructive energy characterizing this arcane activity. And in its second meaning, the name Orcan signifies “storm”: the stormy destruction of all the sultan’s foes in the depths of the seraglio, as well as the stormy restoration of the pouvoir absolu that the sultan sees endangered by the machinations of the seraglio’s inhabitants. Orcan is both the faceless personification of arcane violence and the bearer of an iconoclastic might, his black skin ultimately locating him backstage and rendering him indistinguishable from the darkness in which he kills. In Bajazet, the power of the backstage is limited to the rear part of the seraglio, but in Phaedra it advances to some degree into the scene. The background power that has built up in the tragedy is unleashed here in an entrance that may not tear down the separation between the spheres of on- and offstage, but is nevertheless so threatening that its energy endangers the entire theatrical setting. Whereas the slave Orcan remains shapeless, raging only within the confines of the seraglio, the despotic power that rules in the chambre of Racine’s later work, Phaedra, manifests itself in spectacular form. The tragedy reaches its climax in the entrance of a monster. From Hippolytus’s confidante Theramenes, we hear tell of the spectacular stranding of this creature commanded by Neptune to come ashore from the depths of the ocean and kill Hippolytus, after he had been slandered by Phaedra in front of his father Theseus; more precisely: the monster is commanded to unleash Hippolytus’s horses so that they drag their driver to his death. This creature makes visible the powers of the background god, Neptune, who is responsible in both

143 Barthes, On Racine, 4.

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Roman and Greek mythology for bridling and unbridling horses, and who now advances out of the secrecy of the chambre onto the shore of appearances.144 Theramenes reports that a bull-like creature has risen up from the “fond des flots”—the bottom of the sea. In the compressed form typical of mythology, something atrocious comes to light that was previously hidden in the tragedy’s depths and the actors’ hearts. The ceremonial of the court entrées is met here by a brutalized, utterly disordered event that shakes the foundations of the court’s semiotic space and counters the spectacular entrance of the ruler with an incursion of elemental violence. Surges of water, vomiting, and a violent birth cause the background to flood forward in a hideous figure: A ghastly cry from out the water’s depths That moment rent the quiet of the air. From the earth’s entrails then a fearful voice Made answer with a groan to that dread cry. Deep in our hearts our blood with horror froze, The courser’s manes, on hearing, stood erect And now, there rose upon the liquid plain A watery mountain seething furiously. The surge drew near, dissolved and vomited A raging monster from among the foam. His forehead huge was armed with fearsome horns And his whole body sheathed in yellow scales, Half bull, half dragon, wild, impetuous, His crupper curved in many a winding fold. The shore quaked with his long-drawn bellowings. The heavens beheld the monster, horror-struck; It poisoned all the air; it rocked the earth. The wave that brought it in recoiled aghast. Everyone, throwing courage to the winds, Took refuge in the temple near at hand.145

144 See Spitzer, “The ‘Récit de Théramène,’” 95ff. 145 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 210. Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 872f. (lines 1507ff.), emphasis J.V.: “Un effroyable cri sorti du fond des flots / Des airs en ce moment a troublé le repos. / Et du sein de la terre une voix formidable / Répond en gémissant à ce cri redoutable. / Jusqu’au fond de nos cœurs notre sang s’est glacé. / Des coursiers attentifs le crin s’est hérissé. / Cependant sur le dos de la plaine liquide / S’élève à gros bouillions une montagne humide. / L’onde approche, se brise, et vomit à nos yeux / Parmi des flots d’écume un Monstre furieux. / Son front large est armé de cornes menaçantes. / Tout son corps est couvert d’écailles jaunissantes. / Indomptable Taureau, Dragon impétueux, / Sa croupe se recourbe en replis tortueux. / Ses longs mugissements font trembler le rivage. / Le ciel avec horreur voit ce Monstre sauvage, / La terre s’en émeut, l’air en est infecté, / Le flot, qui l’apporta, recule

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The monster attains its paradoxical form by entering into appearance with éclat despite its lack of shape. Even in states of reversal and dissolution, Racine’s entrances continue to refer to the forms of entering at court:146 the eruption of naked violence from the sea testifies to a majesty that evokes all the features of a ruler’s entrée, albeit in perverted form—and likewise, in the end the splendid entrance rejected by Racine’s tragedy returns in drastically distorted shape. As a contrast to weak personas from a court society caught in the process of dissolution, Racine presents the luxurious details of monstrosity. The power to enter comes together here with form, image, and movement in a spectacularly conceived entrance whose force now exceeds everything of this kind offered by other tragic scenes; and the formlessness of monstrosity is given such a convincing shape that the “human figures” of the court fade away by comparison. Whereas these human figures always remain in the shadow of a profondeur that continues to hold them captive even as they advance, it is only the monster who steps forward completely: the creature attains triumphal presence because it is here alone that the ground withdraws from the figure. The verse “The wave that brought it in recoiled aghast”147 not only paints a picture of heightened terror; it also makes clear that in tragic space only monstrosity can claim the full-bodied clarity of an entrance. Only here does the strength or “force” (“la force m’abandonne”) that had deserted Phaedra during her entrance return in full intensity. And finally, in this catastrophe the effects of the ruler’s entrance in giving life and form are reversed. While the sovereign’s triumphant sun bestows form and color upon his satellites, as we read in Benserade’s 1653 Ballet royal de la nuit, the monster now deprives the figures on stage of these same qualities:148 “Hippolytus disfigured, deadly pale” is Neptune’s answer to the court’s solar theater, with its claim to shape its figures through the gift of light (Figure 5).149 At the same time, it remains apparent that this entrance is endowed with strength only indirectly, in the form of a report delivered by a messenger that gives us a glimpse behind the scenes but refuses to allow these events onstage. The monster comes ashore within the spatial limits set by backstage. The evidentia épouvanté. / Tout fuit, et sans s’armer d’un courage inutile / Dans le temple voisin chacun cherche un asile.” 146 See Maskell, Racine, 170ff. 147 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 210. Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 872f. (lines 1507ff.): “le flot, qui l’apporta, recule épouvanté.” For a discussion of the rhetorical qualities of this verse, see Spitzer, “The ‘Récit de Théramène,’” 115. 148 See Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, 66. On this point, see the introductory section to this chapter. 149 Racine, Phaedra, trans. Cairncross, 212. Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 874 (line 1579): “Hippolyte étendu, sans forme et sans couleur.”

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achieved by its entrance in Theramenes’s depiction stems from the vivid speech that portrays an absent event to us as though it were present; the creature’s power derives from energeia as a figure of thought, which charges the representation of what is absent with force.150 The scene ostensibly follows the rule canonized by Horace, which forbids showing an atrocity in tragedy ad oculos.151 But it is the articulated language of the messenger’s report itself that mobilizes the force of this coming forth in the first place. It is only this evocation in language that makes it possible to both contain and unleash terror: only rhetoric is able to make this terror present to those who are listening, while also attenuating it—to release such a wild energy, while also stylizing the account of horror into a splendid rhetorical object that accords with the demands of bienséance. The energies of the entrance are accordingly channeled into language, but they manifest themselves only within the framework of a strict set of linguistic rules. The disintegration of court forms of entering takes place within the limits of neoclassical doctrine.152 Only the extreme stability of the neoclassically distinct dramatic form makes it possible to at once conjure up and control the profondeur’s shapeless monstrosities. Whether the aim is to depict the loss of form suffered by court characters, or to evoke the monstrously hypertrophic form of invisible violence, this representation presupposes the exemplary observance of poetic rules. The law of the three unities and the sequence of scenes are preserved here in exemplary fashion, and the mechanisms of exclusion and labeling employed by the court world apply equally to all persons. Racine’s tragedies show that the court scene is not the space entirely pervaded by symbolic meaning which court ceremonial prescribes and attempts to maintain with its every action. And even when this scene presents itself as a murky sphere of unrestrained passions and impenetrable obstacles, its formal scaffolding remains. Held in the linguistic cage of the doctrine classique, chaos can be let loose while itself also making an entrance.

150 Spitzer (“The ‘Récit de Théramène,’” 107) speaks of a “secondary visualization.” 151 See Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique, 418. 152 See Spitzer, “The ‘Récit de Théramène,’” 88.

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Figure 5: Charles Le Brun, Phèdre et Hippolyte, frontispiece depicting the death of Hippolytus in Act V (1678), in Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, Act V, frontispiece, Paris, 1677, Bayrische Staatsbibliothek München, image no. 12, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsbioog6463-1.

Tragic Perspectives: The Stage of the Galli Bibiena Magnificence and Enigma Racine’s tragic scheme, which no longer allows the sovereign to enter but instead encloses him in the depths of a chambre, also had a long-term effect on the construction of the court perspectival stage. As spoken tragedies in the vein of Racine pushed further toward the form of opera, and the tragic counterforces they call forth threatened the primacy of the machine spectacle, the court space of appearance designed for perspicuitas also came to be shrouded in mystery. Compromises resulted that attempt to account for both the pomp of majestic

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architectures of power and the profondeur of their despotic counterparts. The painted scenery of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accommodated the ambivalent structure of tragic appearances by simultaneously opening up spaces of appearance and disappearance. It manifested changes that rendered the formerly transparent space of linear perspective opaque, and that transferred the tragic predicate of inscrutability onto the virtual architecture of the painted scenery. This shift can be illustrated by looking more closely at the Galli Bibiena family of Italian artists, whose members found success at European courts in cities including Vienna, Innsbruck, Berlin, Dresden, and Paris from the late seventeenth until well into the eighteenth century. The family’s importance lies less in the originality of its designs than in the ease with which the spatial models associated with its name established their dominance.153 This was based in particular on the family’s standardization of a few, yet distinctive, scenographic types, which had already been worked out by the great stage engineers of the seventeenth century but whose potential was only truly exploited in the following century. Recent scholarship indicates that we find the beginnings of a distorting, stretching, narrowing, and disfiguring of perspective in the earlier painted scenery of Torelli, Berain, and others, which means that here, too, we can speak of the “justesse” of perspective only in a qualified way.154 It was in particular the progenitor of the dynasty, the theater engineer Ferdinando Galli Bibiena (1656–1743), along with his son, Giuseppe Galli Bibiena (1696–1757), both of whom worked in Prussia and Saxony, who contributed to a lasting restructuring of the court perspectival stage and thus also of the protocols governing its entrances. In his 1711 treatise L’architettura civile: preparata sú la geometria, e ridotta alle prospettive: considerazioni pratiche (Civil architecture: based on geometry, and reduced to perspectives: practical considerations), Ferdinando Galli Bibiena developed a number of “operations,” as he called them, that adopted the principle of perspectival perspicuitas in an aim to close the finestra aperta that had opened on the regular perspectival stage. Even though his inventions continued to operate strictly within the framework of linear perspective, without ever questioning its mathematical premises, they transformed a previously transparent space into one that was impenetrable. In

153 See Norbert Miller, Archäologie des Traums: Versuch über Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 39. 154 Ulrike Haß, “Vom Wahnsinn des Sehens in geschlossenen Räumen: Raumdebatten und Szenografie im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Barocktheater als Spektakel, 145ff.; Bettine Menke, “Was das Spektakel möglich macht.”

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the place of the world of appearance that the perspectival stage so clearly structured toward a vanishing point, they create architecturally enigmatic structures that restrict the illusion of a space opening up, and thus also the possibility of making an entrance not only on stage but also within the virtual world of the painted scenery. The result is a “spatial ambiguity” that also poses difficulties to the interactions on stage.155 Sites that are clearly designated for making an entrance disappear, while spatial axes that were previously open become lost in labyrinthine architectural worlds.

Scena per angolo Put schematically, two complementary operations can be distinguished in the Galli Bibienas’ approach that make entrances more unlikely, at least if they are to come from the painted scenery. The first consists in the overextension of the visual axis.156 Here, the vanishing point is shifted so far back into the virtual depth of the back cloth that it is no longer possible to precisely distinguish opening from closing, just as the entrance that previously seemed imminent in the spatial alignment of central perspective now appears barely probable, if at all (see Figure 6). The ceremonial spatial overture of the perspective scenery, as a possible space of entry for solar sovereignty, recedes into an unrecognizable distance. In the designs of the Galli Bibienas, spatial depth is mystified, becoming a concealed form of spatiality. The second and more widely known operation is the angling of the front of the stage known as the scena per angolo, which became the distinctive feature of stages designed by the Bibiena family. “The Galli Bibienas’ diagonal or angular perspective places the main axis of the set at a forty-five-degree angle lateral to the visual axis of the auditorium.”157 The setting requires a rotation of the front of the stage and a doubling of its vanishing point. Its confusing effect results from a splitting of the central visual

155 See Claudia Müller, “Ferdinando Galli Bibienas ‘Scene di nuova invenzione,’” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 49 (1986): 356–375, here 369. 156 This trick had already been employed by Torelli. See Ulrike Haß, Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Bühnenform (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 350, on the endlessness of his stage designs. See also Haß, Vom Wahnsinn des Sehens, 146. 157 Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince, 105; for a general treatment of the scena per angolo, see 104–108.

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Figure 6: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, Scena della festa teatrale, n.d., in Architetture e prospettive, Sala Bolognese 1g87, page P.IV.

axis along with a lateral diversion of the gaze.158 The scena per angolo rebuffs the spectator’s gaze. It transforms the orderly outline of the court world into a system of spatial alignments that cannot be surveyed or controlled from the point of sight. What results is an impenetrable stage situation that steers the principe dei

158 See Eckhard Pabst, the entry for “Scena per angolo,” in Lexikon der Filmbegriffe (online version provided by Kiel University): “This is a spatial composition visible from an oblique position that was developed beginning with a protruding corner of a building via two vanishing points, and that seemingly opened up in a diagonal direction to what appeared to be a nearly interminable series of spaces. . . . The double orientation of the perspective did not allow the spectator to have a closed perception of the space, which seemed instead to continue endlessly.” https://film lexikon.uni-kiel.de/index.php?action=lexikon&tag=det&id=5577, accessed December 17, 2020. See also Müller, “Ferdinando Galli Bibienas ‘Scene di nuova invenzione,’” 358. “As polyfocal images of space that nevertheless maintained their frontal orientation and symmetry (with multiple depth axes) and asymmetrical axial spaces (with an eccentric point of sight), [the Bibiena designs] increasingly question the depth- and visual axes of both realms of reality.” See also Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 36: Miller describes the scena per angolo as the “trick of using a corner position, in order to cut out a smaller space from the palace as a whole, by means of walls or arrangements of columns running diagonally, from right and left, to a point of intersection at the back.”

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razzi—the princely ray of vision—to the side and into the indefinite distance.159 If central perspective gave the spectator the unrestricted right to visually penetrate the stage, the newly angled stage blocks any possibility of control. Norbert Miller, who draws a direct link between the Galli Bibienas and the spatial constructions of Piranesi, speaks of a “violent suspension of the spectator’s sovereignty.”160 What is presented to our sight is not a space of arrival, with actors who turn to the front to address the audience, but “random, fragmentary excerpts of a world governed by laws of its own.”161 Having no discernible aim, these spaces are as equally confusing to the spectator as are the characters who appeared before the stage’s painted cloths.162 The diagonal position of the baseline creates an autonomous pictorial area that does not admit the spectator’s gaze, and that destroys the unity which had previously joined together the auditorium and the stage.163 The scena per angolo entails the loss of the scene’s point of sight. This composition of the scena per angolo is intended to suspend the grand entrance structuring the theater of sovereignty. It hides the place where the sun rises, which is identical with the virtual place where the sovereign enters. Here, too, a negative entrance protocol replaces a solar one, prescribing the absence or concealment of the entrance and transforming the triumphal expectation of the prince into a fear of an indeterminate threat. The Bibiena stage presupposes the minotauric withdrawnness of the prince’s body. By closing the via regia and obliquely situating the layout, it breaks the link between power and visibility that forms the symbolic-political foundation of absolutist representation.

Reggia The advance of tragic profondeur onto the festival stage manifests itself in a preference for certain types of space. On the Bibiena stage, sumptuous, hermetic interiors prevail over open scenes. Although scenes of gardens, war, and the sea continue to appear on its painted cloths, interiors that refer back to the dramatic tragedy dominate.

159 See chapter 2, section “Linear Perspective as the Unity of Interaction.” 160 Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 39. See also Müller, “Ferdinando Galli Bibienas ‘Scene di nuova invenzione,’” 367. 161 Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 359. 162 See Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 39. 163 See Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 367. On the prehistory of the scena per angolo with Servanoni, see Thomas E. Lawrenson, The French Stage and Playhouse in the XVIIth Century: A Study in the Advent of the Italian Order, 2nd edition (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 200.

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The scena per angolo favors the construction of palace architectures that are more reflective of Racine’s spatial models. The architectural types of the reggia,164 the salle magnifique, and the atrium vary and enhance the significance of the setting designation of “palace à volonté” that was conventionally found in tragedies, while adopting its connotations.165 A reggia is the name given to a palace complex governed, despite the grandeur of its layout, by the same paradoxes of display and concealment that can be observed in Racine.166 Even though the setting ostensibly serves to heighten absolutist magnificence,167 it also appears as dark and inaccessible. Regardless of their splendor, the palaces of the Galli Bibienas become luoghi lugubri—gloomy places168—and are thus presented as spaces that manifest structural similarities to prisons and dungeon rooms.169 The impression of indeterminacy can also be traced to the fact that no certain distinction can be made between the spaces for representing spectacular power and the secret spaces for wielding despotic violence. As in Racine, figures here become prisoners moving before a terrifying background.170 The Bibiena stage thus realizes a spatial program we find articulated in Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful—to wit, an attempt to arouse fear by withdrawing the ruler’s presence. “Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions

164 On the increasing importance of the reggia in the stage designs of the Galli Bibiena family, see Oswald Georg Bauer, “‘Ihre Ideen waren der Würde der Herrscher ebenbürtig, und nur die Macht der Herrscher konnte ihren Ideen Gestalt geben’: Zur Typologie des Bühnenbildes der Galli Bibiena,” in Paradies des Rokoko II: Galli Bibiena und der Musenhof der Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, ed. Peter O. Krückmann (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 104–115, here 105. 165 See Maskell, Racine: A Theatrical Reading, 12ff. 166 See Laurent Mahelot, Le Mémoire de Mahelot, Laurent, et d’autres décorateurs de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne et de la Comédie Française au XVIIe siècle, ed. Henry Carrington (Paris: E. Champion, 1920), 26ff. Ethel Matala de Mazza illustrates the ambiguity of representative and arcane architecture through an analysis of Racine’s Bérénice. See Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Die leere Kammer: Zur Exposition in Racines Bérénice,” in Der Anfang des Dramas: Dramenanfänge, Wissenschaftspoetik und Gattungspolitik, ed. Claude Haas and Andrea Polaschegg (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus, 2012), 277–297, here 279ff. Matala de Mazza speaks here of an “open arcanum” in which the intimacy of a small chamber and the rich ornamentation of a representational space overlap. 167 See Bauer, “Ihre Ideen waren der Würde der Herrscher ebenbürtig,” 106. 168 See Adelheid Rasche, “Decoratore di sua Majestà: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena als Bühnenbildner an der Berliner Hofoper Friedrichs II. von Preußen,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999), 99–131, here 110. 169 See Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 76ff. 170 See Miller, Archäologie des Traums, 80ff.

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of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye.”171

Figure 7: Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, Prospettiva con scena di convito (1721), IBC Multimedia “Scene Convivali nelle Collezioni Comunali d’Arte (http://www.ibcmultimedia.it/contenuti/ scene-conviviali-nelle-collezioni-comunali-darte/).

The calculus of fear pursued by despotic architecture consists in the methodical production of an “artificial infinity,”172 which Burke describes as “dark, uncertain, confused, terrible and sublime to the last degree.”173 This is a sphere of intimidation, and not of any emphatic entry (Figure 7).

171 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 59. 172 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 75. 173 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 59.

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Spatial Models of raison d’état It was still possible in the eighteenth century to associate this notion of a main space withdrawn from view and obscured by confusing spatial alignments with the idea of raison d’état. The artificial infinity of the Bibienas’ painted scenery, which made it possible for a space to remain hidden and simultaneously protrude onto the stage, represented a politics of maintaining power that dated back to early modern notions of sovereignty.

Figure 8: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, design for the fifth scene in Britannico (1751), feather drawing in brown ink, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek (Lipp-HdZ 5131recto), in Adelheid Rasche, “‘Decoratore di sua Majestà’: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena als Bühnenbildner,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999): 110.

The scena per angolo and its variants provided architectural visualizations of an arcane politics that allowed the princes of the early modern period to override the law they themselves guaranteed, in order to assert interests of the state. In protruding onto the stage, the angles of the Bibiena backdrops create the idea of an arcane sphere that can be understood as a “gray zone of extralegal and ethically impermissible action, and [as a] field of political operation in which written and

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unwritten laws are entirely absent.”174 The phrase “Politica est ars tuendi et conservandi statum suum”175—“politics is the art of protecting and preserving its state”— forcefully brings this doctrine to a point. Raison d’état, understood in its early, Machiavellian sense, implied the unscrupulous use of means that served power, but which were planned in secret and thus could not be attributed to the ruler himself. It was necessary for the crimes committed in the name of the conservandi statum suum to be perceived as the activity of an indeterminate perpetrator.176 And even in the early modern period, political literature connects this concept with ideas about space.177 Between the palazzo and the piazza, one often finds a screen of fog that is so dense, a wall that is so high, that it cannot be penetrated by the people’s gaze. They know as much about what the ruler is doing, or the motives for his action, as they do of events in India.178

Racine in the Opera House: The Britannicus of Frederick the Great In one production at the Prussian court, we find a case in which the Bibiena family’s stagecraft was deliberately combined with Racine’s form of tragedy. In 1751 Frederick the Great commissioned Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, who was working at the time at the Dresden court, to design the painted scenery for the opera Britannicus;179 a libretto was then written by Leopoldo de Villati and set to music by the court composer Carl Heinrich Graun. This piece was an adaptation of Racine’s Britannicus that transformed the play from a work of spoken theater into a work of opera. After the end of the Second Silesian War in 1745, efforts

174 See Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007), 179. 175 Nicolaus Hieronymous Gundling, Die Politic (Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig, 1733), 8. Cited from Horst Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fürstengesellschaft: Semantik und Theorie der Einherrschaft in Deutschland von der Reformation bis zum Vormärz, vol. 2, Theorie der Monarchie (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), 587. 176 On the depersonalization of power, see Herfried Münkler, Im Namen des Staates: Die Begründung der Staatsraison in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1987), 168. 177 See Haß, Das Drama des Sehens, 232; see also Münkler, Im Namen des Staates, 179, with reference to aphorism 220 from Gracián’s Art of Worldly Wisdom: “When you can’t wear a lion’s skin, wear a fox’s”; Balthasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 124. 178 Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogo e Discorsi del Reggimento di Firenze, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1932), 141. Cited from Münkler, Im Namen des Staates, 183. 179 See Rasche, “Decoratore di sua Majestà,” 109. At the time, Galli Bibiena did not yet have a permanent position at the Prussian court (see Rasche, 101).

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were made to bring the opera of the Prussian court closer to spoken French tragedy, at the expense of Italian opera seria.180 On the king’s initiative, the repertoire was oriented toward the canonical works of French neoclassicism and especially toward Racine.181 This suspended the requirement imposed by the genre of a lieto fine, that is, a happy ending; but it also put an end to the miracles and machines of the French model of opera. One reason for combining Racine and the Galli Bibiena was the opportunity it gave the king to publicly articulate—in two media, the libretto and the painted back cloth—the criticism of despotism he had formulated in his political writings. For Frederick, an enlightened ruler and author of a treatise with the telling title Anti-Machiavel (1740), the operatic stage offered yet another tool to denounce the politics of unbridled Machiavellian despotism associated with the notion of raison d’état: the king not only commissioned the scoring of Racine’s Britannicus for the Berlin court opera, but also authored the despot operas Lucio Silla (1753) and Montezuma (1754). Britannicus formulated the principles of enlightened doctrine of the state, which demanded complete accountability from the ruler for his governmental actions and took Nero as the cautionary example of a monster. The plot of the opera, like that of the spoken tragedy, was centered on Nero’s transformation into a despot182—in the words of Racine’s preface: “a budding monster.”183 On the explicit order of the king, a tragedy was set to music in which the princely palace was designed from its first scene as a despotic, arcane space concealing a monster who controlled all the movements of his satellites. Frederick chose a drama in which the court space of representation had been transformed

180 On the replacement of the opera seria in Metastasian style with the model of spoken tragedy and, consequently, its “orientation toward a main plot,” see Sabine Henze-Döhring, Friedrich der Große: Musiker und Monarch (Munich: Beck, 2012), 77. 181 See Claudia Terne, “Friedrich II. von Preußen und die Hofoper,” in Friedrich der Große und der Hof: Beiträge des zweiten Colloquiums in der Reihe ‘Friedrich 300’ vom 10./11. Oktober 2008, ed. Michael Kaiser and Jürgen Luh (Potsdam, 2009), 28, cited from the electronic edition, http://www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/friedrich300-colloquien/friedrich-hof/Terne_ Hofoper, accessed February 25, 2022. 182 See Friedrich der Große, “Epistel über die Menschlichkeit,” in Friedrich der Große, Die Werke Friedrichs des Großen, vol. 10, Dichtungen, Zweiter Teil, ed. Georg Enders (Berlin: Hobbing, 1914), 39–47, here 42: “Errötet, Sterbliche: das Tigertier / Ist menschlicher als Menschen so wie ihr, / Menschen wie Kaiser Nero, wie Tiber, / Wie Sulla, jener fürchterliche Würger, / Der sich am Blut berauscht der röm’schen Bürger! / Fürwahr, ein Schrecken der Natur war er / Und eine Geißel Roms.” English: “Blush, mortals: the tiger-beast / Is more human than men like you, / Men like Emperor Nero, like Tiber, / Like Sulla, the dreadful strangler, / Intoxicated by the blood of Roman citizens! / Truly, he was a terror of nature / And a scourge of Rome.” 183 Racine, Britannicus, trans. Sisson, 3. Racine, Britannicus, 372: “Mais c’est ici un monstre naissant.”

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into a space of surveillance: “You are in a place which is full of his power. / These very walls, my lord, may have eyes; The emperor is never absent here.”184 Villati’s Nero is another practitioner of arcane power who deliberately removes himself from the scene in calculated fashion, to then become a shadow surveilling the opera’s protagonists: “I shall hide myself there, to watch and hear everything.”185 Against this background, court forms of appearance cannot avoid becoming protocols of fear, exposing those who arrive as trembling figures. The question that Nero puts to the princess Junia, whom he has abducted into the palace, formulates nothing less than the entrance protocol for despotic systems: “Kind princess, / Why do you seem so afraid of me?”186 The visibility that had previously guaranteed the monarch’s splendor and recognizability now becomes a trap.187 All who make an entrance—no matter what they do or say—shift into the position of the fearful antechambrist defined solely in relation to the door, curtain, or wall separating them from the chambre’s hidden center.188 It is true that the representational function of the spectacular stage—as a space of both splendor and fear—is maintained here. In the stage design for this Prussian Britannicus, we moreover find the specific doubling typical of scenes created by the Bibiena family. But here, too, what dominates the space is its tragic quality, with its central characteristic of impenetrability. In the sketches that Giuseppe Galli Bibiena made for this opera, we can discern a working method that begins with architectural nodes and primarily aims to achieve spatial compression (see Figures 9 and 10). The surviving sketches suggest that Giuseppe Galli Bibiena started from complex spatial cores evincing the beginnings of a scena per angolo, even if we can only imagine their completion. The designs 184 Racine, Britannicus, trans. Sisson, 33 (II:6, lines 724–726). Racine, Britannicus, 400 (lines 712ff.): “Vous êtes en des lieux tout pleins de sa puissance / Ces mûres mêmes, seigneur, peuvent avoir des yeux / Et jamais l’empereur n’est absent des ces lieux.” 185 Leopoldo de Villati, Britannicus: Ein Musicalisches Trauerspiel, welches aus Sr. Königl. Majest. In Preussen allergnädigsten Befehl im Jahr 1751 auf dem Berlinischen Schauplatze aufgeführet soll (Berlin, 1751), 35: “Ich will mich dort verstecken, und alles beobachten und hören.” 186 De Villati, Britannicus, 33: “Liebenswürdige Prinzeßin, / Warum erscheinest du denn so furchtsam vor mir?” See also 31: “Weinend, aber bey ihren Thränen noch viel angenehmer, / Habe ich sie bey mir ankommen sehen”; “Weeping, but made gentler by her tears, / I saw her arrive at my palace.” 187 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 206. 188 See de Villati, Britannicus: the second and third scenes or “actions” (“Handlungen”) of the opera are explicitly set in forecourts and antechambers. On the architecture of the antechamber, see Niels Werber, “Antichambrieren bei Schiller und Schmitt: Zum Zusammenhang von Macht und Raum,” Konfigurationen: Gebrauchsweisen des Raums, ed. Anna Echterhölter and Iris Därmann (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013), 63–81.

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develop from pillars of multiple columns giving rise to arcane spatial structures. Here, the tragic context of the plot, which demands the tying of a tragic knot, is translated directly into architectural nodes. Giuseppe Galli Bibiena develops his spaces out of those inscrutable sites where multiple strands of space come together via arches to form an architectural complexity that corresponds structurally to the nœud, or knot, as the defining structural element of tragedy (see Figures 8–10).

Figure 9: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, design for the first scene in Semiramide (1754), feather drawing in brown ink, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek (Lipp-HdZ 5131recto), in Adelheid Rasche, “‘Decoratore di sua Majestà’: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena als Bühnenbildner,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999): 117.

Cancelli Over a longer period, however, this impenetrability of spatial relations defining the court did not remain confined to a critique of despotism. The erratic structure of the Bibiena stage, which makes it impossible to distinguish representational spaces from small private chambers, including the “cabinet” in the archaic sense

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Figure 10: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, detail studies (1754), feather drawing in brown ink, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek (Lipp-HdZ 5131recto), in Adelheid Rasche, “‘Decoratore di sua Majestà’: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena als Bühnenbildner,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999): 117.

as the room in which the sovereign met with his privy councilors, reflected a wider development that depersonalized the ruler and allowed other forms of arcane politics to emerge. This shift transformed the monster hiding in the chamber into anonymous successor forms. With the emergence of the administrative state, a new type of secrecy was generated that was grounded in administrative processes, and which thereby also gave the scena per angolo a modern, administrative cast. The new spatial labyrinths corresponded to a modern concept of raison d’état that replaced the Machiavellian arcana of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with secrets reflecting the arcana cameralia or arcana de aerario, thus ultimately also undermining the foundation for the genre of tragedy.189 The development of the administrative state and the functional differentiation of power in the political system of the eighteenth century created new invisible zones in which state affairs 189 See Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fürstengesellschaft, 576.

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were handled by anonymous civil servants:190 the arcane operation of the chambre de terreur was transformed into the official, administrative, and supervisory operations of modern state apparatuses.191 For this reason, the Bibiena stage, too, creates uncertainty as to whether its facade conceals the workings of a despotic being or, rather, a corps of state officials to whom large parts of government action had long since been delegated.192 In this modern governmental regime, the task of conservandi statum suum lies with the civil servants who transform privy cabinets into official agencies. If they enter the scene at all, state officials are invisible or at least inconspicuous figures, primarily bound to the medium of writing, who carry out their administrative activities away from public view. For them, the movement of stepping forth and making an appearance is no longer fitting.193 This recoding of the scena per angolo is architecturally visible in the fact that the closed building facades of the reggias are in many cases broken up by lattice structures that are partially open yet nevertheless obstruct the view of the audience. The principle of the palace architecture devised by the Galli Bibiena family rests on the semiarcane construction of the chancellery, which is separated from the public not by walls but by cancelli, a latticework screen or grating. Both the German “Kanzlei” and the English cognate “chancellery” (or its shortened form, “chancery”) derive from the Latin “cancellus”: the grille that separates the space of a “chancellor’s court, or office, with its officials,” from the public.194 Such a space demarcated by cancelli—which now found its way, in a baroque heightening, onto the European court stage—replaced the closed-off nature of privy cabinets with a semitransparency created by the latticework, making this site of power into a space recognizable as a chancellery.195 190 See Wolfgang Reinhard, “Geheimnis und Fiktion als politische Realität,” in Krumme Touren: Anthropologie kommunikativer Umwege, ed. Wolfgang Reinhard (Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 221–250, here 225ff. 191 See Münkler, Im Namen des Staates, 242. “The princely claim to sovereignty was supplemented by the development of a state apparatus that eventually became the epitome of statehood. Sovereignty and apparatus complement each other: sovereignty needs this apparatus if it is to implement its decisions, but this very apparatus constrains its freedom to decide.” 192 See Münkler, Im Namen des Staates, 168. 193 On the tension between ceremonial and commerce, see Volker Bauer, Hofökonomie: Der Diskurs über den Fürstenhof in Zeremonialwissenschaft, Hausväterliteratur und Kameralismus (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), 228. 194 “Chancellery, n,” in OED Online, December 2020, Oxford University Press (accessed December 22, 2020). For this definition, 2.a., OED also refers directly to the German term: “Cf. German kanzelei, kanzlei.” 195 See Cornelia Visman, Akten: Medientechnik und Recht, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2011), 34. “The chancellery and gate are barriers: they construct and constrain arcane space; they function to exclude and they make connections. Etymologically and

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Under these conditions, the portico or colonnade now also becomes the supporting architectural element in the imaginary architecture of these stage designs, extending less into the depths of the vertical axis than sideways, into the horizontal axis, making older notions of a concealed perspectival depth disappear in favor of serial arrangements.

Figure 11: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, atrium with grand staircase, n.d., Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, 251.836-B.2Fid.

The Galli Bibiena family designed colonnade systems that appear to continue endlessly in all directions without any central alignment, and that no longer give rise to the perception of a closed, arcane main space (Figures 11, 12). At the same time, a structural and political continuity between the old and new arcane spaces remains visible in these chancellery spaces. As Niklas Luhmann has argued, the organizational forms of the modern state resemble their

functionally speaking, chancelleries emerged literally from barriers. They take their name from the ‘latticed and thus transparent barriers’ of Roman antiquity that were called cancelli.”

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Figure 12: Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, colonnade, n.d., water color, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, reference: 859.081-F1 The. Fol. XIX.

predecessors in refusing to tolerate the “disclosure of their functioning.”196 Even if the activity of the authorities is now given a legal foundation, and the despotism of the prince is curbed by official institutions, the arcane sphere persists within the modern administrative state. The colonnade systems of the Galli Bibiena family visualize the executive nontransparency of these new governmental apparatuses, which ultimately defeat even the ruler’s power of visual control. New labyrinths emerge from the old that similarly disorient those standing or appearing before them. Here, too, where the profondeur of the stage passes (in)to these officials and chancelleries, the splendor of the figure’s entrance vanishes: when set before the semitransparency of the chancellery, the staging of presence loses both its significance and necessity. The same distortions and confusions can be observed before these chancelleries’ gates and the despot’s chambre, just as the chancellery space expels the ruler from his solar center. An example from another eighteenth-century stage engineer makes this drastically clear. The painted scenery designed by Lorenzo Quaglio for the premiere of Mozart’s Idomeneo (1781) places cancelli at exactly the site intended for the ruler’s ceremonial entrée (Figure 13). Shifted to a position in front of the triumphal arch, the colonnade transforms the spectacular space for making an entrance into a space that is concealed and inaccessible.

196 See Niklas Luhmann, Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation, 3rd edition (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1976), 278.

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The large shadows in Quaglio’s back cloth make manifest how the surroundings of modern arcade architectures strip the power to make an entrance at court of its potency. The monumental cancellus not only blocks the despot’s entrance; it also renders precarious the positions for entering that might be occupied by all other figures who seek to assert themselves. Chancelleries concede no sites of entry. Occasionally, we find expressive details that reveal the characteristic tension of the Bibiena family stage between terrifying spatial enhancement and the desire to make an entrance. One such detail is a small figurine in a drawing by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena. Its entrance takes place at the extreme right of a stage design for a ballet (Figure 14)—in the overpowering shadow of large columns, which allows the figures to emerge only incompletely.

Figure 13: Lorenzo Quaglio, stage design for the premiere of Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Munich (1781), Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne.

The paradoxes of entrances on the Bibiena stage are developed here in an ideal form: they elide the oppositions between appearance and disappearance to such an extent that the one is always already the other. The figurine here presents herself to the audience in a perfect pose and assumes a ceremonial posture with arms gracefully lifted up to the side, keeping with court protocol for entering. But the articulatory function of the entrance is greatly diminished. In the semitransparency

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Figure 14: Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, stage design with ballet, n.d., The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1950, accession no. 50.519, http://www.metmuseum. orglart/collection/search/340235.

of the columns, only an incomplete articulation can succeed. The figure remains in the half-light of the chiaroscuro, which illuminates the head and chest, while its other parts are in shadow. Last but not least, the weakening of the entrance is achieved by the diminution of the performers, whose small body size leaves them hardly visible amid the spatial masses of the Bibiena stage, while also making the stage itself loom even larger. These figures are part of a micromegalic arrangement in which the individual figure is degraded to a mere figurant who now ekes out a ridiculous, barely noticeable existence in the forecourts of arcane powers.

Out of Step: Structures for Making an Entrance in the “liaison des scènes” of Schiller’s Don Carlos German theater from the eighteenth century is structured around entrances. With the drama of Christian Weise, and above all that of Johann Christoph Gottsched, a new manner of designating scenes based on the act of entering the stage became established in Germany during the Enlightenment. The representatives

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of baroque theater, such as Andreas Gryphius and Caspar Daniel Lohenstein, still drew on the discursive forms of scholarly culture in categorizing their dramas as “treatises” and thereby disavowing any emphasis on theatrical performance. Now, however, a form of theater emerged that not only divides the action it depicts into scenes structured by entrances and named as such, as Auftritte, but that also uses these entrances to link different scenes together into a single plot. A new nomenclature that was still unknown at the end of the seventeenth century thus came to determine the structure and course of the drama, as a feature unique to German theatrical history. In contrast to other European dramaturgies, which work primarily with the concept of the scene, in Germany it was “entrances” that came to regulate stage movements and their structured sequence. French traditions, however, also played a role in this development. As can be seen from Gottsched’s 1730 Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (An attempt at a critical poetics for the Germans), the new German structural scheme was organized to imitate the model of what was known as the liaison des scenes, or chain of scenes. This was a principle of concatenation developed for the French court theater and based on the rule of character changes: Here, though, scenes are numbered according to the entrances and exits of characters. As soon as a character comes, or leaves, a new entrance [Auftritt] is numbered: and depending on whether these entrances are short or long, many or but a few entrances are to be combined to form an act [Aufzug]. I mention this here again because the stage must never become entirely empty until the act has come to an end. . . . Hence when a character makes an entrance, they must always find someone to converse with; and if a character makes an exit, they must leave someone behind to fill the stage, unless their intention is to diligently avoid the newcomer. Boileau expresses this when he writes: Et les Scenes toujours l’une à l’autre liée.197

The model of liaison des scènes that Gottsched would impose on the Germans derived from seventeenth-century French theatrical discourse, formulated at a moment when rigorous rules of unity gained sway over tragedy and the coherence of drama became mandatory.198 197 Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, in Gottsched, Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 6:2, Anderer besonderer Theil, ed. Joachim Birke and Brigitte Birke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973), 352f. See also, in the same work, 334: “Finally, I must remind you that the entrances of the scenes in an action must always be connected with each other, so that the stage does not become completely empty until the action is over. Hence there must always remain a person from the previous scene when a new one arrives, or one departs: so that the whole action has a coherence.” Jacques Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 266ff., dates the emergence of a stricter managing of the liaison des scènes in France to the period after 1640. 198 See Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique, 266ff.

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This construction of dramatic cohesion was nonetheless not merely based on the demands of neo-Aristotelian drama; it was also to be guaranteed by the construction of a seamless ceremonial sequence. The proponents of the liaison des scènes clearly positioned themselves in the context of absolutist symbolic politics in reconciling the unité of the plot with the directives of court representation. Corneille described this as “a grand ornament in a poem . . . which serves to form a continuity of action via a continuity of representation.”199 Both dramatically and politically, it served to strikingly instantiate a power structure that had been in place since the 1640s as a consequence of Louis XIV’s politics. Like the absolutist court itself, the liaison des scènes was thus designed as a perpetuum mobile that provided for a structured and unbroken sequence in both time and space.200 By linking the change of scenes to the change of characters, it established clearly recognizable demarcations between the drama’s rhythmic divisions, while also preventing the stage from emptying out. And by intertwining the end of one scene with the beginning of the next, it avoided dead time and empty spaces and guaranteed the semiotic density needed to protect the court and its protagonists from crises of meaning.201 At the same time, it created a choreographic framework in which the performers moved toward and away from each other in step with the scenes. This entrance regime was characteristic of the court for another reason, however. Inasmuch as the concept of the scene became tied to the act of entering, the thresholds this entrance had to cross multiplied.202 Each new scene presupposed an artificial hurdle that could only be overcome through ceremony. And this ceremony chiefly entailed a graduated system of announcements that prepared, anticipated, and policed the crossing of the threshold that the entrance entailed. Fixed phrases ensured that characters arriving on stage are introduced in an

199 Pierre Corneille, “Discours des trois unités, d’action, de jour et de lieu,” in Corneille, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Marty Laveaux (Paris: Libr. L. Hachette, 1862), 98–122, here 101: “un grand ornement dans un poème, . . . qui sert beaucoup à former une continuité d’action par la continuité de la representation.” 200 See Elias, The Court Society, 86 and 129–130. Elias uses the term “perpetuum mobile” to describe the ceremonial mechanism of the court. 201 See the entry “Auftritt,” in Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: In einzelnen, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter aufeinanderfolgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt, mit einer Einleitung von Giorgio Tonelli (Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), vol. 1, 240–242. 202 On the concept of threshold multiplication, see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Zeremoniell, Ritual, Symbol: Neue Forschungen zur symbolpolitischen Kommunikation in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 27 (2000), 389–405, here 398. See Ulrich Schütte, “Stadttor und Hausschwelle,” 165.

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orderly manner, and obligatory announcements such as “here comes”203 became increasingly important compared to older usages, since these phrases not only guaranteed the orderly succession of characters entering and exiting but also made sure that the one arriving always appears with a familiar face. Neither happenstance nor unknown figures are found in the French entrance regime from the seventeenth century; opening verses such as “What bloody man is that?”204 (as in Shakespeare’s Macbeth) are beyond tragédie’s imaginative capacity. As a matter of principle, only those persons designated by rank and name, and who have been granted admission to the space of the court, can advance into the palace. This circumstance is all the more significant because court spaces always presuppose a license to enter. This license illustrates, among other things, the apparently permanent restriction placed upon the accessibility of the setting, but most of all the artificially limited accessibility of the ruler. Even in routine court procedures, this is considered the most precious good that can be attained in the court’s social games.205 This regime of the liaison must be kept in mind when addressing the developments that led during the eighteenth century to the formation of new structures for making an entrance. No detailed explanation is required in noting that the bourgeois dramas of this period had no desire to maintain such a commitment to the liaison des scènes. An orientation toward Shakespeare discredited the court choreography of changing characters in favor of forms for appearing that were more open, indeterminate, and informal—and more perilous. If the concept of the entrance remained relevant, it was through a semantic shift that no longer conceived of this act as a form for maintaining power, but rather as an impulse. Hence in contrast to the uses of the entrance at court, the dramas of the Sturm und Drang, in particular, accentuated the potential for movement, power, and feeling that was inherent in entrances, thus reducing their significance as elements of protocol. At the same time, delays also became more important, inscribing the state of melancholy into a movement of entering that was now deferred. Schiller’s early plays provide the best examples of a scenography that can no longer be comprehended through the patterns of court ceremonial. To the same degree that the liaison des scènes is called into question, forms for making an entrance that are oriented toward freer rhythms, and that

203 On the function of announcements in French neoclassical tragedy, see Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique, 270. 204 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Arden Edition of the Work of Shakespeare, ed. Kennetz Muir (London: Methuen, 1965), 4 (1/2, line 1). 205 See Elias, The Court Society, 83ff. See also Carl Schmitt, Gespräch über den Zugang zum Machthaber (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2008), 30, where explicit reference is made to Don Carlos.

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allow the drama’s figures to enter the scene under new kinetic auspices, become more important. This entailed, among other things, that the prescribed announcements of the neoclassical theater became distasteful.206 In eighteenth-century German dramaturgy, extravagant anticipations increasingly aroused suspicions of unnaturalness. As a form of resistance to the aristocratic politics of distance, works of drama, too, now formulated a critique of the very conventions used to define the threshold of the court—finding fault with the restrictions these formalities placed on access, and with their functions of assigning rank and emphasizing remove. In his General Theory of the Fine Arts, for instance, Johann Georg Sulzer bemoans the excessive use of announcements in theater—evidence of the loss of validity suffered by traditional dramaturgy, which had been secured by ceremonial protocols: They often indicate that the arrival of a new person is to be formally announced, even where this would not be necessary at all; as though they feared we might not notice or recognize the character who is making an entrance. The spectator is offended by this distrust in their attentiveness. There may, of course, be cases where this announcement is necessary; but too often it is used unnecessarily.207

The functional weakness of this advance notification dictated by protocol becomes more and more apparent, while in the dramas announcements that are quick, hasty, or even post hoc increase. Exclamations such as “Ha! It is he!,” which reverse the order of aviso and arrival, are the exception in the symbolic universe of neoclassical tragedy. They signal, as in Racine, the loosening of the symbolic structure guaranteed by the liaison.

206 The debate about Gottsched’s tragedy Der sterbende Cato is an early example of this development, in addressing what critics regarded as the hypertrophic design of the work’s announcements and accusing its author of slavish obedience to rules in linking its scenes. See Gottlieb Stolle, “Eines ungenannten Freundes kritische Gedanken über den sterbenden Cato,” in Johann Christoph Gottsched, Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 2, ed. Joachim Birke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), 127–131, here 127. 207 “Auftritt,” in Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 240; this work has been partially translated into English as Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. and trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Breaking the Chain of Entrances Schiller’s Don Carlos, however, which introduces its spectators into the closed world of the Spanish court, challenges the neoclassical scenography of the French court in yet another way. The play, which has rightly been read as an examination of the court machine and its forms of rule,208 can be reread in terms of the dramatic ideal of the liaison des scènes. Beginning with a loosening of scenic devices that generally characterize Schiller’s early dramas, Don Carlos comes to fundamentally interrogate the syntactic convention of the liaison. The conflict between Philip II and the heir to the throne provides the prince with an opportunity to question the forces that bind the two men together, and to recognize the losses of position that result for all parties affected by the dissolution of court syntax. An analysis of the scenic links in Don Carlos shows not only that Schiller’s text explicitly bespeaks a critique of the court, but also that this critique can be read in the failure of even the smallest of ceremonial acts. The special role of the entrance in Don Carlos can be gauged above all from the fact that Schiller once again divides his work into entrances, or Auftritte, after having shifted to the neutral concept of the scene in his earlier Intrigue and Love. Only “entrances,” as will be shown in what follows, offered him the possibility of simultaneously staging the crisis of the absolutist form of rule as a crisis of court dramaturgy—and of thereby honing in on the one element that defined the court protagonist in his actions and yet remained so highly susceptible to disruption: the movement of entrances and their orderly sequence. In Schiller’s drama, the rhythmic unit of the liaison is suspended, the spacing becomes disrupted, and it becomes impossible to incorporate individual entrances into a chain of scenes. Almost all of the play’s “entrances” offer variations of disruption and stoppage, and numerous stage directions present entrées and exits as risky maneuvers with uncertain outcomes and timing. In this context, it is only logical that the undoing of the rules for making an entrance endangers, above all, the distanced position of the king. Inasmuch as the court’s ceremonial structure disintegrates, the king also forfeits his position of power as it was codified in the sum of rules for making an entrance. The weakness of a regent who finds himself lost between the links of dissolved scenic chains becomes ever more apparent. Philip II delegitimizes himself to the same degree that he loses control over the thresholds designating his rank.

208 See Peter-André Alt, Klassische Endspiele: Das Theater Goethes und Schillers (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), here especially 13–35.

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The following argument, however, first reveals how new and unplanned forms of entering develop in the loosened symbolic structure of the Spanish court. As might be expected, the resistance against prevailing regime of entrances is transferred to two outstanding dramatic characters: the charismatic Posa, on the one hand, and the sensitive heir to the throne, on the other. Schiller’s comments on his process of writing give indications that both characters no longer follow any rules of protocol in their movements, but rather a natural or freer rhythm. As an example of a new measure no longer bound by ceremony, Schiller’s letters concretely name the action of the human heart and the beating of its pulse. Writing to his brother-in-law Wilhelm Friedrich Hermann Reinwald on April 14, 1783, he notes for instance that his aim is to transfer his own heartbeat to the characters of Don Carlos and thereby also communicate, to their entrances, the impulses of their author.209 The very first entrance of the Marquis Posa before the queen in Aranjuez accordingly occurs in breach of ceremonial rules and must be carried out against the objections of Olivarez, the queen’s principal attendant, who is responsible for enforcing protocol. This special circumstance [case] is not defined In my experience of protocol— There are some letters from a foreign court, To be presented to the Queen of Spain, And she receives them in her orchard from A nobleman whose home is in Castile—210

Posa’s entrance breaks free from the court chain of symbols to which kings and courtiers alike were bound. His appearance establishes a new regime that can no longer be policed by the ladies of the court, and which makes spontaneous appearances possible even in court space. The marquis’s special “case” compels the withdrawal of the queen’s attendant and thus also of the protocol she

209 See Friedrich Schiller, letter to Wilhelm Friedrich Hermann Reinwald, April 14, 1783, in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 11, Briefe 1, 1772–1795, ed. Georg Kurscheidt (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2002), 72. Also quoted in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Don Carlos: Grundlagen und Gedanken zum Verständnis des Dramas (Frankfurt am Main: M. Diesterweg, 1993), 6. 210 Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, trans. Hilary Sollier Sy-Quia and Peter Oswald (Oxford University Press, 2008), 17. Schiller, Don Karlos (Letzte Ausgabe), in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 3, Dramen II, ed. Matthias Luserke (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 773–986, here 790 (I:3, lines 473–478): “In meiner Vorschrift / Ist des besondern Falles nicht gedacht, / Wenn ein Kastilian’scher Grande Briefe / Von einem fremden Hof der Königin / Von Spanien in ihrem Gartenwäldchen / Zu überreichen kommt.”

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enforces: “But will you please permit me to withdraw, / While this is taking place, your Majesty?”211 Posa’s entrance fits so poorly into court procedures that he forces exceptions to be made at the highest level. His splendid dialogue with Philip II, in which he articulates the demand for freedom of thought, consequently results not in a political reflection but in a special rule of protocol granted by the king: “MARQUIS stands and goes. LERMA enters / This Knight shall be admitted / From this day on, whenever he desires, / Unannounced.”212 This instruction is an immediate reflection of the fact, noted by Norbert Elias, that the “charismatic leader always confronts people directly . . . pushing through his own ideas.”213 The marquis’s entrances compel his recognition outside the rules of protocol and thus emphasize his status as an exceptional figure who cannot be controlled by instructions or, especially, announcements. By contrast, the sovereignty with which the king suspends the rules governing entrances concurrently weakens him over the long term. When the ruler himself begins to follow the pulse of sentiment and grants this extraordinary figure free access to his chambers, he also revokes the protection meant to be afforded to him by protocol.

Impotent Impulses With the withdrawal of protocol from the play, the undoing of the rules for making an entrance continues its advance. In the next scene, it leads to another entrée that is out of order. Under the cover of the marquis, a person shoves his way to the front who moves, as all stages of the play’s creation show, out of sync with the court: Don Carlos. His illicit love for his mother, who was intended to be his wife, further accelerates the speed with which he enters. Dashing forward unannounced, he appears with a suddenness that terrifies the queen, who is normally shielded by strict rules governing access. After a sluggish start—in the first scene of Schiller’s Thalia fragment Don Carlos still appears with the hesitant stride of the melancholic—faster tempi now propel him through the hostile space of the 211 Schiller, Don Carlos, 17. Schiller, Don Karlos, 790 (lines 480f.): “Doch mir vergönne Ihro Majestät / Mich so lang’ zu entfernen.” 212 Schiller, Don Carlos, 121. Schiller, Don Karlos, 898 (III:10, lines 3353f.): “Der Marquis steht auf und geht. Graf Lerma tritt herein. KING: Der Ritter / Wird künftig ungemeldet vorgelassen.” 213 See Elias, The Court Society, 130–131. I describe Posa as charismatic primarily, with reference to Norbert Elias, in the sense of a court figure who succeeds within the absolutist regime of distance through proximity and offers of allegiance. On the discursive register of exceptionality or charisma in Schiller, see also Eva Horn’s illuminating analysis: “‘Mit ihrer Sichel wird die Jungfrau kommen’: Krieg und Charisma in Schillers Jungfrau von Orleans,” lecture given at the Institut für Germanistik of the University of Vienna on June 18, 2007.

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court, which for its part grants him no privileged position of entry and above all rejects his desire for familial intimacy. Guided by the “pulse of sensation,” his movements therefore ultimately break off: his exclamation at the end of the first act—“To the King!”214—is immediately curtailed by the act’s conclusion and slowed down even further at the beginning of the second act by the fact that he is allowed access only for a political discussion. His desire to meet his father outside court formality, that is, without an observer, is not granted. When the prince notices the presence of the Duke of Alba, the sentimental momentum of his entrance is transformed into a movement of retreat, and in immediately “step[ing] back with a bow” at the beginning of the scene,215 he acts under the compulsion of a court ceremonial that allows him neither impulse nor intimacy. His first verse declares: “The realm has precedence,” or “Vortritt,” meaning the courtesy or right granted for one to step ahead.216 Once again, the conflict between the scene of the court and familiar immediacy is exemplified by a crisis of movement that problematizes the very act of entering by staging the indecision of retreat and the right to advance. Hardly any other passage reveals quite so clearly how Schiller intertwines political and dramaturgical crises, or the precision with which he observes that these crises encompass not only the manner in which court protagonists speak, but also, more principally, the very steps linking the scenes together. The desire of the crown prince, at least, is aimed to destroy the liaison in favor of a moment not relativized by any scenic concatenation. If this linkage served to unfold a structure of entrances in time and space and to clarify the coherence of the entire court system, Don Carlos longs for an emphatic, singular entrance: We are alone. The anxious barrier / Of etiquette must vanish from between us— / This is the moment—I can feel the light / Of hope arising in me, and the sweetness / Of what could be floods through my heart like summer; / Heaven looks on, ranks of rejoicing angels / Bend their heads down—the Holy Trinity / Is awestruck by the spectacle [Auftritt].217

214 Schiller, Don Carlos, 36. Schiller, Don Karlos, 809 (I:9, line 1012): “Jetzt zum König.” 215 Schiller, Don Carlos, 37. Schiller, Don Karlos, 811 (II:1): “[tritt] mit einer Verbeugung zurück.” 216 Schiller, Don Carlos, 37. Schiller, Don Karlos, 811 (II:1, line 1015): “Den Vortritt hat das Königreich.” 217 Schiller, Don Carlos, 38. Schiller, Don Karlos, 812f. (II:2, lines 1057–1065): “Wir sind allein. / Der Etikette bange Scheidewand / Ist zwischen Sohn und Vater eingesunken. / Jetzt oder nie. Ein Sonnenstrahl der Hoffnung / Glänzt in mir auf, und eine süße Ahnung / Fliegt durch mein Herz – der ganze Himmel beugt / Mit Scharen froher Engel sich herunter, / Voll Rührung sieht der Dreimalheilige / Dem großen, schönen Auftritt zu!”

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Translated more literally than in this rendering, the German directly links Don Carlos’s vision to the theatrical principles at stake in the scene: “Deeply moved, the trinity looks upon / the grand, beautiful entrance.” The fantasy of entering harbored by the heir to the throne corresponds to a ceremonial oxymoron: he longs for both the spectacle of an entrance and for the imaginary fourth wall that bourgeois theater erected between the parterre and the stage, which was meant to create the illusion of being unobserved and to open up, even at court, the intimate space that made it possible to fashion bourgeois families.218 Don Carlos’s speech evokes the form of the emotionally moving tableau, which follows the model of Diderot’s comédie larmoyante in presenting the familial community founded in emotion,219 while simultaneously aiming to preserve the theatrical concept of the entrance and carry the spectacular core of its performance into the new scene. Yet it quickly becomes clear that there will be no successful double entrance, whether at court or in the family. The heir to the throne, driven by the pulse of sentiment, is called to order and lands in the king’s antechamber, where he waits for access among other courtiers, without the prerogatives that would be due a crown prince.

Loss of Control This disintegration of the court’s grammar of forms is also evident with the king, as will become clear in the following analyses. After the chain of scenes has been shattered, he too moves unprotected through the fabric of court society, which is now riddled with growing gaps. Philip II’s very first appearance in the queen’s garden paradigmatically demonstrates the form-dissolving consequences that now also follow for the king from the withdrawal of the lady of the court, who enforces protocol. The regime’s crisis of form is already taking shape when he is announced by a hurrying and unappointed messenger: “[hurries out

218 See Johannes Friedrich Lehmann, Der Blick durch die Wand: Zur Geschichte des Theaterzuschauers und des Visuellen bei Diderot und Lessing (Rombach: Freiburg i.Br., 2000). On the question of the competing genres in Don Carlos, see the overview provided by Cornelia Zumbusch in Die Immunität der Klassik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 160ff. 219 See Annette Graczyk, Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004), 81ff. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7ff. Since entrances destroy fourth walls and interrupt situations that are deeply moving, this act can be seen as the natural enemy of the heir’s efforts to secure intimacy.

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of the avenue]. The King!”220 Upon appearing, the king is compelled to discover that nothing has been prepared to receive him properly: the queen, who is only allowed to appear in a limited circle of her ladies-in-waiting, finds herself without any “company.”221 The punishment of the negligent guardian Mondecar thus also follows from the unforgivable fact that the chain of entrances was not linked together as prescribed. Characteristic of the king’s entrances is not only that they fail to maintain their form, but also that they take place prematurely, that is to say, at the end of a scene and not at its beginning. For example, the fifth scene of the first act closes with the stage direction: “QUEEN looks round uneasily for her ladies-in-waiting, who are nowhere to be seen. As she would retreat into the background, the KING appears.”222 By having the ruler appear before his entrance begins, Schiller deprives him of the sovereign position granted to him by the liaison. The king’s untimely appearance also detaches him, this time involuntarily, from the structure of the scenic positions that would have illustrated his place and rank in court space. And if the king appears before the time dictated by protocol, the boundary of the scene, which had been so clearly designated in advance, becomes less precise. In its place, an indeterminate and undifferentiated intermediate state takes hold in which entrances can find no orientation. Marking the beginning and end by changing characters is no longer possible. When the king arrives, an interruption occurs that the arrangement of the liaison was precisely intended to prevent, and the perpetuum mobile of continuously interlocking scenes falters. The king’s unexpected appearance first produces embarrassment and then, above all, dead and unstructured time that stops the clockwork of the court:223 “KING [looks around with an estranged expression and is silent for a while].”224 With this decoupling of entrance and scene, the first of the pauses that accompany the ruler’s appearances during the play now sets in, making conspicuous the emptiness surrounding him. As the stage sinks into silence, the cut from one scene to the next also disappears from the spectator’s field of perception; it is now only

220 Schiller, Don Carlos, 130. Schiller, Don Karlos, 802 (I:5, line 803): “MARQUIS eilt aus der Allee: Der König!” 221 Schiller, Don Carlos, 29. Schiller, Don Karlos, 802 (I:6, line 810). 222 Schiller, Don Carlos, 28–29. Schiller, Don Karlos, 802 (I:5): “Die Königin sieht sich unruhig nach ihren Damen um, welche sich nirgends erblicken lassen. Wie sie nach dem Hintergrunde zurückgehen will, erscheint der König.” 223 On the horreur vide in tragédie, see Scherer, La Dramaturgie classique, 271. 224 Schiller, Don Carlos, 29. Schiller, Don Karlos, 802 (I:6): “KÖNIG sieht mit Befremdung umher und schweigt eine Zeitlang.”

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the written form of the drama that indicates to the audience the beginning of a new “entrance.” This de-structuring in space and time, which can be observed with the very first entrance, is repeated three times over the course of the drama.225 The contours of a new entrance regime beyond the bounds of protocol become increasingly clear: it blurs breaks, destroys routines, creates embarrassments, and fashions the ghostly space between two scenes into a site for the spectacle of royal entrances that derail because they hold a surprise.226 This displacement of the king within the court’s rules for entering reaches a climax at the end of the eighth “entrance,” i.e., scene, in the fifth act, when Duke Alba opens the door to the royal chamber on his own authority and thus usurps the rights that were granted only to Marquis Posa.227 “FERIA. No! No one is to enter. / ALBA. Then I will dare to open it myself, / Weighing the danger. [As he walks toward the door it opens and the KING comes out. FERIA. Ha! He comes himself!”228 Not only does this conclusion of the scene reveal the defenselessness of a ruler whose rooms anyone can now enter unannounced; it also unveils the king’s final transformation into a ghostlike presence, deprived of both the site for his scene and his power to rule over the syntax of court forms. Stripped of his emblems of sovereignty and left exposed in the space between the scenes, he 225 The third entrance [Auftritt] in the fifth act brings the murder of the Marquis Posa to the stage and ends in another premature entrée of the king. Schiller, Don Carlos, 180: “[CARLOS stays lying, as if dead, next to the corpse. After a while the KING enters, accompanied by many grandees, but steps back, embarrassed, at the sight. A universal deep silence. The grandees align themselves in a semicircle around the two, and look alternately at the KING and his son. The latter still lies without any sign of life. The KING contemplates him in silence. SCENE IV.” Schiller, Don Carlos, 960f.: “Karlos bleibt wie tot bei dem Leichnam liegen. Nach einiger Zeit tritt der König herein, von vielen Granden begleitet, und fährt bei diesem Anblick betreten zurück. Eine allgemeine und tiefe Pause. Die Granden stellen sich in einen halben Kreis um diese beiden, und sehen wechselweise auf den König und seinen Sohn. Dieser liegt noch ohne alle Zeichen des Lebens. – Der König betrachtet ihn mit nachdenkender Stille. VIERTER AUFTRITT.” 226 On the ceremonialization of spatial dispositions at court, see Rudolf Schlögl, “Der frühneuzeitliche Hof als Kommunikationsraum: Interaktionstheoretische Perspektiven der Forschung,” in Geschichte und Systemtheorie: Exemplarische Fallstudien, ed. Franz Becker (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004), 185–226, here 196. 227 See Friedrich Schiller, Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung, in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 6, Historische Schriften und Erzählungen 1, ed. Otto Dann (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2002), 35–373. Schiller’s account leads to the conclusion that Philip II denies the Duke of Alba an unannounced entrance. 228 Schiller, Don Carlos, 190–191. Schiller, Don Karlos, 972 (V:8, lines 5013ff.): “FERIA: Nein! Der Eintritt ist verboten. / ALBA: So öffn’ ich selbst – Die wachsende Gefahr / Rechtfertigt diese Kühnheit – / Wie er gegen die Türe geht, wird sie geöffnet, und der König tritt heraus. FERIA: Ha, Er selbst!”

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becomes a nightwalker, senseless and powerless: “everyone is shocked at his appearance, and steps back to let him pass through the middle. He walks as if in a waking dream, like a sleepwalker. His clothes and appearance show the disorder in which his spell of unconsciousness threw him.”229 This moment completes the destruction of the ruler’s visibility.

Changing Sides: Background Powers The play does not end with an abdication, however. The disordered costumes and lack of presence only seem to suggest the end of the ruler’s power. The penultimate scene precipitates a turning point, bringing the ghostlike king back into the play in a new and thus all the more emphatic way. In the play’s finale, posts that were lost are regained and the ousted ruler is reinstated. This reempowerment of the king after his “spell of unconsciousness” is bound up with a fundamental transformation of existing court rules for entering. Now that the regime of forms hitherto based on the ruler’s spectacular visibility has been overthrown, the center of power moves out of the spectator’s field of vision. This looming development in Don Carlos is clearly related to the emergence of panoptic structures in the space of absolutist rule; it signals the diminished significance of the theatrical proscenium in favor of an all-seeing eye in the background. In the play’s dramatic turning point, Philip II is transformed from a monarch whose political enfeeblement is initially reflected in the decay of court ceremonial into an agent within a regime of terror that can no longer be precisely located in the court’s theatrical scene or field of view. With recourse to Michel Foucault, Schiller’s Don Carlos can also be used to illustrate the replacement of court spectacle with structures of surveillance, and “the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance” can be linked to the construction of a panoptic world in the background.230 In other words, as this conclusion will now show, Schiller’s Philip II restores his monarchical authority by moving from the illuminated front of the stage to an unspecified somewhere, and hence also from visibility into invisibility, where he can strike an alliance with an institution

229 Schiller, Don Carlos, 191. Schiller, Don Karlos, 973 (V:8): “Alle erschrecken über seinen Anblick, weichen zurück und lassen ihn ehrerbietig mitten durch. Er kommt in einem wachen Traume, wie eines Nachtwandlers. – Sein Anzug und seine Gestalt zeigen noch die Unordnung, worein ihn die gehabte Ohnmacht versetzt hat.” 230 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217.

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that does not manifest itself in theatrical forms of appearance, and that has always subjected the king to observation: the Inquisition. It is nevertheless telling that Philip II initiates this return, too, by renewing an entrance. Issuing the following command, he regains power over the entrances and exits of the characters—the power that had been stolen from him in the preceding scenes: “I recommence a scene [Auftritt] from younger days, / And the Infante Philip seeks advice.”231 The entrance that occurs here does not follow any existing regime of visibility. Rather, it can rather be read as the entrance of a ghost, that is to say, as the entrance of a powerful person who acts in the dark and escapes localization. Philip’s command summons an ancient and previously hidden power onto the stage, which the theater had kept at a distance until now: “The CARDINAL INQUISTOR, an old man of ninety, blind, leaning on a stick and led by two Dominicans. As he walks through the rows, all of the grandees throw themselves down before him and touch the hem of his robe.”232 Significantly, like the king before him the grand inquisitor also appears in the space between the scenes; and as with the king, the indeterminacy of the site where he is to enter causes him appear in ghostly form. But this no longer signals a weakness. In the place where the syntax of protocol breaks down, an apparatus of power becomes visible that had previously kept itself hidden behind the “ornaments” of representation. That it can be seen at all is directly related to the fact that the king, now released from the “bonds of ceremony,”233 has become invisible, at least as far as the court is concerned. The regime of court theater reaches its limit when a man who cannot see and another who is invisible enter into conversation. The blind grand inquisitor ironically bears witness to the bankruptcy of the representation of absolutist sovereignty when he asks upon entering: “Am I before the King?”234 At the same time, he associates himself as a blind man with a darkness that brings out the hidden, unrepresentable reverse side of the court regime and consequently draws the king into its sphere.

231 Schiller, Don Carlos, 196. Schiller, Don Karlos, 978 (V:10, lines 5145ff.): “Ich erneure einen Auftritt / Vergangner Jahre. Philipp der Infant / Holt Rat bei seinem Lehrer.” 232 Schiller, Don Carlos, 195. Don Karlos, 978 (V:9): “Der Kardinal Großinquisitor, ein Greis von neunzig Jahren und blind, auf einen Stab gestützt und von zwei Dominikanern geführt. Wie er durch ihre Reihen geht, werfen sich alle Granden vor ihm nieder und berühren den Saum seines Kleides.” 233 Schiller, Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 6, Historische Schriften und Erzählungen 1, ed. Otto Dann (Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker, 2002), 35–373, here 99. 234 Schiller, Don Carlos, 195. Schiller, Don Karlos, 978 (V:10, lines 5143f.): “Steh’ / Ich vor dem König?”

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The shattering of the liaison des scènes at the Spanish court is thus followed by neither a restoration of court society nor the “großen, schönen Auftritt[e],” the “grand, beautiful entrance[s],” of those who are guided by the rhythm of the heartbeat or the drive of the piece’s energies. Instead, the renewed appearance of the grand inquisitor regenerates an order based solely on repetition and decay. Its ghostlike theatrical mode is the unnoticed appearance at an uncertain place, and its regime makes use of the possibilities arising from the fact that those who have power come into view in a shape that has lost any clear delineation. In the end, the movements of the sensitive young Spanish prince or of the charismatic marquis are violently brought to a halt, like all other impulses, by a new regime. In the last scene of the drama, which follows the king’s switching of sides to the Inquisition, one finally reads this stage direction: “The KING, accompanied by the GRAND INQUISITOR and other grandees, appears in the background [unnoticed].”235 This positioning documents in nuce a double break with the regime of court entrances that follows from the spatial disorientation entailed by the accretion of backgrounds in dramatic space and the obscuring of the characters who are located there. Whereas stagings at court had hitherto aimed to place the king, in all his movements, into the light for all to see, now he appears firstly in the background and secondly unnoticed. The grand inquisitor and the ruler who has joined his side now operate from the latency of a dark background that allows them to first observe and then intervene. Together, the two characters move under the aegis of an obscuritas that disavows splendid appearances at court precisely because it makes it impossible to effectively distinguish between onstage and offstage, between presence and absence. If one can speak at all of a form of entering that might apply to the Inquisition, then only, as one reads in Schiller’s History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands against Spanish Rule, as an intervention that comes “suddenly from the background.”236 Precisely this background—which no longer takes the fact of an entrance as the decisive criterion for presence on stage, and which enables an appearance without an entrance—builds up over the course of Don Carlos to become threatening. In retrospect, then, it is possible to speak of a play that demonstrates the political productivity of this dark ground in numerous

235 Schiller, Don Carlos, 201, translation modified. Schiller, Don Karlos, 985. (V:11): “Der König, begleitet vom Großinquisitor und seinen Granden, erscheint im Hintergrunde, ohne bemerkt zu werden.” 236 Schiller, Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande, 358. The phrase is used here in the context of Count Egmont’s arrest. The introduction to Schiller’s treatise has been translated by Susan Johnson in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, vol. III (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1990), 213–230.

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stage directions, while at the same time describing the forms of rule fostered by this spatial reorientation.237 In hindsight, it is apparent that this background was already being instrumentalized for observational purposes in the play’s first scene, or Auftritt, by having the heir to the throne act from the outset under the eyes of an institution that is simultaneously invisible and ubiquitous. Present even when absent, the church and the Inquisition are always on stage when the prince makes an entrance. More clearly than the completed versions of the play, Schiller’s Thalia fragment of 1786 portrays Don Carlos as a character who is subject to surveillance from the very beginning of the piece. Here, the stage directions “Meanwhile, Father Domingo appears in the background, and stops for a while to observe him. Finally, he approaches; hearing the sound, Carlos rouses his courage and reluctantly starts up”238 move toward a theater that fixes its gaze on the figures who enter, and that does so both without their knowledge and from an indeterminate place.239 Conversely, this theater demonstrates in precise steps how the king is released from the bonds of the ceremonial as he joins the realm of ghosts, to inhabit an invisible enfilade where he organizes his return in accord with the invisible apparatus of the Inquisition. Like the inquisitors, his appearance is now situated at an uncertain space and time. As he immediately makes clear with the arrest of the heir to the throne, his regained power now also manifests itself equally through observation from the background and through sudden intervention. This requires neither steps nor sequences: it needs no court repertoire of forms that defines

237 The extent to which Schiller here works through Racine’s dramaturgical positions, with which he became familiar at the latest during his translation of the first scene of Britannicus, is a question that needs to be examined more closely. See Friedrich Schiller, Britannikus, in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 9, Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen, ed. Heinz Gerd Ingenkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995), 601–612. 238 See the Thalia fragments of Don Carlos in Schiller, Don Karlos, 15–174, here 22: “Unterdessen zeigt sich im Hintergrund der Pater Domingo, und bleibt eine Zeitlang stehen ihn zu beobachten. Endlich nähert er sich, auf das Geräusch ermuntert sich Karlos, und fährt unwillig auf.” 239 See also Racevskis, Tragic Passages, 99: “The externalization of power in space, combined with the fact that the observer remains invisible, suggests another move towards panopticism, not yet fully accomplished but nonetheless strongly suggested in Britannicus—the transition to impersonal power. Spatial relations, rather than individual prerogatives, determine intersubjective dynamics of domination. It is not a single individual who holds the power as a result of his or her identity or legitimacy. . . . The system is beginning to take precedence over the individual, and Neron is only too happy to maintain his observation post, in silence and invisibility.” Here, it would be necessary to examine how the “courtly art of human observation” (see Elias, Court Society, 104) is gradually transformed to favor a panoptic model of observation (see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195ff.). On this point, see also Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, in particular the chapter “Panoptismus,” 219–234.

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positions of power and rank through entrances which clearly distinguish between presence and absence.240 At the same time, this change of position is associated with a depersonalization. The king, who no longer has access to the register of the spectacular, now switches to the invisible side of power, where authorities and institutions have proliferated in hidden chambers. The arcane realm in which he will henceforth operate is the domain of the Inquisition, a power that now also makes the king an invisible henchman of its interests. In summary, Schiller uncovers in Don Carlos a differentiated and multilayered landscape of crisis besetting the semiotic system of the court. The convention of the liaison des scènes, as developed by the French court theater, provides Schiller with an occasion to comprehensively analyze a theatrical practice that was increasingly losing the power to impose its authority, as, too, was the capacity for symbolization that it realized. At the same time, this practice opens up utopian perspectives on a future world of “grand, beautiful entrance[s]” in which entrées featuring great sentiment or charisma appear to triumph over the schematism of court stagings. Here, one finds neither form nor place for a royal entrance governed by rules, just as the theater is incapable of symbolizing the rule of obscure power. When the king appears without being noticed, or when he intervenes without being received, as one sees in Don Carlos, semiotic orientation breaks down—for the king and for the subjects of his rule. The analogy that linked the theater with the court no longer has any basis, just as the dramaturgical regime of the court forfeits its authority over the theater’s sequences of movement. The final twist of the drama, however, implements a regime that has as little need to visualize sovereignty through ceremony as it does to vividly display its functioning through entrances made according to protocol. Theatrical signs are replaced by a principle of ruling power that observes its subjects from an opaque background and keeps them in terror through targeted yet unpredictable interventions. This seat of ruling power—the Inquisition—is also an authority, an administrative body. Court theater thus plays before a space of conjecture whose inscrutable depths question the visibility of figures as a constitutive mode of theatrical representation in a form that is groundbreaking for modernity.

240 For instance, at the arrest of the crown prince and queen, one reads the following stage directions, given without any movement having been previously noted: “He is about to put on the mask. The KING steps between them” (Schiller, Don Carlos, 202). Schiller, Don Karlos, 986: “Er greift nach der Maske. Der König steht zwischen ihnen.”

Chapter 3 Wavering Shapes: Goethe’s Theater of Entrances Preliminary Remark. The Suspension of Tragedy: Entrance Protocols of Life Goethe harbors significant reservations about the entrance protocols of neoclassical tragedy.1 His own tragedies demystify the tragic ground of Racine’s theater and expel the terror that loomed from its depths to threaten its figures. Racine’s arcane staggered rooms or chambres de terreur, with their fiendishly rampaging monsters, give way to settings free of any despotic hinterland. At the end of Iphigenia in Tauris, the vengeful spirits awaiting Orestes beyond the stage retreat “like an escaping snake to its den.”2 To his sister, Orestes declares: “The Eumenides return to Tartarus— / I hear their flight, I hear the brazen gates / Clang shut behind them like far deep-down thunder.”3 In Torquato Tasso, too, we no longer find the building up of any hidden arcanum. The princes of Ferrara not only leave the stage but also disappear entirely from the background: “They’re leaving now—O God, already there / I see the dust that’s rising from their coach.”4 At the end of the play, Tasso finds himself before an empty chambre, entirely on his own. Whereas Racine’s theater was oriented toward an “undetermined, dark place . . . not in the foreground,”5 which functioned as the

1 On Goethe’s reservations toward the genre of tragedy, see Marie-Christin Wilms, “‘Die Construction der Tragödie’: Zum Bedingungsverhältnis von Tragischem und Ästhetischem in Goethes Tragödientheorie,” Goethe-Jahrbuch 123 (2006): 39–53, here 39ff.; Nicholas Boyle, “Goethe’s Theory of Tragedy,” The Modern Language Review 105 (2010): 1072–1086. For a general account of Goethe’s understanding of tragedy, see Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 25–28. 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. David Luke, In Goethe Verse Plays and Epics, Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 8 (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987), 1–54, here 52. (The collected works will be cited hereafter as CW.) Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, MA 3.1: 161–221, here 219 (line 2124): “[w]ie eine Schlange.” 3 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8: 52. Goethe, Iphigenia auf Tauris, MA 3.1 197 (lines 1359–1361): “Die Eumeniden ziehn, ich höre sie, / Zum Tartarus und schlagen hinter sich / Die ehrnen Tore fernabdonnernd zu.” 4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Torquato Tasso, trans. Michael Hamburger, in Goethe, Verse Plays and Epics, CW 8: 55–140, here 137. Goethe, Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1: 426–520, here 518 (lines 3385f.): “Sie gehn hinweg – O Gott! / Dort seh’ ich schon / Den Staub, der von den Wagen sich erhebt.” 5 See also Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 9. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-003

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source of all calamity, Goethe’s theater liberates itself from any such relations of depth. In programmatic fashion, those dramatic texts of his that can be situated within the wider sphere of tragedy resist the inevitability of tragic plots, striving instead to normalize human circumstances.

Middle Grounds At the same time, however, Goethe assigns his dramatic characters a new location on stage, no longer in front of or in the proscenium. Their entrances move in a sphere that can be described as the “middle ground,” to borrow a term used in painting; and this accordingly engenders weak entrance protocols. The figures of this sphere are in many ways denizens of their milieu who keep their distance from the stage’s spatial extremes. Those who live in the middle ground have no experience of being front and center. They are visible, but only amid the totality of the conditions that determine them, and without the splendor that the space of court appearance bestows upon its actors. Goethe’s figures never experience disjunction; they remain embedded in their context even as they enter the stage.6 Unlike in Racine’s tragedies, though, this entanglement no longer consists of tragic attachment to the depths, with its fatal consequences. Rather, it comprises middle forms of entering that shield the characters from exposure, that offer them greater chances at life and survival. These entrances represent a paradoxical conception of theatricality that operates without emphasizing the entrance.

The De-aristocratization of the Stage The resituating of characters in the middle ground inevitably de-aristocratizes the stage. When characters enter from a place of middle depth, the foreground that served as the space for aristocratic self-staging empties out. The setting for entrées, for accentuated entrances that might also turn out to be moments of dangerous self-exposure, gives way to more inconspicuous theatrical spaces. If it was the task of the nobleman to “to enter and appear in the world with supreme excellence,”7 6 See Christoph Menke, “Force: Towards an Aesthetic Concept of Life,” MLN 125 (2010), 552–570, here 564: “in accordance with the conditions of its environment.” 7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Inschriften, Denk- und Senke-Blätter und Aufklärende Bemerkungen über Festliche Lebens-Epochen, und Lichtblicke traulicher Verhältnisse, vom Dichter gefeiert,” in FA I.2, 573–620, here 598: “höchst vorzüglich in der Welt auf[zu]treten.”

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the burgher holds back. He does not expose himself like the aristocrat, who famously only exists when he appears up front. Goethe’s tragedy The Natural Daughter is illuminating here. In place of aristocratic representation—characterized, as one reads in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, by entering and appearing and “moving to the fore”—we now find weaker articulations of presence.8 The tragic core of the play is the insatiable desire of a “natural” daughter, Eugenia, to make an entrance, to appear in splendor at court before the eyes of the monarch, juxtaposed to the thwarting of this desire by the machinations of her family and presumably of the king himself. After her abduction, which completely destroys her hopes of éclat, Goethe has her appear “upstage” or “in the back(ground)”—“im Grunde.”9 This stage direction in the fourth act denotes her new and unspectacular place in the bourgeois world. At the end of the tragedy, she will choose to temporarily renounce the sphere of the court. Torn between death and splendor, between the forestage and profondeur, she opts for the temperate hinterland. She thus moves from the world of splendid appearances into a sphere of inconspicuousness, a lusterless sphere,10 which Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship explicitly designates as bourgeois. Eugenie enters a world that grants no space to make a splendid entrance, and whose figures are drawn, as Herder wrote, as if with “silverpoint.”11 In the end, she retreats to the country house of a burgher who offers her the prospect of a secure though unspectacular existence at his side, but which also allows her to avoid being engulfed by the background forces present in the menacing image of the sea. Situated between éclat on one hand and the despotic terror of the

8 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, CW 9, 175: “Since a nobleman has no restrictions in his everyday life and may possibly be made into a king or the like, he has to appear before his fellowmen with an unspoken awareness of what he is. He can always move to the fore, whereas the burgher does best to respect quietly the limits imposed on him.” Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre: Ein Roman, MA 5, 7–610, here 290: “Wenn der Edelmann im gemeinen Leben gar keine Grenzen kennt, wenn man aus ihm Könige oder königähnliche Figuren erschaffen kann; so darf er überall mit einem stillen Bewußtsein vor seines gleichen treten; er darf überall vorwärts dringen, anstatt daß dem Bürger nichts besser ansteht, als das reine stille Gefühl der Grenzlinie die ihm gezogen ist.” See also Patrick Primavesi, Das andere Fest: Theater und Öffentlichkeit um 1800 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008), 104ff. Primavesi also shows the devaluation of the ceremonial festivity that is inherent in the increasingly bourgeois construction of the public sphere. 9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Natural Daughter, CW 8, 185: “Eugenia, veiled, on a bench upstage, with her face turned toward the sea.” Goethe, Die natürliche Tochter, MA 6.1, 241–326, here 241: “EUGENIE (in einen Schleier gehüllt, auf einer Bank im Grunde, mit dem Gesicht nach der See).” 10 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 14ff. 11 Quoted from the commentary to Die natürliche Tochter, FA I/6, 1116–1175, here 1121.

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depths on the other, this home offers Eugenie a temporary shelter. Those who stay in the middle ground are able to survive and avoid the tragic closure of their fate.

Temporalization: Appearance and Emergence This is but one indication that the ground in Goethe’s texts has a completely different function than it does in Racine’s tragedies. Unlike the deadly profondeur of the chambre, which threatened to deprive Racine’s figures of form and color, Goethe’s grounds stand for a limitless productivity of figuration. In Goethe’s theater, Racine’s objets défigurés become objets naissants. His entrance protocols do not threaten the figures with annihilation; they present them in statu nascendi while simultaneously unfolding their morphological richness. These protocols thus set in motion a formative process, tending toward infinity, that furnishes the entrance with the characteristics of becoming. “[T]racing [a] genesis,” Christoph Menke writes, quoting Herder, means “scrutinizing the ground” from which it proceeds.12 The production of figures in Goethe’s plays is explicitly based on the continuing productivity of a spatially indeterminate field of forces that drives the figures to emerge, reshapes them, and folds them back into themselves.13 This is why the stage directions from Goethe’s Weimar period always serve the additional function of positing a ground. It is striking how often they begin with the phrase “im Grunde,” which concretely indicates “upstage” or “in the background” but also carries valences of “at bottom,” “at root,” or “au fond,” and even “essentially” or “basically.”14 They thus create the conditions of possibility for an entrance that arises directly from the productivity of the ground. Following Wolfgang Iser, these instructions can be described as foundations that “posit an origin,”15 that simultaneously activate and sustain the process of forming a figure. If Racine’s profondeur

12 Menke, “Force,” 556. See also Wolfgang Iser, “Emergenz: Ein Essay,” in Iser, Emergenz: Nachgelassene und verstreut publizierte Essays, ed. Alexander Schmitz (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013) 19–150, here 22. 13 See Gottfried Boehm, “Der Grund: Über das ikonische Kontinuum,” Der Grund: Das Feld des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm and Matteo Burioni (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 27–92, here 47ff. 14 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Der Groß-Cophta,” MA 4.1, 9–93, here 9: “Im Grunde des Theaters” (“In the background of the theater”); Goethe, “Des Epimenides Erwachen,” MA 9, 195–232, here 197f.: “im Grunde ein tempelähnliches Wohngebäude” (“in the background a temple-like dwelling”); Goethe “Pantomimisches Ballett,” MA 2.1, 500–509, here 500: “Wald, Nacht, im Grunde ein Berg” (“Forest, night, in the background a mountain”). See also the following section: “‘Nebulistic Sketches’: Figure and Ground in Goethe’s Weimar Dramas.” 15 Iser, “Emergenz,” 27.

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was a “burial site,”16 Goethe’s grounds are sites of birth—transitional zones between nothing and something, oscillating between hazy and solid, arising and passing away, loose and rigorous couplings. In entering the stage, Goethe’s figures emerge from a creative field of possibilities and generate forms that are never more than provisional and always tend toward instability. In Goethe, we accordingly encounter entrances that have been emphatically temporalized. The figures that appear on Goethe’s stage take shape gradually, in transitory states. A culture of entrances based upon recognizing signs and rank in the manner that prevailed at court is replaced here by mutable personas that elude any attempt at definition, socially or otherwise. Goethe’s predilection for the present participle, which grammatically denotes a process that is ongoing, also lends a processual character to his instructions for making entrances. The stage directions that Goethe gives for Helen in Faust II or Orestes in Iphigenia—“stepping forth” (“hervortretend”) and “He moves away from her” (“Er entfernt sich”)17— clearly reflect the temporalization that pervades all acts of appearing on his stage. This also underscores the way in which Goethe’s dramatic figures enter the theater not as given but as emerging: the fact that they are present in different ways at different points in time, and that their “intensity of appearance” can also be measured in degrees.18 Rhetorical or court forms of making an appearance are replaced by successive and gradual forms that bring the figures into view in adumbrations, always only provisionally and at varying speeds. “The single, clear and selfsufficient line was replaced by a kind of formative zone, a complex of lines which made it difficult to recognise the actual contour.”19 Hence it is only a transitory and unstable theatricality that suits these characters, a theatricality that no longer unfolds in the full light of the court. Especially in Goethe’s later texts, one discovers

16 Wolfgang Pichler, “Zur Kunstgeschichte des Bildfeldes,” in Der Grund, 442. 17 Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, MA 3.1, 190; Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 105–352, here 165. David Luke translates these lines as “HELEN appears” and “He moves away from her.” See Faust: Part Two (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 59, and Iphigenie in Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8:27. 18 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 289. 19 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 53. See also David Wellbery, “Form und Idee: Skizze eines Begriffsfeldes um 1800,” in Morphologie und Moderne: Goethes ‘anschauliches Denken’ in den Geistes-und Kulturwissenschaften seit 1800, ed. Jonas Maatsch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 17–42. Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form: Goethes Morphologie und die Nager (Berlin: August Verlag, 2016); Claudia Blümle and Armin Schäfer, ed., “Organismus und Kunstwerk: Zur Einführung,” in Struktur, Figur, Kontur: Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften (Zurich: Diaphenes, 2007), 9–25.

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protocols that intertwine “defiguration and reconfiguration,”20 and that exhibit a mobility which can only be arrested belatedly by interventions from outside.

Entrance Protocols of Life This altered understanding of theater is accompanied by forms for making an entrance that now aim to express not the court’s need for social distinctions, but rather the lavish productivity of life itself. The texts of Goethe to be discussed here develop a new type of theatricality that is emphatically directed against the court—together with a new form of manifest presence that is no longer meant to be the result of rhetorical animation, to be a rhetorical figure, but the direct effluence of life itself. Goethe’s entrances are conceived as testaments to, and products of, life; they are meant to introduce new energies into a court scene that has succumbed to paralysis, and hence also into the scene of tragedy. They replace the entrance of a persona defined by the court with the energetic self-expressions of an indeterminable evolutionary principle that does not determine, socially or formally, what it generates.21 The creative aspect of this process is also imparted to the forms for entering the stage that we find in Goethe’s theater. Analyzing discourses of life around 1800, including texts by Goethe, Hubert Thüring shows that life is conceived as an indeterminable subject that sets existing structures in motion—and as one that does so either in, or originating from, a “ground” in the sense of a source, root, or foundation.22 Or as Eva Geulen demonstrates, life appears in this discourse as a multiplicity producing numerous mutable pluralities rather than delimited individuals.23 This model clearly departs from the conception of sovereignty that governed Racine’s entrance protocols.24 Entrances in Goethe’s texts are no longer ordered, enabled, or thwarted by a sovereign, nor is any sovereign to be found

20 Hubert Thüring, Das neue Leben: Studien zu Literatur und Biopolitik 1750–1938 (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 27. 21 See Thüring, Das neue Leben, 20, with reference to Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 23. See also Thüring, Das neue Leben, 28: “Seen from a political-social perspective, it [the defiguring force of life; J.V.] consists in the dissolution of the society of estates in favor of a flexible formation, standardization, and normalization of individual and collective forms of existence.” 22 See Thüring, Das neue Leben, 23. 23 Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 16ff. 24 See Joseph Vogl, “Romantische Ökonomie: Regierung und Regulation um 1800,” in Das Laokoon-Paradigma: Zeichenregime im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Inge Baxmann, Michael Franz and Wolfgang Schäffner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 227–240.

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in front of, on, or behind the stage. Rather, entrances are produced by life itself in regulating its own production.25 Behind the generation of figures in Goethe’s dramaturgy, forces of political and economic regulation are at work that reorganize the alternation of emergence and disappearance in drama. From here, it is possible to trace the outlines of a theater that treats its background as its own inexhaustible source. This source is a “creative tissue” that is ceaselessly productive not only in the center or foreground of the stage, but in its backgrounds, too.26 In its forms for making an entrance, drama proves to be a field of activity for tending and maintaining a population—a practice that also ensures regulated growth in the artistic space of the theater. To put it pointedly, every entrance on the stage of life increases the birth rate: it becomes a biopoetic event.27

Antitragic Emerging This background allows us to once again emphasize, even more insistently, the antitragic tendencies of Goethe’s dramaturgy. It is above all where tragic endings loom that he employs entrance protocols of life. His texts counter this impending catastrophe by enhancing the action of entering, thereby allowing it to escape the genre’s drive toward finalization. His dramas arrest the “tightly wound, laconic course” of tragedy by increasing their production of figures and by conversely balancing disappearance with continuously renewed arrivals.28 This introduction of life entails the perpetual suspension of tragic judgment: it averts an ending and renews growth, thereby endowing death, too, with a new significance. Under such conditions for entering the stage, even dying can be interpreted as a natural and therefore untragic process. Whereas death in Racine is a consequence of despotic sovereign power, in Goethe the indifferent principle of natural life—the command: “die into becoming”—prevails.29 In the texts to which this chapter now turns, Iphigenia in Tauris and Pandora, as well as Act III from 25 See Thüring, Das neue Leben, 15; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139 and 145–146. 26 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Zur Morphologie: Die Absicht eingeleitet,” MA 12, 12–17, here 17. On “Gewebe” (“tissue”) as a metaphor in Wolff and Goethe, see Dietmar Schmidt, Die Physiognomie der Tiere: Von der Poetik der Fauna zur Kenntnis des Menschen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011), 129–149. 27 On Goethe’s biopoetics, see Viktoria Niehle, Die Poetik der Fülle: Bewältigungsstrategien ästhetischer Überschüsse 1750–1810 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2018), 226–233. 28 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Phaeton: Tragödie des Euripides, MA 13.1, 301–313, here 310. 29 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Ecstatic Longing,” in Selected Poetry, trans. David Luke (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 183. Goethe, “Selige Sehnsucht,” MA 11.1.2, 21.

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Faust II, which is centered on Helen, tragic grounds begin to compete with others that have the power to productively generate new shapes. A negative entrance protocol designed to annihilate the subject is overridden by a protocol that stages life itself via the emphatic advance or atmospheric enclosure of a figure. It is the moments of this conflict that the following analyses retrace.

Wavering Shapes These analyses, though, will also reveal how this protocol of life is gradually transformed into a ghostly regime, its features reduced to revenants. Goethe’s later texts seamlessly recast his dramaturgy of life as an ontologically suspicious production of figures who emerge from condensed atmospheres—from smoke, haze, clouds, or light—as incorporeal specters signifying that all forms of entering have become mediatized.30 These entrances render the body increasingly precarious in its function as the bearer of a persona. Such pressure is reflected, for instance, in Mephisto’s choice of the word “Getreibe” to name the open and nebulistic field from which the figure of Helen emerges.31 In its varied senses—which encompass an uninterrupted “urging or pressing” (as Grimm’s dictionary notes in English); the hustle and bustle of a crowd; the business or practicing of a profession or social stratum; and even a lexical kinship to Treiben as the sprouting of a seed or plant—the word aptly capture the protean productivity of this new ground.32 Goethe’s Faust project, in particular, works to dissolve the boundaries between euphoric emerging and ghostly Treiben as a driving, urging, doing, sprouting, or even drifting. Its Mephistophelian stagings leave it thoroughly uncertain as to whether its emerging shapes are mere “appearances,” mere “apparitions,” or “living” beings. The theatrical piece Des Epimenides Erwachen (Epimenides’ awakening), written by Goethe for a celebration of Napoleon’s defeat, registers the protocol for the formation of such a figure anchored in the body. Entrances becomes spectral events in a potentially empty theater:

30 See Cornelia Zumbusch: “Dämonische Texturen: Der durchkreuzte Wunsch in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahren,” in Das Dämonische: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe, ed. Lars Friedrich, Eva Geulen, and Kirk Wetters (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014), 79–96. 31 Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 157 (line 6279). 32 See “GETREIBE, n.,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, digitalisierte Fassung im Wörterbuchnetz des Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Version 01/21, https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=G12608, last accessed March 22, 2021.

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The fog of smoke gathers and grows and wavers, / And weaves; it weaves faint shapes / Disclosing clearly yet dimly, forever escaping away, / Monstrosity before my eyes. / They are ghosts, not clouds—Not ghosts! / They are real. Pressing upon me, pushing in, / But how, how can it be real? / The weaving that always unveils itself? / Veiled shapes, shapeless figures, / Renewed in eternal, shifting deceit.33

In its opening verse—in German: “Verdichtet schwankt der Nebelrauch und wächst”—the text employs the crucial term of Schwanken, meaning an unsteady, uncertain wavering, that will apply to all forms of appearing in Goethe’s theater. Whether Goethe’s figures spring from life or from a hazy ground of mist and fog, the shapes traced by his entrance protocols waver upon entering. The famous opening lines of Faust—“You come back, wavering shapes, out of the past”34— conjure the form of entrance characteristic of his theater. As Eva Geulen notes, this activity of Schwanken always enters the stage when something has not yet decided upon the shape it will take. Whatever it is that here “rises up” from haze and mist, tentatively and without firm contours, has not yet found a binding, lasting form—not even a nonform. In this regard, “Schwanken” is a strict opposite of “shape” . . . because this expression so reassuringly and harmoniously interweaves what is still in the process of becoming and what has become.35

Goethe’s theater is bound to this unsteady wavering.

“Nebulistic Sketches”: Figure and Ground in Goethe’s Weimar Dramas Ground as a New Unity In the works he wrote for occasions of amateur and outdoor theater in Weimar, Goethe employs a new register for the stage that is not found in his early dramatic texts. In short, he begins working on a “ground.” It is this “ground” that 33 Goethe, Des Epimenides Erwachen, 216 (lines 526–535): “Verdichtet schwankt der Nebelrauch und wächst / Und webt, er webt undeutliche Gestalten, / Die deutlich doch undeutlich immer fort/ Das Ungeheure mir entfalten. / Gespenster sind’s, nicht Wolken, nicht Gespenster, / Die Wirklichen sie dringen auf mich ein. / Wie kann das aber wirklich sein / Das Webende, das immer sich entschleiert? / Verschleierte Gestalten, Ungestalten, / In ewigem Wechseltrug erneuert!” 34 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust: Part One and Sections from Part Two, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1963, 65. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, MA 6.1, 535–673, here 535 (line 1): “Ihr naht euch wieder, / schwankende Gestalten.” 35 Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 66f.

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the plays he composed beginning in the 1770s for the festivities of the Weimar court establish as the frame of reference for theatrical and dramatic representation. In his plays Lila, The Plundersweilern Fair,36 Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (Triumph of sensibility), and The Natural Daughter,37 the “ground” appears as a new “visual premise” for both plot and figuration, and thereafter it remains as a principle for the rest of his dramatic works.38 The stage directions we find in these dramas are so inconspicuous that one hardly suspects they might contain a central, transformational element of Goethe’s theater. Indeed, the crucial phrase “im Grunde” often disappears as such when it is translated into English—along with its range of meanings: “essentially,” “fundamentally,” “at root,” “au fond”— becoming simply “upstage” or “in the background.” But even if statements such as “Kästen im Grunde” (“boxes in the background”),39 “Höhle im Grund” (“a cave in the background”),40 or “im Grund eine Hütte am Felsen” (“upstage [in the background], a hut on the cliff”)41 initially attract little attention, they nevertheless indicate a fundamental conceptual shift in the stage and the stage directions that Goethe gives to his characters. A new relationship now emerges between the designs of Goethe’s theater and a fond that furnishes the play with a unity unknown in the discourse of Aristotelean drama, despite all its fixations on coherence. This new ground does not function as a spatial continuum guaranteeing the neoclassical unities of place, time, and action, but rather as the totality of a view that includes not only the theater but also the figures acting within it. A “fond,” one reads in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, is “the lowest, deepest, or most fundamental part of a whole.”42 This new unity surrounds the dramatic actors and activities with a

36 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Das Jahrmarkts-Fest zu Plundersweilern: Ein Schönbartspiel (Zweite Fassung), MA 2.1, 213–234, here 221. Translated by Paul McPharlin as Junkdump Fair in A Repertory of Marionette Plays (New York: Viking Press, 1929), 243–273, and earlier by J. S. Blackie as “The Plundersweiler Fair: A New Ethico-Politico Puppet-play, from Goethe,” Dublin University Magazine, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 1836): 524–534. 37 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Natural Daughter, trans. Hunter Hannum, CW 8: 141–216. Goethe, Die natürliche Tochter: Trauerspiel, MA 6.1, 241–326. 38 Gottfried Boehm, “Die ikonische Figuration,” in Figur und Figuration: Studien zu Wahrnehmung und Wissen, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Achatz von Müller (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 33–52, here 38. 39 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit: Eine dramatische Grille, MA 2.1, 165–212, here 175: “Die Kasten werden auf beiden Seiten, die Laube in den Grund, und ein großer Kasten auf die Laube gesetzt” (“The boxes are placed on both sides, the arbor in the ground, and a large box on the arbor”); see also 173, 175, 181, 186, 211. 40 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proserpina: Ein Monodrama, MA 2.1, 161–164, here 161. 41 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jery und Bätely, MA 2.1, 290–312, here 292. 42 “Fond,” in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc, University of Chicago online edition: ARTFL

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grounding whole that continues to work in and between its parts, and that undermines any separation between foreground and background. Gottfried Boehm’s concept of the “continuing ground” offers one term for this function that consolidates Goethe’s stage into a new form.43 In Goethe’s works, the priming or grounding of the dramatic action in the theater now occurs in a similar way to the composition of a painting. As the stage directions cited above indicate, the actors of this theater move and speak before an omnipresent background that serves to connect all of its figures; in its structure and function, this field can be compared to the ground of a painting. Here, too, we can apply the definition given by the Encyclopédie for “fond” to the space of the stage: “The ground of a painting is what serves as a base and field for its figures.”44 The dramaturgy that operates within Goethe’s Weimar plays thus treats the wall at the back of the stage as a support inserted into the architectural framework of the theater. Other passages underscore this analogy. The “Tuch,” or “canvas,” for instance, that grounds an Arcadian scene in Goethe’s poem “Amor as Landscape Painter” is the same “Tuch,” or “big sheet,” that serves as a “Grund,” a “backdrop,” for the puppet theater in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.45 The painted idyll of the poem and the plays performed by the young Wilhelm Meister are premised upon the same undifferentiated gray. Goethe’s poem begins: “Sat upon a rocky peak at daybreak, / Staring fix-eyed through the mist before me; / Stretched like a canvas primed with gray it mantled / Everything on either side and upward.”46 Wilhelm Meister’s puppets are similarly surrounded and fixed from behind by a ground of this kind. Yet Goethe also experimented with the increasingly far-reaching consequences of this compositional principle adopted from painting. A comparison of his theatrical experiments to contemporaneous concepts of priming in the visual arts and in theatrical performance practice reveals even more clearly just

Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2021 Edition), ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, http://encyclo pedie.uchicago.edu/, vol. 7 (1757), 51–54, here 54: “la partie la plus basse d’un tout.” 43 Boehm, “Die ikonische Figuration,” 38. 44 Diderot and d’Alembert, “Fond,” Encyclopédie, vol. 7 (1757): “Fond,” 52: “Le fond d’un tableau, c’est ce qui sert comme de base & de champ aux figures.” 45 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall, in cooperation with Victor Lange, CW 9: 12. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre: Ein Roman, MA 5, 7–610, here 28. 46 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Amor as Landscape Painter,” in CW 1, 98. Goethe, “Amor ein Landschaftsmaler,” MA 3.2, 10–14, here 10: “Saß ich früh auf einer Felsenspitze, / Sah mit starren Augen in den Nebel, / Wie ein grau grundiertes Tuch gespannet / Deckt er alles in die Breit’ und Höhe.” On the concept of landscape painting in this poem, see Norbert Miller, Der Wanderer: Goethe in Italien (Munich: C. Hanser, 2002), 168ff.

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how compelling his theatrical experiments are. For even if he seeks proximity to these neighboring arts, Goethe’s ideas differ in important respects from the understanding of a ground that one finds in Enlightenment painting. Johann Georg Sulzer’s 1771 General Theory of the Fine Arts, for instance, had primarily emphasized the ground’s two-dimensionality, describing it as a “surface” onto which “the first colors are applied to form the painting.”47 Similarly, in Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyklopädie (Economic encyclopedia), the ground is still described as “the rear part of a painting . . . on which everything is painted, and from which it must nevertheless appear to be separate . . . in contrast to the foreground.”48 Whereas these definitions establish an antithesis between front and back, Goethe’s dramatic foundations resist such a static interpretation. His theater, built up from the fond, entirely escapes Sulzer’s definition and its focus on clear oppositions. The processes that take place in Goethe’s backgrounds, completely transforming the theatrical space, run counter to a determination that defines the relation of figure and ground exclusively in terms of detachment. At the same time, Goethe’s play also sets itself apart from the spatial relations of the perspectival court stage, which projected an empty, mathematically conceived depth onto painted scenery at the back of the stage. His experiments— spurred in part by the fact that the Weimar court theater had burned down shortly before his arrival, forcing it to be relocated to temporary stages and open-air theaters49—break away from the notion of a container space structured by perspective that would serve as an empty space for the comings and goings of dramatic characters.50 With the introduction of a ground, Goethe furthermore renounces the closure of a precisely delineated and transparent theater that characters would enter via doors or painted scenery in the wings. In place of vanishing points, his

47 “Grund,” in Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: Zweyter Teil, Neue vermehrte zweyte Auflage, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792), 450f., here 450 (reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1970). Some of the entries in Sulzer’s systematic collection of essays “in alphabetical order”—albeit not the entry on “Grund”—have been published as Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. and trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 48 “Grund,” in Johann Georg Krünitz, Oekonomische Encyklopädie, oder allgemeines System der Staats-, Stadt-, Haus- und Landwirthschaft, vol. 20 (Berlin: J. Pauli, 1780), 249–256, here 253 (electronic edition from the Universitätsbibliothek Trier: http://www.kruenitz.uni-trier.de). 49 See Wilhelm Flemming, Goethe und das Theater seiner Zeit (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968), 28ff. 50 Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne: Eine Archäologie des Theaters und seiner Wissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 35ff.

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stage settings have at best indeterminate recesses, as one finds exemplified in the recurring indication in Proserpina and in the Triumph der Empfindsamkeit: “Höhle im Grunde”— “cave in the (back)ground,” “depths,” or “ravine.” Here, irregularly spaced openings deform the base of the stage and suggest a darkness oriented toward the rear that impedes any penetrating perception of space in the sense of perspectival perspicuitas.

Fonds Vagues With this rejection of empty depth, Goethe is able to situate himself within the tradition of the dramatic tableau established in Diderot’s theater. Diderot’s comédie larmoyante, for instance, had already replaced the contrast between background and foreground with a dynamic gradation;51 here one could speak of a staggering of grounds rather than of a single, two-dimensional surface functioning as a ground. The definitions given by the Encyclopédie and Krünitz’s Oekonomischer Encyklopädie similarly make the case for a pluralized understanding of a painting’s background. These definitions note the effects of depth created via “fond vagues” composed by multiplying and superimposing grounding layers: “The ground of a painting on which a multiple yet imperceptible degradation of the inks is used to depict a spacious area, with many locations situated higher and lower, is called a roaming ground [umschweifenden Grund], in French, a fond vague.”52 This imperceptibility of a painting’s transitions alone hindered any attempt to draw a contrast between the back and the front of an picture, and the obscuring of spatial coordinates made it more difficult to exactly position the figures in the pictorial field. Rather, the semantic fields of “vague” and “umschweifend”—meaning “diffuse” or, literally: “circuitous,” “roaming,” or “rambling” —indicate that these figures are located in an intermediate space in which they cannot position or contour themselves with full clarity or distinctness.

51 See Annette Graczyk, Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004). Graczyk’s study, however, emphasizes the role of grouping in the composition of a dramatic picture (see 83ff.). In contrast to Goethe, this kind of composition maintains a perspectival construction (see 86). Graczyk, too, finds in these compositions a pictorial “unity of human beings and space” (88), yet even in moments when the stage directions call for a “fond,” this remains a specific space that has been fully articulated. See also Johannes Friedrich Lehmann, Der Blick durch die vierte Wand: Zur Geschichte des Theaterzuschauers und des Visuellen bei Diderot und Lessing (Rombach: Freiburg i.Br., 2000). 52 “Grund,” in Krünitz, Oekonomische Encyklopädie, 253.

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It would be going too far to literally transfer the fond vague to the Weimar stage, yet there are many indications that Goethe’s introduction of a priming or grounding to the theater was intended to create a site of spatial and figural indeterminacy on the stage. His pieces exist in a field of discursive exchange that is unmarked, lacks determinate boundaries, and surrounds its figures even when they seem to have detached and individuated themselves by moving to the front. This impression is buttressed by further stage directions that similarly suggest a fond vague and likewise derive from the terminology of contemporaneous painting. When Goethe introduces Erwin and Elmire, the central protagonists in his eponymous Singspiel, with the words “Rosa and Valerio approach from afar, singing together,”53 he invokes yet another conception of grounding that is bound to the field of indeterminacy. One reads, for instance, in Adelung’s Grammatischkritisches Wörterbuch: “In painting, the furthest objects are called die Fernen”— the “far-reaches,” “far-away lengths or depths of a space,” or even “far-off figures,” the figures situated at a distance.54 Goethe also adopts this term when he proposes “establishing a sense of distance [Ferne] that is as vast and feasible as possible, depending on the size of the theater, despite the limited space it offers” (or literally: “despite its limited closeness” [eine beschränkte Nähe]).55 Like the concept of ground, that of Ferne or distance denotes an area of the stage that eludes rational penetration by an observing gaze. Significantly, it is frequently paired with the words “Nebel” (“fog,” “haze,” or “mist”) and “Dämmerung” (“twilight”), suggesting that one’s gaze into the distance fails to find any clear contours. Goethe himself speaks of “nebulistic sketches in the distance.”56 He employs these various phrases to sketch out intermediate zones onstage between day and night, or line and atmosphere, that prevent one from seeing clearly and prove accessible

53 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erwin and Elmire: Ein Singspiel, Zweite Fassung, MA 3.1, 330–360, here 330: “Rosa und Valerio kommen mit einander singend aus der Ferne.” See also 332: “Sie gehen nach dem Grunde des Theaters, als wenn sie abtreten wollten, und machen eine Pause. Dann scheinen sie sich zu besinnen, und kommen, gleichsam spazieren gehend, wieder hervor.” English: “They move to the back [nach dem Grunde] of theater, as though about to exit, and then pause. Here, they seem to reflect and then come forward again, as if out for a stroll.” 54 “Die Ferne,” Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, electronic full-text and facsimile edition based on the definitive edition (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1793–1801), vol. 2 (1811), 114 (electronic edition: http://lexika.digitalesammlungen.de/Adelung). 55 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tragödie aus der Zeit Karls des Grossen (fragment), MA 9, 186–194, here 189: “nach der Größe des Theaters . . . über einer beschränkten Nähe eine weite . . . und practicable Ferne einzurichten.” 56 See the entry “Ferne,” Goethe-Wörterbuch, vol. 3, ed. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1998), columns 664–666.

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only to what Christian Wolff called cognitio confusa.57 It can be noted here only in passing that Goethe’s stage directions have his characters move in ways that correspond to this state of indeterminacy. Goethe’s figures do not come and go: they come closer and move farther away, they approach and depart. They traverse a space that has been extended backwards via diffuse, staggered tiers. And by stepping into this indeterminate field, they also blur the boundaries of the stage itself. Especially in Goethe’s Weimar dramaturgy, these movements arise from a background landscape that initially renders all efforts at differentiation futile and justifies applying the term fond vague beyond painting to theater.58 This is especially true for the forms for making an entrance that are found in Goethe’s plays. The first thing one notices here is that the central protagonists, at least, do not appear on stage as given and complete but rather work their way out of the diffuse zone of the background, with interruptions, as unfinished figures. They systematically amplify and prolong the semiotic crisis that a dramatic figure must undergo upon entering into visibility. Hence Goethe’s entrances do not highlight the figures themselves but processes of figuration; they illuminate an infinitesimal process of forming a shape that emerges from the ground, and that must be repeated again and again. In the end, distinct clarity and plasticity of a bodily form remain unattainable goals and are lent to the figures only temporarily: just as Goethe’s figures emerge from the “ground,” they are absorbed by it once again. Here, they exit upstage, “toward the ground” (“nach dem Grunde”); or they retreat “into the background [of a hall]” (“in den Grund [eines Saales]”), where they become lost “little by little” (“nach und nach”).59 To use the terminology from Gottfried Boehm’s seminal essay “Die ikonische Figuration,” which develops key concepts for understanding the figure-ground relationship, Goethe’s dramas, too, can be situated in the “hiatus between visibility and invisibility.”60 They linger programmatically at the “site of chaos” that is the

57 See Hans Adler, “Fundus Animae – der Grund der Seele: Zur Gnoseologie des Dunklen in der Aufklärung,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 62 (1988): 197–220, here 205ff. Wolff defines cognitio confusa as a perception that lies below the threshold of clarity or distinctness. See also ibid., 200. 58 See Goethe, Die Fischerin: Ein Singspiel, MA 2.1, 338–356. 59 Goethe, Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, 215. For the dynamics of this process, see James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 78–125, here 118ff. See also 85: “‘Detachment’ is anything but simple.” On the arthistorical horizon of the problem of detachment, see 102. 60 Boehm, “Die ikonische Figuration,” 36.

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entrance61—which other playwrights suppress, abbreviate, and gloss over with scant and conventional stage instructions, such as “Enter Caesar.” The stage thereby becomes increasingly perceptible as the place of a permanent genesis, of an appearing of something,62 and this revelation articulates a fundamental critique of a neoclassically oriented aesthetics of the theater that would regard dramatic figures as eidetic entities, and their entrances as faits accomplis.

Falterings This zooming in to the crux of entering as a process is all the more striking because of the way in which this newer practice so clearly sets itself apart from court regimes for making an entrance. While neoclassical theater can presuppose that those who act at court are prominent, high-ranking, and salient in their appearance, this new ground now brings forth more indeterminate characters. As can be observed above all in Torquato Tasso, the stagings of entrances developed by Goethe have an unsettling effect on the rules for entering imposed by court society.63 With the Italian poet, a figure appears who cannot be positioned, in either its shape or movement, on the court’s field of play: indeed, from his very first entrance, Tasso eludes the determination as a fixed entity that the symbolic politics of absolutism sought to achieve not only at court, but even in its dramatic fictions. Tasso does not fit into any perspectival background or completed action. Rather, the drama paradigmatically unpacks the difficulties in orientation that result from his indeterminate social and figural position in court society. It prepares his appearance on stage in an almost painful dilation of time, which nevertheless makes it equally clear in advance that his arrival must remain incomplete. From the outset of the play, as the action begins, the members of the court in Ferrara puzzle over Tasso’s location. In a complete reversal of the usual hierarchy, the desire to appear that is so essential to the court is no longer directed toward the prince himself, but toward the intangible and simultaneously incomprehensible person of a poet who has disappeared into the “ground” of the

61 Gabriele Brandstetter, “Figur und Inversion: Kartographie als Dispositiv von Bewegung,” in Figuration: Beiträge zum Wandel der Betrachtung ästhetischer Gefüge, ed. Bettina Brandl-Risi et al. (Munich: EPodium-Verl., 2001), 189–212, here 190. 62 Boehm, “Die ikonische Figuration,” 36. 63 On the relationship between Tasso and court society, see Peter-André Alt, “Höfische Ambivalenz: Schaustücke der Aristokratie bei Goethe,” in Peter-André Alt, Klassische Endspiele: Das Theater Goethes und Schillers (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 108–136.

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garden. “I have been looking everywhere for Tasso / And cannot find him,”64 are the first lines delivered by Prince Alphonsus, whose unfulfilled longings place him among the ranks of those waiting for Tasso. “I saw him from far off today” is the princess’s vague reply.65 This entrance from afar finally begins to take shape at the end of the scene, with the lines: “Long I’ve seen Tasso come this way. How slowly / He shifts his feet, then suddenly stops a while / As though he were undecided, in two minds, / And then approaches faster, but to halt / Once more.”66 The slow motion of these verses makes apparent the impassable space between near and far, while illuminating the paradoxical quality of the process of figuration that this entrance activates. As the syntax passes through the spatial layers, it falters, as do the metric feet modeled on Tasso’s steps. His approach is repeatedly interrupted, betraying no direction until it is said: “But he has seen us, and is coming here.”67 In more than one respect, Torquato Tasso deals with the impossibility of placing, into the proscenium of the theater, a body fashioned as “one harmonious whole,”68 that is to say, a body that detaches itself from the distant surroundings in which it is enveloped so as to emerge as an individual figure into the foreground of the play. The image of an approach interrupted by stopping and going yields fundamental insight into

64 Goethe, Torquato Tasso, trans. Hamburger, CW 8:61. Goethe, Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1: 426–520, here 433 (line 239): “Ich suche Tasso, den ich nirgends finde.” 65 Goethe, Torquato Tasso, trans. Hamburger, CW 8:62. Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1, 433 (line 252): “Ich sah’ ihn heut’ von fern.” 66 Goethe, Torquato Tasso, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 64–65. Goethe, Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1: 436 (lines 373ff.): “Schon lange seh’ ich Tasso kommen. Langsam / Bewegt er seine Schritte, steht bisweilen / Auf einmal still, wie unentschlossen, geht / Dann wieder schneller auf uns los, und weilt / Schon wieder.” 67 Goethe, Torquato Tasso, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 65. Goethe, Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1: 436 (line 379): “Nein, er hat uns gesehn, er kommt hierher.” 68 Goethe, Torquato Tasso, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 62: “And this one impulse dominates his spirit, / To make his poem one harmonious whole.” Goethe, Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1: 433ff. (lines 274ff.): “Und seine Seele hegt nur diesen Trieb / Es soll sich sein Gedicht zum Ganzen ründen.” The interminability of Tasso’s figuration is presented as analogous to the fragmentary state of his epic, “The Liberated Jerusalem,” and treated with the same phrases and images used in that poem. See Torquato Tasso, CW 8, 62 (lines 265ff.): “He cannot finish, never can have done, / But always alters, creeps a little farther, / Stands still again, and so deceives our hope: / Put off, the pleasure sours, and irritates— / What seemed so near, incalculably distant.” Goethe, Torquato Tasso: Ein Schauspiel, MA 3.1 (lines 256ff.): “Er kann nicht enden, kann nicht fertig werden, / Er ändert stets, ruckt langsam weiter vor, / Steht wieder still, er hintergeht die Hoffnung; / Unwillig sieht man den Genuß entfernt / In späte Zeit, den man so nah’ geglaubt.”

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the interminability of dramatic figuration, captured in the image of an entrance that is inherently contradictory. Tasso’s entrance is not the emphatic manifestation of a figure, but the temporary interruption of a permanent morphological restlessness.

A Rambling Entrance: The Poodle Goethe’s Faust dramas, as will now be addressed at least briefly, critically intensify the processes that one finds in Tasso. The theater of figuration outlined above in its basic features reaches a new level in that the distant background of the stage is no longer merely a passageway for stage figures making an entrance, but the site of their production. Among all aspects of these dramas, it is primarily the structuring of entrances that suggest the theater’s grounds have now themselves become active, that they have acquired a creative capacity. These grounds develop form-giving energies and enter the play as modifications of themselves. Even without elaborating on the philosophical preconditions of this process, one can speak with Leibniz of a theater of dynamized substance realizing itself as a multiplicity, transformed here into both the ground and the source of scenic figures.69 Goethe’s persistent stage direction “im Grunde” points to a concept of configuration that first draws its figures from the obscuritas of undivided matter, and then progressively formulates them with increasingly clarity in a process of development. From the storehouse in the bowels of the theater, this stage thus sets free formative forces that express themselves in increasingly distinct shapes,70 without themselves being given any status of a detached, individualized, and stable existence. Here, it is only possible to adumbrate the extent to which this dramaturgy is related to the logics of development found in Goethe’s morphology and his theory of metamorphosis.71 Correspondences are nevertheless thoroughly evident between a theory that determines nature and its forms in terms of a process, and a conception of entering the stage that pays more heed to the becoming,

69 See Thomas Leinkauf, “Der Monadenbegriff in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Der Monadenbegriff in Spätrenaissance und Aufklärung, ed. Hanns-Peter Neumann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 1–25. 70 On the prehistory of Goethe’s concept of entelechy, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 83ff. 71 On Goethe’s genetic-morphological thinking, see Olaf Breidbach, Goethes Metamorphosenlehre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006); Eva Geulen, “Metamorphosen der Metamorphose: Goethe, Cassirer, Blumenberg,” in Intermedien: Zur kulturellen und artistischen Übertragung, ed. Alexandra Kleihues, Barbara Naumann, and Edgar Pankow (Zurich: Chronos, 2010), 203–217.

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transforming, and passing away of its theatrical figures than to their existence. Both kinds of productions—of nature and of the theater—are subject to the same genetic-morphological methodology. In examining the poodle from Faust I, the following analyses consequently reconstruct the morphological crisis attending this entrance in order to retrace the paradigmatic model it sets forth.72 What is to be shown is how this entrance, too, emerges from the concealed space of the background, as well as how long it takes for this appearance to be fixed and magically bound within the dramatic figure of Mephisto. This process begins in the scene “Before the City Gate,” at the close of evening on Easter Day following Faust’s all-night vigil in his study, as he heads out into nature for a walk. The rules for entering that apply here are marked by a change in perspective. The process that ultimately brings Mephisto on stage is not guided by stage directions or any accompanying text. Rather, it is depicted from the perspective of an observer who translates the gradual formation of a theatrical figure into the gradual fabrication of a cognition. Exaggerating through parody, Goethe uses the entrance of the poodle to present a transition between cognitio confusa and cognitio clara as envisioned by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, especially by Christian Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.73 In a nearly paradigmatic fashion, the dialogue between Faust and Famulus traces the cognitive processes and crises triggered in the spectator by an entrance that is made from a distance, while retracing the steps of perception that gradually clarify the figure of the poodle—first as it is “nebulistically sketched” and then as it brought to the foreground of the stage. Or more specifically, as will now become clear: during the Easter-time conversation between Faust and Famulus, something is seen moving in the background of the stage whose perception and more precise determination require a stretch of time. The following verses spoken by the famulus Wagner prime the scene with a darkening ground or a malleable atmosphere: WAGNER . . . The air has cooled, the world Turned gray, mists are unfurled. When evening comes one values home, Why do you stand amazed? What holds your eyes? What in the twilight merits such surprise?

72 I am grateful to Inka Mülder-Bach for a stimulating discussion of this poodle. 73 See Adler, “Fundus Animae,” 203ff.

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FAUST See that black dog through grain and stubble roam? WAGNER I noticed him way back, but cared not in the least.74

The semidarkness, we learn from this conversation, holds a black body moving about that has not yet completely crossed the threshold of Wagner’s attention or begun to arouse his capacity to see or designate distinctions within his perceptions. As Faust’s question also shows, at this point this black body is still an actor completely enclosed by its surroundings of “grain and stubble,” occupied even before it is seen in a process of becoming that is shrouded in darkness. The dog still belongs to the sphere of the ground and to the area of those indistinct sensations that precede clear perception and its articulation in language.75 The spectators thus note that the identification of a figure is preceded by a phase of cognitio confusa, a latent perception in which seeing does not yet translate into articulation. In the sentence “I noticed him way back,” we hear echoes of the line “Long I’ve seen Tasso come this way” spoken by the princess of Ferrara. Both posit a dark and confused area of objects that becomes apparent prior to the moment of entering but remains withdrawn from the spectator’s capacity to designate things in language or ultimately perceive them distinctly.76 As an indeterminate black and woolly figure emerging between haze and twilight, set against the ground of a “world turned gray,” the poodle moves for a time at the border of the semiosphere, that is to say, at the limit of both figural and linguistic articulation. As Albrecht Schöne notes in his commentary to Faust, with reference to Krünitz’s Encyklopädie, Goethe thereby chooses an animal whose black woolly fur conceals further figures that initially remain unrecognizable: the dog is covered “over its entire body in long fur so unruly that one can hardly imagine the animal’s true shape, with its parts all hidden under its shaggy coat.”77 At least on its surface, the dog that emerges here only gradually from the twilight is itself fons et fundus for further shapes hidden within its black fur, as is demonstrated by its excessive and aimless metamorphoses in the subsequent scenes.

74 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 145–147. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, MA 6.1, 535–673, here 566 (lines 1142ff.): “WAGNER . . . ergraut ist schon die Welt, / Die Luft gekühlt, der Nebel fällt! / Am Abend schätzt man erst das Haus. – Was stehst / Du so und blickst erstaunt hinaus? / Was kann Dich in der Dämmrung so ergreifen? / FAUST Siehst Du den schwarzen Hund durch Saat und Stoppeln streifen? / WAGNER Ich sah ihn lang, nicht wichtig schien er mir.” 75 On this point, see Adler, “Fundus Animae,” 201. 76 See also Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, 111: “passing through states of indeterminate formlessness, and slowly gathering form and meaning.” 77 Albrecht Schöne, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Kommentare,” in FA 7/2, 243.

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This impression is reinforced by the fact that, as with Tasso, the animal does not move directly toward the foreground. Like the poet in the garden at Belriguardo, the poodle, too, seems initially to follow a haphazard course. It, too, approaches via “spiraling tracks” and “serpentine lines”—on paths that are, in any case, not clear and distinct but multiple and circuitous. To refer once more to the French concept of fond vague, which Krünitz’s definition translated as a “circuitous,” “roaming,” or “rambling” ground (“umschweifenden Grund”): this semantics of digressing, of having lost one’s way—in the sense of an ambulation with multiple tracks, which is constantly beset by reversals—appears here to completely take over and engulf the movement of the dog. The scene’s indeterminate grounds are not traversed in a straight line but are rather opened up via an enigmatic, labyrinthine wandering that leads the dog along trails running as much toward the front as toward the back of the stage. It thereby remains undecided until the end whether this path is to be read as an animalistic sniffing guided by instinct, or as a magical symbolic act, i.e., as the drawing of a sign; and hence whether we have here the coincidental appearance of an animal, or an entrance that has been made intentionally by a spirit. The genesis of the poodle’s figure, however, is not yet finished when the dog is eventually identified as a poodle and arrives in the foreground. The figure’s emergence continues in the next scene in the study, for even at this next threshold it becomes apparent that the play perpetuates the black animal’s entrance in front of a dark background, along with the crisis of this entering. When Faust enters from “deep night” with the poodle, a new threshold drama begins: “Be quiet, poodle! Stop running around! Why do you snuff at the sill like that?”78 Once again, the clear contouring of this animal is delayed during its passage to the proscenium. The frequency with which Goethe’s directs his dramatic characters to move “to and fro” or “back and forth” (“hin und wieder,” “hin und her”) upon entering is yet a further sign of the locomotive indecision that marks theatrical figuration at the threshold. With a significance that goes far beyond this poodle, these movements indicate a liminal and polydirectional restlessness that threatens every figuration in Goethe’s theatrical universe by calling its advancement into question. The very next lines of Faust demonstrate how the metamorphotic principle of constant transformation in the theater’s ground also takes possession of the spirit that is appearing: “But what must I see! / Can that happen naturally? / Is it a shadow? Am I open-eyed? / How grows my poodle long

78 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 151. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 567 (line 1186f.): “Sei ruhig Pudel! renne nicht hin und wieder! / An der Schwelle was schnoperst du hier.”

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and wide! / He reaches up like a rising fog— / This is no longer the shape of a dog! / Oh, what a specter I brought home! A hippopotamus of foam.”79 These protean transfigurations of the black poodle’s fur fittingly also take place at a dark and productive site: behind the stove—the “space between the furnace and the wall,” as Albrecht Schöne writes,80 in which the metamorphosis produces yet another outcome: “Behind the stove it swells / As an elephant under my spells; / It fills the whole room and quakes, / It would turn into mist and fleet.”81 Here, the activity of shaping does not proceed single-mindedly from ground to figure, or from envelopment to detachment. Rather, it appears as a permanent and irreversible process of chaotic emergence which cannot be stopped but only interrupted—and that, if at all, by authoritarian or magical interventions.82 With the appearance of this “peculiar son of chaos!”83—the name given here by Mephistopheles to Faust—the peculiar chaos of the entrance is specified as a site of directionless metamorphosis. Ultimately, magic is needed to capture the volatile figures of this productive ground and to force them to assume a clear theatrical shape that will ultimately cross the threshold of the stage. Only a figure such as Faust, or magician of his kind, proves able to capture these spirits of the air within the confines of a contour and compel them to properly enter the stage. By contrast, when Mephisto enters and takes on such a theatrical form, he employs a theatrical language that is provocatively conventional. No incongruity could be greater than that between the spectacle of a permanent semiosis and the entrance of a “traveling scholar.”84 Against the background of a continual metamorphosis, the actual appearance of a spirit forced into the confines of a concrete persona cannot help but appear insipid. When the spirit subjugated by

79 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 153–155. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 569 (lines 1247ff.): “Aber was muß ich sehen? / Kann das natürlich geschehen? / Ist’s Schatten? ist’s Wirklichkeit? / Wie wird mein Pudel lang und breit? / Er hebt sich mit Gewalt, / Das ist nicht eines Hundes Gestalt. / Welch ein Gespenst bracht’ ich ins Haus! / Schon sieht er wie ein Nilpferd aus.” 80 Schöne, “Faust: Kommentare,” 245. 81 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 157. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 570 (lines 1310ff.): “Hinter den Ofen gebannt, / Schwillt es wie ein Elephant, / Den ganzen Raum füllt es an, / Es will zum Nebel zerfließen.” 82 On the protean shapeshifting of the devil and his obsession with disguise, see Edith Anna Kunz, “Zur Darstellung des Ungreifbaren: Goethes Mephistopheles,” Colloquium Helveticum 36 (2005): 143–164. 83 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann Goethe, 163. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 572 (line 1384): “des Chaos wunderlicher Sohn.” 84 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann Goethe, 159. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 570: “fahrenden Scholastikus.”

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Faust’s magic finally settles down within a stable form to “step . . . forward from behind the stove . . . while the mist clears away,”85 what he performs is above all an atrocious parody of a successful stage entrance. It is only via an ironic faltering of form-giving forces that the figure of Mephisto takes shape, just as it is only via the momentary self-limitation of a principle of permanent production that we are able to see him clearly and in physical form. The fact that he is now nothing but a figure, that he has chosen this guise amid a boundless potentiality of formations, makes him ridiculous.86 “The casus makes me laugh” is Faust’s fitting reaction to an entrance that temporarily halts this theater of transformations by returning to convention.87

Im Getreibe: An Entrance amid the Bustling Crowd Yet even here the drama gives hints that these protean transformations will become more powerful in the second part of Faust, where they will burst the physical boundaries of the stage and demolish all rules for making an entrance. In this later work, namely, the ground expands up as well as down. The “deepest depth [Grund] of all” becomes the element that encloses, surrounds, and transforms everything manifesting itself on the stage.88 This expands the phases of semiotic turbulence to such an extent that the dramatic figures now find themselves principally unable to move beyond the state of their emergence. The empty container space of the neoclassical theater, which guaranteed an orderly distance between the figures and gave them freedom to move, is now finally occupied by the “Getreibe” of materials in motion and emerging forms.89 Faust’s observation from Part I—“It fills the whole room”90—spills over to encroach upon everything that

85 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 159. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 570: “tritt, indem der Nebel fällt, gekleidet wie ein fahrender Scholastikus, hinter dem Ofen hervor.” 86 Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 634ff. On this point, see also the commentary of Ulrich Gaier, who emphasizes the mask-like nature of this choice of role: Ulrich Gaier, Kommentar zu Goethes “Faust” (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), 58. 87 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 159. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 64 (line 1324): “Der Casus macht mich lachen.” 88 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 53. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 103–351, here 157 (line 6284): “vom tieffsten, allertieffsten Grund.” 89 Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 157 (verse 6279): “Wie Wolkenzüge schlingt sich das Getreibe.” 90 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 157. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, 570 (line 1312): “Den ganzen Raum füllt es an.”

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happens on stage. The turbulent self-movement of drama’s theatrical media becomes increasingly visible as a precondition of all figuration: to use Luhmann’s terminology, these media shift back and forth between strict and loose couplings, and thus constantly question the stability of the forms they are permanently generating.91 The process creates such a dense and productive atmosphere that neither the plasticity of bodies nor the salience of entrances—the means that figures employ to develop a lasting form on stage—is able to take shape. Conceived from its ground, this theater finds itself drastically misaligned with the figures and possible settings of neoclassical dramaturgy. In performing and exposing such a permanent genesis, the theater generated from this productive ground focuses entirely on the revocable act of calling forth characters who prove to be as chimerical as Helen when she is summoned by Faust at the beginning of Part II from the “deepest depth of all.” It thereby becomes increasingly clear that the old spatial order—which had functioned as a condition of possibility for the act of making an entrance that is indispensable for theater—finds itself in a process of dissolution. In this permanent movement from and toward the ground, the entrances and exits that previously accentuated the space of neoclassical theater, and that reliably ensured the visibility of its characters, also become superfluous. Whereas the neoclassical stage used a structured ambiance and fixed rules to regulate its traffic of circulating bodies, Goethe’s theater of clouds and mist now generates its figures itself.

Surrounded: The Embedding of Entrances Symphysis Like his stage direction “im Grunde,” Goethe’s indication “umgeben von”—“surrounded by”—specifies an entrance as a relational event. Goethe’s figures often enter the stage embedded in surroundings. They thus signal that they are not coming to appearance in an empty space of representation but as embedded in an ambient space. Stage directions such as “THE PENEUS. The river-god is surrounded by tributary streams and nymphs”92 or “THE RIVAL EMPEROR’S TENT”93 are

91 See Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 198. 92 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 86. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 103–351, here 193 (line 7250): “Peneius, umgeben von Gewässern und Nymphen.” 93 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 197. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 308: “Des Gegenkaisers Zelt, Thron, reiche Umgebung.”

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aimed against an entrance protocol that demands detachment and permits its figures to step out entirely or into the forefront of the stage. “Grund” and “Umgebung”—“ground” and “surrounding(s)”—are positings that define dramatic figures in relation to something that is open, more “extensive,” and uncertain.94 With each entrance, Goethe also makes visible something from which the figure attempts and yet fails to set itself apart. Nevertheless: while the ground represents a generative field of forces realized mainly in the depth axis of the stage, surroundings entirely enclose those who make an entrance. Instead of a sense of depth, they emphasize “the relational conditions to the outside world” that have now become visible on all sides in their diversity.95 Semantically, they denote the relationality of a figure to a surrounding space of uncertain extent and indeterminate structure. Unlike a ground, which becomes active mainly at the site where the drama is generating and retracting figures, surroundings ensure that figures are embedded in a world. They are the world as the totality of its web of references and interrelations, in its full diversity and contingency. They resist the artificial isolation of the figure and take into account the manifold factors that influence how it appears on stage. This worldliness of the situation of entering the stage to which this chapter now turns is not least a fruit of the eighteenth-century German reception of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s dramas, it is likewise possible to find such a blending of the world into the dramatic action. Even if Shakespeare’s surroundings do not achieve this effect by means of stage directions but rather through panoramic fragmentation, they similarly function to set the scene for his plays. Erich Auerbach, for one, describes them as “consciousness of the manifold conditions of human life.”96 Among the authors of the Sturm und Drang, it is the observation that Shakespeare’s dramas do not present individual actions, but rather portray the “single, whole dramatic image,”97 that motivates calls for a form of imitation heeding not only the figure but also the world in which it appears. With Goethe, then, “surroundings” becomes a basic concept of dramaturgy that demands embedding be a part of drama—and of other genres, as well.

94 Boehm, “Die ikonische Figuration,” 39. 95 Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 55. 96 See also Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 322. 97 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 291–307, here 299. “Shakespear,” in Herder, Von deutscher Art und Kunst: Einige fliegende Blätter (Hamburg: Bode, 1773), 73–118, here 93: “[das] Ganz[e] eines theatralischen Bildes.”

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Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics is another text that assigns central importance to the formative function of surroundings in setting a scene. In calling for “the whole wealth of painting in relation to natural environment, architectural accessories, backgrounds, horizon . . . etc.,” Hegel, too, offers glimpses of a budding theatrical ecology.98 Yet it is revealing that, for him, this enrichment cannot be accomplished by language alone; it requires the aid of all media deployed in the theater: Then if an individual is to be portrayed as he actually is in the real world, a specific locality is thus necessary, [an external surrounding], in which he moves and is active, and consequently dramatic poetry needs the aid of almost all the other arts, if all these aspects are not to continue in their immediate accidental character but are to be given artistic shape as an essential feature of art itself. The surrounding scene is [partly] architectural [. . .], like a temple, [partly] something in nature, but both of these are treated and carried out pictorially.99

On stage, this is intended to realize what ancient authors called “‘symphysis’ with the surrounding element,” i.e., the representation of the “natural connection [of a person or a thing, J.V.] with what encompasses us.”100 Gottfried Boehm’s term “concrescence,” which denotes a composition in which the pictorial continuum and its “distinguishable elements” exist in a state of oscillation, can also be applied to Goethe’s theater.101 Both concepts, “symphysis” and “concrescence,” are suitable for more precisely characterizing a diminished theatricality that prevents complete detachment and instead favors more indeterminate forms of making an entrance. And by incorporating

98 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 883. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, in Hegel, Werke, vol. 15, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 125: “Reichtum in betreff auf Naturumgebung, architektonisches Beiwerk, Hintergründe, Horizont.” 99 Hegel, Lectures on Fine Arts, vol. 2., 1181, translation modified. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, in Hegel, Werke, 505: “Das sich in wirklicher Realität darstellende Individuum macht dann ferner eine äußere Umgebung, ein bestimmtes Lokal notwendig, in welchem es sich bewegt und tätig ist; und so bedarf die dramatische Poesie, insofern keine dieser Seiten in ihrer unmittelbaren Zufälligkeit belassen werden kann, sondern als Moment der Kunst selber künstlerisch gestaltet sein muß, die Beihilfe fast aller übrigen Künste. Die Szene umher ist teils, wie der Tempel, eine architektonische Umgebung, teils die äußere Natur, beide malerisch aufgefaßt und ausgeführt.” 100 Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 1 (1942): 1–42, 4. Spitzer cites a German translation of Sextus Empiricus by Karl Reinhardt; the passage is quoted here from Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, trans. Richard Brett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28. 101 Boehm, “Der Grund: Über das ikonische Kontinuum,” 43.

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the plurality and contingency of arbitrary external worlds into figuration, these forms in turn allow the figures to exert a reciprocal influence on their surroundings. The question that this chapter will now pose is what it means for a figure to enter the stage while remaining embedded in its entrance. It is the entanglement of immersion and emergence, and of appearance and the restrictions imposed by a figure’s surrounding, that lends ambiguity to the protocols for entering that Goethe develops under these conditions.

Social and Elemental Atmospheres: “THE PENEUS. The river-god is surrounded by tributary streams and nymphs” Both the social and the atmospheric-cosmic significance of surroundings are crucial in Goethe’s theater for the embedding of figures. Following Leo Spitzer’s influential distinction between social milieu and cosmological ambiance, we can similarly discern two kinds of surroundedness in Goethe, one natural and the other social.102 As a social term, a “milieu” accordingly refers to the changing webs of relationships in which people communicate, and to the multiplicity of connections to oneself and others that constitute these webs. This contrasts with the embedding of individuals in cosmological contexts: here, surroundings consist of thickets, forests, elemental horizons, or climates—atmospheric spatial conditions in which the shapes that seem to emerge can fade into indeterminacy. Especially Goethe’s Faust project endeavors to ensure the stage is never “without . . . a [surrounding].”103 At the end of the first act of Faust II, it is the atmosphere that prepares the entrance of Paris: “The mist subsides: from it, as if to dance, / We see a beautiful young man advance.”104

102 Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 2. Spitzer begins his analysis by generally defining “milieu” as “an aggregate of influences or conditions which shape or determine the being, development, life, or behavior of a person or thing.” “Milieu,” Spitzer argues, accordingly refers to a person’s social environment, while the term “ambiance” denotes something “which surrounds, encompasses,” and in its origins “used to refer to the all-embracing air, space, sky, atmosphere, climate: the cosmic ‘milieu’ of man.” 103 Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford (London: George Bell & Sons, 1874), 419, modified from “without a background.” Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, December 20, 1829, MA 19, 341–343, here 343: “nicht an Umgebung . . . mangelt.” 104 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 59. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 164 (lines 6449f.): “Das Dunstige senkt sich; aus dem leichten Flor / Ein schöner Jüngling tritt im Takt hervor.” It would be worth pursuing further the influence that contemporaneous theories of climate had on Goethe’s dramaturgy of the atmosphere; see Gonthier-Louis Fink, “Klima-

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But as is immediately apparent from the stage directions quoted above, “THE PENEIUS. The river-god is surrounded by tributary streams and nymphs” (also from Faust II), in Goethe’s theater it proves impossible to maintain a durable distinction between cosmic-natural ambiance and social milieu. The stage directions in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” leave the boundary between waters and entourage open: Peneus appears both in the elemental ambiance of the water and in the social milieu of the nymphs, and during his entrance the two merge seamlessly. Whether it is the social and the elemental, figuration and dissolution, or the liquidity of water and the solidity of bodies: none of these oppositions have yet been divided when Peneus enters, and they tug the river god at their center into their undifferentiated condition. Indeed, all of the figures involved in this entering group are characterized as unstable, shifting formations in an uncertain material state.105 The intensity with which Goethe insists on the surroundings suggests a model of “being-in-the-world” that grants his figures neither consistency nor lasting attachment to an outside world. Social surroundings vaporize into haze, fog, or atmosphere. They become elemental states of a second nature that no longer exists as solid corporeality, and that causes the differentiation effected by entrances to disappear in its loose elemental couplings. Conversely, as we will see in Goethe’s Iphigenia, atmospheric surroundings can be transformed back into social ones. Both of these forms of surroundedness, however, are governed by the principle we find articulated in a fragment, “Natur,” that appeared in 1784 in the Tiefurter Journal, and which can be taken to articulate Goethe’s view despite its uncertain authorship. Here, one reads regarding the possibility of making an entrance while surrounded: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—powerless to exit her.”106

und Kulturtheorien der Aufklärung,” Georg-Forster-Studien 2 (1998): 25–56; Eva Horn, “Klimatologie um 1800: Zur Genealogie des Anthropozäns,” in “Romantische Klimatologie,” special issue, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaft 1 (2016): 87–102. 105 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 568ff., in The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: A Harvest Book, 1993), 25. 106 [Georg Christoph Tobler], “Die Natur: Fragment,” in HA 13, 45–57, here 45: “Natur! Wir sind von ihr umgeben und umschlungen – unvermögend aus ihr herauszutreten.” The text was written in 1782 but first published in 1784, in issue 32 of the Tiefurter Journal. Its authorship is attributed to Georg Christoph Tobler. See here Goethe’s remark: “I cannot in fact remember writing these observations, but they correspond to the ideas that my mind had formed at the time.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Chancellor Friedrich von Müller, May 24, 1828, in HA 13, 48f., here 48.

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Goethe implements this ecological protocol, as one might call it, both in court forms of socialization and in tragedy. When he allows surroundings to penetrate the court’s culture of entrances, it is to the detriment of a rhetorical actio that would allow its figures to step forth with a presence that is aristocratic, clear, and powerful.

Surrounded by Splendor: Amplification Goethe first uses the word “Umgebung,” “surrounding(s),” in the context of representative publicness. Here, it simply means heightening an appearance by increasing its extent. “To surround a figure,” or to stage an entrance that is “surrounded,” means amplifying it rhetorically. Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years explicitly notes that a “significant person . . . cannot be conceived without a surrounding.”107 Surroundings, too, function like ornatus, mise en scène, adornment, splendor, or embellishment in elevating an entering character by endowing them with the dignity of a court persona, thus adding a quality that raises them above their natural body. “Umgebung” is used as an epithet to the entrance in the prominent dressing scene from Goethe’s drama The Natural Daughter, in which the protagonist Eugenie—her “naturalness” established by the very title of the piece—acquires a court body capable of making an entrance. She wishes for a symphysis of “maiden” and “jewelry,” i.e., for a union of figure and splendor: “Put it on too, and stretch the train behind. / This gold, you see, has also tastefully / Been worked into a glowing, flowery order. Thus clothed, do I not [enter surrounded by beauty]?”108 This impression is further reinforced when her surroundedness is associated with the presence of an entourage. In Peneus’s entrance, as shown above, surroundedness at court means augmenting the ruler through the addition of a royal household, or enveloping of the sovereign by an accompanying retinue. The stage directions quoted above—“THE RIVAL EMPEROR’S TENT [A throne, rich furnishings]”—make this clear. Both of these passages, however, confirm the suspicion that a splendid amplification by means of clothing or an entourage is bought at the price of clarity.

107 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Jane K. Brown, CW 10: 148, translation modified. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, MA 17:311: “der bedeutende Mensch, den man sich ohne Umgebung nicht denken kann.” 108 Goethe, The Natural Daughter, CW 8: 169, translation modified in the last line from “do I not make a fair impression?” Goethe, Die natürliche Tochter: Trauerspiel, MA 6.1: 241–326, here 272 (line 1054ff.): “Die Schleppe ziehe, weit verbreitet nach. / Auch diesem Gold ist, mit Geschmack und Wahl, / Der Blumen Schmelz, metallisch, aufgebrämt.”

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Surroundedness is always connected with a degradation of recognizability, and the enclosure that comes with the state of being surrounded by splendor also erases the distinctions that are meant to be demonstrated by an entrance at court. It is precisely at the very place and moment where a figure appears in potent splendor, encircled by an entourage, that it can no longer be clearly perceived. In the eyes of dazzled spectators, the entrance suffers a deprivation of form in which the accessory meant to give it emphasis jeopardizes the uniqueness of its appearance.109 In The Natural Daughter, for the entourage and the gown with gold that has been “worked into a glowing, flowery order” (the German is “aufgebrämt,” literally: “opened up with an edge or trim”), surroundedness leads to a loss of distinction at the center. The court may initially be a product of the king’s capacity to create differences, in that this sphere assigns each courtier a place in its hierarchy.110 But when reconfigured in the de-differentiated form of a “surrounding,” it makes the sovereign himself disappear. Its orderly, hierarchical constellation, with its clear point of focus, diffuses within the indeterminate plurality of the entourage; and in front of or within this plurality, the organizing sovereign center no longer stands out, or it is lost from sight amid a blinding light. Here, the concept of surroundings indicates a form of socialization that relinquishes a hierarchical structure of estates in favor of more indeterminate and unsettled aggregations. It thus becomes part of a multiplicity—which for Goethe is always a living web of relations.111

Losses of Distinction This transformation of structured court arrangements into indeterminate social formations can be observed especially clearly in texts written for ceremonial

109 The use of splendid surroundings specifically aims to frustrate the ability to see. Generating splendor entails strategically deploying dazzling devices in which the appearance of sovereignty limits the vision of a spectator who is always classified as subject to the king. Effects that overpower dominate those of perception. Louis XIV’s solar protocols, for instance, pursue the goal of “éclatter et éblouer”—a “sudden shining” and “dazzling”—with the hope of exploiting the partial blindness of a spectator who has been prostrated by the sovereign’s brilliance: “Quels yeux en la voyant n’en seroient ébloüys?”—“Which eyes that look upon it would not be dazzled?,” one reads in Benserade’s Ballet royal de la nuit, which precisely dissects the calculus of effects underlying this solar protocol. See Isaac de Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuit, divisé en quatre parties, ou quatre veilles: Et dansé par sa Majesté le 23 février 1653 (Paris: R. Ballard, 1653), 65. See also chapter 2, “The King as the First Actor.” 110 See Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 131. 111 See Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 16ff.

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occasions at court. Within the conventional framework of court festivals, Goethe develops new forms of movement and entering the stage that dramaturgically realize the figurants’ relation to their surroundings. Most prominent here are the masked processions he organized for the Weimar court in the 1780s (discussed in more detail below in the section on the “Masquerade” in Faust II), which take shape in complex choreographies reflecting the transition between court figuration and more open arrangements. Among these pageants, that of the Female Virtues is given a particularly unusual form. Written in 1782 in honor of the Duchess Anna Amalia, it blurs the boundary between princess and entourage that was decisive for the semiotic structuring of representative publicness. The few verses that Goethe adds to this masquerade destroy the ceremonial scheme that directed the princess and the court’s satellites to enter according to their differences in rank. Instead of an orderly sequence in which the allegories of the virtues emerge individually and distinctly from one another, these pageants stage a moving “Gedränge”—a crushing throng—that defies the rules of protocol. We your subjects, / We unite, / In the middle / Of the throng, / Before the crowd, / Quiet footsteps. / We surround / Your life constantly, / And Your will / Commands us all softly / To act in silence. / Oh forgive! / That to consecrate / This celebration / We show ourselves / More freely today / In the throng / Before the crowd / To meet you / And bless you.112

In this encomium’s syntactically free-floating groups of words, the constellation denoted by its lines also begins to slip. The speakers position themselves at an uncertain place between appearing and disappearing, between stepping forth and blending into the surroundings. The chiastic verses—“In the middle / Of the throng, / Before the crowd”—intertwine the foreground and background of the scene without specifying the exact site of their enunciation. It remains uncertain whether the speaker or speakers are in the crowd or in front of it: the virtues declaiming these lines seem to be both in front of and in the middle of something. The boldness of the poem, however, lies not solely in the pluralization and delocalization of an allegorical corpus but in the fact that the princess is also drawn into the ambit of the “crowd” or “throng.” The verses—“We surround / Your life constantly”—blur the line of demarcation that had clearly

112 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die weiblichen Tugenden, MA 2.1, 510: “Wir die Deinen, / Wir vereinen, / In der Mitte / Vom Gedränge, / Vor der Menge / Leise Schritte. / Wir umgeben / Stets Dein Leben, / Und Dein Wille / Heißt uns stille / Wirkend schweigen. / Ach verzeihe! / Daß zur Weihe / Dieser Feier / Wir uns freier / Heute zeigen, / Im Gedränge / Vor der Menge / Dir begegnen / Und Dich segnen.” See also Heinrich Düntzer, Goethes Maskenzüge, In ihren Zusammenhange dargestellt und erläutert (Leipzig: Ed. Wartigs Verlag [Ernst Hoppe], 1886), 18.

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separated the princess from her satellites. Rather than emphasizing the distances that the ceremonial is meant to establish and underline, the virtues move “more freely” on a threshold that has become amorphous and permeable. The hierarchical configuration of sovereign and satellite thus gives way to a dynamic socialization that is no longer constituted by entrance, distance, boundary, and distinction but by indeterminate and mutable vicinities. Rulers, too, are perceived more in terms of embeddedness than distinction. In the process, the court in the sense of the royal household becomes a court in the optical sense of the word, functioning as a ring that encircles luminous persons and objects without any internal differentiation.113 The masks of Goethe’s pageants inseparably belong to a mobile sociality that no longer features any recognizable social or semiotic markers.

“Out into Your Shadows” At the same time—and this is equally important for the context of the present study’s investigations—Goethe’s works increasingly transform the spaces of tragic drama into surroundings and thereby render them antitragic. By creating natural and atmospheric ambiance, his works also open up the artificial spatial constriction of Aristotelian tragedy to the diversity of its accompanying and conditioning factors. It is not only the figure but also the closed tragic space governed by the unity of place that loses its external boundaries. Goethe’s surroundings convert closed areas into indefinite expanses. They open up spaces for the completion of tragic action while also revealing prospects of survival in an outside world. The following remarks now retrace this process in order to examine the dramaturgical implications that come with this kind of surroundedness. They are premised on the observation that when Goethe’s Weimar dramas follow the scheme of tragedy, they take place in surroundings that lead out of the closed-off spaces of their palaces. This is true for Tasso, who thinks he is being brought down by court cabals even as his scenes play in an open garden, and likewise for Iphigenia, who is banished to Tauris as a member of the house of Atreus, where she is compelled by ancient laws in her duty as a priestess of Diana to sacrifice her own brother. If we read the opening lines of Iphigenia in Tauris with attention to surroundings, then it becomes clear how the artificial spatial narrowness of the space for tragic action that had been required by the rule-bound tradition of

113 I am grateful to Karin Leonhard for this suggestion.

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Aristotelian poetics is no longer a given condition of the scene. Here, too, we find ourselves in a setting en plein air or in a garden theater.114 The very first words spoken by Iphigenia in the play, which lacks any generic designation, transform the temple of Diana into a natural setting. Iphigenia’s first step leads not only out of, but into something. Her verses depict an immersion: Into your shade, you gently stirring treetops, Into this ancient sacred leafy grove, The goddess’s own silent sanctuary, I come forth, and come even now with dread . . . 115

These lines do not—or do not only—sketch the exposition of the figure at the precarious position of the tragedy’s proscenium, but rather her full enteringinto a space of foliage. As Iphigenia advances, she steps into a sphere of trembling leaves and half-light that resembles the waters of the river god Peneus; like those waters, this sphere affords no permanent identities and presents all those who appear, along with their actions, as mutable.

The Dramaturgy of Feuillage Accordingly, the task here must be to comprehend what might be called the dramaturgy of feuillage as it comes to infiltrate tragic drama. The question that arises is what it means for a tragic figure to appear within a space of foliage, surrounded by leaves in motion. Additional insight into the entrance protocol at work in Iphigenia can be gleaned from contemporaneous texts on garden design and the planting of trees. These texts illuminate this entrance inasmuch as their discussion of garden design is concerned not only with the choice and arrangement of the vegetation, the mix of tree species, and the creation of lines of sight, but also with depictions of visitors. They focus, moreover, on the dynamic reciprocity between vegetation and an emerging figure. Horst Bredekamp’s book on the garden of Herrenhausen Palace in Hannover identifies such a principle of varietas of feuillage in a tradition that predates

114 The opening verses of Iphigenia also refer to the park at Ettal, where the first performance of the play took place in 1779, with Goethe himself playing the part of Orestes. 115 Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8: 2. Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, MA 3.1: 161–221, here 161 (line 1ff.): “Heraus in eure Schatten, rege Wipfel / Des alten, heil’gen, dichtbelaubten Haines, / Tret ich noch jetzt mit schauderndem Gefühl, / Als wenn ich sie zum erstenmal beträte.”

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Goethe, namely, that of the French baroque garden. Examining the history of this spatial type, which essentially derived from designs by Leibniz, Bredekamp develops the basic features of a “philosophy of leaves” that productively interrelates the wealth of forms in a French garden’s foliage and its geometric formations.116 Even at this earlier moment in history, that is to say, before the fashion for English gardens, we can see how a mathematical garden layout structured perspectivally by lines of sight becomes a space of possibility for the unlimited generation of forms. Leibniz used the foliage of this garden as an example to prove to his patron, Princess Wilhelmine, that no form is repeated in nature.117 “Since no two leaves are alike, he recognized in the seemingly infinite variety of forms of the baroque garden the profoundly individual shape of nature and the freedom of the individual par excellence.”118 This view finds in the foliage of the park, as in the park itself, a natura naturans in which the forms of creation were constantly being renewed: “Therefore there are always actual divisions and variations in the masses of existing bodies, however small we go.”119 In the background of the foliage, one could say with Bredekamp, Leibniz perceived the “restlessness and the drive of matter to produce variation in transcending itself.”120 Exposed to this space of leaves and its evolutions, the court figure who moves therein also loses both its distinctiveness and its ceremonial form; within such a sphere of shadows and “stirring treetops,” not only the liveliness but also the uncontrollability of appearances are enhanced. In postulating a new environment shot through with motion, the garden theories of the eighteenth century thus merely echo Leibniz’s ideas. They, too, are founded on variety and change as key concepts. The influential garden theory of Christian Hirschfeld, for instance, who adapted the principles of English gardens for Germany, builds on the programmatic cues found in Herrenhausen in its suggestions for how one might create a diverse surrounding through skillful planting: “The picturesque variation of colors in the foliage of some trees makes a new distinction.”121 Similarly, Hirschfeld writes, the “diversification” of a garden will also present the eyes of a beholder with a thicket that is constantly being

116 Horst Bredekamp, Leibniz und die Revolution der Gartenkunst: Herrenhausen, Versailles und die Philosophie der Blätter (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2012). 117 See Bredekamp, Leibniz und die Revolution, 73ff. 118 Bredekamp, Leibniz und die Revolution, book blurb. 119 “Leibniz to Sophie, 31 October 1705,” in Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, trans. Lloyd Strickland (Toronto: Iter Inc. Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 337; also quoted in Bredekamp, Leibniz, 74. 120 Bredekamp, Leibniz, 89. 121 Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst (Leipzig, 1779), 19.

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reconfigured in new forms, depending on the angle from which it is perceived.122 In the process, “[t]he trees with their various figures, the crisscrossing shapes and colors of the foliage” combine with the “alternations of light and shadow, . . . [the] lovely incursions of the moonlight, the gentle reflections, . . . [the] manifold songs of the birds, [the] scents of the plants.”123 Surroundings are created according to a plan that steers, in new directions, the perception of the persons and things appearing in them. Restless illuminations are not only the cause, as one reads in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, of the indeterminate “way that objects appear in the foreground or the background”;124 they also change the persons who are to be seen therein. Here, too, under these conditions, figuration becomes tangible in a processual and radically temporalized mode, while also taking place as an unpredictable action that lacks any clear orientation and invites a beholder to continually generate new interpretations.125 This model deliberately incorporates contingency and processuality into the garden’s staging, and the figures that appear in the garden’s condensed field of vision accordingly become visible as emerging from an unlimited potential to appear in new forms. A consideration of Thomas Gainsborough’s paintings, which paradigmatically unfold foliage’s potential for form that surrounds his subjects, underscores that this effect also applies to the visual arts (Figure 15). One consequence of this 122 Harald Tausch, “Locke, Addison, Hume und die Imagination des Gartens,” in Der imaginierte Garten, ed. Harald Tausch and Günter Oesterle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 23–44, here 32. 123 Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 38. See Michael Gamper, “Garten als Institution: Subjektkonstitution und Bevölkerungspolitik im Volksgarten,” in Der andere Garten: Erinnern und Erfinden in Gärten von Institutionen, ed. Natascha N. Hoefer and Anna Ananieva (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 35–54. 124 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, 836. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, in Hegel, Werke, vol. 15: “Hervor- und Zurücktreten der Gegenstände.” 125 Goethe’s Singspiel Die Fischerin (The fisherwoman), written to be performed in the Tiefurt Park, relies on the chiaroscuro effects of foliage in the scene where its characters emerge, borne by torch-lit boats, from the park’s alder forest, which had been repurposed as the background of the stage: “Scattered fishermen’s huts stand under tall alders by the river. It is night and silent. Pots are set on a small fire, nets and fishing gear are hanging up all around.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Fischerin: Ein Singspiel, MA 2.1, 338–356, here 338: “Unter hohen Erlen am Flusse stehen zerstreute Fischerhütten. Es ist Nacht und stille. Auf einem kleinen Feuer sind Töpfe gesetzt, Netze und Fischergeräte rings umher aufgestellt.” In these vegetal and variable surroundings, court figures are no longer defined by the sovereign. When they appear in the chiaroscuro of this ground of leaves, they are enclosed in an open and mutable field of view. See Stefan Rieger, “Dichtung und Landschaft: ‘Auf dem natürlichen Schauplatz zu Tiefurth vorgestellt,’” in Landschaft am “Scheidepunkt”: Evolutionen einer Gattung in Kunsttheorie, Kunstschaffen und Literatur um 1800, ed. Markus Bertsch and Reinhard Wegner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 87–111, here 103ff.

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effect is that tragedy, along with its entanglements, its necessities, and the contexts of its completed actions, loses its spatial foundation. The inevitability of a tragic ending cannot be sustained in the dynamic ambient space of the garden, because tragedy can be eluded in a space of leaves. This much is clear merely from the fact that only natural, and not tragic, entanglements are to be found in the vegetative abundance of the garden.

Figure 15: Thomas Gainsborough, The Mall in St. James’s Park (1783), The Frick Collection, New York, AKG1899708.

In the garden, the intertwined nodes of plants are fertile: they are life in a phase of self-reproduction, not an inscrutable fate whose strings the tragic figure cannot escape. The following passage from Hirschfeld’s garden manual, written from an observer’s point of view, sketches a space enlivened by beautiful natural entanglements, which serves as a background for the sudden, fleeting appearance of a theater of puppet-like figures able to take multiple forms. Here, too, the garden proves to be a generative ground giving rise to indifferent processes of life, albeit none that are tragic: The spectator’s busy imagination comes to life at the sight of the crisscrossing tangles of trees and bushes, and the low-hanging darkness; it creates for itself new fantastical apparitions from the shapes floating within it that emerge and unsettle, that delight and disappear.126

126 Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 44. Adalbert Stifter would later describe the generative potential of the garden in a similar way, assigning a poetological significance to the

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Tragedy amid the Leaves What does it mean, then, that Iphigenia enters an atmospherically dense space ruled by the boundless varietas of forms—while also belonging to the Atreidae, who had been condemned by a curse to repeat the same crimes? What is the relationship between the natural ambiance of the “gently stirring treetops [of] this ancient sacred leafy grove,” and the protocol of tragedy, which seems to be predetermined by this choice of myth? How might the stirring of the leaves accord with the tragic narrative governing the house of Atreus, a script that bequeaths this curse from generation to generation and appears to lead Iphigenia inexorably toward a tragic ending? As in other texts by Goethe that engage with the genre of tragedy, here too, in Iphigenia’s entrance, the regimes of tragedy and of life are precariously balanced. From the opening lines of the play, when the feeling of “dread” or “shuddering” (“schauderndem Gefühl”) and natural stirring or agitation come together in the very same moment, a clash unfolds between forces that are generative and destructive, figurative and defigurative, as the play’s opening lines build up a tension that is maintained through to its conclusion. The verses “I come forth, and come even now with dread. / As if it still were my first time of coming” (which Charles E. Passage renders more literally: “with a shuddering awe / As though my foot fell here for the first time”)127 articulate a delay in entering the stage that is reminiscent of Racine’s tenebrosi.128 These

“Gartenlaube,” the arbor, bower, or small cottage. See Saskia Haag, Auf wandelbarem Grund: Haus und Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach Verlag, 2012), 210ff. 127 Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8: 2. Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1963), 21. Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, MA 3.1: 161–221, here 161 (line 3): “Tret ich noch jetzt mit schauderndem Gefühl, / Als wenn ich sie zum erstenmal beträte.” 128 In Racine’s earlier works, we already find that shadows offer no space for entering the stage. During her slow emergence, Phaedra wishes to remain sitting in the shade of the woods: “Would I were seated in the forest’s shade!” Jean Racine, Phaedra, in Iphigenia—Phaedra—Athaliah, trans. John Cairncross (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), 129–214, here 156 (line 176). Jean Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte: Tragédie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Théâtre – Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 814–904, here 826 (line 167): “Dieux! Que ne suis-je assise à l’ombre des forêts!” Racine’s Aulian Iphigenia similarly comes forth from a dark, nearly impenetrable forest in which she is lost with her mother, and which blocks the entrance to the stage: “In the woods that hide from view / The entrance to camp, she went astray. / With difficulty in the forest gloom / We found the way back to our path again.” Racine, Iphigenia, in Iphigenia—Phaedra—Athaliah, trans. Cairncross, 33–125, here 67 (lines 341–344). French: “Dans ces bois, qui du Camp semblent cacher l’entrée. / À peine nous avons dans leur obscurité / Retrouvé le chemin que nous avions quitté.” Jean Racine, Iphigénie: Tragédie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Théâtre – Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 695–813, here 713 (lines 342ff.).

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words describe a dark, strange place that remains a world of shadow as the drama begins. Yet this darkness also shows itself to be nontragic, since, unlike Racine’s forests, it is filled with the stirring of the leaves and thus opens up the tragically closed horizon toward unobstructed surroundings. The figure moves into a doubly conditioned space whose shadows belong equally to life and death, to fate and to the happenstance of the naturally given circumstances it encounters.129 The protocol of life that Goethe’s texts follow is nevertheless already established with the first verses of the play; and conversely, it is only with the final lines of the play, “Farewell” (literally: “Live well!”), after all its tragic knots have been resolved, and the dispute between Greeks and Taurians has been settled, that the tragedy literally turns toward life (Figure 16).130 Nonetheless, this finale does not culminate in a complete stepping forth. The end of the play brings neither a renewal of the court’s regime of entering nor a rehabilitation of its festive entrances, and Goethe’s tragedy, which no longer wants to be a tragedy, perpetuates this state of surroundedness even after the drama ends. After the protocol of tragedy has been suspended in the peaceful agreement of those on stage, a new form of social complexity takes shape and envelops the characters in an entirely new way. The life regained immediately generates new webs of relations, creating a restructured ambient space. The conclusion of the scene makes every effort to establish a new relationship between the parties to the conflict, in accordance with a new international law and right to hospitality, that will now redefine these surroundings in social and political terms:131 “Let friendship / And hospitality prevail between us, / Not final separation.”132 In the end, Goethe creates—and not for the last time—an improved situation of interaction and communication, as Iphigenia inaugurates a peaceful exchange among formerly hostile peoples. A situation governed by law thus sets in, replacing a tragic ending of the drama and normalizing the relations between its parties. As snakes “retreat to [their] den”133 and the tragic background of furies empties, it is the characters 129 On the concept of double conditioning, see Albrecht Koschorke, Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative, trans. Joel Golb (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), 133. 130 Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8: 53. Goethe, Iphigenie, 221 (line 2174): “Lebt wohl.” 131 See Thomas Weitin, Freier Grund: Die Würde des Menschen nach Goethes Faust (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013). 132 Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8: 53. Goethe, Iphigenie, 220 (lines 2153ff.): “Ein freundlich Gastrecht walte / Von dir zu uns: so sind wir nicht auf ewig / Getrennt und abgeschieden.” 133 Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, trans. Luke, CW 8: 53. Goethe, Iphigenie, 219 (lines 2153ff.): “zu der Höhle.”

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Figure 16: Georg Melchior Kraus, Goethe as Orestes and Corona Schröter as Iphigenia (1779), Klassik StiftungWeimar.

left behind who now actively shape the new conditions that will help define this stage’s new figurations. Here again, it is a variant of the middle ground that is asserted at the end of the drama in this moderate solution, and that holds the characters back from the apron of the stage. In this middle zone, the “prose of circumstances” prevails: the figures who appear are no longer great individuals caught in tragic peril, but rather bourgeois subjects whose lives are fostered and shaped by institutions. In such a middle ground, the tragic figure attains “prosaic shape.”134

134 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, 1093. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, in Hegel, Werke, vol. 15, 393: “prosaische Gestalt.”

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Staffage: Entrance Protocols of Landscape Painting In Goethe’s theatrical texts, natural scenarios become the defining frameworks for entrances. Whether the space for entering the stage is an “open field” in Part I of Faust,135 or an “open country” in Part II,136 Goethe prefers to have his figures appear in unobstructed terrain. Once again, these settings draw attention to a fond vague that is given in Goethe’s text in a specific form, namely as a landscape. Hence if the previous section dealt with performance protocols en plein air, that is to say, with the real ambiance of gardens and parks, here the focus will shift to entrances performed amid painted scenes of nature. This background for entering the stage is landscape painting, and thus a “field of art” in which “a great deal of determinacy must be abandoned . . . (because the parts tend to become engulfed by the whole, and the effect is only achieved through composites [Massen]).”137 Entrances within landscapes position their figures amid indistinct spatial masses or aggregates that never attain full clarity and thus elude any penetration by perspective. They shift into the mode of sfumato, which conceives body and space as one atmospheric continuum. Or as Goethe remarks in an essay on paintings made by his friend Jakob Philipp Hackert: in landscape painting, central perspective is overlaid by a perspective from the air, and geometric-mathematical spatial depth is replaced by that of atmosphere:138 One finds the gentle fog of the morning and the vapors of the evening not only in the farthest distances, but in all degrees through to the middle ground where the gentle fog

135 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 405. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, MA 6.1, 535–673, here 667: “Nacht, offen Feld.” 136 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 207. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 103–351, here 317. 137 Friedrich Schiller, “On Matthisson’s Poems,” trans. John Sigerson, in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, vol. II (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988), 429–453, here 436, italics in the original. Original in Schiller, “Über Matthissons Gedichte,” Werke und Briefe, vol. 8, ed. Rolf Peter Jantz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 1016–1037, here 1022: “[ein] Kunstgebiet, [in dem] von der Bestimmtheit der Formen sehr viel nachgelassen werden muß (weil die Teile in dem Ganzen verschwinden, und der Effekt durch Massen bewirkt wird.” 138 See Eckhard Lobsien, “Landschaft als Zeichen: Zur Semiotik des Schönen, Erhabenen und Pittoresken,” in Landschaft, ed. Manfred Smuda (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 159–177. An introductory overview of aerial perspective can be found in Janis Callen Bell, “Perspective,” in The Dictionary of Art, vol. 24, ed. Jane Turner (London/New York: Grove, 1996), 485–495. On aerial perspective, see Ernst Hans Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1962), 154ff.

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prevails, though without the local colors revealed by nature and without any alteration of detail.139

In landscape painting, too, Goethe thus finds a spatial order that dispenses with clear contours and allows forms and figures to dissolve into dense atmospheres. His entrance protocols are guided by the gradual shaping of sfumato, which permits a body to fade into its surroundings rather than delineating it.140 The construction of perspective is replaced by fog and vapors, rendering the outlines of the figures indistinct. The appearing of figures within a landscape is nevertheless associated not only with a lack of detachment, but above all with a loss of importance. It takes place in a space of nature whose significance and scope far exceeds that of its figures. Whereas the genre of history painting is dominated by figures capable of action, landscape painting tends to employ staffage. Here, the practice of depicting figures generally consists of dispersing a small and insignificant number of individuals throughout a weakly structured terrain.141 In a review of Friedrich Matthisson’s poems, Schiller remarks that this practice “relegat[es] man to a mere auxiliary role [Figurant].”142 Carl Ludwig Fernow also starts from the premise that the enlargement of space in landscape painting is accompanied by a reduction in the size of its figures.143 And Goethe, too, points to the dangers associated with over-accentuating figures in landscape painting in a work written jointly with Heinrich Meyer, “Etwas über Staffage landschaftlicher Darstellungen” (Thoughts on staffage in scenes composed as landscapes): “Introducing historical or mythological figures into a landscape is especially questionable, because they draw attention away from the whole and to themselves, making the picture appear

139 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Philipp Hackert,” MA 9, 665–869, here 859: “Man findet den sanften Nebel des Morgens und die Ausdünstungen des Abends nicht allein in der fernsten Entfernung, sondern alle Grade durch bis auf den Mittelgrund, wo der sanfte Nebel herrscht, ohne jedoch die Lokalfarben, welche die Natur zeigt, und ohne das Detail zu alterieren.” 140 On the relationship between atmosphere and perspective, see Hubert Damisch, A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Loyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 137. 141 See Gerhard Gerkens, Staffage – oder: Die heimlichen Helden der Bilder (Bremen: Bremen Kunsthalle, 1984), 3: “The . . . difference is that in history painting the figures must carry the whole statement, whereas in paintings utilizing staffage the main statement is assigned to the surroundings, not to the person.” 142 See Schiller, “On Matthisson’s Poems,” 429. Schiller, “Über Matthissons Gedichte,” 1016. 143 See Carl Ludwig Fernow, “Über die Landschaftmalerei (Beschluß),” in Der Neue Teutsche Merkur 12 (1803): 594–640, here 616.

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only as a disproportionate ground for the figures.”144 The pictorial genre directed at the whole of a landscape demanded that its figures be subordinated, decentralized, and rendered less potent. Even so, the genre continued to insist on harmonizing staffage and landscape: a crucial demand made of landscape painting remained that it ensure conformity, proportionality, and coherence of both elements.145 This would guarantee, as one reads in Johann Georg Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts, that landscape and figure “mutually support and elevate each other.”146 Yet such harmonization can only fulfill its purpose if it remains inconspicuous and “the staffage does not stand out from the whole.”147 This chapter thus now turns to the question of how and under what conditions dramatic figures are introduced into the ground of a landscape. Beginning with a reading of Goethe’s texts, it traces the constitutive lines of a stage aesthetic that is guided by the compositional rules of landscape painting, and that thus also regards the stage as a pictorial whole to be furnished by the dramatist with staffage figures. At stake is a dramaturgical-aesthetic concept that allows entrances to take place in front of a “disproportionate ground” and thus always risks that they appear trivial. As in Diderot’s theater, Goethe’s figures appear in relation to a tableau that surrounds them and integrates them into a whole.148

144 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Meyer, “Etwas über Staffage landschaftlicher Darstellungen,” in Propyläen: Eine periodische Schrift, vol. 3, ed. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Tübingen, 1800), 153–156, here 153: “Historische oder mythologische Figuren in die Landschaft zu introduciren ist allemahl bedenklich, weil sie die Aufmerksamkeit, vom Ganzen ab, auf sich ziehen, ja das Bild blos als ein unverhältnißmäßiger Grund derselben erscheint.” 145 See Roger de Piles, “Cours de peinture par principes” (1708), in Landschaftsmalerei, ed. Werner Busch (Berlin: Reimer, 1997), 160–167, here 161: “In composing his landscape, the painter may conceive of imposing upon it a character conforming to the subject he has chosen, and which his figures must represent.” In his Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey, Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn demands that “this fisherman’s presence [be] fitting to the reeds and willow bushes of the shaded shore”; Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey: Erster Theil (Leipzig, 1762), 365). The garden theorist Thomas Whateley similarly calls for a “subject” that “should seem to have been suggested by the scene”; Thomas Whateley, “Observations on Modern Gardening” (1770), in Busch, Landschaftsmalerei, 195–201, 196). And in his 1803 treatise on landscape painting, Carl Ludwig Fernow urges that landscape and staffage, a painting’s main and accessory parts, “be harmonized to form a total impression”; Carl Ludwig Fernow, “Über die Landschaftmalerei,” Der Neue Teutsche Merkur 12 (1803): 527–557, here 545. See also Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild. 146 Sabine Strahl-Grosse, Staffage: Begriffsgeschichte und Erscheinungsform (Munich: Tuduv, 1991), 86. 147 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Bemerkungen über Landschaft und Staffage,” in Wölfflin, Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (B. Schwabe & Co.: Basel, 1946), 123–126, here 124. 148 See Graczyk, Das literarische Tableau, 82ff.

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In Diderot’s theater this is a matter of setting: each scene places a group of figures in the center of the composition and thus creates an ensemble directing the spectator’s attention to a human situation. For Goethe, by contrast, this is a matter of a “figureless tableau” that precedes the entrance and is only subsequently occupied by the actors.149 Goethe’s “Rules for Actors,” written for the Weimar theater, explicitly subordinate actors to the pictorial field of the stage. Four paragraphs of this manual declare actors to be “staffage,” clearly indicating their lesser position and warning them not to step out of the enclosure set by the tableau and into the full light of the scene. Seen thus, theatrical representation is the secondary populating of a pictorial space devoid of human beings: [Section 83] The stage should be seen as a figureless tableau in which the actor supplies the living figure [Staffage]. [Section 84] Therefore he should never play too close to the wings. [Section 85] Nor should he step out onto the proscenium. This would be the gravest error, for which it would mean the actor leaves the space within which, together with the painted scenery and the other actors, he helps form a whole. [Section 86] When the actor stands alone on stage, he should bear in mind that he too is only part of a whole [zu staffieren berufen ist = is called to function as staffage], all the more since attention is concentrated on him alone.150

As will now be seen in the following dramatic texts, however, Goethe’s theater is not content to keep the actors in the background, where they are subject to the scenic supremacy of the landscape. Rather, it creates the conditions for a stepping

149 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Acting,” CW 3, 216–224, here 223, translation modified from “bare tableau” to “figureless tableau.” Goethe, “Regeln für Schauspieler,” MA 6.2, 725–746, here 744. This is also the term used in an earlier translation of these rules by Arthur Woehl: “Goethe’s Rules for Actors: A Translation with an Introduction,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 13, no. 3 (1927): 243–264. 150 Goethe, “On Acting,” CW 3: 223–224. Goethe, “Regeln für Schauspieler,” MA 6.2, 744: “§ 83 / Das Theater ist als ein figurenloses Tableau anzusehen, worin der Schauspieler die Staffage macht. / § 84 / Man spiele daher niemals zu nahe an den Kulissen. / § 85 / Ebensowenig trete man ins Proszenium. Dies ist der größte Mißstand; denn die Figur tritt aus dem Raume heraus, innerhalb dessen sie mit dem Szenengemälde und den Mitspielenden ein Ganzes macht. / § 86 / Wer allein auf dem Theater steht, bedenke daß auch er die Bühne zu staffieren berufen ist, und dieses um so mehr, als die Aufmerksamkeit ganz allein auf ihn gerichtet bleibt.”

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forth that is once again emphatic, that detaches the figure from the landscape and moves beyond the boundary set by the frame of the pictorial composition. The effect of this landscape dramaturgy is a revaluation of the staffage that restores the embedded figure’s ability to make an entrance and thus recaptures, for the tableau, an energy that had been lost.151 It thereby vivifies the category of “merely accessory” figures, allowing them to exit from a disproportional relationship to their ground and become independent actors. This chapter will now examine an increase of manifest presence that was not inherent in conventional concept of staffage. It pursues the guiding question of how a suppressed or weakened entrance within a landscape might become an emphatic exit from a landscape, and what possibilities for entering the stage are offered by a theater whose figures can only ever claim secondary significance, as subordinate to the space that surrounds them.

The Increased Significance of Staffage The increased significance of staffage associated with this dramaturgy becomes most visible if it is distinguished from the technique of staffage in the sense employed by art scholars. Staffage was a practice of arbitrarily filling empty or weak spaces in a composition with ornamental figures who were external to the landscape, and who did not assume any structuring role in the process of composing the painting. Characteristic of this procedure was the fact that figures were belatedly added to an already completed pictorial composition. In his General Theory of the Fine Arts, Sulzer defines staffage as the “adornment of a thing that has already been finished, in order to give it a little more life or make it more dignified.”152 This belatedness was exacerbated by the fact that the task of staffage was often delegated to someone other than the artist:153 “Since staffage requires more drawing than does landscape proper, one finds many good landscape painters who are not able to add these figures into their pieces; hence the staffage is often carried out by another master.”154 In the art discourse of the eighteenth century, the embellishment of a painting with figures is thus often considered to be a subordinate artistic activity and is invariably regarded with disdain.

151 On Goethe’s positive revaluation of landscape painting, see Strahl-Grosse, Staffage, 23ff. 152 “Staffirung” in Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: Vierter Theil, Neue vermehrte zweyte Auflage (Leipzig: In der Weidmannschen Buchhandlung, 1794), 450. On this point, see Strahl-Grosse, Staffage, 80ff. 153 On the use of specialized staffage artists, see Strahl-Grosse, Staffage, 104ff. 154 “Staffirung” in Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 80ff.

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Goethe, by contrast, has his figures spring from the ground of the landscape. He, too, initially assumes that they should be subordinated to an overall composition when he writes: “The figures used for the staffage of a landscape will only be considered appropriate if they agree with the character of the whole picture and can be regarded as subordinate parts that have sprung from it.”155 But in describing these parts as having “sprung from” the whole picture, Goethe invokes a potential energy that not only endows the figure with a powerful forward movement but also points to a practice of staffage that is no longer merely accessory. The word denotes a genesis localized in the ground of the image itself. When staffage springs from a painting, the landscape becomes the productive ground.

“Amor as Landscape Painter” An interpretation of Goethe’s poem “Amor as Landscape Painter,” written in 1787, can serve here to elaborate the circumstances and preconditions of what it means to spring from a picture. Step by step, the poem traces the creation of a landscape painting through to the application of staffage. In this process, the painter Amor also seems to initially follow the rule that these figures are to be introduced into the landscape only at the very end. Like the landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert, whom Goethe described as working in his paintings “from back to the front,”156 Amor begins by preparing the scenic ground for the appearance of staffage. Only after the staggering of foreground, middle ground, and background, and the painting of the sky, trees, rivers, and groves, is the figure then also given its place in the scene.157 The staffage thus emerges from the same continuous semiotic movement as the landscape before which it appears, without the intervention of any foreign hands.

155 Goethe and Meyer, “Etwas über Staffage,” 153, emphasis J.V.: “die Figuren also, deren man sich zur Staffirung einer Landschaft bedient, werden nur alsdann für schicklich gelten, wenn sie mit dem Character des ganzen Bildes übereinstimmen und als untergeordnete, aus demselben entsprungene Theile angesehen werden können.” 156 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, CW 6: 169. Goethe, Italienische Reise, MA 15, 253: “Drei Tinten stehen, wenn er tuscht, immer bereit, und indem er von hinten hervorarbeitet und eine nach der anderen braucht, so entsteht ein Bild . . . .” See also Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild, 334. 157 The art theory of the time considered water and light to be “the primary ingredients of nature, with trees testifying to fertility and abundance.” See Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1990), 124.

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In the poem’s concatenation of the word “drew,” the sketch of the landscape gradually transforms into the sketch of the figure until the tracing finally completes its intention by producing the “loveliest girl”: At the top a beauteous sun he painted, I was almost blinded by the dazzle; Borders of the clouds, he made them golden, Rays of sun to perforate the cloud mass; Painted then the delicate and tender Tops of freshly quickened trees, with hillocks Touched into place and freely grouped behind them; Lower down-water he put, and plenty, Drew the river, as it is in nature, So much so, it seemed to glint with sunlight And murmur as it rose against its edges. ... Then, with pointing fingertip and very Solicitously, by the little forest, Right on the brink of it, where sunlight gathered To be reflected off the shining humus, He traced the loveliest girl you could set eyes on, Pretty figure, and a graceful garment . . .158

In this scenario, we can no longer speak of any subordination of the figure. Amor’s method of working not only illustrates the enhancement of the figure as a motif within the composition of the landscape; it also evinces a degree of vivification that emphatically outshines the enlivening effect of conventional staffage figures. It thus takes a position against the conventional use of this technique and its manner of applying life to landscapes in but small doses. Sulzer speaks in passing of staffage as introducing “a little more life” into a painting. Thomas Gainsborough would not have allowed this technique more than “a little business.”159 Goethe, by

158 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Amor as Landscape Painter,” CW 1: 98–101, here 99. Goethe, “Amor ein Landschaftsmaler,” MA 3.2, 10–14, here 13: “Oben malt er eine schöne Sonne, / Die mir in die Augen mächtig glänzte, / Und den Saum der Wolken macht er golden, / Ließ die Strahlen durch die Wolken dringen. / Malte dann die zarten, leichten Wipfel / Frisch erquickter Bäume, zog die Hügel / Einen nach dem andern frei dahinter; / Unten ließ ers nicht an Wasser fehlen, / Zeichnete den Fluß so ganz natürlich / Daß er schien im Sonnenstrahl zu glitzern, / Daß er schien am hohen Rand zu rauschen. / . . . / Zeichnete darnach mit spitzem Finger / Und mit großer Sorgfalt, an dem Wäldchen, / Grad ans Ende wo die Sonne kräftig / Von dem hellen / Boden wiederglänzte, / Zeichnete das allerliebste Mädchen, / Wohlgebildet, zierlich angekleidet.” 159 Thomas Gainsborough, The Letters, ed. Mary Woodall (London: Cupid, 1963), 99. See also Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild, 377.

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contrast, is not concerned with the local enlivening of a scenic view or with arousing a sporadic restlessness by cleverly positioning staffage figures. He envisions, rather, an animation that emerges from the process of creating the work itself, that grasps the picture as a whole and leads to an emphatic stepping forth.160 Here, the process of painting has the task of preparing a figure’s entrance.161 “Amor as Landscape Painter” stages the moment of staffage as a pneumatic impulse emerging under the direction of the artist’s brushwork from painting’s organic, autonomous activity. The making of a landscape painting culminates in a process that resembles an entrance and that leads the figure it produces to exit the very setting of the landscape: Even as I’m speaking, look, a zephyr Gently stirs, it agitates the treetops, Ruffles all the river into wavelets, Fills the filmy robe that she is wearing. The perfect girl, amazed I am, and more so When she starts to set her feet in motion, And she moves, she walks, she’s coming this way To where I sit beside my wicked teacher.162

The model of movement that can be recognized here takes hold at the intersection of pictorial and theatrical imagination. It describes how the principle of enargeia operating in the depiction of a landscape, as a representation that is especially vivid and clear, translates into energeia, or the energy of an entrance. With the rising of the wind and the filling of the figure’s “robe” (or more literally: “veil”), Goethe deploys the same energetic Pathosformeln—emotionally charged visual tropes or archetypes—that Renaissance art theory and Alberti

160 See Christian Begemann, “Kunst und Liebe: Ein ästhetisches Produktionsmythologem zwischen Klassik und Realismus,” in Zwischen Goethezeit und Realismus: Wandel und Spezifik in der Phase des Biedermeier, ed. Michael Titzmann (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 79–112, here 80–89. 161 See here also Fernow, “Über die Landschaftmalerei,” 543: “In this way, a landscape becomes more significant, its character more definite, its content richer and more poetic, its impression clearer and more satisfying; in a word, the representation of an ideal natural scene becomes more aesthetically interesting when it appears, like real nature, to be a place where living beings abide; when it is enlivened by human beings and animals, by artistic products of culture, by interesting events and appearances [Auftritte].” 162 Goethe, “Amor as Landscape Painter,” CW 1: 101. Goethe, “Amor als Lanndschaftsmaler,” 14: “Da ich noch so rede, sieh da rühret / Sich ein Windchen und bewegt die Gipfel / Kräuselt alle Wellen auf dem Flusse, / Füllt den Schleier des vollkommnen Mädchens, / Und was mich Erstaunten mehr erstaunte / Fängt das Mädchen an, den Fuß zu rühren, / Geht zu kommen, nähert sich dem Orte / Wo ich mit dem losen Lehrer sitze.”

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in particular had prescribed to painters.163 The Pathosformeln employed by Goethe in 1787 are moreover those that would later play a fundamental role in Aby Warburg’s Ninfa project.164 Both Goethe and Warburg achieve the effect of vivification through the euphoric movement of a stirring foot that bestows vitality upon what is initially an inanimate composition. The girl is characterized by the same “vivaciously light and yet so highly propelled [bewegte] way of walking,”165 the same unstoppable movement, that for Warburg will also serve to impart a dynamic energy to images. Her entrance is portrayed as an entrance with “dynamic [bewegtem] accessories”166 that both mobilizes and transcends the landscape from which it springs. Moreover, the complex web of conditions that make it possible for the painting to depict this entrance becomes visible: the painter who completes the staggering of the grounds with a figure; the natural relationships between the elements produced by the picture itself; and the beholder who awakens from their contemplative stance as the figure approaches, increasing their readiness to receive it. Such a composition transforms the ground of the landscape into a generative field of forces that appears to organically produces this entrance from within itself. Here, the incidental staffage figure becomes a force structuring the image and giving it meaning.167

163 See Charlotte Kurbjuhn, Kontur: Geschichte einer ästhetischen Denkfigur (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 126ff. 164 See Gerhart von Graevenitz, “Goethes ‘Pathosformel’: Zur Phileros-Handlung in ‘Pandora,’” in Epiphanie der Form: Goethes ‘Pandora’ im Licht seiner Form- und Kulturkonzepte, ed. Sabine Schneider and Juliane Vogel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 93–104. 165 Aby Warburg, “Ninfa Fiorentina,” in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml et al. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 198–211, here 200. 166 Aby Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932), 19. On the terminological complex of the movement, see Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone: New York, 2004), 83; Cornelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern: Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 71–89; see also Aby Warburg, “Die Theaterkostüme für die Intermedien von 1589,” in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 124–168, here 155. 167 Theorists of landscape painting, by contrast, use conventional theatrical metaphors: “If one were to furnish each landscape with suitable appearances [Auftritte] from the animal and moral world, then such a collection would be a most useful school of instruction for the mind and the spirit.” Sulzer, cited in Strahl-Grosse, Staffage, 170. Carl Ludwig Fernow also identifies a distinct genre of poetic landscape painting that regards the landscape solely as an “empty scene . . . intended as an abode for living beings”; see Fernow, “Über die Landschaftmalerei,” 550.

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Landscape in the “Grand Manner of Poussin” It is no accident that Goethe’s landscape theater finds a model in an artist who was regarded by the art discourse of the time to occupy a middle position between landscape and history painting—for it is precisely where Goethe’s dramaturgy operates before a background of landscape that the name Nicolas Poussin appears.168 Goethe’s pieces Lila, Proserpina, and especially Pandora are specifically set against a backdrop “in the grand manner of Poussin.” For his divertissement Lila, Goethe wanted painted scenery that would portray a location dotted with pieces of architecture, like a “copperplate by Poussin.”169 His monodrama Proserpina is similarly located “in a serious landscape in the style of Poussin.”170 And the setting of Pandora, to be discussed here in more detail, “is conceived in the grand manner of Poussin.”171 These indications point to an oeuvre that eighteenth-century art critics deemed capable of creating a balance between history

168 On Goethe’s reception of Poussin and his activities as a collector of art, see Anja Petz, Goethe und die Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt Schirn Kunsthalle, 1994), 89–92; David Wellbery, Goethe’s “Pandora”: Dramatisierung einer Urgeschichte der Moderne (Munich: Sitzungsberichte der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017), vol. 2; Johannes Grave, “Goethes ‘Pandora’ – Erscheinung und Entzug im Bild,” in Im Buchstabenbilde: Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen, ed. Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 135–137; Steffen Egle, “Poussin, Nicolas und Dughet, Gaspard,” in Goethe-Handbuch, supplement vol. 3, Kunst, ed. Andreas Beyer and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 542–544. 169 “We want to give Duchess Louise a new play on our stage for her birthday and to do so we need a new curtain in the very back toward the forest. We would like to use this scenery to present a magnificent surrounding with groves and lakes, a few pieces of architecture, etc., because it is intended to represent a park . . . the best would be a copperplate by Poussin, or some other idea.” Goethe to Adam Friedrich Oeser, January 7, 1777, in WA IV3, 129: “Wir wollen der Herzogin Louise auf ihren Geburtstag auf unsern Brettern ein neu Stück geben und bedürfen dazu eines hintersten Vorhangs zum Wald. Wir mögten auf diesem Prospeckt gern eine herrliche Gegend vorstellen mit Haynen Teichen, wenigen Architeckturstücken denn es soll ein Parck bedeuten, . . . allenfalls ein Kupfer von Poussin, oder sonst eine Idee.” 170 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proserpina: Melodram von Goethe, Musik von Eberwein, MA 11.2, 191–198, here 193. Goethe justifies the choice of a Poussin landscape for the painted scenery in Proserpina as follows: “The veneration of Poussin is becoming more widespread, and it is precisely this artist who offers the decorator [dem Dekorateur], in both fields of landscape and architecture, the most magnificent motifs.” Goethe, Proserpina: Melodram von Goethe, Musik von Eberwein, MA 11.2, 198: “Die Verehrung Poussins wird allgemeiner, und gerade dieser Künstler ist es, welcher dem Dekorateur, im landschaftlichen und architektonischen Fache, die herrlichsten Motive darbietet.” 171 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pandora, trans. Michael Hamburger, CW 8: 217–246, here 217. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 151–185, here 151: “wird im großen Styl nach Poussinischer Weise gedacht.”

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and landscape painting, while also heroically enhancing the role of the figure. Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, for instance, argued that Poussin’s landscapes document the interaction of two equal artistic faculties. As an “imitator of Raphael in painting histories [i.e., in the drawing of the figure; J.V.] and of Titian in painting landscapes,”172 Hagedorn writes, Poussin met the demands of both genres. Fernow also sees the merit of Poussin’s landscape paintings in the fact that he “united the poetry of landscape and of staffage in an exemplary manner,”173 indeed that he enabled staffage to surpass landscape in its poetic qualities. In paintings where the surroundings and the figure are such strong rivals as they are in Poussin’s paysages, the principle of staffage, which is tailored to a hierarchical pictorial order, must also be adapted. The increased significance accorded to staffage likewise accords more significance to human actors in the landscape. Against this background, this chapter now turns to an analysis of Goethe’s festival play Pandora with the aim of unfolding the complexity of the figure-ground relationships in the landscape. In this piece, one can observe how Goethe employs a protocol that has the figure enter as embedded in relationships to the landscape yet then emphatically transcend these ties.

Goethe’s Pandora In Goethe’s festival play Pandora from 1810 (a work that remained a fragment), the tension between figure and landscape moves to the center of the dramatic composition. The piece presents the Titan brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus, each of whom embodies opposite yet equally barren forms of life. It contrasts the early capitalist Prometheus, who exhausts himself in empty activity by producing weapons underground, to Epimetheus, who represents an exclusively contemplative and reactionary stance. With precise clarity, it disambiguates the antithetical states of an in-between time that will usher in the reappearance of a divine, salvatory power in the figure of Pandora. The piece is entirely constructed around this redemptive entrance, but Goethe inserts a tragic plot element into this period of expectation involving Prometheus’s son, Phileros. This action culminates with

172 Hagedorn, Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey, 367. See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 220: “I have spoken of the landscape beyond the landscape in Poussin’s mature work, and now I have to point out how in some of the late work there is a development in this area. The far landscape retains its identity—it remains a second landscape—but now it gets entrapped in the main picture. The effect is uncanny. It is like a fly caught in a spider’s web.” 173 Fernow, “Über die Landschaftmalerei (Beschluß),” 620.

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Phileros being rejected and banished by his father, Prometheus, after having tried to kill his beloved in a blind rage of jealousy. Powerless before this violent sentence, he carries it out upon himself even more harshly by committing suicide in the sea. But when Prometheus tries to save his son, the action of the rescue is taken out of his hands by higher powers. At the bottom of the sea, dolphins and other wondrous creatures emerge and carry Phileros back to land alive. The fragment closes with this festive entrance, while the conclusion, which was to bring about Pandora’s return—her entrance, and the reordering of the world in allegorical form—remains unfinished and postponed. It is preserved only as a sketch. Characteristic of this text, with a relentless level of abstraction that renders it a forbidding piece of drama, is the interweaving of tragic and allegorical structure. In the episodic arrangement of its scenes, it follows the scheme with which a court masquerade would position its figures, demanding symmetry and contrast between significant groupings, while nevertheless also advancing into tragic terrain on the level of the Phileros subplot. This tragic pageant, too, takes place before a Poussinian landscape. The opening stage directions—“The scene is conceived in the grand manner of Poussin”174—establish the style for all of its theatrical events. This indication not only declares the dramatic figures to be staffage inserted into an overpowering ground of landscape, but also encourages an investigation to explore the close intertwining of the piece’s pictorial and textual entrance protocols. Poussin’s landscapes, namely, provide an ambience allowing Goethe to depict a stagnant, antitheatrical aeon of the Titans. In Pandora, the embedding of the figures in landscape proves to be a tragic imprisonment in a space that is cut off from the resources of life: from the beginning, the play’s characters seem trapped within a “disproportionate ground.”175 Over time, however, an emphatic entrance prepares itself within this ground that will once again set the sclerotic world into motion and enable those who are trapped within it to exit its enclosure with elemental force, or as Aby Warburg writes, with “an energy turned toward the world.”176 Pandora, too, is a piece concerned with reactivating a scenic ground that has become stagnant and deprived of its generative potential. The piece begins with a spacious scene of waiting, in which we encounter the Titan brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus in a state of being that is equally indecisive and immobile. Following Pandora’s disappearance from the world,

174 Goethe, Pandora, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 217–246, here 217. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 151–185, 151: “Der Schauplatz wird im großen Styl nach Poussinischer Weise gedacht.” 175 Goethe and Meyer, “Etwas über Staffage,” 153. 176 Aby Warburg, “Francesco Sassettis letztwillige Verfügung,” in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 234–280, here 260.

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the organic self-activity of both the landscape and its inhabitants has come to a standstill and the articulatory function of entering has been weakened. An extensive stage direction opens the scene with a ground of landscape staggered in multiple layers, in which culture and nature are juxtaposed in unresolved conflict and definite forms transition into indefinite ones.177 What becomes visible is a landscape dominated by undirected forces, a scene from which form has been withdrawn or upon which it has not yet been bestowed. On Prometheus’ Side On the left of the audience, rock and mountains, out of whose mighty sides and bulk natural and artificial caverns have been constructed next to and above one another, with many inter-connecting paths and steps. Some of these caverns are bounded by pieces of rock once more, others are closed in by gates and grilles, all of them crude and hard. Here and there one sees some regular masonry, mainly serving to support and artificially connect those massive shapes, hinting at more convenient dwellings, but all without symmetry. Climbing plants hang down; single shrubs appear on the shelves; higher up, the scrub thickens, rising to a wooded peak. On Epimetheus’ Side Opposite, on the right, a serious wooden building of the most ancient kind and form, with columns of tree trunks, and beams and mouldings hardly square. In the ante-room one sees a couch [Ruhestätte, literally: a place of rest] with furs and rugs. Next to the main building, against the background, smaller dwellings of a similar type, with manifold constructions of dry walls, planks and hedges, indicating the satisfaction of various possessions; behind them, the crests of fruit trees, indicating well-cultivated gardens. Farther back, more buildings of the same type. In the background, various planes, hills, bushes and groves; a river flows through falls and bends towards a sea bay, bordered on the near side by rocks. The sea horizon, over which islands rise, closes the whole scene.178

177 See Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, 135ff. 178 Goethe, Pandora, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 218. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 151f.: Seite des Prometheus Zu der Linken des Zuschauers Fels und Gebirg, aus dessen mächtigen Bänken und Massen natürliche und künstliche Höhlen neben- und über einander gebildet sind, mit mannigfaltigen Pfaden und Steigen, welche sie verbinden. Einige dieser Höhlen sind wieder mit Felsstücken zugesetzt, andere mit Toren und Gattern verschlossen, alles roh und derb. Hier und da sieht man etwas regelmäßig Gemauertes, vorzüglich Unterstützung und künstliche Verbindung der Massen bezweckend, auch schon bequemere Wohnungen andeutend, doch ohne alle Symmetrie. Rankengewächse hangen herab; einzelne Büsche zeigen sich auf den

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It would be hard to find a choice of background anywhere in Goethe that is at once more complex and more overpowering. It proves in fact to be both so overpowering and so unproductive that it deprives the characters of their ability to perform on stage. It is no coincidence that, mythologically, the Titans Epimetheus and Prometheus also belong to an immobile, captive race that has been banished into the hinterland.179 Hesiod’s Theogony, for instance, describes the Titans as background and underground creatures who wear themselves down in a decade of drawn-out battles and are then banished, after their ultimate defeat by the Olympians, to “a dank place,” at “the sources and limits of the dark earth.” The directions “EPITHEMEUS (coming forward from the middle of the landscape)”180 is thus also expected to produce the elemental energies that the girl in “Amor as Landscape Painter” had introduced into the landscape. Epithemeus’s entrance immediately undoes itself the moment it is performed, as the words “and crave an everlasting night!” precipitate an antitheatrical turn.181 Directly after his entrée, Epimetheus is drawn back to the “couch”—more literally: the “Ruhestätte,” or “resting place”—being offered to him by the ground: “He goes to the couch [Ruhestätte] in the ante-room and rests on it.”182 While Amor’s girl appeared “where sunlight gathered / To be reflected off the shining

Absätzen; höher hinauf verdichtet sich das Gesträuch, bis sich das Ganze in einen waldigen Gipfel endigt. Seite des Epimetheus Gegenüber zur Rechten ein ernstes Holzgebäude nach ältester Art und Konstruktion, mit Säulen von Baumstämmen, und kaum gekanteten Gebälken und Gesimsen. In der Vorhalle sieht man eine Ruhestätte mit Fellen und Teppichen. Neben dem Hauptgebäude, gegen den Hintergrund, kleinere ähnliche Wohnungen mit vielfachen Anstalten von trockenen Mauern, Planken und Hecken, welche auf Befriedigung verschiedener Besitztümer deuten; dahinter die Gipfel von Fruchtbäumen, Anzeigen wohlbestellter Gärten. Weiterhin mehrere Gebäude im gleichen Sinne. Im Hintergrunde mannigfaltige Flächen. Hügel, Büsche und Haine; ein Fluß, der mit Fällen und Krümmungen nach einer Seebucht fließt, die zunächst von steilen Felsen begrenzt wird. Der Meereshorizont, über den sich Inseln erheben, schließt das Ganze. On the construction of contrast, see Grave, “Goethes ‘Pandora.’” Grave emphasizes above all the idealizing tendencies of the Poussin model. 179 See Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 53ff. (lines 625ff., here 729–736). 180 Goethe, Pandora, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 218. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 152: “Epimetheus (Aus der Mitte der Landschaft hervortretend).” 181 Goethe, Pandora, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 219. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 153 (line 25): “Besser blieb’ es immer Nacht!” 182 Goethe, Pandora, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 221. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 156: “Er begibt sich nach dem Lager in der Vorhalle und besteigt es.”

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humus,” Epimetheus flees from Helios and returns to a background that immobilizes him as he “rests” for the time being.183 The Poussinian scene itself is thereby arrested in a tenebrous state of latency that also indefinitely suspends the splendor of its characters.

Landscape with Polyphemus The way in which the Titans are semiotically tied to the background can be illustrated by a painting that may have also served as the model for the painted scenery of Pandora.

Figure 17: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus (1649), The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (GE-u86). In Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, ed. Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 79.

183 See Wellbery, “Pandora.” My observations were sparked by Wellbery’s description of Pandora as a mythologically layered thought-image.

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David Wellbery and Johannes Grave have pointed specifically to Poussin’s Landscape with Polyphemus, which Goethe possessed for a time in the form of a copperplate reproduction by Étienne Baudet, though this is not to say that Goethe’s use of the work was a matter of simple appropriation (Figure 17).184 The work is a pictorial representation of the episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses devoted to the desire of the Titan Polyphemus for the nymph Galatea, centered on the moment in which Polyphemus is sitting on a mountain awaiting her appearance from the sea. In the middle horizon of the picture, a formless volcanic rock formation rises up from which Polyphemus’s back appears to grow organically. Figure and ground formally combine here to forge a unity constituting a landscape.185 As a proxy for the race of the Titans, Polyphemus does not appear within the scene as an individual figure placed before and detached from the natural setting, but as inseparably captured and fixed within its ground. He is thus no dramatic staffage figure belatedly inserted into the landscape, but a component of the pictorial ground itself that has grown into place; he belongs, in other words, to the grounding layer of the work process. Poussin’s painting follows the conception of an archaic and still unredeemed world bearing the imprint of the Titanic figures that it encloses within mythical layers of space.186 The possibility of detachment and of any dynamic articulation of a shape by means of an entrance remain foreclosed to its figures.

184 Wellbery refers to Goethe’s letter to Meyer of January 1796, which reports the purchase of “eight large works of Poussin,” including the painting with Polyphemus: “1. A Setting on Etna. Polyphemus sits on the top of the cliff, peasants in the fields below, a river god with nymphs.” Goethe to J. H. Meyer, January 22–25, 1796, in WA II.4, 159–162, here 161. On the prints after paintings by Poussin that were contained in Goethe’s collections, see Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, 136ff. 185 On the art historical significance of accidental images, see Horst W. Janson, “The ‘Image made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 254–267. 186 In his study on Poussin, Otto Grauthoff not only points out the anthropomorphic features of this rocky landscape but also draws attention to the fact that Polyphemus turns to the sea as the outermost ground of the scene: “In his position facing the sea, Polyphemus is thus elevated far above any anecdotal significance of staffage. His figure, developed entirely out of the form of the cliff, is solely intended to make it seem to us that the three mountains of the landscape also longingly turn toward the sea”; Otto Grauthoff, Nicolas Poussin: Sein Werk und sein Leben, vol. 1 (Munich: Müller, 1914), 256.

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“From the Swell”: The Galatea Protocol At the same time, however, the sea is designated, even if through an absence, as a future space for entrances. Poussin’s Polyphemus is turned toward the sea because this is from where he expects Galatea to arrive, i.e., to make an entrance.187 His stance is entirely determined by his longing for the nymph he adores to appear upon the water and enliven the composition that remains arrested in its grounds. But it is only in Goethe’s Pandora that the sea, which remains empty in Poussin’ work, comes to life and the crippled activity of entering once again begins to stir. The fragment builds toward the entrance of Phileros from the sea, bringing this eponymous tragedy to a euphoric conclusion. After the recovery and return of the tragic figure, Phileros turns back to life with “worldly energy”: There! Already he emerges From the swell, the sturdy swimmer. For the love of life won’t let him, Youthful as he is, go down. If the waves all round are playing, Matinally moved by breezes, With those waves he’s only playing, For they bear him lovingly. All the fishermen and swimmers Form a living circle round him, Not to save him, though, from drowning: Playing, too, they bathe with him. Even dolphins join them, gliding, Leap amid that lively escort, Coming up for air, they lift and Carry him, refreshed and glowing. All that busy crowd together Hasten now to reach the shore. And in energy and freshness Land by water won’t be beaten; All the hills and all the clifftops Are alive with living folk! All the vintners, from their presses, Cavern cellars, come to offer Countless cups and countless wine-jugs To the animated waves. Now the god-like youth, dismounting From the backs, foam-flecked all over, Of those friendly ocean creatures,

187 See Wellbery, “Pandora.”

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Reaches land, my roses round him, An Anadyome he, Climbs the cliff. —An old man passes Him the loveliest of wine-cups, Well-contented, bearded, smiling Hands it to the Bacchus-like. Kettle drums, resound! And trumpets! They surround him, and they envy Me the beauty of his stature, My enjoyment of the sight. From his shoulders to his hips now Panther-skins are wrapped around him And, the thyrsus in his hands, he Strides triumphant now, a god. Do you hear the cheers, the trumpets? Yes, the day’s high celebration, Festival for all, begins.188

These lines transform the stagnant, barren landscape at the center of the first scene into the productive “swell,” and the destructive sea into a generative force: the end of Pandora mobilizes precisely those elements in the background of the picture that were active in “Amor as Landscape Painter.” Wind and water flow into, and so vivify, an entrance that hearkens back to Venus, the goddess of love who was born of sea foam. In referring to Phileros as “Anadyome,” namely, the 188 Goethe, Pandora, trans. Hamburger, CW 8: 244–245. Goethe, Pandora, MA 9, 182f. (lines 996–1041): “Dort! er taucht in Flutenmitte / Schon hervor, der starke Schwimmer: / Denn ihn läßt die Lust zu leben / Nicht, den Jüngling, untergehn. / Spielen rings um ihn die Wogen, / Morgendlich und kurz beweget; / Spielt er selbst nur mit den Wogen, / Tragend ihn, die schöne Last. / Alle Fischer, alle Schwimmer, / Sie versammeln sich lebendig / Um ihn her, nicht, ihn zu retten; / Gaukelnd baden sie mit ihm. / Ja Delphine drängen gleitend / Zu der Schar sich, der bewegten, / Tauchen auf und heben tragend / Ihn, den schönen aufgefrischten. / Alles wimmelnde Gedränge / Eilet nun dem Lande zu. / Und an Leben und an Frische / Will das Land der Flut nicht weichen; / Alle Hügel, alle Klippen / Von Lebend’gen ausgeziert! / Alle Winzer, aus den Keltern, / Felsenkellern tretend, reichen / Schal’ um Schale, Krug um Krüge / Den beseelten Wellen zu. / Nun entsteigt der Göttergleiche, / Von dem ringsumschäumten Rücken / Freundlicher Meerwunder schreitend, / Reich umblüht von meinen Rosen, / Er ein Anadyomen, / Auf zum Felsen. – Die geschmückte / Schönste Schale reicht ein Alter / Bartig, lächelnd, wohlbehaglich, / Ihm dem Bacchusähnlichen. / Klirret Becken! Erz ertöne! / Sie umdrängen ihn, beneidend / Mich um seiner schönen Glieder / Wonnevollen Überblick. / Pantherfelle von den Schultern / Schlagen schon um seine Hüften, / Und den Thyrsus in den Händen / Schreitet er heran ein Gott. / Hörst du jubeln? Erz ertönen? / Ja des Tages hohe Feier, / Allgemeines Fest beginnt.”

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lines allude to the entrance made by Venus as she “exited” from the sea (“venerem exeuntem e mari” is how Pliny translates “anadyomene”189). Moreover, in being addressed as one who is “Bacchus-like,” Phileros’s entrance draws in BacchanticDionysian performance forms and energies, further heightening the intensity of his appearance. And finally, hints of another pictorial layer can be discerned here, associated not with Poussin but with Raphael: as Wellbery notes, Poussin’s empty sea recalls Raphael’s Galatea fresco, which Goethe had seen at the Villa Farnesina during his stay in Rome and would elaborate into a pictorial sketch guiding his own entrance protocols in his later text on “Philostrats Gemälde” (Philostrato’s painting).190 This fresco depicts the triumphal approach of the nymph Galatea across the sea as she is viewed from an adjacent fresco by Polyphemus (Figure 18). Goethe’s essay, inspired by Raphael, describes the moment of a triumphant figuration in front of an elemental horizon. It paradigmatically lists all of the features that antitragically mark the entrance as a form of energeia and an expression of vitality: The broad surface of the sea calmly wavers beneath the shell chariot of the beautiful Galatea; four dolphins are yoked together, pulling in tandem as though animated with a single spirit; virgin Tritons have put them in bridle and bit to curb their lively leaping. She, though, stands upon the conch, as her purple robe, itself a play of the winds, swells over her head like a sail and sets her in shadow.191

189 See Pliny, Natural History, vol. IX, Libri XXXIII–XXXV, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 329: “His Aphrodite [Venus] emerging from the Sea was dedicated by his late lamented Majesty Augustus in the shrine of his father Caesar; it is known as the Anadyomene.” 190 See Wellbery, “Pandora.” See also the following section “‘HELEN (stepping forth)’: Homecoming from the Deepest Ground.” In the festival in Faust II that plays in the “rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea,” this emphatic-euphoric form of entrance is directly associated with the figure of Galatea. As will be seen, Helen’s entrance also follows this pattern. See Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 30 (1956): 1–40; Heinrich Dörrie, Die schöne Galatea: Eine Gestalt am Rande des griechischen Mythos in antiker und neuzeitlicher Sicht (Munich: Ernst Heimeran Verlag, 1968), 73–76; Dieter Richter, Das Meer: Geschichte der ältesten Landschaft (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2014), 56. 191 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Philostrats Gemälde,” MA 11.2, 449–494, here 476: “Ruhig schwankt die breite Wasserfläche unter dem Wagen der Schönen, vier Delphine nebeneinander gespannt scheinen, zusammen fortstrebend, von Einem Geiste beseelt, jungfräuliche Tritonen legen ihnen Zaum und Gebiß an ihre mutwilligen Sprünge zu dämpfen. Sie aber steht auf dem Muschelwagen, das purpurne Gewand, ein Spiel der Winde, schwillt segelartig über ihrem Haupte und beschattet sie zugleich.”

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Figure 18: Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea (1512), Raffael: Das malerische Werk, ed. Konrad Oberhuber (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), 171.

Poussin vs. Raphael This entrance protocol is not to be found in Poussin, whose sea remains empty and whose world is in a state of expectation; it is written by Raphael, who has his figures advance and step out of the picture frame, as one can see in the Galatea fresco and in other works. It is in Raphael, not Poussin, that Goethe finds a dynamic Bildformel able to activate the ground and enlist the entrance in the service of life. Only Raphael’s figure painting seems to offer the manifest presence an entrance needs to enliven the world, while also enabling the figure to advance upon the stage in a manner that spectators perceive as filled with life. This Bildformel is emphasized not only by the Galatea fresco, which could be viewed only in Rome and thus had little purchase in German visual memory, but also by

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a second painting that was much more present in Germany and that staged the same euphoric forward movement: the protocol for Galatea’s entrance was the same as that found in the Sistine Madonna, who also comes forward from an elemental background to perform a movement that August Wilhelm Schlegel called, in a well-known description of the painting, a “lively stride.”192 Hence it is “Raphaelian liveliness”193 that is needed to overcome Poussin’s statuary composition of figures and to revive the dead Phileros, who has vanished into the bottom of the sea.194 Here, too, Goethe gives a mythological cast to the protocol that will finally be established in the second part of Faust as a protocol of life. In the festival in the Aegean Sea found in the second act of Faust II, Goethe has Galatea herself make an entrance, where Venus vouches for this protocol as its benefactress. “Venus’s rainbow-coloured chariot / Of shell now brings the loveliest of the lot, / Galatea” (see Figure 19).195

192 August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Die Gemählde: Gespräch,” Athenaeum 2 (1799): 39–151, here 127: “Then the blue skirt or coat begins beneath the bluish veil until it parts at her feet, with a fold that flies open to the left, to once again reveal her red robe.” 193 Robert von Langer, “Raphael und Poussin,” Der Neue Teutsche Merkur 2 (1806): 221–242, here 224. The Galatea protocol allows Goethe to detach these figures from the ground and lead them over the pictorial threshold. As is also evident from the reception of the Sistine Madonna, it is the dynamic of stepping forward and stepping out of the frame that captivates viewers of Raphael’s painting. In a quite remarkable lecture on the reception of the Sistine Madonna, Brigid Doherty has pointed to August Wilhelm Schlegel, who focuses in a description of the painting on this energetic step of the Madonna: “In Schlegel’s treatment of the Sistine Madonna, published in the Athenäum in 1799, Raphael’s Maria ‘does not stroll among us, but treads stridingly along the clouds, and does not merely hover in the sky into which her grand form draws its contour.’” Doherty also emphasizes the significance of the prefix “vor” that is accentuated in these texts about the Madonna. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s text is characterized by “the deployment of vor-words—the forward stepping Madonna as a figure who appears as if about to enter the real space in which the painting is seen.” Brigid Doherty, “Shudders of Reproduction: The Sistine Madonna in Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay, and Beyond,” lecture given at the Eikones workshop “Trace and Transmission: Discussions in German Modernism,” Basel, July 13, 2012, ms. 194 However, Galatea’s entrance can also be traced back to Poussin. His painting Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite was also inspired by the Triumph of Galatea from the Villa Farnesina. Here, too, however, it should be noted that Poussin stripped the dynamism from his dynamic source. “The illusion of dynamic movement so vividly conveyed by the fresco has been intentionally shattered. Instead everything is emphatically frontal, and the dolphins and sea-horses toss and turn seemingly outside time and space.” Alain Mérot, Nicolas Poussin, trans. Fabia Claris (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 87. 195 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 112. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 221 (lines 8144f.): “Im Farbenspiel von Venus Muschelwagen / Kommt Galatee, die schönste, nun getragen.”

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This shift from Poussin to Raphael, which is also a shift of emphasis from the ground to an energetic entrance, was prepared by the art discourse of the day. Such a juxtaposition can be found, for instance, in an essay by Robert von Langer in the journal Der Neue Teutsche Merkur, entitled “Raphael und Poussin,” in a way that anticipates Goethe’s Pandora by assigning the background to Poussin and the vivid stepping forth to Raphael.196

Figure 19: Raphael, The Sistine Madonna (1512/13), Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. In Raffael: Das malerische Werk, ed. Konrad Oberhuber (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), 135.

196 Robert von Langer (1783–1846) carried out a loose correspondence with Goethe from 1802 to 1815.

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Langer writes: “Poussin’s figures do not yet hint at any expression, their movements are mostly without life; but one finds instead . . . impressive backgrounds and a superbly magnificent distribution of shadow and light.”197 In Raphael, by contrast, Langer finds emphatic liveliness. Langer praises Raphael in formulaic terms for his “true, vivid, and noble depiction,” for his “liveliness and fineness of expression.”198 Raphael’s visual paradigm makes it possible to suspend the entrance protocol that allows the figure to fall back into the ground, redirecting the figure’s turn to the rear and transforming it into an advance. Read thus, Goethe’s Pandora fragment is more complete than it might seem.199 Though the text may at first appear to be conceived around the reentry of the goddess Pandora, it is ultimately an entrance from the sea that enables the world of the Titans to break free from its paralysis. The divine epiphany that Goethe vainly attempted to elaborate in his sketches for the conclusions of Pandora is replaced by the epiphanic impact and manifest presence of a figure turned back toward life from a tragic ground. Finally, it should be noted that Phileros does not return in the splendor of a sovereign figure who is accentuated and distinguished from all others. His entrance is embedded within a multiplicity. It takes place in a social web of relations that was not found in the immobile world of the Titans. Upon returning, Phileros becomes the center of a new community, which consequently organizes itself in the form of the festival.200 The initially natural-mythological surroundings of “Meerwunder”—wondrous ocean creatures—is transformed into a social milieu tinged with festive, utopian features. The figures are thus no longer surrounded by a landscape, as at the beginning of the festival, but by a social world, or to speak with reference to tragedy, by a chorus. In the jubilant rescue of Phileros, an egalitarian society comes together in celebration, reorganizing itself under the sign of life and making a collective entrance. It is moreover no longer the ancient Titans, but the minor characters of vintners and shepherds who now occupy the stage. In the festival scene, the staffage figures draw the tragic hero into their midst, spanning a dynamic chain of life between foreground and background. To employ the language of Jean-Luc Nancy, Phileros’s entrance effects a transition from the singular to the plural.201 In becoming part of a “busy

197 Langer, “Raphael und Poussin,” 225. 198 Langer, “Raphael und Poussin,” 225f. 199 See the commentary on Pandora in MA 9, 1138–1157, here 1142ff. 200 See Primavesi, Das andere Fest, 104ff. 201 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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crowd” (“Gedränge”) that “hastens” toward the shore where he is received by shepherds and vintners, the “god-like youth” inserts himself into a collective movement. As he alights, he fulfills “the longing for an authentic collective presence of a festival.”202 The act of stepping forth becomes a festive experience of communion that leaves behind the fixed arrangements of court festivals to imagine a new utopian space of celebration. At the same time, the figures in the landscape acquire tremendously increased significance. Though they began as accessory and subordinate, they now transform the pictorial space threatened by paralysis into a space of life and step into a preeminent position that dominates the picture. Roger de Piles had already considered this possibility when he wrote: “I am persuaded that the best way to make figures valuable is, to make them agree with the landskip [sic] that it may seem to have been made purely for the figures.”203 The connection between figure and ground is emphatically underscored when the sea creatures and the characters on shore unite to save Phileros. If staffage in the semantics of the eighteenth century can mean a technique of “enlivening,” of “populating,” and of “decorating,”204 all of these meanings now come together. In the end, it seems as though the power to rule the scene has passed to the staffage figures. Phileros’s entrance becomes a figure of restoration, accompanied by a renewal of society and its entrance protocols.

“HELEN (stepping forth)”: Homecoming from the Deepest Ground Antecedents Helen’s arrival in the third act of Faust II is a well-prepared event. Few entrances are as announced so thoroughly as that of the queen of Sparta. Since first engaging with the Helen myth in 1800, Goethe began to anticipate her entrance. There is no circumstance that he emphasizes more often, and with such tenacity, than his expectation that “Helen will return to the soil of Sparta, where she will make an entrance, in truly living form, in an imaginary house of Menelaus.”205 In 1826, when he was preparing the publication of the Helen act as an independent work treating Helen’s return home from Troy, he drafted no

202 Primavesi, Das andere Fest, 13. 203 Roger de Piles, Cour par des principes—The Principles of Painting (London, 1743), 140. 204 Strahl-Grosse, Staffage, 48. 205 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, [Par. 123A] Erste Ankündigung der Helena, final handwritten copy for publication (i.e., the “Reinschrift”—the “pure copy” or “pure writing”), MA 18.1,

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fewer than three announcements insisting that “The play thus begins in front of Menelaus’s palace at Sparta, where Helen, accompanied by a chorus of Trojan women, makes an entrance after having just landed on shore, as she immediately indicates in her first lines.”206 This entrance becomes so significant in the composition not least because it is destined to function as the bridgehead between the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust project. Its task will be to establish the connection between the Gretchen tragedy and that of Helen, and to gear it toward the semiotic structure of Part II, on which Goethe was working, toward this entrance of the “Greek hero’s wife.” Acts I and II of the second part of Faust merely set the stage for this entrance. Their entire effort aims toward elaborating a space for its anticipation.207 The third “Announcement of Helen,” for instance, notes: To at least somewhat bridge the great gap, however, between the familiar, sorrowful conclusion of Part I and the entrance to be made by this wife of a Greek hero, readers are kindly presented with a depiction of what precedes this event; may they find it sufficient for the time being.208

Goethe calls these bridges—which include nothing less than the “Masquerade,” the conjuring forth of spirit, the laboratory scene, the “Classical Walpurgis Night,” and the festival in the Aegean—the “antecedents of Helen.”209 These texts should further be taken to encompass the publisher’s announcements along with his sketches and drafts: “May this short sketch serve for the time being to communicate the antecedents that must be known and thought in

934–936, here 935: “Helena auf den Boden von Sparta zurückkehr[t], um als wahrhaft lebendig dort in einem vorgebildeten Hause des Menelas aufzutreten.” 206 Goethe, Erste Ankündigung der Helena, and in almost identical formulation on page 857 and in [Par. 123C] Dritte Ankündigung der Helena, 860. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, [Par. 123C] Erste Ankündigung der Helena, handwritten copy for publication, MA 18.1, 936—938: “Das Stück beginnt also vor dem Pallaste des Menelaus zu Sparta, wo Helena, begleitet von einem Chor trojanischer Frauen als eben gelandet auftritt, wie sie in den ersten Worten sogleich zu verstehen gibt.” 207 This was already noted by Wilhelm Emrich: Die Symbolik von Faust II.: Sinn und Vorformen, 4th ed. (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1978), 352f., 359. See also Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 30 (1956): 1–40, here 25. 208 Goethe, Dritte Ankündigung der Helena, here 937: “Damit aber die große Kluft zwischen dem bekannten jammervollen Abschluß des ersten Theiles und dem Eintritt einer griechischen Heldenfrau einigermaßen überbrückt werde, so nehme man vorerst eine Schilderung des Vorausgegangenen freundlich auf und finde solche einstweilen hinreichend.” 209 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, diary, December 21, 1826, in WA III.1, 444: “Antezedenzien der Helena.”

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advance of the announced work on Helen.”210 Hence the publisher, the author, and the tragedy itself all point to Helen’s appearance. And the beginning of the Helen act in Faust II moves to the center of an interest that is keyed to this act of making an entrance.

True Life and the Protocol of Tragedy Yet even in these announcements, two acutely conflicting tendencies push the moment of Helen’s return to Sparta toward crisis. The tension that is built up and then discharged at the beginning of the Helen act establishes an opposition between the vivid presence of the eponymous figure in the moment of her appearing and the genre of tragedy as such. The demand for manifest presence expressed in the words “truly living form” competes with the tragic scheme that threatens this living energy and immediately takes hold of Helen upon her return home. The desire for presence competes here for preeminence with the reduction of presence in tragedy. This distinguishes Goethe’s Faust tragedy from a treatise he wrote as early as 1803, which had placed the returned Helen within a triumphant tableau. In his reflections on the “Paintings of Polygnotus,” i.e., in the medium of art criticism, Goethe had sketched a picture of Helen unburdened of the past, who is greeted upon returning home by those she had left behind. The question of whether and under what conditions a figure who was responsible for a war and for bringing ruin to Troy and Greece can be granted the right to emphatic presence is given an affirmative answer in the following passage: Here she sits again, as queen, served and surrounded by her maids, admired by a former lover and suitor, and reverently greeted by a herald. . . . All the crimes committed against her have the most sorrowful consequences; those she committed herself, are simply extinguished by the present. / An object of adoration and desire from her youth, she arouses the fiercest passions of a heroic world, imposes an eternal servitude on her suitors, is robbed, married, kidnapped, and regained. . . . And, though previously the prize of a pernicious war, she now appears as the most beautiful justification of victory, sitting enthroned, raised up by nothing less than a heap of the dead and captured, at the pinnacle of her power. All is forgiven and forgotten; for she has returned. He himself now also

210 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, [Par. 123B] Zweite Ankündigung der Helena, MA 18.1, 857f., here 858: “Dieses kurze Schema . . . diene . . . einstweilen die Antecedenzien bekannt zu machen welche der angekündigten Helena . . . voraus gekannt und gedacht seyn müßten.”

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truly alive, her husband once again beholds this woman and enjoys in her the highest earthly good, the sight of a perfect form.211

Against this background, however, one must ask what is to be expected when this moment of emphatic presence—expressed with words positing the possibility of a new beginning: “All is forgiven and forgotten; for she has returned”— now takes place within the generic framework of tragedy? Can the emphasis of the treatise be sustained in a composition that theatrically exposes a subject caught up in the web of myth? who has become an enigma to herself? Here, too, tragedy evinces an antitriumphalist character, in which the figure’s desire to make an entrance comes into conflict with the catastrophic threat of tragic developments in the plot. Even in this moment of euphoric theatricality, the figure is subordinated to a genre that is endangered from the very moment of its appearance. The ambiguity of Helen’s return—the oscillation between the vivid effect of presence and tragic entanglement, between the claim to a living present and the demands of a past that await Helen at her homecoming—is what defines the opening scene of the Helen act.

“Nostos” and Tragedy Goethe’s play invokes this generic framework here not only in a general way, but quite specifically. To wit: the beginning of the Helen act adapts the prominent protocol of tragedy dating back to the genre’s origins that links it to the motif of homecoming. The citation of tragedy in the Helen act that structures this scene is that of nostos.212 Since the beginnings of tragedy with Aeschylus, the genre has

211 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Polygnots Gemälde in der Lesche zu Delphi (An diesem Versammlungsorte),” MA 6.2, 509–538, here 528f.: “Hier sitzt sie wieder, als Königin, bedient und umstanden von ihren Mägden, bewundert von einem ehemaligen Liebhaber und Freier, und ehrfurchtsvoll durch einen Herold begrüßt. . . . Alles, was gegen sie verbrochen wurde, hat die traurigsten Folgen; was sie verbrach, wird durch die Gegenwart ausgelöscht. / Von Jugend auf ein Gegenstand der Verehrung und Begierde, erregt sie die heftigsten Leidenschaften einer heroischen Welt, legt ihren Freiern eine ewige Dienstbarkeit auf, wird geraubt, geheiratet, entführt und wieder erworben. . . . [U]nd, vorher das Ziel eines verderblichen Krieges, erscheint sie nunmehr als der schönste Zweck des Sieges, und erst über Haufen von Toten und Gefangenen erhaben, thront sie auf dem Gipfel ihrer Wirkung. Alles ist vergeben und vergessen; denn sie ist wieder da. Der Lebendige sieht die Lebendige wieder, und erfreut sich in ihr des höchsten irdischen Gutes, des Anblicks einer vollkommenen Gestalt.” See also Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” 4. 212 See Karen Bassi, “Nostos, Domos, and the Architecture of the Ancient Stage,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 415–449; Christopher Wild, “Royal Re-entries: Zum Auftritt in der

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required its tragic heroes to return to the place from where they set out: the return of the Greeks, for example, from the vanquished city of Troy to Mycenae or Sparta, or the return of the “rag king” Xerxes,213 after his defeat in the Battle of Salamis, to a Persia shaken by the crises of an interregnum. The focus of the tragedy is on the figure of the hero returning home who appears to be a victor yet suffers a tragic reversal of fortune. He ends up in a situation that turns the triumphator into an ignoramus, the ruler into a victim, and the festive self-manifestation of a character into a pawn of tragic decisions. When Goethe has Helen return from the Trojan War, he, too, makes use of a scheme that develops the narrative of nostos established in the Odyssey—yet under different, now tragic, premises.214 Goethe finds this concrete model for the tragic turn of a triumphant arrival in Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon, which he knew from the translation that Wilhelm von Humboldt produced between 1796 and 1804.215 Portrayed in this tragic perspective, Helen is a reworking of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. In both Aeschylus and Goethe, the sovereignty of the figure’s first entrance conflicts with the mythical powers that surround the tragic stage. And in both works, a strong entrance quickly turns into tragic exposure. Both Agamemnon and Helen come “from the ships.”216 Both linger in front of the palace before heading for the house where death by axe awaits them.217 And as one reads in Humboldt’s introduction to his own translation, as soon as they “set foot upon their home country,” both “appear to be encircled by inescapable nets.”218 While Agamemnon is received by Clytemnestra, who murders him behind closed doors after his appearance on the skene, Helen, too, is threatened with death within the house where she arrives. The task given to her by Menelaus is to prepare a sacrifice—which will be herself. The comparison with this earlier model, however, reveals the resistance that Goethe brings to the mythical dispositions of tragedy. For even though the Helen act closely follows Aeschylus, incorporating the ancient playwright’s nostos structure directly into its own exposition, the relationship it establishes

griechischen Tragödie,” in Auftritte: Strategien des In-Erscheinung-Tretens in Künsten und Medien, ed. Annemarie Matzke, Ulf Otto, and Jens Roselt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 33–61. 213 Siegfried Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie: Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides auf der Bühne ihrer Zeit (Munich: DTV, 1974), 73. 214 See Wild, “Royal Re-entries,” 45ff. 215 See Aischylos, Agamemnon, trans. Wilhelm von Humboldt (Leipzig: G. Fleischer, 1816). 216 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, [Par. 162] “Schema-Entwurf” in his own hand, MA 18.1, 938f., here 938. 217 In Humboldt’s translation: Aischylos, Agamemnon, 39 (line 827): “Doch jetzt ins Haus, zum Heerd.” 218 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Einleitung,” in Aischylos, Agamemnon, I–XXXVII, here page V.

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between its heroine and tragedy is significantly freer. Goethe grants Helen an autonomy and incipience unknown to Agamemnon. He crafts the movement with which she enters the stage as a dynamic event with inchoate, i.e., inaugurating, force. The figure that articulates itself retains the activity of the elements. Buoyed by the favor of Poseidon and the power of the east wind (Euros), Helen approaches under propitious auspices. Her return is initially marked as an act of new creation or of oceanic begetting. It takes place before the “elemental horizon” of the sea219—and as the philosopher Thales remarks at the end of the second act, “at the beginnings of creation”:220 HELEN. So much admired and so much censured, Helena, / Now from the sea I come; we are not long ashore, / And drunken still with rocking upon the lively waves / Which on their high-uptossing backs, from Troy’s wide plain, / By great Poseidon’s favour and by the east wind’s force / Brought us once more to harbours of our fatherland.221

Helen becomes so present to her author that he wishes to capture her entrance as a moment of “perfect incipience.”222 As Goethe himself writes, he was reluctant to translate this generative moment into a tragedy: Fortunately, over the last eight days I was able to capture those situations about which you know, and my Helen has in fact [wirklich] made an entrance. Now, however, I am so attracted to the beauty in her situation that I am grieved that I must now transform it into a grimace.223

Only grudgingly does Goethe abandon the euphoric moment of presence generated before the horizon of the sea, the beautiful site he envisions for Helen’s homecoming, in favor of a generic scheme that according to Aristotle’s definition requires the imitation of a myth, a completely structured context of plot and action that causes the tragic characters to suffer a change of fortune and disfigures the beauty of the scene.

219 Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” 1. 220 Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 227 (line 8322): “[v]on vorn die Schöpfung an[fängt].” 221 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 124. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 233 (lines 8488–8493): “Bewundert viel und viel gescholten Helena / Vom Strande komm’ ich wo wir erst gelandet sind, / Noch immer trunken von des Gewoges regsamem / Geschaukel, das vom phrygischen Blachgefild uns her / Auf sträubig-hohem Rücken, durch Poseidons Gunst / Und Euros’ Kraft in vaterländische Buchten trug.” 222 Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” 28. 223 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Schiller on September 12, 1800, MA 8.1, 812: “Glücklicher weise konnte ich diese acht Tage die Situationen fest halten von denen Sie wissen und meine Helena ist wirklich aufgetreten. Nun zieht mich aber das Schöne in der Lage meiner Heldin so sehr an, daß es mich betrübt wenn ich es zunächst in eine Fratze verwandeln soll.”

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The differences between Greek tragedy and the Helen act are thus also evident in the differences found in the space of anticipation that serves as the precondition for the entrance of the two protagonists. As an example: the imminent arrival of Agamemnon in Aeschylus is prepared by a gigantic scenario that proleptically employs intimations, lamentations, forebodings, and prophecies to foreshadow the threat awaiting the king’s arrival. The chorus’s parodos and stasima invoke the catastrophe building up inside the house, and a thousand verses preceding Agamemnon’s homecoming weave a demonic web that ensnares him long before he enters. As Humboldt observes, these forebodings become more important than the appearance of Agamemnon himself: Agamemnon is characterized just as much, and even more, by what precedes his appearance as by his appearing itself. He is meant to enter as the greatest and most fortunate mortal the gods have ever crowned with glory and victory. . . . But at the same time, all this sublimity is presented as the threat of a fall that will immediately follow. Thus the king himself enters, and after a few words about the greatness of the enterprise that has been accomplished, and about the necessity of now bringing his city and his house to order, he bespeaks nothing but concern . . . 224

In contrast to the grim antecedents of tragedy, which is a genre that invokes triumph only as a contrast to impending catastrophe, Goethe’s Helen initially leaves all doom behind. Helen “enters,” as Goethe writes to Zelter on January 4, 1831, “simply as a heroine.”225 Her nostos occurs in a performative act of selfpositing and without any need to assert herself, like Agamemnon, in a darkened space of anticipation. Her entrance is not preceded by a chorus of lamentation; and with the words “So much admired and so much censured, Helena,” she cuts off any possibility of someone else announcing her arrival, by naming herself in a sovereign act of self-distancing. Goethe has Helen herself begin this act and thus relieves her, at least in the moment of her return, of her inglorious past and its burdens. If Agamemnon’s triumph marks only the height from which he will fall, Helen reveals herself in shadowless presence that steps forward to escape from fate. Even the sea in the background of this scene is no longer a pernicious, mythical ocean as it is in Aeschylus’s tragedy, where it functions as a space of danger for the arriving figure, who will potentially be viewed as a castaway.226

224 Humboldt, “Einleitung,” VIIIf. 225 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Carl Friedrich Zelter on January 4, 1831, MA 20.2, 1425f., here 1425: “[sie tritt] als Heroine ohne Weiteres auf.” See also Albrecht Schöne, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Kommentare,” in FA 7/2, 588. 226 The text speaks of a “terrible wave of troubles”; Aeschylus: Oresteia, Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 2009), 77 (line 653). See also Wild, “Royal Re-entries,” 44.

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Rather, it is an animating element inhabited by propitious daemons, conveying Helen home “by great Poseidon’s favour / And by the east wind’s force.”227 Her approaching step combines the fluctuations of the waters and formal stability of poetic form, activating the poetic meter as an additional element stabilizing her figure that is also explicitly named in the “foot” of the line (as Martin Greenberg nimbly translates): “Now back at Father’s house, / Late-footed back indeed, / Yet back with surer foot.”228 Overall, the figure is conceived as one that casts aside, and moves beyond, its situation; that detaches itself figuratively and spatially from the “monstrous background” given to it by Humboldt:229 “and let all the storms of fate / That have been raging round me now be left behind.”230 At least at the beginning of the scene, the actuating force of Helen’s stride allows her to step out of the sphere in which Agamemnon perishes. Even Mephisto, who awaits her inside the house as Phorcyas, cannot refuse to acknowledge one who appears in such a convincing form: Lady, since you, whom now I acknowledge, take again Your former place as queen and mistress of the house: Take up the reins that have so long grown slack, rule now.231

A Discredited World of Appearance It is not only the genre of tragedy, however, that is threatened by this presence wrested from the powers of the past. Even though Helen seems in this moment of return to gain form and life, in full defiance of the tragic demand for a fatal ending to the piece, the incipience won with her entrance quickly comes under ontological suspicion. Helen is an exclusively phantasmagorical entity. In calling herself an idol—that is to say, in producing, even in her most forceful entrance, only “a 227 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 124. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 233 (lines 8492f.): “durch Poseidons Gunst / Und Euros’ Kraft.” 228 Martin Greenberg, Faust: A Tragedy. Parts One & Two Fully Revised (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 308. David Luke translates these lines as: “To her hearth and her home she comes, / Tardy her steps, yet all the more / Firmly and surely they bring her.” Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 127. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 236 (lines 8616ff.): “spätzurückkehrendem / Aber desto festerem / Fuße freudig.” 229 Humboldt, “Einleitung,” XII. 230 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 124. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 233 (lines 8508f.): “[A]lles bleibe hinter mir, / Was mich umstürmte bis hieher, verhängnißvoll.” 231 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 133. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 241 (lines 8803ff.): “Da du, nun Anerkannte! neu den alten Platz / Der Königin und Hausfrau wiederum betrittst, / So fasse längst erschlaffte Zügel, herrsche nun.”

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pervasive sense that [she] is semblance”232—she is admitting just how dubious her reality must be. The fact that Goethe himself calls the Helen act a phantasmagoria must be added as a precondition for the entire analysis up to this point and projected back upon all arguments this chapter has made.233 The scene of return inevitably raises the question of what options a nomadic form offers for entrances, because here the model of nostos is ironically actualized in a figure that can be described, with Hans Belting, as nomadic, as “inherently intermediate.”234 She is a figure without a beginning, to whom no origin can be assigned, whether as a fixed reference to a place or to a uterus, and who is reactualized on the stage of Faust II in multiple media and at different places. Although Goethe would have her originate from “the mothers,” the verses from the scene “A Dark Gallery” make it clear that, even in the “deepest ground,” she is caught up in a restless circular movement with no beginning. As one of many “Schemen,” or “empty forms,” Helen comes from the “Getreibe” of the forces—from the bottomless ground or nothingness—from which, as it is said, the “unique form” must be continually refashioned.235 The mothers are media: passageways for ever-changing realizations of human projections. Helen is thus nothing other than the transitory “iconic difference” (Gottfried Boehm) that always emerges anew before formless grounds—and which these grounds always reclaim. In Helen’s case, the crisis of detachment that Goethe’s characters undergo occurs in the transition from medium to form. Helen’s entrances do not “expose what is present,”236 in the sense of “she is

232 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, vol. 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1980), 26: “die durchschimmernde Empfindung ihres Scheins.” 233 See Goethe, “Erste Ankündigung der Helena,” 934. 234 Hans Belting, Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011), 145: “Like perception, images too are inherently intermediate. They transcend the various historical media that are invented for them, pitching their tent in one new medium after another and then moving on to the next.” Similarly, page 21: “One might say that images resemble nomads. They migrate across the boundaries that separate one culture from another, taking up residence in the media of one historical place and time and then moving on to the next, like desert wanderers setting up temporary camps.” See also Helmut Lethen, Der Schatten des Fotografen: Bilder und ihre Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2014), 14: Lethen speaks in a Mephistophelean vein of “images of depth on demand.” 235 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 53. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 158, 157, 198 (lines 6290, 6279, and 7439): “einzigste Gestalt.” 236 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer; Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934,

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back.” Rather, they expose one who is absent, testing the various kinds of power in the media that generate this paradox. The “mothers” have already been given as plural because the figure of Helen is realized not only in one but in several media of articulation. As “multiplicit[ies] without real self-determination,”237 they open up a multiplicity of medial possibilities for the shape called “back into life.”238

Mediatized Entrance 1: Smoke This applies first of all to the phantasmagorical protocol governing Helen’s initial, though preliminary, entrance at the end of Act I, which projects Helen’s figure onto an animated cloud of smoke as if in a laterna magica demonstration.239 In this first appearance of Helen, located within the society of the court, Goethe uses a medium for her actualization that does not allow for any forms to be stabilized. Smoke is a medium that permits no ultimate clarification, and in which entrances accordingly remain indeterminate. Performed before such a “soft screen,”240 entrances can only be observed in statu nascendi, as permanent emergence, and as the repeatedly futile attempt to assert a form in a field of view dominated by loose couplings. “We cannot recognize anything of their faces,” was the complaint from the audiences at spirit-summoning spectacles organized by charismatic entrepreneurs at the end of the eighteenth century.241 Such events, as this report reflects, drew the attention of the press, and in Helen’s first entrance Goethe, too, seems to take notice of, and deploy, their medial possibilities, “because the

trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 769–782, here 779. See also Samuel Weber, “Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality,” in Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 97–120, here 103. 237 Thomas Khurana, “Was ist ein Medium? Etappen einer Umarbeitung der Ontologie mit Luhmann und Derrida,” in Über Medien: Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. Sybille Krämer (Berlin, 1998), 111–143, 115. 238 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 91. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 198 (line 7439): “Ins Leben.” 239 See Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien: Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 2002), 129. On the use of smoke and fog in stagings of Faust, see Edith Anna Kunz: “‘Luftige Welten’: Zur Poetik von Rauch und Wasserdampf in Goethes Faust,” Colloquia Germanica 39, no. 1 (2006): 43–56. 240 See Gunnar Schmidt, Weiche Displays: Projektionen auf Rauch, Wolken und Nebel (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2011). 241 Eberhard von der Recke, “Nachricht von der Philidorschen Geisterbeschwörung,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 13 (January to June 1789), 468. See Schöne, Faust, “Kommentare,” 480ff.

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outline appears to flow and swirl without clear form, and the entire figure seems to be floating. This is presumably why Schröpfer used this smoke. . . . The faces of the ghosts looked like haze that had been given a shape” (see Figure 20).242 Helen’s first appearance takes place in a sphere of partial realities or, to use Herder’s terminology, of “half-articulations.”243 Accordingly, the step that begins the entrance cannot be convincingly simulated in a scene projected by a magic lantern. It remains fundamentally ambiguous whether such phantom figures enter “with a ghostly step”244 or merely play with a threshold of articulation in vaguely manifesting themselves upon a ground of smoke. The accounts given by the sources begin to waver themselves when they attempt to more precisely capture the movement that carried this spectral image forward. Where some spectators saw such a “ghostly step,” others reported that these spirits moved “without lifting a foot,” so that they appeared “simply to float.”245 It also remained unclear whether these figures arrived by striding from the back the front, from outside to inside, or, as Friedrich Nicolai writes, “by hopping in through an open door”;246 or whether they articulated themselves on a turbulent field of smoke without needing to move their feet at all in order to take such steps. At the same time, it becomes apparent that these steps remain incomplete, no more than fleeting shadows. Mephisto takes note of Helen’s entrance with a subjunctive—“Well, that would be her!”247—that questions the indicative givenness of the ideal figure. In contrast to an announcement that she is back, his words reflect a subjunctive stripping of power from a presence that is

242 Moses Mendelssohn, “Herrn Moses Mendelssohns Anmerkungen über einen schriftlichen Aufsatz, die Wunderthaten des berüchtigten Schröpfers betreffend,” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 26 (1775), 277–281, here 280. 243 See Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottfried Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772),” in Herder: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65–264, here 70. 244 Eugen Sierke, Schwärmer und Schwindler zu Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1874), 301. 245 Johann Salomo Semler, “Herrn D. Crusii Bedenken über die Schröpferische Theurgie,” in Sammlungen von Briefen und Aufsätzen über die Gaßnerischen und Schröpferischen Geisterbeschwörungen, mit eigenen vielen Anmerkungen, vol. 2, ed. Johann Salomo Semler (Halle, 1776), 1–14, here 5. 246 Friedrich Nicolai, “D. Christian August Crusius: Bedenken über die Schröpferischen Geister beschwörungen (Rezension),” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 26 (1775), 272–277, here 274. See also Sierke, Schwärmer und Schwindler, 301. 247 Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 165 (line 6479): “Das wär’ sie denn!” David Luke translates this as “So that’s her!” (Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 60)—in line with other contemporary English translators of Faust II, who all use indicative.

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already precarious.248 Mephisto addresses the figure who has appeared in the coniunctivus potentialis, a grammatical mood appropriate to the phantasmagorical constitution of Helen’s image as one who has not yet entered into full reality. Since a projection of smoke cannot guarantee articulation through movement, haze intervenes here, too, when a figure begins to emerge via an entrance. The characters who enter the stage in the second part of the tragedy never entirely efface their medial “vehicle”;249 they always arrive with a residue of chaos that prevents them from being completely formed, and that binds them to an indeterminate background which threatens to deprive them of the contour they have gained. Helen and Paris are also forms in the process of decomposition, that is to say, forms dissolving back into their medium.250

Mediatized Entrance 2: Water In a second entrance, however, a new element appears on the tragedy’s horizon. After the unsatisfactory entrance in the Great Hall of the Imperial Palace, the Helen scheme is updated in a medium more powerful and less discredited, one that is able to endow its figure with the “life” denied by haze and fog. The ground that Goethe now activates is the sea, an “elemental horizon,” to use Wolfgang Schadewaldt’s phrase. At the same time, the space of anticipation expands in whose vanishing point Helen is to reappear. The scene before Helen’s second entrance is moved out of the confines of the Great Hall into the open air, and the drama embarks on a “journey to water.”251 The festival in the Aegean Sea that precedes Helen’s entrance in Sparta functions not least to activate the elementary ground that enables the figure of Helen to perform a second, far more convincing arrival. If smoke was an artifact of charlatanry, the sea is a natural element with a dignity that is supremely generative.252 Its philosopher is Thales, whose line “In

248 See Albrecht Schöne, “Zum Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert Musil,” Euphorion 55 (1961), 196–220. 249 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 175. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 284 (line 10041). 250 See Khurana, “Was ist ein Medium?,” 125. 251 Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” 25. This is how Schadewaldt describes the “Classical Walpurgis Night.” 252 On the distinction between natural and artificial media, see Jochen Hörisch, “Die Medien der Natur und die Natur der Medien,” in Zum Naturbegriff der Gegenwart: Kongress zum Projekt “Natur” im Kopf, vol. 2, ed. Kulturamt Stuttgart (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994) 121–138, here 124; Dieter Mersch, Medientheorien zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2006), 13; Khurana, “Was ist ein Medium?”; Ulrich Gaier, “Schwankende Gestalten: Virtuality in

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Figure 20: Karl von Eckartshausen, Aufschlüsse zur Magie, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, 1626213-C.Neu.

water all things began to thrive!!”—or, more literally: “From water, all things have sprung!!”—opens a new horizon in the medium of a scene that also possesses a

Goethe’s Faust,” in Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity, ed. Hans Schulte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 54–67.

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new generative power, and that redirects the drama’s production of forms from the projection of smoke to creation itself.253 At the end of the Walpurgis Night, a new form-giving force comes into play, engendering “fresh life” and thus bestowing the figures emerging from the ocean with a degree of manifest presence that surpasses their appearance in smoke.254 In this water festival, Goethe stages the erotic turbulence of the form-giving forces by which the theater, as Max Kommerell noted, “subordinates itself to the law of becoming” and thus augurs a new semiotic regime.255 The result is a situation that allows the nomadic scheme of Helen’s appearing to be invoked a second time under more favorable conditions.256 What this activity of the ground leaves behind, however, is not only the ground of smoke but also, as indicated above, the dark ground of tragedy. The formative, generative, and inchoative forces that carry Helen forward also work against the distortions that threaten the figure in the genre that Goethe cites in the Helen act. Goethe composes this act in opposition to the superiority of the “monstrous backgrounds” evoked by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the introduction to his translation of Agamemnon: The individual action . . . is furnished with . . . a monstrous background. From the first scene to the appearance of Agamemnon, the entire Trojan War, with all the destruction it wrought upon individual Greek houses and all the splendor with which it glorified the nation, stands vividly before the spectator.257

In place of ruin as the tragedy’s ground, that is to say, of an expansive landscape of the past that Humboldt sees opened up in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Goethe thus posits a ground of water in the mode of creation that endows Helen’s entrance with actuating, initiating power. He thereby establishes a model of figuration that significantly differs from that of Humboldt. Humboldt follows a conventional classical metaphor in which the tragic figure is fashioned as a self-contained sculptural entity circumscribed by fixed boundaries, which consequently mark a strong contrast to the ground. Goethe, by contrast, opens up the boundaries of the figure and thereby also preserves a permeability between the detached form and its surrounding element.

253 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 122. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 230 (line 8435): “Alles ist aus dem Wasser entsprungen!!” 254 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 122. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 230 (line 8444): “frischeste[s] Leben.” 255 Max Kommerell, “Faust II. Teil: Zum Verständnis der Form,” in Kommerell, Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung: Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 9–75, here 45. 256 See Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” 4. 257 Humboldt, “Einleitung,” XII.

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Humboldt, for instance, emphasizes that Aeschylus presents characters making an entrance “with the greatest firmness and determination.”258 Similar to the figures of Pindar, they seem to Humboldt as if they were “reposing on a pedestal,” that is to stay, existing as statuary “formations”:259 In Agamemnon, the mind is filled from the very first verse with the chorus’s expressions of alarm, the obscure yet unfailingly terrifying intimations made by Clytemnestra, the lamentations and prophecies of Cassandra; as though these were melancholy melodies; clouded and black, yet indistinct, forebodings; and this is the ground upon which the great figures now step, now move—some terrifying, such as Clytemnestra, some glorious, such as Agamemnon and Cassandra. What more beautiful object could be imagined, even for the art of sculpture, than Cassandra on the chariot of the man who led her captive from her destroyed native city, before the gate to the palace that will bring death to them both!260

In Goethe, by contrast, the image of supreme beauty is not statically articulated as a self-contained visual artifact detached from its backgrounds and freely placed in an empty space. Rather, it is dynamized and set in motion by the elements themselves. His drawing of Helen thus remains non finito—not definitively articulated261—insofar as its outlines prove to be fluid or mobile and resist any closure that would also arrest them. Her presence, even in its perfection, is always to be thought as coming “from the sea” and yet still animated by the “rocking” of the waves, that is to say, posited as an open beginning and not as the beginning of an end. In her entrance, too, she remains bound to the medial field that continuously recomposes her contours. Her figure is constituted as wave and contour, momentum and form, and her entrance is a life-filled insistence of the figure in an animated field of possible transformations.262 In both how she is drawn and how she enters, this articulated form continually remains in status formandi, connected with the forces that shape it and thus stepping into a field of oscillation that Goethe directly associates with life.263 In this tragedy dominated by weak and spectral entrances, only Helen’s second entrance attains presence. And in a 258 Humboldt, “Einleitung,” XIV. 259 Humboldt, “Einleitung.” 260 Humboldt, “Einleitung,” XIVf. 261 See Hans Belting, Das unsichtbare Meisterwerk: Die modernen Mythen der Kunst (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 233–242, here especially the chapter: “Absolute Kunst und das Non-finito.” 262 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 25: “birth cannot simply remain an interminable process (a mark must be traced), nor can ostension simply present a formed or closed form. The status nascendi or status formandi—this status that has no stable state and that remains incessantly metastable—never stops preceding and extending itself beyond itself.” 263 See Schadewaldt, “Faust und Helena,” 5ff.

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context that brings the theatrical figure onto the stage exclusively in mediatized form made present by an illusion-making machine, it is water that proves to be the most convincing medium. Appearing from the sea, Helen completes the series of emphatic entrances that Goethe commenced with the entrance of Phileros in Pandora or in “Amor as Landscape Painter.” This appearance justifies, at least for a moment, the exclamation “She has returned!”—a claim that, in a theater which has ceased to exist and has long since delegated the entrances of bodies to a media apparatus, ultimately no longer possesses any capacity for truth. The consistency of this “unique form” therefore cannot last long. Helen’s only counterpart on her return is Mephisto—the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2) who replaces reality with phantasmagorical stagings, and a theater of bodies with a theater of fog formations. When Mephisto directs the action, the only entrance protocols that retain any force are those of a discredited world of appearances.264 Whether places, figures, or genres, nothing he calls to appear ever, or anywhere, manages to achieve formal stability. With his entrance in the mask of Phorcyas, a form-dissolving force takes root in the tragedy that Max Kommerell aptly calls the “disarticulating principle”265—its effects visible in the breaking-up of the strict couplings of tragic form, to name but one example. The task of evil in this play is the “privation de l’être”266—the privation of being, as Leibniz called the intention of evil. On the one hand, this privation succeeds in dissolving the formal structure of the tragedy by preventing the tragic action from coming to an end, and this suspension of dramatic action is diabolical.267 On the other hand, however, it also succeeds in disarticulating the tragic figure that had only just entered the stage in “truly living form.” Helen herself notes this privation of being caused by Mephisto when she relapses at the end of the scene, after her encounter with Phorcyas, into “wavering shapes”—that is to say, into the Mephistophelian mode of appearance. She enters by declaring: “In my swoon a desolation eized me, [wavering] I step free / And would gladly rest again now, for so weary are my bones.”268 Soon thereafter, she is surrounded by the fog from which she arose in 264 See Werner Hamacher, “Faust, Geld,” Athenaeum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 4 (1994): 131–187, here 152. 265 Kommerell, Faust II. Teil, 24. 266 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essaies de théodicée sur la bonté de dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Chez François Changuion, 1734), 93. See Peter Michelsen, “Mephistos ‘eigentliches Element’: Vom Bösen in Goethes Faust,” in Michelsen, Im Banne Fausts: Zwölf Faust-Studien (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), 171–191, here 173. 267 See Hamacher, “Faust, Geld,” 138. 268 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 137, translation modified from: “In my swoon a desolation seized me, trembling I step free / And would gladly rest again now, for so weary are my bones.” Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 245 (lines 8913f.): “Tret ich schwankend

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the first act and is then transported into the scene “Inner Courtyard of a Castle” by way of an uncertain movement: “somehow / We have come here so swiftly, taking not a step.”269 This analysis does not, however, intend to distinguish between a theater of illusion and a theater of presence in “truly living form.” The theater of Faust is based on the cognizance and staging of its mediatization. Effects of presence—and in particular those pertaining to entrances—arise in this theater only inasmuch as they are conveyed via media and openly revealed as mediated. Goethe considered the second part of Faust to be unperformable not only because its temporal and spatial dimensions would necessarily exceed any framework for a performance, but possibly because the medial constitution of its spaces and figures could no longer be fixed. These consist of nothing more than variously stable condensations of theatrical and visual media, even as they belong without exception to a world of appearances capable of achieving the manifest presence of “She has returned!” only by means of a reconstruction in these media. Even outside the realm of phantasmagoria, theatrical figures have an exclusively medial status that renders both their givenness and their capacity to make an entrance uncertain. Another reason that Goethe’s Faust is unperformable is the fact that the bodies at its disposal exist in so many material states and pass through so many degrees of derealization. The question of corporeal solidity as the foundation of theatrical representation has ultimately become irrelevant. In the excess of figurations and overactivity of the media comprising its backgrounds, the old theater of entrances has vanished. This stage no longer possesses a fixed spatial structure, with depth, stratifications, or markers of distance. Rather, it exists as the boundless field of forces, lacking any specific direction, that Mephisto first refers to as “Getreibe” before then giving it the venerable name of “ground” (in David Luke’s translation: “the deepest depth of all”).270 This is the ground for those fleeting, contingent processes of figuration that the following section on the masquerade in Faust II will call arrivance. Processes of entering are replaced here by distinctions of medium and form. These comprise permanent, weak, and reversible self-divisions of the medial ground, and all possible gradations of detachment—but above all weak gradations and, as a rule, multiplicities and groups that no longer attain consistency

aus der Oede die im Schwindel mich umgab, / Pflegt ich gern der Ruhe wieder, denn so müd ist mein Gebein.” 269 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 145. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 254 (line 9144): “Ich weiß nicht wie, gekommen, schnell und sonder Schritt.” 270 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 53. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 157 (line 6284).

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and cannot be consolidated in a body. The most characteristic stage direction for entering that indicates this weakness of distinction is found in the fifth act, at the entrance of the figures announced thus: “What comes now, like a hovering shade? MIDNIGHT [Enter FOUR GREY WOMEN.]”271

The Management of “Arrivance”: Goethe’s “Masquerade” Hardly any designation of genre is more provocative than that of “tragedy” in Part II of Goethe’s Faust.272 A reader who comes with Aristotelean conceptions of genre will find themselves lost amid the impenetrability of a text that lacks the unity, coherence, and consistency of a plot. Among “tragedies,” it is hard to find more than a few that so openly violate Aristotelian rules. The precepts that guide the writing of tragedy even into the nineteenth century are confronted here with a dramaturgical delirium that exceeds the horizon of expectations attached to the genre, and with a work whose own author declared it impossible to perform.273 The scandal the piece represents can be traced to the fact that the structures of its entrances are superimposed over the dramatic structures dominating neoclassical tragedy. Faust II foregrounds the activity of making an entrance and presenting oneself. It replaces a coherent structure of dramatic action with sequences or series of entrances, and the plot’s events with “the

271 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 217. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 326 (lines 11383f.): “Was schwebet schattenhaft heran? Mitternacht. Vier graue Weiber treten auf.” 272 In an analysis of Faust II, David Wellbery has elaborated Goethe’s dynamic-genetic understanding of tragedy as a form of thought and a potential to generate form that moves beyond any technical or rule-bound concept of genre. See also David E. Wellbery, Goethes “Faust I”: Reflexion der tragischen Form (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2016). 273 See Johann Peter Eckermann’s remark about Goethe from December 20, 1829: “‘Pray, no more about the public,’ said Goethe; ‘I wish to hear nothing about it. The chief point is, that the piece is written; the world may now do with it as it pleases, and use it as far as it can.’” Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, 419. German in MA 19, 342–344, here 343: “Geht nur, sagte Goethe, und laßt mir das Publikum, von dem ich nichts hören mag. Die Hauptsache ist, daß es geschrieben steht; mag nun die Welt damit gebaren so gut sie kann, und benutze es so weit sie es fähig ist.” See also Goethe in a conversation with Friedrich Förster on August 25, 1831, who reports Goethe as having said that “for himself, he had never even given a thought to a performance on stage.” Wolfgang Herwig, ed., Goethes Gespräche: Eine Sammlung zeitgenössischer Berichte aus seinem Umgang, vol. 3.2: Zweiter Teil 1825–1832 (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1972), no. 6889, 798–799, here 799.

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performance of the entrance itself.”274 The number of figures who play a part in the action is reduced to a minimum, while that of the figures who are entering and emerging swells to innumerability.275 These parades begin with the “Masquerade” in the first act, spill over into the “Classical Walpurgis Night,” continue in the war scenes, and reach an end in the act of the heavenly powers in the oratorical final scene. The clarity of a small ensemble of figures related to each other via a dramatic plot vanishes amid the increasing crush of the piece’s characters. On the spacious stage of Faust, Goethe’s tragedy unfolds precisely what Shakespeare described with the neologism “arrivance”:276 an activity of entering that cannot be quantified or resolved into individual characters, and that haunts the stage in waves from each act to the next. What increasingly becomes evident is the replacement of dramatic complications by an inflationary flood of arrivals. The more impoverished the plot becomes, the more insistently the tragedy demands a form of stage traffic with the capacity to introduce vast numbers of unknown and bizarre figures. This requires a dramaturgy denoted here by the phrase “management of arrivance.” This urgent, pressing activity is also what Goethe must have had in mind when he claimed to have found in Faust a form that “Aristotle and other prose writers would consider a kind of madness.”277 Yet it is only an illusion that the accumulation of entrances leads to a renewed theatricalization of the drama. Though this coming and going is now rampant, the entrance protocols that give it form also begin to decay. In both its Christian and its ancient variants, theater had been based on the principle of individuation in allowing its characters to step forth as individual figures, even in scenarios of crisis. But theater cannot withstand the pressure that now results in Faust II. The intensification of arrivals as dramatic actions destroys the framework that had long ordered entrances, hastening the end of this fundamental theatrical principle through its systematic exaggeration. Beginning with

274 Alexander Honold, “Elementartheater: Walpurgisnacht und Klassische Walpurgisnacht,” in Faust I/II von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012), 143–164, 155. 275 See Heinz Schlaffer, Faust: Zweiter Teil, Die Allegorie des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 139: “It is clear even from looking at the large number of dramatis personae in Faust II (so large that Goethe spares himself the work of enumerating them) that the individual figures are used up in the individual scenes in which they appear.” 276 William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Maurice R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958, 1974), 49 (II/1), lines 42f. 277 Goethe to Wilhelm von Humboldt on December 1, 1831, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Horst Fleig, in FA 38, no. 875, 493–496, here 495. Also in Ludwig Geiger, ed., Goethes Briefwechsel mit Wilhelm und Alexander von Humboldt (Berlin: Bondy, 1909), 280.

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the “Masquerade,” the dramaturgical foundations of a theatricality based on a regulated sequence of entrances disintegrate. Crucial theatrical boundaries drastically erode: the boundary between the one and the many, out of which a figure emerges; between figure and ground, which the entrance solidified; and between actors and spectators, which opens up in the entrance. This decay of entrance protocols possessing the power to generate order corresponds with a social and economic transformation that continually reduced the theatrical dimensions within the staging of a person. If one follows Albrecht Schöne, the “Masquerade” exemplifies the transition from a court society to a capitalist one based on the exchange of money, which calls into question all protocols anchored in the reality of the body and allows the indifference inherent in the circulation of commodities to rule even over human relations.278 One can observe here how the theatrical subject of the ancien régime loses not only its ability to make an entrance, but increasingly even the body with which it might do so. This upheaval becomes visible where Goethe once again engages with the ancien régime’s culture of entrances, in the grand setting of the opening acts of Faust. The comings and goings that dominate so much of the Faust tragedy, the parades that constitute its dramaturgical structure, initially take place in the context of court festivities. All the entrances of the first act belong to the formal world of the court ceremonial, which provides a symbolic machine for their production. In the first scenes of Part II, Goethe enters the sphere of “state etiquette,” which was defined like no other by acts of emerging and stepping forth. More specifically, however, the erosion of the grand rhetorical protocols for making an entrance is demonstrated by the decline of allegorical theater, and here especially in its manifestation as a court masquerade, which the play once again evokes and then discredits.

Court Masquerades Since the Renaissance, and continuing at the courts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, masquerades and allegorical pageants functioned as focal points of court representation. Their purpose was to represent, in the entrances of their various parts, the order of a world subject to the sovereign’s rule. The succession of allegorical or emblematic groups of masked figures was employed

278 See Albrecht Schöne, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Kommentare,” in FA 7/2, 430ff. On this point, see also Schlaffer, Faust, 49ff.; Joseph Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen, 4th edition (Zurich: Diaphenes, 2011), 310–351.

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during festivities to construct the clearly articulated image of a cosmos dominated by the sovereign’s splendor. The gradations of rank of its masked aristocrats were reflected in the gradations of an order descending from the highest to the lowest, in which seasons, virtues, types, planets, or units of time, together with their subdivisions, stepped forward in orderly sequence and clearly circumscribed form.279 These structures allowed participants to feel that “they belonged to a hierarchical total order” built up in concentric circles around a solar center.280 Yet such occasions granted no license for carnevalistic excesses. Even if these masquerades took place at the same time as carnival, they were subject to strict regulations and left no leeway for improvisation. As documented by a new literature devoted specifically to these rituals—a Zeremonialwissenschaft or science of ceremonial from the early eighteenth century that began to write down and systematize the formalities of European courts—such events usually followed a plan approved by the ceremonial authorities and authorized by the ruler himself that did not allow for any surprises. “The process is headed either by a herald or a marshal on horseback,” one reads in the literature281—that is to say: all of these masked processions were directed by a maître who was empowered to command the participants, and who provided them with the necessary directives in advance. “The persons who are to take part in the procession,” one reads, “must gather beforehand at a certain place, where they will receive their instructions from the maitres who direct such processions: they will be told how they are to conduct themselves in marching, and also in what order they should march.”282 Specifically, the participants were divided into “alternating corpos [sic] and divisiones,”283 which were “each headed by special officers as befits any division.”284 The key consideration for their lining up and entering was accordingly the avoidance of disorder and the production of distinctions. It was necessary for the divisions among masks and masked groups to be clearly recognizable and identifiable: “Often, they even have their own

279 See Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 109 and 112, for a discussion of the hierarchical arrangement of an allegorically structured cosmos. 280 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des alten Reiches, 2nd edition (Munich: Beck, 2013), 94. 281 Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft Der Großen Herren (Berlin: Berlin bey Joh. Andreas Rüdiger, 1733), 742. 282 Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft, 741. 283 Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft, 740. 284 Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft, 743.

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flags, each person carrying in their own hands the appropriate one.”285 A person who wished to make an appearance had to submit to the dictate of “se distinguer”: they had to have stepped out of the shadows into the light under the eyes of the monarch, and with the monarch’s consent; and they had to become recognizable both hierarchically and semantically as an individual distinguished from others. The master of these court distinctions, as Norbert Elias notes, was therefore the ruler himself: “Everything in him was valuable because he created differences.”286 In the theatrum ceremoniale of the court, the monarch revealed himself in his unquestioned semiotic authority. Wherever he appeared, light divided from darkness. His presence brought clarity even amid the most confused and tangled of situations; it instituted categories and hierarchies among the throng of courtiers, and bestowed clarity upon the festive selfdepiction of his rule.287 Courtly masquerades allegorically representing the world subject to his sovereign rule thus tended to be arranged in simple, clear, and symmetrical forms that were intended to make precise conceptual distinctions.288

“Force et Grace” However, these distinctions were only made salient by a motus corporis, that is, by physical movement. Under the regime of Louis XIV, which integrated court masquerades into the genres of its festivities, movement and step were thus an intense focus of choreographic attention. The court’s masked parades were not exclusively intended to maintain separations but, equally so, to energize the court’s field of vision. The absolutist model of order could be successfully conveyed only if the splendor of the persona was enhanced by the power of a body making an entrance. The masquerades that rendered the monarchical cosmos present to the senses served not only to more precisely define and exhibit cosmic symbols but also to release energeia. Allegorical entrances were powerful corporeal acts that staged a symbolic body and catalyzed its significance (see

285 Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschafft. 286 Elias, The Court Society, 131. 287 Fletcher, “Allegory,” 61. 288 See Fletcher, “Allegory,” 87: “The most striking sensuous quality of images in allegories is their isolation from each other. . . . [A]nd at the same time they preserve their identities by being drawn with extremely sharp-etched outlines.” See also Rohr, Einleitung zur CeremonielWissenschafft, 745.

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Figure 21: Daniel Rabel (attrib.), Entrée du Grand Can et ses Suivants in Ballet royal du grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626), ink, gouache, and gold, Paris, Louvre (photo: RMN), in Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29.

Figure 22: Anon, Nine Men Dancing (1660), pen and wash (1660), London, Victoria and Albert Museum (photo: V&A Picture Library), in Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47.

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Figures 21 and 22).289 Court allegories utilized the “drive”290 or demonic forward momentum that Angus Fletcher has argued is inherent in allegories and lends emphasis to this significance: the court step was expected to unite “force et grace” and to send out physical and semantic impulses in transporting the body.291 To dance an entrée is to “danser un commencement,”292 one reads in D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Entrances made in the festive setting of entrées were understood to have inchoative, that is to say, initiating, powers. Each new masked entrance transformed the scene, renewing the order it represented. The decisive movens were the arrivals of new divisions and the introduction of new themes by newly arriving figures, who constantly imparted new impulses of movement to the scene.293 As Erich Auerbach notes, the appeal of allegorical performances lies in their “abrupt advances and regressions and . . . abundance of energetic new beginnings.”294

Weimar Parades When Goethe became involved in the court’s festivities after his arrival in Weimar, one of his central tasks was to organize masquerades during the carnival season. As a form for displaying order, the allegorical procession, which usually served to glorify the ruling house, played a central role in the small public sphere of a Weimar court that was increasingly taking on a bourgeois cast. Even amid progressively visible signs of fatigue toward the ceremonial forms of the premodern

289 See Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27ff. 290 Fletcher, “Allegory,” 52. See the chapter “The Daimonic Agent,” 25–70. 291 Diderot and d’Alembert, “Entrée (Danse),” Encyclopédie, vol. 5, 730f.: “Dans toute entrée de danse, le danseur, à qui suppose de la vigueur & de l’habileté, a trois objets principaux & indispensables à remplir. Le premier, les contrastes perpétuels de la force & de la grace, en observant que la grace suive toûjours les coups de vigueur.” 292 Diderot and d’Alembert, “Entrée (Danse),” 730: “Ce sont ordinairement les chœurs de danse qui paroissent sur cet air; c’est pour cette raison qu’on les nomme corps d’entrée. Ils en dansent un commencement.” 293 Fiona Garlick, “Dances to Evoke the King: The Majestic Genre Chez Louis XIV,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 15, no. 2 (1997): 10–34, here 13ff.: “[I]n the mid-seventeenth century it [the entrée; J.V.] was characterized by the arrival of dancers in new costumes to indicate the introduction of a new theme or subject.” 294 See also Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 118: “This life, to be sure, is restricted by the rigidity and narrowness of the categories, which persist unalterably, and it fails all too easily for lack of progressive movement; but it is precisely through the resistance offered by the frame of rigid categories that it acquires impressiveness and force.”

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era, the interest in masquerades seems to have persisted unabated at the end of the eighteenth century, and beyond its aristocratic courts.295 Undeterred by wars and revolution, the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of luxury and styles) reports masquerades in Weimar and Berlin whose participants still “step forth one after the other in excellently ordered groups and dances.”296 Weimar’s carnival season, too, featured annual processions paying homage to its ruler, in addition to a celebration for the birthday of its Grand Duchess Louise in which the nobility who were present appeared in allegorical masks. Heinrich Düntzer’s 1886 monograph Goethes Maskenzüge (Goethe’s masked processions) documents the unbroken continuation of what Sarah Cohen has called, in her work on dances at the court of Louis XIV, “a stream of entrées”: the countless entrances made by the aristocracy wearing masks and obliged to appear as allegorical figures beneath the gaze of the ruler and his family.297 Goethe’s task in his years as directeur de plaisir consisted of drawing up plans for these masquerades and conceiving suitable groupings:298 “Early this morning I had the whole plan of our masquerade written out and conveyed to all of the divisions.”299 For more than thirty years and even

295 On symptoms of fatigue toward the forms of court ceremony, see Annette Kappeler, L’Œil du Prince: Auftrittsformen in der Oper des Ancien Régime (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016), 143; “Entrées,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 5, 729f. 296 Karl August Böttiger, “Der große Maskenball in Berlin: Ein Kupferwerk,” Das Journal des Luxus und der Moden, July 1805, 469–472, here 470. 297 Cohen, Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Anciene Régime, 18. 298 Johann Gottfried Herder in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann on July 11, 1782, in Herder, Briefe: Gesamtausgabe 1763–1803, ed. Karl-Heinz Hahn, vol. 4: October 1776 to August 1783 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1979), no. 221, page 224f: “Goethe felt comfortable in his role as privy councilor, maitre de plaisir, and ‘factotum’ of the Weimar court.” Also in Wilhelm Bode, ed., Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: 1749–1793 (Munich: Beck, 1982), 283. On this point, see especially Dieter Borchmeyer, Die Weimarer Klassik: Eine Einführung (Königsstein: Athenäum-Verlag, 1980), 95; Borchmeyer, “Die Festspielidee zwischen Hofkultur und Kunstreligion: Goethe und Richard Wagner,” in Theodramatik und Theatralität: Ein Dialog mit dem Theaterverständnis von Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Volker Kapp, Helmuth Kiesel, and Klaus Lubbers (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2000), 167–186. On these masquerades, see Christoph Siegrist, “Dramatische Gelegenheitsdichtungen: Maskenzüge, Prologe, Festspiele,” in Goethes Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), 226–244, here 227ff.; Wolfgang Hecht, “Goethes Maskenzüge,” in Studien zur Goethezeit: Festschrift für Lieselotte Blumenthal, ed. Helmut Holtzhauer and Bernhard Zeller (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1968), 127–142; Stefanie Stockhorst, Fürstenpreis und Kunstprogramm: Sozial- und gattungsgeschichtliche Studien zu Goethes Gelegenheitsdichtungen für den Weimarer Hof (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 169ff. Stockhorst indicates that Goethe introduced the masquerades at the Weimar court. 299 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Charlotte von Stein on February 12, 1781, in WA IV.5, no. 1119, p. 5152, here pp. 51f.: “Heute früh hab’ ich den ganzen Plan unserer Maskerade zurecht schreiben lassen und alle Departements ausgetheilet.”

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after the Napoleonic occupation, he accepted the duty of structuring these parades and creatively enlivening their monotony. From the first masquerades Goethe organized in 1780 to his final productions in 1810, the difficulties that this format presented him are nevertheless clear. They consistently reflect how a rigorous court ceremony began to loosen under the direction of a bourgeois author. Even in the conception phase for these processions, Goethe was sensitive to countercurrents resisting a division of their flows. “It will still work,” Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein, “although it is a tremendous tangle.” A constant factor was that the rooms were “overly crowded.”300 As one witness reported, the smooth running of the event could only be ensured by erecting barriers: “Everything played out inside barriers, held by hale sons of Mars, which rebuffed the intrusive gawkers with unmistakable demonstrations.”301 In both the planning and the realization of these processions, order seemed threatened by disorder; the articulation of meaning and recognizability of the figures appeared to be at risk. Moreover, both Goethe’s written instructions and his actual stagings reveal that the structure of the procession loosened to such an extent that the message of homage could no longer be delivered via a coherent formation. From the staging of what has been identified as Goethe’s very first masquerade, “a procession of Laplanders on January 30, 1781,” these disruptions not only induce a slippage of the procession’s structure toward formlessness but are also integrated into Goethe’s texts themselves. This procession’s constellations emerge, as Goethe writes, from its “splendid turmoil.”302 As verses delivered during the procession explicitly articulate, the activity of entering is pluralized, transforming rows into swarms and, conversely, swarms into rows. The feminine virtues in the masked procession of virtues, discussed in more detail earlier in this chapter, speak only in a plural voice.303 They describe themselves as part of a moving crowd in which they are surrounded. One should add that these loosened arrangements could not

300 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Schiller on January 30, 1796, in FA 31, 162–164, here 162f: “[E]verything went well, although the hall was overly crowded.” German: “[E]s ging alles gut ab, obgleich der Saal übermäßig voll war.” 301 Amalie von Imhoff to her cousin Fritz von Stein on November 15, 1798, in Mitteilungen aus dem Literaturarchiv in Berlin N.F. 5, ed. Heinrich Meisner and Erich Schmidt (Berlin: Literaturarchiv-Gesellschaft, 1911, no. 33), 17–20, here 18: “I have attended only two masked balls, the last of which (on the birthday of the duchess) was so dreadfully crowded that I might nearly have added one more soul to the realm of shadows, since I almost suffocated.” See also Düntzer, Goethes Maskenzüge, 38. 302 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Ein Zug Lappländer: Zum 30. Januar 1781,” MA 2.1, 496 (line 15): “glänzenden Getümmel.” 303 See “Surrounded: The Embedding of Entrances” in this chapter.

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in fact be realized in the performance practice of these masquerades. The dynamization of the “well-arrayed figures”304 resulting from Goethe’s verses was limited to their written form, which dissolved during the performance back into conventional allegorical parades.305

The Roman Carnival Goethe’s text “The Roman Carneval” can thus also be read as a critical commentary on the ceremonial restrictions that confronted Goethe as the master of court masquerades in Weimar. Only against the background of an activity that essentially consisted of “dividing the procession into sections” does the significance of a text that centers its observations on the suspension of the procession’s order become clear. “The Roman Carnival” describes a festival of masks in which, as one reads not once but twice, the masks “multiply.”306 The section heading “Gedränge,” or “Crowd,”307 names the collective dynamic that threatens the preservation of formations and levels out any attempts they might make to accentuate certain figures as outstanding. This heading also explains why no entrances were possible during the Roman carnival that might have secured rank and significance. Goethe’s observations are directed at the futile melee within the crowd to gain the space needed to make an entrance; they register the agglomerations of people that formed in the artificial space of the Roman corso. The separations between the carriages are so quickly lost in the tangle that their owners are left with no place to make an entrance that would have set them apart from the crush:308

304 See the adjective “wohlgereiht” (“well-arrayed”) in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Prolog zur Eröffnung des Berliner Theaters im Mai 1821,” MA 13.1, 241–250, here 242. 305 See Düntzer, Goethes Maskenzüge, 18ff. 306 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Roman Carnival,” in Great Writings of Goethe, trans. Charles Nisbet, ed. Stephen Spender (New York: The New American Library 1958), 186–217: “The masks begin to multiply” (193); “While the masks are multiplying” (197). Goethe, “Das römische Carneval,” MA 3.2, 217–270: “Nun fangen die Masken an sich zu vermehren” (224); “Indessen die Masken sich vermehren” (229). 307 Goethe, “The Roman Carnival,” 199. Goethe, “Das römische Carneval,” MA 3.2, 231. 308 See Susanne Lüdemann, “Vom Römischen Karneval zur ökonomischen Automate: Massendarstellung bei Goethe und E.T.A. Hoffmann,” in Massenfassungen: Beiträge zur Diskursund Mediengeschichte der Menschenmenge, ed. Susanne Lüdemann and Uwe Hebekus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010), 107–123, here 111; Michael Gamper, Masse lesen, Masse schreiben: Eine Diskurs- und Imaginationsgeschichte der Menschenmenge 1765–1930 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 115ff.

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The people jam themselves as best they can between the other carriages, and by hook or crook contrive to get to one side or the other. And as water when a ship cuts through it is parted only for a moment, at once commingling again behind the rudder, so the mass of masked and other foot passengers at once reunites behind the procession.309

These are the conditions under which Goethe continues to develop the unstable dramaturgy of entering that had already begun to take shape in the masked processions in Weimar. This dramaturgy testifies to the dwindling of space for making an entrance in an increasingly bourgeois society hostile to social distinctions; it moreover reflects the fact that its figures always emerge only temporarily—“for a moment”—in a crowd. Those who enter find it increasingly difficult to assert themselves against a packed ground that no longer concedes any space for an entrance, and that overtakes their every attempt to exit. Figures compete with one another for space in pushing “through the crowd,”310 and “the maddest impression is swallowed up [by the multiplicity of the crowd].”311 Like water, which prevents the formation of any permanent wake by collapsing back again behind the rudder, entrances are once again engulfed in the waves of the crowd out of which they would lead. Here, the rigid structure of the old allegorical masquerades is but a vague memory: In earlier times, these equipages are said to have been more numerous and more costly, being also rendered more interesting by mythological and allegorical representations. Lately, however, for whatever reason [aus welchem Grunde], the more distinguished folk appear to be lost in the mass, being more intent on enjoyment than on [standing out from the others].312

309 Goethe, “The Roman Carnival,” 200. Goethe, “Das römische Carneval,” MA 3.2, 230f.: “Sie drängen sich, so gut sie können, zwischen den übrigen Wägen hinein, und auf diese oder andere Weise zur Seite. Und wie das Wasser, wenn ein Schiffer durchfährt, sich nur einen Augenblick trennt, und hinter dem Steuerruder gleich wieder zusammenstürzt, so strömt auch die Masse der Masken und der übrigen Fußgänger hinter dem Zug gleich wieder zusammen.” 310 Goethe, “The Roman Carnival,” 193. Goethe, “Das römische Carneval,” ibid., 225: “durch die Menge.” 311 Goethe, “The Roman Carnival,” 193, translation modified from “The maddest impression is swallowed up in repetition and multiplicity.” Goethe, “Das römische Carneval,” ibid., 226: “der tollste Eindruck wird gleich von Menge und Mannigfaltigkeit wieder verschlungen.” 312 Goethe, “The Roman Carnival,” 198, translation modified from “being more intent on enjoyment than on than on showing themselves better than others.” Goethe, “Das römische Carneval,” ibid., 230f.: “Ehemals sollen diese Prachtwagen weit häufiger und kostbarer, auch durch mythologische und allegorische Vorstellungen interessanter gewesen sein; neuerdings aber scheinen die Vornehmeren, es sei nun aus welchem Grunde es wolle, verloren in dem Ganzen, das Vergnügen, das sie noch bei dieser Feierlichkeit finden, mehr genießen, als sich auszeichnen zu wollen.”

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Masquerade and Spectral Theater Scholars have repeatedly noted the degree to which the “Masquerade” in Faust II is indebted, precisely in this point, to “The Roman Carnival.” Here, one finds the final phaseout of an entrance protocol that Goethe had been beholden to stage since 1780. The “Masquerade” more directly disturbs the traditional court forms than the earlier pageants that Goethe created for the Weimar court, which still managed to preserve the festive genre of the masked procession through the transition into a newly bourgeois age and to moderate the tensions between dynamic crowd and court formation in such a way that the basic form of the masked procession was maintained. In this inexact, sprawling theatrical space (“a spacious hall with ante-rooms”313), the crush of indefinite, impenetrable, and leaderless crowds of people destroys the entrance protocols of the court, which presuppose distance. Yet while “The Roman Carnival” disintegrates under the influence of a life force that no longer allows for rigorous divisions, the disembodied arrivance of the spectral figures in Faust II follows a protocol that renders their movement phantasmagorical. Unlike the people who physically crowd together at the carnival, the plurality that appears in the “Masquerade” is attributed to an “unsecured mode of being” in which allegorical figurations no longer achieve permanent, stable shape.314 This abolishes a basic rule that had governed court masquerades in particular, and the staging of allegorical elements in general: as Angus Fletcher has argued, it was prohibited to mix allegorical fields of meaning with one another and so jeopardize the distinctness of their meanings through contact with other semiotic fields.315 From the very moment, then, that the first groups of masked figures—the graces, garlands, and flower-girls—“mix” and “join together” in a tight group, the ceremonial requirement that proper distance be maintained between parties has been cast aside.316 Sharply defined figurations are replaced by multiplicities,

313 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 16. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 103–351, here 119: “weitläufige[r] Saal mit Nebengemächern.” 314 Michael Gamper and Peter Schnyder, eds., Kollektive Gespenster: Die Masse, der Zeitgeist und andere unfaßbare Körper (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2006), 12, “Einleitung,” 7–28. 315 See Fletcher, “Allegory,” 87. 316 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 20: “[They are joined by a number of pretty young playmates, and all the girls begin gossiping intimately together.] FISHERMEN and BIRDCATCHERS with nets, rods, lime twigs, and other equipment enter and mix with the pretty girls. Charming dialogues develop as they all by turns try to woo and capture and escape and hold on to each other.” Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 123: “(jung und schön gesellen sich hinzu, ein vertrauliches Geplauder wird laut) FISCHER U. VOGELSTELLER. (Mit Netzen, Angel und Leimruthen, auch sonstigem Geräthe treten auf, mischen sich hinter die schönen

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and rigid divisions by semiotic processes in which pairing and detachment are entangled. The Herold’s lines—“I see already how they gather / And part, and fondly come together”—reveal a process of entering that the “Masquerade” has given a ghostly guise.317 The verse “Chorus with chorus as they meet and mix”— or as David Constantine more aptly translates, “One shoving choir upon another choir”—likewise expresses the symptoms of a crisis that principally questions the possibility of a drama constituted by entrances.318 It is no coincidence that the chorus alludes in the very thick of the “Masquerade” to the founding scene for entrances in antique tragedy. In characterizing the mixing of these multiple choruses as “zudringlich”—“intrusive”—the text entirely suspends the founding act of tragedy itself, for with the multiplication of the choruses on and behind the stage, the Faust tragedy takes another anti-Aristotelian turn. Its allegories are drowned out by its choruses, whereas for Aristotle tragedy began when the leader of the chorus stepped forth from the chorus of dithyramb.319 The entrances of this “Masquerade” are thus governed by a protocol of “intrusiveness”; and by directing elements from the back to come to the front, it disregards all boundaries and rules for proper placement, while simultaneously eliminating the body as the medium of articulation. The corresponding dramaturgy unfolds in the lexical field of “Drang,” “Drängen,” “Vordringen” and “Zudringen”—of pressing and urging, crowding and thronging, pushing forward and pushing in (see line 4791)— that floods the potential space for entering from the bottom up, and that weaves any individual who makes an entrance back into the ghostly crowd. If the precondition of entering is the concession or creation of space (“the winds make space”320), here by contrast the activity of appearing encounters a challenge to this very claim to the space it needs to unfold its effect.

Kinder. Wechselseitige Versuche zu gewinnen, zu fangen, zu entgehen u. festzuhalten, geben den angenehmsten Dialogen Gelegenheit.)” 317 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 16–17. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 119 (lines 5081f.): “Ich sehe schon, wie sie sich schaaren, / Sich schwankend sondern, traulich paaren.” The entrances in the “Masquerade” can also be described, following Cornelia Zumbusch, as demonic. See “Dämonische Texturen," 80ff. 318 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 17. David Constantine, Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 17. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 119 (lines 5083): “Zudringlich schließt sich Chor an Chor.” 319 See chapter 1 “Tragic Entrances: The Hubris of Taking a Step.” 320 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Planetentanz,” MA 2.1, 514–518, here 514: “Die Winde machen Raum.”

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The Herald at the End At no point is the breakdown of the court entrance protocol more evident than in the figure of the herald, whose office is defined precisely by its responsibility for what this chapter has called the management of arrivance. The gradual failure of the ceremonial is demonstrated by the failure of the maître who is given the task of leading and explaining the masquerade. When Goethe opens the “Masquerade” scene with a herald’s speech, he is still operating within the scope of eighteenth-century ceremonials, which assigned the herald a leading role in staging a festival procession. A herald takes on the function of ceremonially designating the arrival of persons within the sphere of the court. Directly appointed by the sovereign, he regulates, oversees, and announces the stepping forth of one or more individuals at a site designated by the rules of ceremonial: he supervises and executes the ceremonies of coming and going, takes responsibility for the annoncement of each arrival, and upholds state etiquette amid the interactions of the guests. The office of herald also encompasses the task of identifying signs and announcing them by name. Heraldic knowledge comprises familiarity with coats of arms and precise awareness of the ruling hierarchy, which enables a herald to recognize arriving persons by their emblems.321 A herald has the ability to decipher enigmatic figures and explain their meaning to a baffled public. His place is the threshold, where the arrivance of unspecific guests is transformed into a structured parade of clearly designated persons. The herald thus acts as the guardian of the threshold who regulates the influx of the multitude, identifying unknown figures and separating and ordering individuals in calling them out by name: “I have done, since I was made / Herald of the Masquerade, / Duty at each feast as sentry: / Nothing harmful must gain entry / To our place of celebration.”322 To the extent it was necessary to confirm that the edges of the stage needed to be secured against unwelcome intruders, and that vigilance was called for at the transition between stage and offstage, this was to be achieved through lines spoken by the herald. In Goethe’s work, too, the herald’s mission is to monitor the process of entering and to ward off the intrusion

321 “They judge according to the shields, escutcheons, ancestral registries, and everything that concerns the honor of the noble houses.” See von Rohr, Einleitung zur CeremonielWissenschafft, 742. 322 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 29. Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 132 (lines 5495f.): “Seit mir sind bey Maskeraden / Heroldspflichten aufgeladen, / Wach’ ich ernstlich an der Pforte, / Daß euch hier am lustigen Orte / Nichts Verderbliches erschleiche, / Weder wanke, weder weiche.”

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of the “questionable shape[s]” that gather here, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, at the stage’s borders.323 This description of the herald’s office only reveals the crisis of the masked procession in Goethe’s “Masquerade” all the more clearly. Under the rush of the crowd, the task of establishing and maintaining control embodied by the herald fails. He is able neither to control the scrum nor to distinguish singular figures from among the multitude. The court forms of entering that distinguish individuals by name and rank are leveled out into metaphors of collective influx. Within this ceremonial debacle, though, a new regime takes shape that allows the crowds being driven back to move into the foreground as vague aggregations. The powerlessness of heraldic authority is first evident at the herald’s announcement of the poets: the age of splendid individuals who occupy space as they appear, pushing aside their rivals in making an entrance, is no more. In Goethe’s “Masquerade,” low to vanishingly small degrees of clarity and forms of leveling predominate, making it impossible to satisfy any individual desire for entering, and even the brilliant figure of the poet is grievously pluralized. The directions that follow are more than just literary satire. They reflect the weak forms of entering found in a bourgeois society that no longer gives rise to spectacular personalities, even among poets, and that prevents the triumph of the individual in the free competition of the many: THE HERALD announces poets of various kinds: nature poets, bards of chivalry and court life, tender minstrels and rhapsodists. In this throng of miscellaneous competitors none succeeds in making himself heard. One of them slinks past, uttering a few words.324

What we find here pushing its way onto the stage and flooding the perspectival spatial order are shadows of a ghostly population. If the crowds in the Roman carnival still appeared as a productive, dynamic whole, a pulsing composition, here at the blurred threshold of the imperial palace this has become perverted into a “ghostly spawn.”325 As the act progresses, entrances lose their form. The 323 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 211 (I/4), line 43. 324 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 23. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 126: “Der Herold. Kündigt verschiedene Poeten an, Naturdichter, Hof- und Rittersänger, Zärtliche wie Enthusiasten. Im Gedräng von Mitbewerbern aller Art läßt keiner den anderen zum Vortrag bringen.” On the increasingly bourgeois characteristics of court ceremonial forms, see Primavesi, Das andere Fest, 103–109. 325 Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 132 (line 5487): “gespenstisch[es] Gezücht.” David Luke translates this as “creepy” whereas David Constantine perhaps comes closer with “brood of ghosts and ghouls.” Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 29. Goethe, Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy, trans. Constantine, 31.

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courtly entrée is increasingly replaced by indeterminate forms of arrivance that no longer bind themselves to boundaries of space and thresholds of entering, no longer follows rules, can no longer be translated into measured steps, and can neither be named nor mastered by heraldic announcements: Yet through windows, I admit, Airy phantoms seem to flit; There are ghosts and magic here Which I can’t keep out, I fear. First, that spooky dwarf; and now A whole flood of it somehow.326

Here at the latest, everything that arrives also comes under ontological suspicion. In the progressive decomposition of its protocols for making an entrance, the court theater of presence becomes a theater of absent beings, actes de présence become actes d’absence. This spectral protocol disintegrates all devices and operations that served to generate evidentia and the staging of presence: it destroys the perspectival space that made it possible to precisely position individuals, along with the gatekeeping function of the threshold, by allowing the populations this protocol governs to appear at indeterminate sites.327 “Out of joint” is what Jacques Derrida calls such spaces, with recourse to Shakespeare, that find themselves open to ghostly in-migrations, that become permeable when things are “disharmonic” or “discorded.”328 Presence can only be achieved in closed and structured spaces with clear boundaries; it is bound to a framing within which it can be realized, whereas the “spacious hall” in which the “Masquerade” takes place does not meet any of these preconditions.329 Once based on effective restrictions of access able to successfully fend off intruders, the theater now becomes a place open to influxes, with no fixed sites for entrances.

326 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 29. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 132 (lines 5500ff.): “Doch ich fürchte, durch die Fenster / Ziehen luftige Gespenster, / Und von Spuk und Zaubereien / Wüßt’ ich euch nicht zu befreien, / Machte sich der Zwerg verdächtig, / Nun! Dort hinten strömt es mächtig.” 327 See Walter Benjamin, “Ein Gespenst,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV.1: Kleine Prosa: Baudelaire-Übersetzungen, ed. Tillmann Rexroth (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 278–280: Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, here 279: “Den Ort, an dem es [das Gespenst; J.V.] sich zu schaffen machte, hätte ich schwerlich schildern können.” 328 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge: New York, 2006), 27. 329 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 16. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 119: “weitläufiger Saal.”

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Fast Money: Plutus The final end of the herald’s office comes, however, when a new sovereign appears on the scene who overwhelms his hermeneutic abilities:330 “As my office bids, I should / Give you an interpretation / Of these shapes; I wish I could! / They defy all explanation. / Pray assist my ignorance!”331 At the climax of the Masquerade, a ghostly principle of ruling power takes hold that can no longer be deciphered with the help of the heraldic bywords of the ancien régime. When the god of wealth enters as a “resplendent figure” sitting on a “chariot’s throne,”332 the semiotic portents of the allegorical masked procession are finally turned inside out, and the premises of a culture of entrances become visible in which only the semblance of the old regime is retained. To be sure, Goethe follows the ceremonial protocol of the court masquerade when he triumphantly introduces money into the scene as a figure of value. “Raised to the divine” through his festive adornment,333 Plutus initially seems to fulfill all the criteria of a triumphant appearance as he marches in. Goethe’s Plutus, who comes “in splendor” and fully claims the power to enter,334 undoubtedly draws from the propagandistic forms of triumphal representation that had served since the early modern period to glorify feudal or absolutist rulers and their regimes. From the outset, it is nevertheless made clear that Plutus, too, is part of the ghostly stream flowing into this “spacious hall.” The triumphal protocol had served to demonstrate a ruler’s power over a space, indeed to demonstrate imperium itself, and it functioned by immeasurably increasing the distance between the triumphator and the crowd subject to his rule. But the ghostly image of Plutus erases such gaps. Even though Plutus appears in the regalia of the victor, his splendid entrance lacks the performative power ascribed to the triumphal appearance of the premodern sovereign. His insignia possess no

330 See Schlaffer, Faust, 74. 331 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 29–30. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 132 (lines 5506ff.): “Die Bedeutung der Gestalten / Möcht’ ich amtsgemäß entfalten. / Aber was nicht zu begreifen, / Wüßt’ ich auch nicht zu erklären, / Helfet alle mich belehren!” 332 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 31. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 134 (lines 5552f.): “Prachtgebilde / Hier auf dem Wagenthrone.” 333 Heinrich von Kleist, Amphitryon, in Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 100. Kleist, Amphitryon: Ein Lustspiel nach Molière, in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, vol. 1, Dramen 1802–1807, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 377–461, here 422 (line 1191): “in’s Göttliche verzeichnet.” 334 David Luke translates “in triumph”; Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 31. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 134 (line 5570): “in Prunk.”

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semiotic force; his entrance occupies no space in space.335 Pluto’s approaching quadriga is no longer a res extensa or a body that claims space for itself; it is a phantasmagoria that, as the reference to the laterna magica shows, de-realizes the court space of appearance. See Through the crowd—how can this be?— Floats a splendid chariot, drawn By four steeds, easily borne Through their midst; they need not part Or give way. What wizard’s art Does it?—Far-off glittering Stars in many colours rise, Flickering, magic-lanternwise. What is this storm-snorting thing? Now I’m scared! Make way now!336

Plutus approaches without dividing the crowd. Two separate acts in which triumphant power to enter announces itself—to wit, the act of dividing space or the crowd; and the act of flectere, of forcing people to bow down in the face of splendor, of overpowering domination and the clear-cutting of a path—peter out here into emptiness. Instead of giving way to one side, the crowd permeates the form of the sovereign who traverses it. Under the ghostly conditions of this entrance, the ground penetrates into the figure that is meant to detach as an individual and appear in splendor. In fixed regimes of order defined by a monarch, the relationship between figure and ground was decided in favor of the figure, but the entry of Plutus, that is to say, the advent of wealth accessible to all, renders all social distinctions obsolete. Plutus emerges from the crowd without leaving it behind. The movement of his entrance encounters no physical resistance. His quick approach—coming like a

335 Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 55–56. On the questionable sovereignty of Faust’s entrances, see Thomas Weitin, Freier Grund: Die Würde des Menschen nach Goethes Faust (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013), 90. 336 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 30. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 132 (lines 5511f.): “Seht ihr’s durch die Menge schweifen? – / Vierbespannt ein prächtiger Wagen / Wird durch alles durchgetragen; / Doch er theilet nicht die Menge, / Nirgend seh’ ich ein Gedränge. / Farbig glitzert’s in der Ferne, / Irrend leuchten bunte Sterne, / Wie von magischer Laterne, / Schnaubt heran mit Sturmgewalt! / Platz gemacht! Mich schaudert’s!”

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“storm-snorting thing”337—is an improbable if not altogether impossible form of entering as part of a throng; and precisely through its speed, it reveals the ontological dubiousness of the one who is arriving. The “Schweifen”—“rambling,” “roving,” or “roaming”—mentioned before his arrival situates him in the same demonic space for entering as the poodle who approached in a rambling fashion, analogous to the “umschweifender Grund” from the fond vague in Faust I.338 Moreover, Plutus’s quick approach casts suspicion on the wealth he brings. While honestly earned money generates a gravitational pull that slows the train in which it is carried, the fast and light approach of Plutus’s group points to a diabolical, impure source of wealth associated with Pluto, the god of the underworld. Plutus’s entrée feeds the suspicion that the money he brings is as illusory as he himself.339 For like the paper money that soon arrives on stage, these figures, too, are no more than imaginations of a lost or at best promised substance of value. Like paper money, which is both payment and unredeemed promise of payment, the chimerical figures of this triumphant group are projections of an abundance promised to come. Accordingly, the modern god of wealth does not himself bring any wealth: while the triumphators of the precapitalist world return in pomp, visibly slowed by the lavish riches they captured on their campaigns, Goethe’s Plutus appears on the scene without an accompanying baggage train and at accelerated speed. A comparison with Goethe’s description of the sequence of paintings by Andrea Mantegna entitled The Triumphs of Caesar reveals just how far the Plutus of Goethe’s “Masquerade” has departed from the triumphant models to which it refers (Figure 23). Juxtaposed to Mantegna’s depictions, which have been identified

337 Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 30. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 133 (line 5519): “Schnaubt heran mit Sturmgewalt.” Stuart Atkins more literally renders this passage as “as it storms and snorts along” (CW 2: 143). 338 Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Kaufmann, 147. Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, MA 6.1, 545–673, here 565ff. 339 Francis Bacon, “The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall,” in The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. Michael Kiernan, vol. XV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 109f.: “The poets faigne, that when Plutus (which is Riches) is sent from Jupiter, he limps and goes slowly; but when he is sent from Pluto, he runs and is Swift of Foot. Meaning that Riches gotten by Good Means and Just Labor, pace slowly; But when they come by the death of Others, (As by the Course of Inheritance, Testaments, and the like), they come tumbling upon a Man. But it mought be applied likewise to Pluto, taking him for the Devill. For when Riches come from the Devill (as by Fraud and Oppression and unjust Means), they come upon Speed. The Waies to enrich are many, and most of them Foul.”

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Figure 23: Andrea Andreani after Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar (1484–94/1599), in Andrea Mantegna After: Andrea Andreani and Bernardo Malpizzi, copyrighted work available under creative commons attribution only, license CC BY 40 http://creativecommons. org/licenses/byl4.o/, credit: Wellcome Library, London. Welcome Images.

as the template for the masked procession in the Great Hall,340 the changes in the triumphal semiotic structure that distinguish Goethe’s “Masquerade” from its predecessors become clear. Describing these paintings, Goethe himself notes that Mantegna emphasizes the element of copia or abundance and the weight of the treasures being carried: the plunder weighs heavily on the shoulders of those who carry it, while pressing the train more closely together. Goethe notes “potbellied urns, heaped full with coins, and on the same trays, vases and jugs; carried on the shoulders, these already weigh heavily enough, but each porter also bears in his arms a vessel or something else of significance.”341 Overall, the paintings convey the picture of a sluggish train that can hardly be grasped

340 Gert Mattenklott, “Faust II,” in Goethe-Handbuch, vol. 2: Dramen, ed. Theo Buck (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 391–477, here 404ff. 341 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Julius Cäsars Triumphzug, gemalt von Mantegna,” MA 13.2, 119–147, here 125: “dickbäuchigen Urnen, angefüllt mit aufgehäuften Münzen, und auf denselben Tragegestellen Vasen und Krüge; auf den Schultern lasten diese schon schwer genug, aber nebenbei trägt jeder noch ein Gefäß oder sonst etwas Bedeutendes.”

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visually as a single unit, barely moving from its place under the weight of the riches it carries. By contrast, the goods that Goethe’s Plutus offers to the crowd have yet to be generated. They are not subject to gravity. From the chest that Plutus brings, treasures spill out without measure, distinction, limit, or weight. They dissolve the moment they are grasped: “And they fly open. In bronze vessels, see! / The golden lifeblood stirs, a seething wave, / And jewellery—rings and chains, a crown— / Which soon the metal flood will swallow and melt down.”342 The absence of the train signals that the epoch of amassing treasure has come to an end. The plenitude that arises with Plutus’s appearance is phantasmagorical— and not only because, in leaving behind premodern forms of value, it also leaves behind the solid bodies of its bearers. The solidity of bodies now gives way to a drastically reduced physical density of other, vicarious carriers. Forms of entering are replaced by forms of appearing for which no steps are needed.

342 Goethe, Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. Luke, 35–36. Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, MA 18.1, 138 (lines 5711f.): “Es thut sich auf! schaut her! In ehrnen Kesseln / Entwickelt sichs und wallt von goldenem Blute, / Zunächst der Schmuck von Kronen, Ketten, Ringen; / Es schwillt und droht ihn schmelzend zu verschlingen.”

Chapter 4 Triumph and Rending Movement Preliminary Remark. Amid the Energies of War “With Undetected Steps” In 1806, the Weimar theater that Goethe directed found itself faced with an interruption. As the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt loomed nearby, Weimar’s duke and his family fled the approaching French troops, who soon captured the city. Under the pressure of the French forces, the very structure of the Weimar state appeared to give way like the city’s fortifications. Bringing looters, civilians fleeing the violence, and many wounded, not to mention Napoleon himself, the war pushed unimpeded into the city and directly into Goethe’s bedroom. The guards had been withdrawn from Weimar’s gates, border controls suspended. The duchy found itself at the mercy of the irresistible, violent force of war that was incarnated in Napoleon. Upon encountering Princess Louise, who had remained in Weimar, the victor is said to have declared: “I pity you. I will crush your husband [the duke of Weimar].”1 The conqueror of Weimar stylizes himself here as an elemental event: he presents himself as the embodiment of an energy whose impact will smash the duke’s solid form into “dust or pulp.”2 At the time, Napoleon was still being branded by his contemporaries with the well-worn label of despot, as though he were nothing but the Machiavellian miscarriage of an absolute monarch. Yet these same observers also regarded him as the embodiment of a revolutionary energy that transcended the boundaries of individual states and could no longer be grasped with the political terminology of the old world. One year after the defeat at Jena-Auerstedt, Weimar’s theater was reopened with a celebration in conventional form to mark the return of the rulers who had fled the city. For the occasion, Goethe composed a prelude according to clear principles that aimed toward restoration. Eight years before the Congress of Vienna, which would reinstate the monarchies shattered by Napoleon along with the rights of their aristocratic rulers, he anticipates the peace settlement on Weimar’s newly opened stage. In this work of theater, Goethe endeavors to

1 Jacques Thomas Verneur, Das Echo der Säle von Paris oder merkwürdige Erzählungen und unbekannte Anekdoten von Napoleon, seiner Regierung, seiner Umgebung, seinem Hof und seinen Beamten (Leipzig, 1816), 40. 2 “Zermalmen,” in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 15 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1956), column 722–725, column 723. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-004

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once again legitimize aristocratic rule, though not unrestrictedly so, and to reestablish the order destroyed by the French invasion. The express purpose of the prelude is to restore solid ground to a world that had become bottomless and groundless, and to recover the space for making an entrance that had been destroyed by the incursion of world-historical forces in the midst of war. Goethe begins, however, with an entrance of the goddess of war, who announces herself in allegorical form and thereby names the very devastation wrought by her appearance. The war that appears here on stage as an allegorical emblem eliminates all points of orientation—up, down, right, and left—that might guarantee the order of the world in which entrances are to take place. Instead of a stage with a clearly structured frame into which a character might step, the text posits a sublime space of movement whose discrete terms—“Forest. Cliff, sea. Night. Far away, thunder”—no longer provide a spatial syntax ensuring an orderly transition into visibility.3 The entrance made here by the goddess of war is invisible and nocturnal, made with “undetected steps” and “through night-covered fields.” In her arrival, we see the outlines of an entrance protocol succinctly taking shape that is defined not by the vivid clarity of the character but by an energy-rupturing form, and that endangers, with the very force of its movement, the stage on which it is expressed: GODDESS OF WAR Across the still expanse of these night-covered fields, I storm closer with undetected steps, Will anyone dare to oppose my power? Yet I remain alone. No doubt about it, This sword will deftly make space for me, when The startled masses boldly rise up to resist. Because no mortal can survive its steel. . . . Even now, there are rows, rows of those it has killed [Getötetes], Lying dead, like flowers and grass before diligent reapers. While I advance unstoppable in strength, To meet my guiding star of fortune.4

3 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Vorspiel zur Eröffnung des Weimarischen Theaters am 19. September 1807 nach glücklicher Wiederversammlung der Herzoglichen Familie,” MA 9, 235–243, here 235: “Wald. Fels, Meer. Nacht. Ferner Donner.” 4 Goethe, “Vorspiel zur Eröffnung des Weimarischen Theaters, 235 (verses 1ff.): “KRIEGESGÖTTIN Durch dieser nachtbedeckten Felder still Gebreit, / Mit unbemerkten Schritten, stürm’ ich rasch heran, / Ob Jemand widerstünde meiner Kraft. / Noch aber find’ ich Niemand. Ja, behende soll / Dies Schwert mir Raum verschaffen, wenn sich mir / Die aufgeschreckte Menge kühn entgegenstellt: / Denn diesem Stahle widersteht kein Sterblicher. / . . . / Schon reihenweis’ liegt / ausgestreckt Getötetes, / Wie emsig Mähenden das Blumengras. / Ich aber, unaufhaltsam schreite kräftig vor, / Dem Glücksgestirn entgegen, das mich leitete.”

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The action ascribed to the goddess of war upon entering is that of Mähen—of cutting, mowing, or reaping. This is an extreme form of flectere that mortally bends down those it encounters. The action testifies generally to the power of making an entrance, and it does so here with particular violence. The goddess’s path is lined with bodies of the dead—literally: with “Getötetes,” or that which has been killed. In this phrase, the function of an entrance as a means of articulation is undone; human form has been reduced to a lifeless thing captured in the grammatical neuter of the past participle. The prelude’s initial impulse comes from an iconoclastic entrance that unleashes an onslaught against the piece’s own figures, stripping anything visible of its forms and recognizability. At the same time, however, the prelude sets a limit to annihilation. The force of war is checked when confronted with majesty itself, which turns the war’s operational theater back into a court stage. After everything has collapsed and “the earth’s solid ground” begins to sway,5 a “royal hall” suddenly appears, as the site for the immediate staging of a splendid entrance: “MAJESTY (in coronation regalia) I enter safe and sure, surrounded by splendor.”6 Only the solar entrance protocol of absolutism can be trusted to resist the inexorable advance of the energies of war and to refashion a form out of the war’s upheaval. Once again, these lines harness the order-generating function of the ruler’s entrance, for the purpose of reopening the theater—albeit in full awareness that this entrance has lost all credibility. Amid the downfall of all forms of orientation, only the court entrée can still promise to bring chaos under control. This step creates the very stage it enters.

Energetic Catastrophes Whatever could still be stopped in the courtly prelude, however, is now unstoppable in the genre of tragedy. Goethe’s theatrical intervention marks the point at which the movement of entering is transformed into a rending force, such that no ceremony could restore what its energies carry away. The third part of this study thus focuses on entrances of such high energetic intensity that they threaten to annihilate—or in Napoleonic terms, to “crush”—the figure they present to be seen, while simultaneously destroying what stands in their way. Entrances of this kind assume forms that resemble a rolling surge; they take 5 Goethe, “Vorspiel zur Eröffnung des Weimarischen Theaters,” 237 (line 57): “der Erde fester Boden.” 6 Goethe, “Vorspiel zur Eröffnung des Weimarischen Theaters,” (line 83): “DIE MAJESTÄT (im Krönungsornat) Sicher tret’ ich auf und glanzum.”

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place violently and escalate into incursions that smash through the boundaries of the stage and charge the theatrical space with dynamic energy that issues from its ground. The balance between form and movement, which is self-regulating in Goethe’s protocols, now appears to be utterly destroyed. The stage becomes the scene for a catastrophic invasion of force. If the genre of tragedy revolves around the transgression and fall of a character, this transgression is now linked to an overpowering, excessive irruption of energy that neither the stage nor the limits of its figures can withstand. The tragedies that stage such irruptions can be described as energetic catastrophes: first, because they threaten to tear away the fragile subject at the very moment of its self-exposure; and second, because they cause the ground itself to advance tumultuously to the fore. The life forces whose productive dimension Goethe had harnessed in order to escape the fateful completion of tragic actions now reveal their own destructive side. Even before Goethe’s tragedies, though, Schiller’s essay “On the Sublime” defined tragedy as an energetic situation of crisis. Schiller presents human beings as exposed within “a world of forces” that “are all stronger than him, and play the role of his master.”7 For Schiller, too, these are “life forces” amid which “those of our own life disappear into nothingness.”8 Entrances made according to established rules constantly moderate energy by enabling figures to step forth slowly or quickly, presto or maestoso. Yet under the effects of such uncontrollable powers, these figures reach the limits of their containment and comprehension. The entrance protocol not only entails a force of entering that disfigures and damages the persona of the character; it also establishes the basic lines of a radically dynamized model of tragedy, which this chapter will now elucidate in analyzing texts by Kleist and Nietzsche. These analyses will reveal a view that abandons the tragic individual even though it cannot take recourse to the repertoire of signs that organized entrances within the semantic field of the court.

Triumphs amid Ongoing War Heinrich von Kleist, the chief proponent of such a dramaturgy, will be the focus of what follows. His war dramas—mainly Penthesilea, along with Robert Guiskard—

7 Friedrich Schiller, “Über das Erhabene,” in Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, vol. 8, Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 822–840, here 822: “in einem Reich der Kräfte . . . alle ihm überlegen sind, und den Meister über ihn spielen.” 8 Schiller, “Über das Erhabene,” 827: “Lebenskräfte, [in der] die unsrige[n] in nichts verschwinde[n].”

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are where we find such entrances being made amid the energies of war. Once again, it is the Napoleonic wars that give particular historical color to the backgrounds posited here. The question guiding the dramatic action is the extent to which war is even able to guarantee the splendor of an entrance at all, or which forms of entering are conceivable against the tumultuously deregulated background that Kleist opens up for his plays. This is, however, also a question of the extent to which Napoleon could possibly be stopped, at least on a symbolic political level, as the overmatched opponent of Prussia whose triumphalist entrance onto the European stage had galvanized the continent’s states. Kleist’s antitriumphalism is always also anti-Napoleonic. Here, too, it is a powerful—and this time, military—entrance protocol that is deconstructed within the sphere of tragedy. At the same time, what becomes manifest in Kleist’s plays are the two complementary, or rather reciprocally related, facets of entering the stage that can be realized here and are possible before every tragic ground. In Kleist, too, pathos and triumph ultimately remain inseparable. Here, too, passio and splendor, suffering and the ruthless seizing of space, converge in forms of entering that are contradictory and internally polarized. In different ways, both the incursion of rending forces (Penthesilea) and their complete absence (Robert Guiskard) undermine the ceremonial originally conceived to govern the splendid entrances that were employed to celebrate the conclusion of a battle. Kleist’s triumphs remain phantasms: the “potentiated anticipation” of an impossible victory that belie, for one triumphant moment, the reality of the struggle continuing in the background.9

Dionysian Protocols for Making an Entrance With this tragic thwarting of triumphalism, Kleist’s war tragedies anticipate a theory of tragedy that situates the process of tragic individuation against the backdrop of a turbulent energetic field. Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche understand this field as a process of detachment or individuation that is at once endangered and made possible by the development of these energies, and which translates itself, both in tragedy and in its theory, into a figure-ground relation beset by crisis. Depending on whether the ground proves to be a principle of violent generativity, procreative potency, incipient birth, or cyclic annihilation, whether it creates something or destroys what it has created, the individual

9 Beda Allemann, Heinrich von Kleist: Ein dramaturgisches Modell, ed. Eckart Oehlenschläger (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005), 13.

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emerging from the ground realizes itself in each case in a different way. In his treatise The Birth of Tragedy, also written against the background of war in 1871/72, Nietzsche will describe this protean entrance protocol for unleashed energy as “Dionysian” and posit it as the basis for a theory of tragedy that is wholly oriented toward the appearance of a god. All of these figures—the frenzied Dionysus, who eludes the dictates of Apollonian form; the triumphant Dionysus, whose chariot is drawn by panthers and tigers; the suffering Dionysus Zagreus, his body dismembered by the Titans—comprise a single yet polymorphic epiphanic paradigm, violent and riddled with contradictions, that is compressed here into a complex Dionysian protocol for making an entrance.10 Dionysus is the figure in whom the ground itself appears, but he is also the ground that reclaims the figure in which he has been incarnated. Entrance and arrival thus take shape as both a triumphant adventus and a form-rupturing imposition of violence. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy articulates an epiphanic form in which figuration and defiguration inextricably interpenetrate each other in unremitting opposition. The analyses gathered in this final section of the book aim first to bring together Kleist’s war dramas and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy through the common denominator of such a model for making an entrance, and then in a second concluding step, to show how the tragic crisis is shifted away from the dramatic action into the moment of entering the scene.

Disenchanted Triumph: Kleist’s Guiskard Fragment and the Plague Victims of Jaffa Entrance amid a Scene of Catastrophe Kleist’s dramatic project Robert Guiskard, which has survived only as a fragment, is entirely structured around the appearance of a “great man.” The text sets the stage for the appearance of a military commander who will title himself “the idol of the people,”11 and it breaks off after this process of making an entrance has been completed and Guiskard has emerged from a tent that had long

10 On the various manifestations of the Dionysian, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, Das Erscheinen des Dionysos: Antike Mythologie und moderne Metapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015), 148ff. 11 Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Guiskard: Herzog der Normannen, in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, vol. 1, Dramen 1802–1807, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991) 235–283, here 247 (line 269). In the following, Kleist’s texts will be cited from this edition by line number in parentheses.

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been kept closed to the audience, to then step into the publicness of the stage. The few surviving scenes of the draft dramatize the expectations of a people befallen by the plague who have placed all their hopes of deliverance in the intervention of their commander. Kleist offers a paradigmatic example of how the phantasm of a “great man” takes shape in a directionless situation ruled by chaos; of the manner in which his stepping forth is imagined; and of the consequences that can be observed when a collective constituted solely by its expectation of a charismatic hero finally faces the mortality of its leader. The opening scenes depict the agony of the Normans at the siege of Constantinople, while simultaneously offering an observation on the political and dramaturgical currents that emerge in a vacuum of leadership. As they enter the stage, the people deliver lines famously modeled on Sophocles’s Oedipus that immediately sketch a scene of catastrophe encompassing both a disordered crowd and a devastated site.12 These lines depict a people “in restless motion,” as the opening directions read, who have been struck by the plague and now find themselves in a situation bereft of any path, form, or direction.13 The scene they evoke resembles the churning of an agitated ocean: “Lashed by the storm of fear, it foams and sprays, / Like the open sea.”14 In this situation, the hope for a commander who will come to save the people takes on religious overtones.15 Set amid war and pestilent disorder, Kleist’s opening lays out a dramatic structure directed toward an epiphany. The fervent anticipation of the “great man” expected to arrive at the decisive hour endows his appearance with the features of a deus ex machina. At least the first scenes of the fragment anticipate an entrance furnished with sacred characteristics, as they move toward the moment when, as is announced by the aged man who steps forth to speak for the Normans, “Guiskard shall appear to us.”16 In their epiphanic rhetoric, these scenes invoke a hermeneutic scheme of salvation promising the entrance of a higher being attributed with the power, as Karl Löwith writes in his study of salvation history, to bring “fulfillment, structure, and order.”17 This entrance itself is invested with the hope of a return to order 12 See Ernest L. Stahl, “Guiskard and Oedipus,” Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 3 (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1962), 172–177, here 176. 13 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (stage directions before line 1): “in unruhiger Bewegung.” 14 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 37f.): “Gepeitscht vom Sturm der Angst, und schäumt und gischt, / Dem offnen Weltmeer gleich.” 15 See Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall” der Kunst (Tübingen: UTB, 2000), 124. 16 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 204): “Guiskard uns erscheinen möge.” 17 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 23.

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from a state of complete social, political, and physical disorganization. It can thus be said that the exposition of Robert Guiskard is determined by the gesture of “potentiated anticipation,” or an anticipatory energy that Beda Allemann’s study of Kleist’s dramaturgy has shown to repeatedly recharge Heinrich von Kleist’s dramatic constructions with a fundamental tension.18 From the outset, this physical dissolution of the national body of the Normans is accompanied by a political subtext. As can be seen from the chorus performed by the Normans as they enter, the devastating effects of the plague also seem to have eliminated the social and political divisions that characterize an organized polity. Chaos reigns not only inasmuch as the plague is laying low the bodies of the community and annihilating its families, but also in that the Normans whom it is afflicting have no functioning political institutions. A people “set in restless motion,” as the opening lines declaim, is left robbed of its ability to efficiently articulate its interests. What has indistinctly emerged from the vast waves of this dynamic multitude is, to wit, merely a committee of twelve members charged on behalf of the suffering people with presenting a petition to a commander who has been placed out of sight of his army, in hopes of persuading him to retreat to Italy. The dramaturgy of the first scene makes clear that the Normans cannot decide in this moment of crisis between a form of organization based on plebiscite or representation. Torn between speaking with the voice of the people and that of its representatives, Kleist’s opening highlights a failed attempt at democratic self-organization in depicting how the members of the committee repeatedly disappear from sight amid the waves of Normans.19 With but a few dramaturgical strokes, the scene erases the boundaries between representative speech and the “lamentation of this whole people” struggling in vain for political stability.20 The deputies’ command of “Order! Order!” remains entirely without effect as they cannot make themselves heard among the babel of voices coming from the restless crowd.21 The German word for this committee—“Ausschuss”—appears in print only in the late eighteenth century as a translation of the French comité and clearly evokes revolutionary associations. In this context, it emphatically lays bare the

18 Allemann, Heinrich von Kleist, 13. 19 On the instability of representative democracy following the French Revolution, see Horst Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fürstengesellschaft: Semantik und Theorie der Einherrschaft in Deutschland von der Reformation bis zum Vormärz, vol. 2, Theorie der Monarchie (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), 853. 20 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 51): “Jammer dieses ganzen Volks.” 21 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 39): “Schaff’ Ordnung hier!”

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semantic space of political allusion that the fragment itself blatantly opens up. The chorus accompanying the entry of the plague-stricken people recalls the political crises brought about by the historically not-so-distant French Revolution, whose recurring upheavals had made it impossible to establish a stable institutional foundation for French democracy. The opening lines of the drama thus recapitulate nothing less than the agony experienced by a people who, as Hannah Arendt notes in her study On Revolution, had been prevented from establishing a new form of government because they were caught in an existential crisis.22 Kleist takes the comparison between a restless people and the sea from Robespierre.23 In the entrance of the Normans, there is a notable sharpening of the crisis afflicting a polity that is incapable of effectively establishing and deputizing representative bodies, and that repeatedly reabsorbs the very committees or “Ausschüsse” it has itself named—a word that means not only committees but also objects that are discarded or rejected as defective—back into the agitated body of the nation. Like the French citoyens of the postrevolutionary period, the Normans hope for the intervention of a “great man” to rescue them from chaos and create new sociopolitical structures founded on an authoritarian style of government. And the longing of the Normans left leaderless before the gates of Byzantium corresponds to the hope for a “new despotism” that France pinned upon the figure of Napoleon. The Romantic writer and pamphleteer Joseph Görres adumbrated this revolutionary void as follows: It was necessary to step across the threshold into a new region; what had not yet been tried was the despotism of a genius and great man. Crushing greatness coupled with crushing power was to forever put an end to schisms; all parties were to be disarmed, and all of them recomposed to make his; no more disagreement among state powers, no more

22 See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 143. 23 See Arendt, On Revolution, 90. The association of an agitated crowd with the storm-tossed sea can be found even earlier, in Giambattista Vico’s New Science from 1730/44: “But as the popular states became corrupt, so also did the philosophies. They descended to into skepticism. Learned fools fell to calumniating the truth. Thence arose a false eloquence, ready to uphold either of the opposed sides of a case indifferently. Thus it came about that, by abuse of eloquence like that of the tribunes of the plebs at Rome, when the citizens were no longer content with making wealth the basis of rank, they strove to make it an instrument of power. And as furious south winds whip up the sea, so these citizens provoked civil wars in their commonwealths and drove them to total disorder. Thus they caused the commonwealths to fall from a perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy or the unchecked liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies.” Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1948] 1986), section 1102, 423.

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artificial equilibrium by opposing forces, all resistance subdued by the supremacy of unity, all opposition crushed under the glimmer of greatness.24

This “new despotism” described here from the German point of view was not to be ensured by a return to the absolutist form of rule, but by an extraordinary leader personality25 who would detach himself from bonds of tradition and “ordinary worldly attachments.”26 Such a figure would embody the dynamic principle of authority based exclusively on success and recognition that Max Weber termed “charismatic” in his writings on the sociology of domination: for pure charisma does not recognize any legitimacy other than one which flows from personal strength proven time and again. The charismatic hero derives his authority not from an established order and enactments, as if it were an official competence, and not from custom or feudal fealty, as under patrimonialism. He gains and retains it solely by proving his powers in practice. He must work miracles, if he wants to be a prophet. He must perform heroic deeds, if he wants to be a warlord.27

The play accordingly begins with the anticipation of a savior figure resembling Napoleon. Like the French, the Normans are waiting for a charismatic leader who, as Eva Horn has shown, would step into the forcibly vacated place of the legitimate king and reorganize a people who had fallen out of the traditional monarchical regime of rule.28 Yet it is not only Kleist’s dramatic fragment that draws parallels between the Norman Robert Guiskard and the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte. They are also found in an earlier text that served Kleist as a model: in Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Funck’s study Robert Guiskard Herzog von Apulien und Calabrien (Robert Guiskard Duke of Apulia and Calabria),29 which had appeared in Schiller’s journal Die Horen in 1797. In a fashion that proved decisive for Kleist, this earlier study elaborates the charismatic traits of the Norman ruler and his style of leadership. Funck describes the techniques of power employed by a commander and parvenu who lacked a dynastic origin or any signs of legitimacy of

24 Joseph Görres, Resultate meiner Sendung nach Paris (1800), cited from Dreitzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fürstengesellschaft, 754. 25 On the characteristics of the charismatic model of authority, see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1111–1120. 26 See Weber, Economy and Society, 1113. 27 Weber, Economy and Society, 1114. 28 See Eva Horn, “Herrmanns ‘Lektionen’: Strategische Führung in Kleists ‘Herrmannsschlacht,’ “in Kleist-Jahrbuch 2011, ed. Günter Blamberger et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 66–90, here 67. 29 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Funck, “Robert Guiskard Herzog von Apulien und Calabrien,” Die Horen 9 (1797), 1. Stück, 1–58; 2. 1. Stück, 1–33; 3. Stück, 1–14.

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his own and was thus compelled to secure military allegiance through emphatic demonstrations of his presence. In particular, Funcke tells of the many occasions when Guiskard used this presence as a gift to bind his followers to himself. Tellingly, the word “presence” serves him here as the incantation for a principle of ruling authority that can invoke neither traditions, nor the past, nor provenance. Funck presents Guiskard as one who lacks ancestral rights but is guided in his campaigns by the “proud conviction . . . that his presence alone could make good the evils his absence had caused.”30 Over the course of the account, sentences such as “Robert hastened to show himself to the terrified army” are repeated many times in varied form.31 Taken together, they paint the picture of a military commander and ruler willing to “share not only the dangers, but also the discomforts and inconveniences of the least among his knights.”32 In their hopes of being saved by Guiskard’s entrance before his terrified people, the anticipations of Kleist’s Normans thus operate within the political sphere founded by presence.

Jaffa as a Stage Of further significance here is that Kleist’s choice of dramatic situation also refers directly to the history of the Napoleonic wars: his Robert Guiskard refashions a critical moment from Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Syria. The siege of Constantinople by the Norman army would have doubtless been recognized by contemporaries of Kleist as an allusion to the March 1799 siege of the fortress of Jaffa, with its accompanying atrocities.33 This military operation had presented the French, and their designs to open up the Orient to Western interests, with an unsurmountable military and sanitary challenge. Kleist’s fragment thus hearkened back to a recent episode of military history in which a massacre, pestilence, and war coalesced into a picture of disorder so illegible that it prevented any clarification or catharsis that might have been apprehended throughout Europe. The siege of Jaffa revealed the chaos of war in its maximally condensed form. The starting point for Kleist’s Guiskard draft is a catastrophic situation from the early Napoleonic wars in which three thousand Frenchmen stationed off Jaffa had contracted the plague, thirty of them dying of it every day. Not long before, on

30 Funck, “Robert Guiskard,” 3. Stück, 2. 31 Funck, “Robert Guiskard,” 1. Stück, 47. 32 Funck, “Robert Guiskard,” 1. Stück, 53. 33 See Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen, 134ff.; Iris Denneler, “Legitimation und Charisma,” in Kleists Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 73–93, here 86.

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Napoleon’s orders, they had massacred 2,400 Turkish prisoners of war with bayonets in Jaffa;34 soon thereafter the French were themselves attacked from the sea by the English. Rumors had moreover been circulating throughout Europe that Napoleon had not hesitated even a moment before then having the plaguestricken soldiers poisoned with opium in order to restore his military mobility.35 These reports painted the picture of a general who was capable of cold-blooded barbarities—the widely circulating phrase was “froide barbarie”36—yet also extremely weakened militarily by the plague. Equally revealing, however, are the anecdotes mobilized by Napoleon’s side to counter these rumors. In an entirely different vein, these tell of an army commander who visited the military hospital, appearing with a “calm” demeanor and a “serene countenance” to grace the sick with his salutary presence.37 The accounts referred to the testimony of a certain Desgenettes, a field doctor working in Jaffa, who reported that Napoleon himself had visited the plague camp of Jaffa and had boldly walked through various rooms speaking with the sick soldiers and with Desgenettes himself.38 These tales suggested that Napoleon’s intentions in visiting the troops had been to prove that his moral strength was enough to protect him from infection with the plague, and that he could defeat the epidemic through an act of self-empowerment. Kleist alludes to this situation in Guiskard when he thematizes the hopes and expectations directed at the commander in the scene’s precarious moment of hopelessness. Kleist, too, emphasizes the political significance of the military leader’s presence during the plague. This is also the point of reference for understanding the explosive nature of the fragment’s opening scenes, which delay Guiskard’s appearance amid the sick to such a degree that the Normans’ worries escalate and their belief in him finally fades.39 The following analysis will demonstrate how Kleist’s play itself

34 See Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s PlagueStricken of Jaffa (1804),” Representations 51 (1995), 1–61, here 26. See also Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen, 134. 35 See Grigsby, “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization,” 26. 36 Henri Deherain, L’Egypte Turque: Pachas et Mameluks du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle; L’expédition du général Bonaparte (Paris: Plon, 1931), 406ff., cited from Walter Friedländer, “Napoleon as ‘Roi Thaumaturge,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4, no. 3/4 (1941): 139–141, here 139. 37 René Desgenettes, Histoire médicale de l’Armée de l’Orient (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1830), 50, quoted in Friedländer, “Napoleon as ‘Roi Thaumaturge,’” 139. 38 Desgenettes, Histoire médicale de l’Armée de l’Orient, 139. 39 On the significance of plague and epidemic in Kleist’s texts, see Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Hintertüren, Gartenpforten und Tümpel: Über Kleists krumme Wege (Der zerbrochne Krug),” in Ausnahmezustand der Literatur: Neue Lektüren zu Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Nicolas Pethes

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Figure 24: Antoine-Jean Gros, General Bonaparte with Soldiers Stricken by the Plague at Jaffa (1804), akg-images/Album/Oronoz.AKG287777.

also participates in the phantasmic activities that were triggered throughout Europe by Napoleon’s appearance at the military hospital in Jaffa.40

Image Politics amid the Chaos of War Yet Kleist’s depiction of a plague-stricken war camp outside Constantinople not only reworks the reports and counterreports circulating in Europe—it seems quite concretely to build on a widely known image that depicted Napoleon’s presence in the plague-stricken camp in a hagiographic light. Kleist’s Guiskard can likely

(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 185–207, here 196. Matala de Mazza argues that Kleist’s interest in epidemics and plagues stemmed from a strategic interest in the war against the French: knowing “that contagious diseases exert pressure on existing sociopolitical systems” (197), he also practiced, she argues, a kind of biological warfare against Napoleon’s occupying forces by means of articles and literary texts. 40 On the media echo of Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign in Germany, see Gerhart von Graevenitz, Mythos: Zur Geschichte einer Denkgewohnheit (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1987), 165ff.

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be tied to a painting that was disseminated by Napoleon’s propaganda machinery at the same time that Kleist composed the fragment—to be precise, in the second phase of the fragment’s genesis, before 1808—and that provoked discussion throughout Europe as a scandalous, iconographic euphemism. Kleist’s dramatic conception appears to borrow motifs and its composition from a painting commissioned by the French government from the painter Antoine-Jean Gros in 1803/04.41 Titled Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa, it was produced by an artist who had already created key icons for the contemporaneous cult of Napoleon (Figure 24). The narrative that unfolds in this painting provided a striking pictorial precis of the Jaffa legend by having Napoleon appear in the midst of his soldiers as they celebrate both his loyalty and valor in such a chaotic moment. The work also ushered in a new phase in the development of history painting: after a period of iconographic disorientation in the early years of the Empire and the Revolutionary wars, the genre now came under Napoleon’s command. With Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa, history painting transformed into the visual template for representing the image of the “great man.” Formally, Gros’s achievement was to recenter the pictorial composition, inserting a heroic figure to fill a space in its middle that the French Revolution had rendered vacant. At least as perceived by his contemporaries, Kleist’s depiction of the Jaffa scene provided a way out of a compositional malaise caused by recent demands that artists incorporate the political principle of égalité into painting.42 As the contemporary art critic Quatremère de Quincy wrote, Gros’s painting ended “the chaos of equality” into which not only society, but also art, had been plunged by the Revolution.43 De Quincy saw Gros’s painting as a response to this crisis in providing a strong visual point of reference and a figure who could center the work for viewers who had been constantly confused by the chaotic paintings of crowds and battles from the Revolutionary wars. After having been forced, de Quincy wrote, to be spectator for such a long time to such a leaderless war, “to march its brushes in the wake of armies, lingering on

41 Of course, these considerations are based on the speculation that Kleist was aware of new historical developments during the second phase of the fragment’s composition; and moreover that he drew, as in the case being discussed, on contemporaneous pictorial materials that were not yet available in 1803. 42 For a general discussion of the crisis of the hero in history painting around 1800, see Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild: Die Krise der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert und die Geburt der Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1993), 19ff., section on “Historie.” 43 David O’Brien, After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros; Painting and Propaganda under Napoleon (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 92.

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the battlefields, touring bivouacs and camps,”44 the exhibition-going public was now witnessing the restoration of history painting’s lost visual hierarchy. The image of a “great man”—Napoleon—had been inserted into the chaotic war painting, in the intention of rectifying the visual lines in the depictions of war that had come out of the Revolution, with their tangled, contorted, and fallen bodies, and once again reorienting the composition toward a heroic center. As Rainer Schoch wrote in his description of the painting: Even before considering the concrete event depicted in the painting, the composition of the figures conveys a contrast between disaster and salvation with undeniable origins in Christian iconography. In analogy to Christian depictions of miracles, Napoleon appears as the only character unperturbed by the victims marked by the plague for death: he appears as a being endowed with higher powers, who exists above the laws of his surroundings. His very entrance promises salvation to the unfortunate. Accentuated by the splendid uniform of a general, Bonaparte stands in the brightly lit center of the picture. Refusing to let himself be held back by his companions, he steps to face a dying man, touching the buboes on the victim’s chest with a ceremonial gesture.45

The polysemy of this touch, which is also significant for Kleist’s reception of the image, has prompted extensive commentary by art historians. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out that two interpretive patterns overlap in Gros’s pictorial scheme, one sacred, the other rational, and that each interprets the role of Napoleon’s gesture in entirely different ways. On the one hand, critics draw attention to the sacramental exaltation of this touch in showing that the symbolic act attributed to Napoleon, with his ambitions to rule, was a monarchical rite drawn from Bourbon traditions. In a reading of the image published in the Warburg Journal in 1941, Walter Friedländer identifies Napoleon’s touching of the man stricken by the plague as the magical practice of toucher des écrouelles— the healing touching of lepers by the Christian king of France, as practiced since the Middle Ages by the country’s Bourbon rulers. By touching the bump, Napoleon appears in the role of the roi thaumaturge—the sanative king who appropriates the signs of Bourbon royalty that the Revolution had stripped from France’s monarchs—to then emerge as the bearer of the supernatural gifts characterizing a charismatic leader.46

44 Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Recueil de Notices Historiques (Paris: Adrien Le Clere, 1834), 318. Translation from O’Brien, After the Revolution, 92: “de se traîner sur tout les champs de bataille, de parcourir les bivouacs et les camps.” 45 Rainer Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel, 1975), 76. 46 See Friedländer, Napoleon as “Roi Thaumaturge,” 140; Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 131, and Weber, Economy and Society,

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Verticalization and “Ranimation” This is complemented by a rational interpretive scheme that is based on the historical situation itself and nearer to Napoleon’s intentions in visiting the military hospital. In this interpretation, Napoleon appeared among the sick in order to counter rumors that the malady manifesting itself in the camp was the plague, that is to say, a contagious disease. His visit was intended to prevent a mass panic that would have jeopardized the success of his campaign. Seen from this perspective, his gesture of touching the sick man appears to be a rational demonstration of immunity. Painted five years after the siege, in 1804, the work was meant to refute the rumor that the great general was helplessly at the mercy of two uncontrollable forces, contagion and rumor. Occupying the middle of the history painting, Napoleon establishes himself as a counterforce whose very presence has the ability to stop an epidemic, and to even to overcome the silent and faceless powers that could not be captured by the brightly defined category of enemy.47 The painting thus not only characterizes Napoleon as a “great man” who acts with sublime courage in placing himself in mortal danger, or as a charismatic leader who appropriates the monarchical signs of rule used by his predecessors. In the contemporaneous reception of the painting, one finds discussion of further effects wrought by this “great man.” Critics reporting on the Salon of 1804, for instance, where the painting was exhibited, speak of the regenerative effects of Napoleon’s visit. They write of how the image depicts him reviving or reanimating the soldiers’ crestfallen spirit—the crucial word is “ranimer”—who are enthralled by the “élan d’un courage sublime,” the “rush” or “impulse” of sublime courage, that he brought with him into the camp.48 They explicitly take his gesture

1112. On the history of the toucher des écrouelles, see Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 47 See Friedländer, Napoleon as “Roi Thaumaturge,” 140. 48 Friedländer names Nicolas Desgenettes’s report Histoire médicale as the source of the first sketch (Louvre 4613) for the painting. See Friedländer, Napoleon as “Roi Thaumaturge,” 139. The sketch is accompanied by the note: “This drawing by Gros is the real historical scene or the first sketch of his masterpiece. It depicts the general Bonaparte raising, with his own hand, the corpse of a man stricken with the plague, to revive the downcast morale of those around him. All appear to tremble before his action. He alone is calm, as expressed by his figure. This scene, being more worthy of the glory of the great man than the substitution of an attribute more noble in appearance, has the impulse [élan] of a sublime courage.” Cited here from the website of the Louvre, in a version that differs slightly from that reproduced by Friedländer: “Ce dessin de Gros est la véritable scène historique ou la première esquisse de son chef

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of touching the sick man and the audacity of his appearing among the troops as evidence that he is a grand homme. A later text illustrates the effects that some saw in this visual staging and grand entrance of Napoleon, articulating the healing power of his presence in a phantasmic form. It comes from Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness from 1853: A fine picture in this sphere is that of [Jean-Antoine] Gros, Napoleon among the pestiferous at Jaffa. How gruesome are these patients with their boils, with their livid colour, with the green-blue and violet skin tints, with the drily burning gaze, with the distorted features of desperation! But they are men, warriors, French: they are the soldiers of Bonaparte. He, their soul, appears among them, fears not the danger of the most malicious, horrifying death; he shares it, as in battle he shared with them the rain of bullets. This thought delights the good. The dull, muffled heads are raised; the half-extinguished or feverishly glittering eyes turn to him, the limp arms stretch enthusiastically toward him, and after this treat, a blissful smile plays on the lips of the dying—and right among these forms of horror, the giant human being Bonaparte stands straight, full of compassion, and lays his hand on the boil of one of the ill, who has arisen half-naked before him. ... Similarly at the end of Hamlet, as the poisoned corpses of a house fallen into decay lay twisted all about, Shakespeare lets the forceful trumpet blast and the young, cheerful, pure Fortinbras step forth as the beginning of a new life.49

This passage is instructive in several ways for a reading of Kleist. First, Rosenkranz points to the theatricality of the event when he shifts from speaking about one medium to another by making a comparison to the final scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This comparison of Napoleon’s appearance among those suffering from the plague in Jaffa with young Fortinbras’s triumphal entrance, accompanied by the fanfare of trumpets, in Elsinore’s corpse-strewn courtyard underscores the theatrical dimensions of the motif and the structural proximity between the entrance in the painting and on the stage. At the same time, the description of the painting also reveals the regenerative powers that accrue to the symbolic form of a successful entrance. Advancing from figure to figure, Rosenkranz’s emphatic ekphrasis retraces the process of a raising up—a ranimation—that revives a company corroded by disease, and it realigns a visual order threatened by chaos.

d’œuvre. / Il représente le général Bonaparte relevant de sa propre main le cadavre d’un pestiféré, / pour ramener le moral abattu de ceux qui l’entourent. Tous semblent effrayés de son action, / lui seul est calme, comme l’exprime sa figure. / Cette scène était plus digne de la gloire du grand homme que la substitution d’une attitude / plus noble en apparence à l’élan vrai d’un courage sublime.” See https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl020114902. 49 Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Andrei Pop and Mechthild Widrich (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 194–195.

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Here, too, in the scene from Jaffa, one can observe the charismatic effects wrought by a form of entrance that regenerates a collective afflicted and marked by illness, and that establishes the middle of the painting as a center of power that flows to, and reanimates, the contorted bodies. In rising here along the phantasmic vertical axis of one who has arrived like a god, the sufferers fulfill the promises of salvation attributed to epiphanic forms of entering. With the appearance of the “upright Bonaparte,” the sick soldiers, too, are wrested from the spell of both gravity and disease. Rosenkranz clearly names the verticalizing effects that come from this form of entrance when he points out how the soldiers lift up their “dull, muffled heads,” how they turn their gaze toward the lodestar of their commander and find the strength to reach out with their weary arms. With Bonaparte’s appearance, the charismatic energeia—the enlivening power inherent in the entrance of a “great man”—imparts its effects to the abandoned and diseased company he has visited; it recovers these twisted bodies from a state of formlessness and restores them to stabler, steadier forms. Following Rosalind Krauss, whose concept of form systematically presupposes a process of verticalization, one could say a “reassuring action of form”50 emanates here from the center of the painting, politically and physically, removing both the individual and the collective body from the “dispersive field of gravity.”51 Conversely, there is something to be said for reading Kleist’s Guiskard fragment as dramatic counterproject to the propagandistic goals articulated in Gros’s painting. Kleist’s fragment aims to demonstrate the invalidity of the entrance protocol structuring Gros’s painting: to unmask and politically demystify the collective phantasm of legends that, in “rais[ing him] to the divine,” had warped the picture of the man who had conquered Prussia.52 The tragedy was intended to deny both the healing power that had been attributed to Napoleon’s touch and the legend of his sovereign immunity. And it does so by having Guiskard’s speech directly refer to the composition of Gros’s painting. When a representative of the people asks Guiskard to stay away from those stricken by the plague, he quotes the heroic tale spread by the painting 50 Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 102. 51 Krauss and Bois, Formless, 97: “A function of the well-built form is thus vertical because it can resist gravity.” 52 Heinrich von Kleist, Amphytryon, in Kleist, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Constantine (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, [1997] 2004), 100. German: Amphitryon: Ein Lustspiel nach Molière, in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, vol. 1, Dramen 1802–1807, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991: 377–461, here 422 (line 1190f.): “Für sein Gemälde, sieh, von Künstlershand, / Dem Leben treu, in’s Göttliche verzeichnet.”

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Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa, while also making plain its implausibility: I’ve told you all, so many times Since when has my Guiskard not kept his word? It’s not reckless if I fail to shy away From touching the sick, nor is it mere chance, If it should happen and I remain unscathed, It will be the end of the matter—briefly, a final word: Have no fear for my sake!—53

All the same, the Guiskard scenes mercilessly expose the fact that this selfimposed ending is close by, since the touch that was meant to prove the commander’s magical inviolability has long since delivered its deadly effect. Kleist juxtaposes the spectacular entrance of a “great man” in the painting with that of a failed theatrical entrance that leaves unfulfilled the promises of immunity and healing articulated in Antoine-Jean Gros’s composition. Just as it did with Gros’s contemporaries, the propagandistic scene of Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa seems to have inscribed itself into the collective imagination of the Normans. Yet Kleist’s Normans are ultimately disappointed by an epiphany that cannot bring about the turn of salvation, perform the promised ranimation, or even sustain the dramatic structure within which it takes place. While the Napoleon of Gros’s history painting succeeds in occupying the center of the picture, ending the chaos and injecting new life into a collective military body threatened with dissolution, Robert Guiskard is a figure who initially seems to bundle together all the characteristics of a charismatic leader but then proves to have no convincing power to make an entrance. The fragment is designed to demystify the bedazzling effect of Napoleonic propaganda and to debilitate attempts to stage the presence of an emperor who had invaded and occupied Prussia by the time the fragment was written. In denying the very power of the charismatic commander to realize a “scheme of progressive order and meaning,” to “articulate” and “fulfil” its promises,54 Kleist designs a counterdramaturgy that aims to diminish greatness, is targeted precisely at the promise of salvation offered by Gros, and characterizes the leader’s charisma as the fantasy of an unfulfillable collective desire.

53 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 475ff): “Ich hab’s, ihr Leut’, euch schon so oft gesagt, / Seit wann denn gilt mein Guiskard’swort nicht mehr? / Kein Leichtsinn ist’s, wenn ich Berührung nicht / Der Kranken scheue, und kein Ohngefähr, / Wenn’s ungestraft geschieht. Es hat damit / Sein eigenes Bewenden – kurz, zum Schluß:/ Furcht meinetwegen spart! –.” 54 Löwith, Meaning in History, 18.

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A brief examination of Guiskard’s appearance, which occurs only after a long hesitation on his part, will now more precisely elucidate these considerations.

Loss of Force: An Entrance without a Bang From the outset, then, Kleist’s text vividly illustrates the disruptions found in the form of politics based on the presence of the military commander Guiscard. Yet they manifest themselves not only in the fact that Guiskard’s appearance is delayed; the energies of expectation also flag when it is only deputies who first emerge from the tent where he has remained concealed. This protracts the ritual of his announcement to such an extent that the hope of his appearance is eclipsed by rising fears of loss.55 The splendor of a singular figure at the center of the scene loses its power as weaker harbingers multiply. This commander no longer hurries to “show himself to the terrified army,” like the historical figure of Guiskard in Funck’s depiction. Rather, he allows rumors of his illness to proliferate. We see this, for instance, in the report given by one of the guards posted in front of the commander’s tent: “Keeping watch earlier at midnight, / Here at the entrance to Guiskard’s tent, / I suddenly hear wretched groans coming from inside, / Howling, as though a diseased lion / Were breathing its last breath.”56 The crisis of entering that emerges further manifests itself in the fact that when the long-awaited entrance finally does occur, its power to overwhelm the spectators still relies upon forms for staging epiphanic presence. As the scene unfolds, the commander comes not suddenly before his people with the vanquishing power of an action that occurs all at once. Rather, he must laboriously arm himself

55 The unifying power of the charismatic leader is further undermined by the fact that not just one, but many figures caught in conflict make an entrance. The double entrance of Roger and Abelard, who emerge from the tent in place of Guiskard, already weakens the expectations that the commander’s entrance will generate order. This episode is usually read as symptomatic of a crisis besetting structures of charismatic leadership. Such an interpretation sees the conflict between Roger and Abelard as negotiating the problems encountered by genealogy and succession in the context of charismatic authority, that is to say, of authority guaranteed exclusively by personal success. See Helmut Schneider, Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2011), 317ff. 56 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 143ff.): “Da ich die Wache heut, um Mitternacht, / Am Eingang hier des Guiskard’szeltes halte, / Fängt’s plötzlich jammervoll zu stöhnen drin, / Zu ächzen an, als haucht’ ein kranker Löwe / Die Seele von sich.” The adopted son Abelard confirms this when he declares: “Guiskard is feeling sick.” German (line 326): “Der Guiskard fühlt sich krank.”

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with the attributes of a “great man.” To weaken the Napoleonic entrance protocol, Kleist mobilizes a dressing scene containing a detailed account of the martial accessories needed to fabricate a hero. “Yes, father, I see him! / I see him standing by himself in the middle of the tent / He layers armor upon his high chest / Lays the fine chain of grace upon his wide shoulders! / And upon the broad dome of his head he sets, with force, / The mighty, wavering, high-plumed helmet.”57 The conditions are nevertheless set for a splendid entrance that will, at least at first glance, stage a hero whose stature has been amplified by forms of celebration. In stepping forward into the scene, he initially appears to fulfill all the expectations the piece has built up, as he is accompanied by a declamation pointing to the fullness of this epiphanic moment: “Now look, look here! – There he is himself!”58 As Guiskard enters the stage with the immediacy of the “now” of salvation history, the Normans break into shouts of triumph—the same shouts that always ring out in Kleist’s works when a long-awaited entrance appears to succeed and allow a figure to manifest itself in the space of the stage with overwhelming presence: “Triumph! It is him! It is Guiskard! Long live Guiskard!”59 For a brief moment, the promise made by the topos of the triumphant victor seems to have been redeemed, and political chaos seems to have been overcome. With the triumphant Guiskard, a jubilatory wholeness finally appears on stage that allows the languishing collective to rise up and reanimate itself. The Normans clearly articulate their desire for verticality when they give the following directions for Robert Guiskard to enter: “O Guiskard! We salute you, O Prince! / As one descending to us from the heights of heaven! / For we have long believed you to be among the stars – – !”60 Signs soon mount, however, that this jubilation is premature—that the splendor in this image of triumph is nothing more than a wish that quickly fades, prefiguring a salvation that fails to materialize in the horizontal reality of the scene. The Robert Guiskard “raised to the divine” finally presents himself to the committee not in his symbolic, but in his natural form. When Guiskard 57 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 400ff.): “Wohl, Vater, seh’ ich ihn! / Frei in des Zeltes Mitte seh’ ich ihn! / Der hohen Brust legt er den Panzer um! / Dem breiten Schulternpaar das Gnadenkettlein! / Dem weitgewölbten Haupt drückt er, mit Kraft, / Den mächtig-wankend-hohen Helmbusch auf!” Yet even this choice of items is not free of an intention to taunt. As a gift customarily bestowed by the sovereign, the fine, or “little,” chain of grace suggests that Guiskard is dependent an authority higher than himself, just as its diminutive size contradicts the stature of a “great man.” 58 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 406): “Jetzt seht, o seht doch her! – Da ist er selbst!” 59 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 407): “Triumph! Er ist’s! Der Guiskard ist’s! Leb’ hoch!” 60 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 408ff.): “O Guiskard! Wir begrüßen dich, o Fürst! / Als stiegst du uns von Himmelshöhen nieder! / Denn in den Sternen glaubten wir dich schon – – !”

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emphasizes upon entering that he “stands here before you in the fullness of life” and “controls every one of his limbs,”61 it only underscores that he had “just now been lying upon the floor of his tent.”62 Even though it may at first seem that Guiskard restores the Normans to “a life [they had] given up,”63 it is precisely this life that is now absconds from the duke: “Yet strange is the coincidence that on this very day / I do not feel so lively as usual.”64 The horizontalization of the commander’s entrance is drawn out even further as it becomes impossible to overlook the fact that Guiskard has just now risen with great effort from his sickbed. Not only the bodies, but the verses, too, disintegrate as Guiskard looks around and abandons the commanding en-face situation fashioned by his entrance in literally taking a downward turn. In a cascade of verse fragments, the vertical axis is lowered—and then abandoned even by the language of the piece: “Do you want – ? / Do you desire – ? / Do you lack – ? / God in heaven! / What is it? / What’s wrong with you? / Guiskard! Speak a word!”65 The horizontalization of the bodies irreversibly advances when Guiskard’s daughter provides a seat for her wavering father. “The empress pulls out a large kettledrum and pushes it behind him.”66 Here, the triumph of Guiskard’s appearance conclusively turns into a process of sinking down. After Guiskard has “gently” settled down on the drum,67 the remaining characters in the scene also bow down in a movement of exhaustion that equally grips both body and speech. This movement, too, no longer takes place in the concise and precipitation-inducing form of the movements in Kleist’s text, but as a gradually dwindling, progressive loss of force. One could perhaps speak with Roland Barthes of an “weariness” of the entire social body, and with it, of life vanishing from the scene.68 This begins with the old man looking downward in thought, followed by additional tableaus of incessant sinking: “And every day, like firs before the storm winds, they sink, / The heads of those sworn to you

61 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 439f.): “Der ich in Lebensfüll’ hier vor euch stehe / Der seiner Glieder jegliches beherrscht?” 62 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 347): “Noch eben, da er auf dem Teppich lag.” 63 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 450): “ein aufgegebnes Leben.” 64 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 454f.): “Zwar trifft sich’s seltsam just, an diesem Tage, / Daß ich so lebhaft mich nicht fühl’, als sonst.” 65 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (lines 487ff.): “Willst du – ? / Begehrst du – ? / Fehlt dir? / Gott im Himmel! / Was ist? / Was hast du? / Guiskard! Sprich ein Wort!” 66 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 254): “Die Kaiserin zieht eine große Heerpauke herbei und schiebt sie hinter ihn.” 67 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 254): “sanft.” 68 Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 16.

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sink down into the dust, / Those who lie down have no resurrection, / And wherever they sank, they sank down into their grave.”69 Or to cite Foucault: as a weakened ruler, Guiskard loses the “power . . . [of] generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them.”70 Sinking down upon the kettledrum, he makes contact with an instrument that figured in popular imagination as a whirling,71 even pulsing,72 instrument of agitation to war. But he does so without making a sound—a sign that the reanimation of his nation has failed. The instrument whose beats were properly meant to spur, synchronize, and accelerate the movements of a military formation is reduced to a seat for a sick man. At the end of the fragment, there are no more rhythmic impulses to be conveyed, since there is nothing left to be synchronized in the plague-ridden camp, nothing left to be reanimated by the drum’s beat. Another connection is made to the prop of the army kettledrum in an anecdote from the Franco-Prussian War that circulated about the lost battle of JenaAuerstedt, and which thus coincides temporally with the composition of the second version of Kleist’s Guiskard. Gustav Seibt’s book on Goethe and Napoleon notes that the Duke of Weimar, who had fled from Napoleon in 1806, anticipated his own abdication while sitting on a kettledrum. In speaking the words: “For the time being, we would have been the Duke of Weimar,” he is said to have

69 Kleist, Robert Guiskard (line 530ff.): “Und täglich, wie vor Sturmwind Tannen, sinken / Die Häupter deiner Treuen in den Staub, / Der Hingestreckt’ ist’s auferstehungslos, / Und wo er hinsank, sank er in sein Grab.” 70 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 136. 71 See Jean Paul, Das Leben des Quintus Fixlein, in Jean Paul, Werke, vol. 7, Kleinere erzählende Schriften I, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1975), 7–259: Jean Paul’s ninth box of notes speaks of the “whirling on the kettledrum at the jubilee celebration” (148). See also Chapter 189 (“8. Fahrt”) of the Luftschiffers Giannozzo: “But in the evening at 11 o’clock a majestic thunderstorm came, entirely too good and too sublime for the workaday city—and so there arose in my mind, all the while, the divine thought that, as the thunder whirled so terribly on its kettledrum, I should run at the chamber door with my whole body like a block of artillery, and smash it in if possible.” Jean Paul, Des Luftschiffers Giannozzo Seebuch (Komischer Anhang), in Jean Paul, Werke, vol. 6, Titan II, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1975), 925–1010, here 978: “Aber da abends um 11 Uhr ein majestätisches Gewitter kam, das ordentlich zu gut und zu erhaben war für die Werkeltagsstadt: so flog der göttliche Gedanke in mir auf, allemal, während der Donner auf seiner Heerpauke fürchterlich wirbelte, an die Kammertüre wie ein Sprengblock mit dem ganzen Leibe anzurennen und sie etwan einzustoßen.” 72 “Heerpauke,” in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1877), column 759; this entry contains a reference to the army kettledrum as a source for generating impulses: “pulsare tympanon geminum.”

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acknowledged his temporary fate following the defeat of the Prussian army.73 Here, too, in this anecdote, the instrument of war employed to coordinate and propel the Prussian army is debased to a site for announcing a capitulation.

The Fragment, or the Refusal of Tragic Progression In this same passage, however, one can also observe the aims of Kleist’s fragment as a means to wage war. The performative intention of the piece is to annihilate the opponent Napoleon: it chips away at the general’s charisma and breaks the spell of the circulating fantasies about the power of his presence. But above all, it undercuts him with weakness in in the same way that it has him sit upon the kettledrum. In a bold displacement of the discredited field instrument to Napoleon’s side, or rather to Guiskard’s as Napoleon’s proxy, Kleist inflicts on his opponent the humiliation Prussia itself had experienced during the occupation. Through the magical dramaturgy of Guiskard, Napoleon himself is now placed, via calculated steps, in the situation of powerlessness that prevailed in Prussia after the defeat at Jena-Auerstedt. Finally, the dramatic fragment casts doubt on Napoleon’s capacity to act in yet another way: even if an unstoppable movement of sinking sets in with the fragment’s premature ending, unopposed by any tangible counterforce, the text also does damage to the genre in which this humiliation is thematized. The absence of a strong, equal antagonist also affects the genre of tragedy, which around 1800 still occupies the first and highest rank in the hierarchy of the period’s theory of genres, just as it affects the provisions of Aristotelian poetics, which defines tragedy as the imitation of the actions of “great” men. It is thus possible that another reason Guiskard remained a fragment is that Kleist wanted to deny his hero any greatness or capacity for tragic art. In this reading, no action should be conceded to the enemy at all, no opponent assigned to him that would allow him to prove his strength. The few scenes of Guiskard deny the victor of Jena-Auerstedt not only the “shimmering greatness” of appearance,74 but also the tragic trajectory the genre lays out for its hero. At the same time, and perhaps of even graver significance, Kleist deprives the military commander of any visible and recognizable opponent. Guiskard is finished off by intangible forces that he cannot face, recognize, or grasp: those of the epidemic, and of the rumors about his illness that he cannot silence as Napoleon does in Antoine-Jean Gros’s history

73 Gustav Seibt, Goethe und Napoleon: Eine historische Begegnung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 12. 74 Here, again, see Görres, Resultate meiner Sendung nach Paris.

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painting.75 Dramatic form, which presupposed that its actors be visible, now finds itself threatened in this work by invisible forces that elude not only attempts to be shaped but also to be engaged in combat. Instead of a worthy and equal opponent, the Napoleonic “great man” encounters nothing but a void. In breaking off, the fragment denies the “great man” any access to the dimensions of tragedy and strips him of any further capacity to act. Instead, the few scenes that are left to him depict the loss of his credibility and the vanishing of any fictional greatness. Were one to ascribe an intention to the piece’s fragmentary status, then perhaps this.

The Pomp of Terror: Antitriumphalism in Kleist’s Penthesilea Tragedy as an Antitriumphalist Genre Tragedy is an antitriumphalist genre; it has a negative relationship to the splendor of appearance. At least in its modern form, it is bound up with a ritual designed to endow sovereign characters with the attributes of divine exaltation. The construction of the genre in the early modern period in France, Italy, Germany, and England is at once the deconstruction of an ancient formula that prescribed a specific setting, defined by protocol, for the triumphator’s victory procession. It aims its attack at a repertoire of signs that served what Steven Greenblatt calls “Renaissance self-fashioning,”76 and its critique is directed at forms of self-fashioning that staged the individual as immortal and invincible. In historical terms, the connection between these two complexes of forms is visible in the fact that the early-modern rediscovery of the Roman triumph and its semiotic repertoire coincided with rediscovery of ancient tragedies. It was not only drama, but especially tragedy that benefited from the fifteenthcentury editions of ancient sources documenting the Roman triumph, with Valturio’s De re militaria (1472) and Biondo’s Romæ triumphantis libri decem (1482) 75 On the structural relationship between rumor and epidemic, see Cornelia Zumbusch, Die Immunität der Klassik (Berlin: 2011), 52ff. On the logic by which rumors spread in Kleist, see Elke Dubbels, “Zur Dynamik von Gerüchten bei Heinrich von Kleist,” ZfdPh 131 (2012): 191–211, and Torsten Hahn, “Rauschen, Gerücht und Gegensinn: Nachrichtenübermittlung in Heinrich von Kleists Robert Guiskard,” in Kontingenz und Steuerung: Literatur als Gesellschaftsexperiment 1750–1830, ed. Torsten Hahn, Erich Kleinschmidt, and Nicolas Pethes (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 101–121. 76 Steven Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. Early modern triumphalism, Greenblatt argues, evinces an “increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.”

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as the first forerunners.77 And though it is hardly a new insight to say that tragedies punish human delusion through a catastrophic turn of events, this reference to the Roman ritual of triumph can make visible the concrete historical and semantic forms in which this destruction takes place. If the ritual of triumph aims to elevate a military commander beyond human measure,78 dressing him in divine splendor and placing him at the center of a celebratory procession that takes complete control of the space he enters,79 tragedy aims to dismantle this rite. One contributing factor here was that the Roman triumphal procession itself already contained the possibility of a tragic reversal. Even in its original forms, the discourse of the triumph insisted that the self-exhibition of the triumphator could suddenly transform into the exposure of a tragic subject. In the choreography of this ritual, tragedy takes on the role of a prompter in the theater whispering to the victorious commander, while holding a wreath over his head, that he is no more than a man and therefore mortal, that his triumph could turn to pathos.80 As Anthony Miller demonstrates in his study Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture, Shakespeare’s tragedies especially benefit from the renovatio of Roman triumphal formulas in an England so confident in its victory over the Spanish Armada. Shakespeare’s Roman dramas in particular work with the formal repertoire of Roman triumphal rituals. Indeed, the opening of his first tragedy, The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (1591/92), reflects a semiotic-political crisis in depicting the failure of the eponymous general’s triumph after he returns victorious from a campaign against the Goths.81 In this work, the tragic plot literally develops out of a triumphant exposition. The triumphal procession that opens the play immediately signals the coming catastrophes,

77 See Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2001), in particular, the chapter “Humanist Transmission,” 38ff. 78 Therese Fuhrer, “Triumph und Theater im Text: Literarische Inszenierungen imperialer Repräsentation in Rom,” in Theater und Fest in Europa: Perspektiven von Identität und Gemeinschaft, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Matthias Warstat, and Anna Littmann (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2012), 80–94, here 87. 79 See Ernst Künzl, Der römische Triumph: Siegesfeiern im antiken Rom (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988); Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Hendrik S. Versnel, Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman Triumph (Leiden: Brill, 1970), specifically, his reference to the cult of Dionysus. 80 Fuhrer, “Triumph und Theater im Text,” 84ff., 86ff. See also Beard, The Roman Triumph, 85–92. 81 See Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture, 129f.; on triumph as a medium of critique, see also 14ff.

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and it is literally from the “rites that we intend”82 that tragedy is born and the “most lamentable” fall of the commander is set in motion. The syntax of the ritual thus disintegrates at the moment of its actualization. The triumphant announcement—“Romans, make way, the good Andronicus, / Patron of virtue, Rome’s best champion / Successful in the battles that he fights, / With honor and with fortune is return’d / From where he circumscribed with his sword, / And brought to yoke, the enemies of Rome”83—is only the beginning of a downfall that will strip Andronicus of the “fortune” and “honor” he has earned. In executing this reversal, Shakespeare proceeds with protocol-like precision. He replaces the exhibition of the spoils of war with the coffins of Titus’s slain sons; he sullies the splendor of the feast with the nefas of a blood sacrifice; and it is Titus’s triumphal exhibition of the defeated Goth queen during the procession that draws the enmity resulting in his demise. The “progress of pomp” is thus additionally doomed to fail inasmuch as the war meant to be ended by the triumph continues.84 Shakespeare places the triumph at the beginning and not at the end of the tragedy, as a moment of symbolic-political hubris that only indicates the tragic height from which the hero will fall. Everything is aimed at underlining the instability within this staging of glory and at marking a subject endowed at the moment of victory with the attributes of divinity as a mere illusion arising before an ongoing horizon of war.85 The violence from which the subject appears to emerge in the splendor of victory reclaims that to which it gave birth. A brief consideration of Aeschylus shows that this relation is evident even in the Greek origins of tragedy. Xerxes’s entrance after the lost battle of Salamis in Aeschylus’s The Persians is structured as an inverted triumphal entrance,86 as is that of Agamemnon in the Oresteia, where he is given a triumphant welcome upon his victorious return from Troy that proves to be a red carpet leading straight into the arms of his murderers. The very beginnings of tragedy suggest that war cannot be left behind, that it remains present even in the now of the triumphal moment. 82 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. James Cottus Maxwell, 3rd edition (London: Methuen, 1984), I/1, line 81. 83 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus I:1, line 78, line 64ff. 84 Christopher Marlowe, “Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two,” in The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999), 74–148, here 75: “death cuts off the progress of his pomp / And murd’rous fates throws all his triumphs down” (verses 4–5). 85 In this respect, the tragic subject is not unlike the miles gloriosus, the boastful war hero in Roman comedy. 86 See Christopher Wild, “Royal Re-entries: Zum Auftritt in der griechischen Tragödie,” in Auftritte: Strategien des In-Erscheinung-Tretens in Künsten und Medien, ed. Annemarie Matzke, Ulf Otto, and Jens Roselt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 33–61, here 37 and 39ff.

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“This Lone Jewel’s Magnificence” If it is possible to assume that this characteristic of the genre remains constant over time, expressing itself more or less clearly in various models of tragedy, then it finds its most extreme articulation in the works of Heinrich von Kleist. Here, too, in Kleist’s tragic compositions, the relationship of triumph and tragedy is crucial. Its limits, which he employs to create drastic contrasts, are the triumphal amplification of the figure on the one hand, and the violent loss of distinction on the other. His war dramas in particular can be read as reflecting the revival of military triumphalism that accompanied the Napoleonic wars. In their political symbolism, they are directed against both Napoleonic and Prussian stagings of victory. Having previously reacted in Robert Guiskard to Napoleon’s splendid public self-stagings with an aggressive strategy of deconstruction, in Penthesilea Kleist further deployed tragedy as an antitriumphalist weapon. His aim, as he himself wrote, was to destroy the “great moment.”87 His war dramas are thus especially radical in targeting that “shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm”—to quote Hannah Arendt—as it is found on the stage.88 They systematically dismantle the space of appearance that the ceremonial of triumph grants to the victor. Kleist translates this antitriumphalism into a stage concept that unmasks the illusionistic character of all visibility as such. The discrepancy between triumphal figuration and the ongoing violence of war gives rise to a spatial order that highlights the precarious status of the figure and the way in which all figurative processes are rendered less potent in the theater of war. This dismantling is first realized in a continuing series of crises in the act of making an entrance. The numerous splendid entries staged by the piece quickly prove to be ephemeral visual hyperboles that perpetually remain tied to the very war they appear to overcome. Paradoxically, they come to light precisely when they are accompanied by shouts of triumph. In the very moment the word “triumph” is uttered, these works reveal the phantasmic foundation of triumphal figuration.89 Shouts of triumph prove to 87 Heinrich von Kleist to Adolphine von Werdeck on November 29, 1801, in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke u. Briefe, vol. 4, Briefe von und an Heinrich von Kleist 1793–1811, ed. Klaus Müller Salget and Stefan Ormanns (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997), no. 58, 579–583, here 279: “Well done to Arminius for finding a great moment.” 88 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, trans. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 180. 89 On fantasies of invincibility in Kleist, see Helmut J. Schneider, “Kleists Ehrgeiz und Ruhmsucht,” in Kleist-Jahrbuch 2008/09, ed. Günter Blamberger et al. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2009), 202–213, here 203. Blamberger builds on the work of Katharina Mommsen, who notes the frequency with which images of triumph and the exercise of power

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be the form for expressing a theatricality that always remains hypothetical. They are acclamations that lead to nothing,90 and that can be traced to the desire to see something where all differences are leveled out in the ground. The cries—“Hail to you! Hail! All-conquering! Victorious! / Queen of the Festival of Roses! A triumph!”91 or “Triumph! There comes Odysseus in the distance! / The whole Greek army lit up by the sun / Comes suddenly from out the forest’s night!”92—fail to capture the situation; they come prematurely and expose the hallucinatory character not only of the triumph they invoke, but of every attempt to make an appearance under the conditions of an ongoing war. The suddenness with which Odysseus emerges from the dark ground of the forest—another passage speaks of the “thickets of this war”93— and the drastic intensity with which Kleist employs the painterly device of chiaroscuro reveal, precisely in the sudden triumphal exaggeration of the figure, the hallucinatory irreality of every entrance. The jubilatory subject formations anticipated by the shouts of triumph have the status of “colorful images of victory,” as it says in Kleist’s play Die Herrmannschlacht (The battle of Hermann), that “turn the eye from this dark truth.”94 These verses point to nothing but the dark ground while hinting at the inevitable overpowering of the chiaro by the oscuro. High on a hilltop glittering he stands, Encased in steel his horse and he, the sapphire, The chrysolite don’t shed such brilliant rays!

appear in Kleist. See Katharina Mommsen, Kleists Kampf mit Goethe (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1974), 160. On the specific structure of “potentiated anticipation” in Kleist’s dramas, see Allemann, Heinrich von Kleist, 13. 90 On acclamation as a structural element of the triumphal ritual, see Ernst Kantorowicz, “The ‘King’s Advent’ and The Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” in Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1965), 37–75, here 60. 91 Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 31; modified from “Hail!” in the final word to “A triumph!” Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea: Ein Trauerspiel, in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, vol. 2, Dramen 1808–1811, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 143–256, here 166 (line 626f.): “Heil Dir, du Siegerin! Überwinderin! / Des Rosenfestes Königin! Triumph Dir!” In the following, Kleist’s texts in German will be cited from this edition by line number in parentheses. 92 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 23; “Triumph” modified from “Hurrah!” Kleist, Penthesilea (lines 461ff.): “Triumph! Dort tritt Odysseus jetzt hervor! / Das ganze Griechenheer, im Strahl der Sonne / Tritt plötzlich aus des Waldes Nacht hervor.” 93 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 11. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 219): “Forst des Krieges.” 94 Heinrich von Kleist, Die Herrmannschlacht: Ein Drama, in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, vol. 2, Dramen 1808–1811, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 477–554, here 46 (lines 345f.).

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The earth around, in all its bloom and color, Cloaked in the blackness of a stormy night; It serves but as a ground, a dusky foil To set off this lone jewel’s magnificence!95

These passages further justify reading the triumphal entrances staged by Kleist as evidence for a figure-ground relation beset by crisis.96 The chaos of war and an exaggerated triumphalism realize themselves as an opposition that continually collapses from scene to scene. In Penthesilea, a progressive and iconoclastic action is activated in the background in which the iconic difference of a figure can no longer be permanently stabilized, and the theatrical space blurs its own boundaries in its transition to the ground.97 As the privileged site for making an entrance, the proscenium proves to be an endangered, orphaned, reluctantly visited place, occupied primarily by teichoscopic figures who turn their backs to the audience and keep their gaze hypnotically fixed on the energetic field of war that manifests itself on the stage. Telling of figures who are entangled, disfigured, fused, knotted up, or wedged together, the reports given by these characters

95 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 47. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 1038ff.): “Auf einem Hügel leuchtend steht er da, In Stahl / geschient sein Roß und er, der Saphir, Der / Chrysolith, wirft solche Strahlen nicht! / Die Erde rings, die bunte, blühende, / In Schwärze der Gewitternacht gehüllt; / Nichts als ein dunkler Grund nur, eine Folie, / Die Funkelpracht des Einzigen zu heben!” 96 On scenic doubling in Kleist, see Manfred Schneider, “Die Welt im Ausnahmezustand: Kleists Kriegstheater,” in Kleist-Jahrbuch 2001, ed. Günter Blamberger et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 104–119, here 104ff. See also Cornelia Vismann, Medien der Rechtsprechung, ed. Alexandra Kemmerer and Markus Krajewski (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2011), 38. 97 See Gottfried Boehm, “Die ikonische Differenz,” Rheinsprung 11 – Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170–178. In several essays on the entrance, Bettine Menke has impressively highlighted the impossibility of separating the scene from the backstage. Bettine Menke, “Off/On,” in Auftreten: Wege auf die Bühne, ed. Juliane Vogel and Christopher Wild (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2014), 180–188, here 183; Bettine Menke, “Die Suspendierung des Auftritts,” in Auftreten: Wege auf die Bühne, 247–273. Samuel Weber and Bettine Menke forcefully argue that the theatrical action remains attached to an “outside” even in the moment of its realization. The theatrical mode of being present on-site is negatively determined by an offstage. According to Weber, this mode of being is “in itself a marginal phenomenon . . . structurally . . . dependent on the outside world, never entirely self-contained”; Samuel Weber, “Vor Ort: Theater im Zeitalter der Medien,” in Grenzgänge: Das Theater und die anderen Künste, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter, Helga Finter, and Markus Weßendorf (Gunter Narr: Tübingen 1998), 31–54, here 34. “Everything that takes place onstage relates constitutively to what has taken or will take place on-stage”; Samuel Weber, “The Incontinent Plot (Hamlet),” in Literatur als Philosophie – Philosophie als Literatur, ed. Eva Horn, Bettine Menke, and Christoph Menke (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 233–252, here 236.

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indicate an undoing of the war-play beyond the stage,98 while also emphasizing the energetic intensity that prevails beyond the proscenium: “A molten heap, like metal in a forge, / Horses and riders thrown pell-mell together!”99 Faced with the power of this “continuous ground running through the stage,” toward which everything turns, scenic presence cannot constitute itself. The “foreground,” as it is called, becomes nothing but the space for reacting to what is going on in the war-filled “background.”100 And from the beginning, the central figures are characterized as background beings who evade any entrance or triumphal glorification. When one reads of Penthesilea: “She’s in the background and will not come forth,”101 and of Achilles: “But I lost sight of him among the rocks,”102 the antitheatrical tendencies of a dramaturgy dominated by a bellicose ground become visible. The triumphal space of appearance is negated by an invasive play of forces that reclaims, recaptures, and reabsorbs everything which steps forth. In speaking the words—“What triumph? There’ll be no rose feast yet!”103—Penthesilea immediately bows out of the scene and returns to the backstage from where she came.

Entrance with a Quadriga The structural significance of the missed triumph in Penthesilea, however, is primarily reflected in the fact that the play unfolds between two triumphal entrances. Triumph comprises the piece’s central tectonic element. It is the desire to

98 See Schneider, “Die Welt im Ausnahmezustand,” 115, 108ff.; Rüdiger Campe, “Zweierlei Gesetz in Kleists ‘Penthesilea’: Naturrecht und Biopolitik,” in Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz, ed. Rüdiger Campe (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2008), 313–342, here 325ff., specifically on the dissolution of “ordered contingency” in Penthesilea. 99 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 22. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 433f.): “Wie in der Feueresse eingeschmelzt, / Zum Haufen, Roß und Reut’rinnen, zusammen!” 100 Gottfried Boehm, “Der Grund, oder das ikonische Kontinuum,” 73. On teichoscopy, see Gabriele Brandstetter, “Penthesilea: Das Wort des Greuelrätsels, Die Überschreitung der Tragödie,” in Kleists Dramen: Interpretationen, ed. Walter Hinderer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 75–115, here 86. See also Campe, “Zweierlei Gesetz in Kleists ‘Penthesilea,’” 331ff., in this context specifically in relation to the concept of hypotyposis. 101 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 27. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 552): “Sie rückt nicht aus dem Hintergrund hervor.” 102 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 16. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 349): “Doch in den Gründen bald verschwand er mir.” 103 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 31; modified from “What victory!” Kleist, Penthesilea (line 628): “Nichts vom Triumph mir!”

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step forth in celebration that endows the play with form, and the disenchantment of this desire that then strips this form away. In the third and twenty-fourth scenes—or entrances, Auftritte—these actions take place in different, though interrelated forms. Rarely has an entrance announced itself with more grandeur than the one made by Achilles in the third scene. He appears to approach from the depths of the stage in full splendor, without veering from his path. In the teichoscopic account prefaced by the Greeks with the command “Behold!,” a festive image emerges—of a victorious figure coming closer on a four-horse chariot and advancing to the proscenium. Following the European model of triumphal iconography, Achilles’s entrance resembles the sun, and his approach is portrayed as a sunrise. The verses follow the gradual rise of this star on the horizon: “Just like the sun / Rising in splendor on a clear spring day!”104 Shouts of triumph identify the protocol governing Achilles’s appearance, hearkening back to the definition of “Auftritt” in Grimms’ dictionary as a “sinnliches Aufsteigen,” or a sublime, physical rising up:105 “A triumph! Achilles! The gods’ own son! A triumph! / Driving the four-horse chariot home himself! He’s safe!”106 At the same time, the verse’s form itself gives an indication of just how highly we are to think of this ostensibly stellar certainty. Not only is each verse that describes Achilles’s ascent punctuated with a question mark that calls into question his imperceptibly gradual movement; he is also interrupted by interjected questions (“Whose?”) that discredit the visual evidence of solar progression. Moreover, even before the sun reaches its apogee, a visual break becomes apparent that casts doubt on the brilliant totality of the triumphal image,107 inasmuch as the ascent of the hero also makes visible the discordances that stand in the way of his full realization. In dissipating into degrees of ascension, the rising sun also divides into two conflicting halves. Upon crossing a midway point—“the golden belt,” as it is named in the verses—the triumphal chariot becomes a vehicle of war, and the radiant hero is transformed into a centaur.

104 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 18. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 368f.): “So geht die Sonne prachtvoll / An einem heitern Frühlingstage auf.” 105 “Auftritt,” in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854), column 765f. 106 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 18; translation modified from “Hurrah!” to “A triumph!” Kleist, Penthesilea (lines 370f.): “Triumph! Achilles ist’s! Der Göttersohn! / Selbst die Quadriga führet er heran! Er ist gerettet!” 107 On the dichotomy of dust and imaginary wholeness, see Bettine Menke, “Körper-Bild und -Zerfällung, Staub: Über Heinrich von Kleists ‘Penthesilea,’” in Körper – Gedächtnis – Schrift: Der Körper als Medium kultureller Erinnerung, ed. Claudia Öhlschläger and Birgit Wiens (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1997), 122–156, here 138ff.

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Look! Rising up above that mountain ridge, Is that a head I see, an armored head? A helmet, feathers dance up above? The neck that bears the head, the powerful neck? The arms, the shoulders dressed in flashing steel? The shining breastplates, don’t you see them, friends, Down to the golden belt around his waist? ... Now I can see the heads, adorned with blazes, Of his four stallions! Only their haunches And hooves are still concealed behind the ridge. On the horizon, there it is, complete, A chariot fit for war!108

The triumphal image is thus no longer “simple and uniform . . . a complete piece,” as one reads in Horace’s The Art of Poetry, but an apparition of monstrous appearance, which shatters, in the second half of its path, the very image it constituted in the first.109 Nor is this image stationary, as its spectators initially claim: rather, it is seen to be caught in a rending movement. Racine in Phaedra was certainly not the first to depict horses as iconoclasts whose unleashed energies are capable of tearing their driver down into the dust and ripping his body apart. And here, too, the gravitational approach made possible by the triumph is likewise immediately transformed into a storm of images that smashes the figures on stage, for Achilles proves to be neither master of the scene nor ruler over a subjugated space of appearance. The victor is revealed as the one being hunted— as a figure who advances without any clear aim, and whose movements remain caught within the chaotically energetic field of war. His vehicle is torn around from its course “[o]ff to the side!”;110 the rising sun disappears into a gray cloud of dust, which immediately absorbs the figure attempting to step forward in the splendor of “this lone jewel’s magnificence”; and the hero is surrounded and smothered. James Elkin’s remark that “grounds might envelop and suffocate

108 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 18. Kleist, Penthesilea (lines 356ff.): “Seht! Steigt dort über jenes Berges Rücken, / Ein Haupt nicht, ein bewaffnetes, empor? / Ein Helm, von Federbüschen überschattet? / Der Nacken schon, der mächt’ge, der es trägt? / Die Schultern auch, die Arme, stahlumglänzt? / Das ganze Brustgebild, o seht doch, Freunde, / Bis wo den Leib der gold’ne Gurt umschließt? / . . . / Die Häupter sieht man schon, geschmückt mit Blessen, / Des Roßgespanns! Nur noch die Schenkel sind, / Die Hufen, von der Höhe Rand bedeckt! / Jetzt, auf dem Horizonte, steht das ganze / Kriegsfahrzeug da!” 109 Q. Horatius Flaccus [Horace], The Art of Poetry: To the Pisos, ed. C. Smart and Theodore Alois Buckley, Perseus project, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0893. phi006.perseus-eng1:1-43. 110 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 21. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 424): “zur Seite.”

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figures” can also be applied to Kleist’s dramaturgy of dedifferentiation,111 which counters the processes of euphoric individuation that is formalized in the protocol of the triumph with drastically undifferentiated states: “Dust all around / . . . The eye can no longer discern a thing.”112 Such an utterance signals the collapse of the figure-ground distinction, emphasizing once again the antitriumphalist side to Kleist’s dramaturgy of war. Achilles will not reach the foreground of either the stage or the war; and even as he approaches, he will remain caught by an energy field that pulls him back into a void, into the “grounds” of the stage, where he vanishes once more. Kleist reveals this dark ground as the truth behind the images of victory. Triumph and sunrise prove to be “screen scenes” that superimpose teichoscopic images of victory where in truth there is nothing at all,113 or rather, where there is nothing but a bellicose turbulence that buries the figures within and beneath itself. At the same time, the features of a modern theater of war begin to emerge here, characterized, to cite Samuel Weber, by the “preponderance of energy over matter, of force over bodies, of power over place.”114 This truncation of triumphal figuration at the horizon of the stage—or in other words, the fact that Achilles cannot advance to the apron—is also historically telling. In it, one can discern the last offshoot of a series of triumphal screen scenes marking the center, to use terminology of Albrecht Koschorke, of the Prussian imaginary.115 The word “quadriga” employed in the teichoscopic account, for instance, refers to a catastrophic moment in the conflict between Prussian and the Napoleonic forces during the Napoleonic wars—a scene of Prussian humiliation that had a long-lasting, traumatic impact in the years Penthesilea was written. It evokes a context that not only reveals the discrepancy between triumphal image and monstrous truth, but simultaneously explains why this discordance erupts again and again. As will now be shown, the repeated appearance of this discordance in Kleist’s publications bears a direct relation to the fate of the triumphal group of figures that Gottfried Schadow had created for the pediment of the 111 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 115. 112 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 22. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 433ff.): “Staub ringsrum, / . . . Das Aug’ erkennt nichts mehr, wie scharf es sieht.” On the dichotomy of dust and imaginary wholeness, see Menke, “Körper-Bild und -Zerfällung, Staub.” 113 See Freddie Rokem, “Meta-Theatricality and Screen-Scenes,” in Hamlet-Handbuch: Stoffe, Aneignungen, Deutungen, ed. Peter W. Marx (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2014), 53–58. 114 Samuel Weber, “Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality,” in Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 97–103. 115 See Koschorke et al., Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007.

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Brandenburg Gate. The same applies to the frontispiece of the journal Phoebus, edited by Kleist, in which the fragment of Penthesilea was published, and which was quite rightly associated with Achilles’s entrance (Figure 27). Yet the full significance of this charged connection only becomes apparent when it is noted that both Kleist’s dramatic fragment and the frontispiece to this journal conjure an image of victory with a quadriga that in fact no longer stood upon the Brandenburg gate. Both Achilles’s solar entrance and the title page of Phoebus, which deploys the iconic power of the figure Apollo borne in triumph by a four-horse chariot, point directly toward this void in the symbolic-political center of Berlin. That is to say, they both conceal and recall the fact that the Prussian image of triumph par excellence had been removed from its place: for after defeating the Prussians at Jena and Auerstedt, Napoleon had ordered that the statue be dismantled and taken to Paris.

Figure 25: The Brandenburg Gate without its quadriga (1813/1814), image extracted from page 076 of volume 1 of Journal of a Tour in Germany, Sweden, Russia, Poland, during . . . 1813 and 1814, by JAMES, John Thomas, British Library HMNTS 10291.dd.15 (https://de.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Datei:JAMES(1817)_p1.076_BERLIN,_BRANDENBURGER_TOR.jpg).

As one newspaper reported: The quadriga—the triumphal chariot—has now been removed from the attic of Berlin’s ... Brandenburg Gate, to be taken to Paris. Standing in this quadriga, modeled after forms

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from classical antiquity, one finds the goddess of victory holding the signs of victory in her hand.116

This void remained palpable in Berlin and Prussia until the quadriga was returned in 1814, and then even beyond that date, yet it did not manifest itself via an absence that was complete.117 Rather, it was felt in the remnant of an iron rod that had served to support Schadow’s figure of Victoria but now stood out as blank piece of material utterly resistant to any sense, and thus as a stubbornly painful sign of the quadriga’s absence (Figure 25): “Now the only thing left on the gate is a high iron rod, to which all of it [the quadriga] had been attached, as nothing but a dreadful memory.”118 It was not long after Napoleon’s triumphant entrance into Berlin in 1806 that Friedrich August Wolf, the classicist who remade philology with his critical studies of the Homeric corpus, composed a distich in German and Latin reinterpreting this rod as a thorn in Prussian flesh: Cuspis portae Brandenburgicae “Exstans magnanimam pupugi probe aculeus urbem: Post pugnam latinans, huc redeunte Dea.” Das Brandenburger Thor “Ragend reizte mit Macht mein Stachel die edlen Berliner: Reiz’ er sie ferner versteckt, kehr mir die Göttin zurück.”

116 Münchner Mittwochs- und Sonntagsblatt für den gebildeten und bildungsfähigen Bürger und Landmann in Baiern in Deutschland überhaupt, Munich 1806, no. 16 (December 28, 1806), here 418. See Emil von Siefart, Aus der Geschichte des Brandenburger Tores und der Quadriga (Berlin: Verlag des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, Ernst Seggfried Mittler und Sohn, 1912), 75ff.; Michael S. Cullen and Uwe Kieling, Das Brandenburger Tor: Die Geschichte eines deutschen Symbols (Berlin: Argon, 1999), 43–46; Hannelore Gärtner, “Im Angesicht ihrer neu errungenen Glorie: Raub der Quadriga vom Brandenburger Tor durch Napoleon I. 1806 und ihre Rückführung 1814 von Paris nach Berlin,” in Die Quadriga auf dem Brandenburger Tor: Zwischen Raub, Revolution und Frieden, ed. Ulrike Krenzlin (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1991), 13–26. 117 As nineteenth-century memoirs show, this memory fueled anti-French resentment throughout the following century and ultimately proved fertile in mobilizing German sentiment against the French around 1870: “During the long years of subjugation, the iron rod that served to support the goddess Victoria protruded, stark and barren, above the gate. It must have been a stab into the eyes and hearts of everyone who passed by, forcing all to feel the wound as if it were fresh.” Siefart, Aus der Geschichte des Brandenburger Tores und der Quadriga, 76. 118 “Französische Plünderungen: Der Siegeswagen vom Brandenburger,” Das Neue Deutschland, February 7, 1814, 15.

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Figure 26: The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, April 10, 1814, in Die Quadriga auf dem Brandenburger Tor: Zwischen Raub, Revolution und Frieden, ed. Ulrike Krenzlin (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1991), 22.

An English rendering of the German might read: The Brandenburg Gate “My jutting thorn is a mighty goad to the fine Berliners: However hidden it be, may the goddess return.”119

It is this persistent remnant of a thorn that is emphasized by the initial position of the word “Exstans”—“standing out” or “jutting”—and that drives the production of triumphal phantasms. Kleist’s quadrigas occupy and swirl around “the little piece of the real”120 in the center of a visual fantasy that always refers, as it arises, to an empty place where an entrance is to be made. In “jutting out,” this remnant provokes endlessly new and phantasmic fantasies of entering the scene.

119 Quote from Friedrich August Wolf in Siefart, “Aus der Geschichte des Brandenburger Tores,” 93. 120 If one follows Žižek’s theory of the imaginary, as inspired by Lacan, it is “the little piece of the real,” “an extimate kernel” in the center of an illusion serving “to fill out the place of this void that gapes in the very heart of the symbolic”: “[s]omething sticks out.” Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 52.

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Figure 27: Ferdinand Hartmann, Phoebus above Dresden, design for a theater curtain (1808), in Phöbus: Ein Journal für die Kunst, ed. Heinrich v. Kleist and Adam H. Müller (Darmstadt: 1961), cover image.

In the eye of the excited spectator or teichoscopic witness, this lack turns into jubilatory fullness, and the looted vehicle reappears as a physical and sensual rising up, a sinnliches Aufsteigen (see Figure 26). This “lone jewel’s magnificence” is thus nothing but a solar—or rather, phoebic—frontispiece or title page covering up a ground in which there is nothing to see. Such a reading is further buttressed by the genesis of Phoebus’s title page and its origins in a drawing by Ferdinand Hartmann: as Ernst Osterkamp has shown, this drawing was itself initially intended as a design for a Dresden theater curtain, that is to say, as a

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screen.121 Like Achille’s entrance, Phoebus functions as a vision in the foreground obscuring dark and empty theaters further back.122

Raptus The tension between the image of victory and the war’s ground reaches its climax, however, in the twenty-fourth scene, or entrance [Auftritt], which now mobilizes the signs of triumph as the second pillar of the triumphal structure defining the piece, but this time for Penthesilea. It is her final entrance, in which she famously follows the model set by Euripides’s Bacchae in stepping onto the stage with the dismembered corpse of Achilles,123 that finally and conclusively realizes the fractured triumphal structure of the play. Having wreaked havoc in the unseen ground of the war, Penthesilea now reappears on stage in a state of triumphant delusion. Her entrance meets the criteria for a mock triumph or a parody of triumph, in which a character who has been defeated or deceived stages themselves as the ostensible victor and thus appears in a mantle of splendor that drastically contradicts their real situation. Triumphs of this kind result from an act of self-misrecognition: they attempt to present something that has happened in a state of blind madness, and which now devastates the triumphant character, as the glorious effect of a sovereign act. The hallmark of such triumphal parodies, which can be found even in ancients works of drama,124 is a moment in which the subject who mistakes itself as omnipotent in an instance of triumph is seized by a passion depriving it of control over itself and the scene. The characteristic of this nonsovereign form of entrance, which can also be traced to Euripides’s Bacchae, is raptus: the state of being carried away in the act of appearing by a superior, intoxicating power that truly rules the scene. In the case of Euripides’s tragedy, it is Bacchus or Dionysus himself, the triumphant god, who humiliates those subjugated on stage by allowing them to persist in a delusion of triumph even in the moment of their defeat. Richard Paul Jodrell, one of the key

121 Ernst Osterkamp, “Das Geschäft der Vereinigung: Über den Zusammenhang von bildender Kunst und Poesie im ‘Phoebus,’” Kleist-Jahrbuch 1990, 51–71, here 53: “The drawing was originally designed by the ingenious Hartmann as a curtain for the Dresden theater.” 122 See Campe, “Zweierlei Gesetz in Kleists ‘Penthesilea,’” 333. 123 On the connection to Agave of Thebes, the mother of Pentheus, who tears her son apart, see Bernhard Böschenstein, “Die ‘Bakchen’ des Euripides in der Umgestaltung Hölderlins und Kleists,” in Aspekte der Goethezeit, ed. Stanley A. Corngold, Michael Curschmann, and Theodore J. Ziolkowski (Göttingen Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977), 240–254, here 252ff. 124 See Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture, 29ff.

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eighteenth-century commentators of the Bacchae, prefaced his Illustrations of Euripides on the Ion and the Bacchae with a motto that succinctly articulates this passivity in triumph and the violence of being swept away in Bacchanalian frenzy: “Quo me, Bacche, rapis / tui plenum”—“Where are you taking me, Bacchus, fullness of my heart, God of intoxication?”125 Deployed in Penthesilea, this refashions the triumphal act of self-positing as a scene of pathos. Triumph turns to raptus, sovereignty falls into madness, laurels become a Christian crown of thorns, acclamation twists to horror, and the power of making an entrance that is bound to the form of triumph is transformed into the self-exposition of a subject caught in delirium: Look, women! There she is, look! Walking toward us, A wreath of nettles on her head, the horror, In place of laurels, twined with barren twigs Of hawthorn, following behind the corpse, Her bow slung festively across her shoulder, As if she’d killed a mortal enemy!126

What is seen here in teichoscopic form is the only emphatic entrance realized in Penthesilea. It is nothing less than a festive advance from the background to the forefront of the stage. But this movement also seals the final capitulation of the figure, for the triumph that marks the end of the fighting now bears, onto the stage itself, the very horrors of the war that victory should in fact have overcome. In a turn of the tables, the forces that the public demonstration of triumph claims to have conquered now reassert themselves in triumphal form. Through its heightened splendor, Penthesilea’s triumphant entrance is meant to erase any memory of the fragmentation that the subject suffers in the ground of war, and to guide this subject out of this scene of violence in a powerful step that seizes space for itself. But in the end, it is precisely the violent ground from which this entrance is made that ultimately triumphs in the piece. With Penthesilea’s torn booty, the war itself penetrates the figure, and Achilles’s membra disiecta penetrate the triumphator’s splendid form. Penthesilea’s appearance brings the backstage itself onto the scene, which in turn carries her away, even as she makes her entrance. Her figure, one could say again with James Elkins, is “mingled with background,”127 shot through with the ground of war. 125 Motto in Richard Paul Jodrell, Illustrations of Euripides, on the Ion and the Bacchae (London: J. Nichols, 1781). 126 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Agee, 130. Kleist, Penthesilea (line 2704 ff): “Seht, seht, ihr Frau’n! – Da schreitet sie heran, / Bekränzt mit Nesseln, die Entsetzliche, / Dem dürren Reif des Hag’dorns eingewebt, / An Lorbeer-Schmuckes statt, und folgt der Leiche, / Die Gräßliche, den Bogen festlich schulternd / Als wärs der Todfeind, den sie überwunden.” 127 Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, 100.

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Dionysian Stirrings: From Rousseau’s Pygmalion to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy The Entrance of the Statue Were one to look in the eighteenth century for a primal scene of entering the stage, Rousseau’s Pygmalion could not be ignored. This mono- or rather melodrama about the desire of a sculptor for a work of his own creation reaches its climax at the very moment the stone he has shaped steps down from its pedestal and onto the stage. It is the artist’s prayer to the goddess Venus that imparts motion to a lifelike but lifeless image. Rousseau’s scene is devoted precisely to the conditions under which a figure that initially stands beautifully but motionlessly in the background, “[d]ans le fond,”128 comes to make an entrance. Even the stage design anticipates this entrance in placing the statue of Galathée on a pedestal with steps, thus showing us from the outset the path that she will take. The crux of the rudimentary plot in this one-act play is the bringing together of two complementary rhetorical principles, enargeia and energeia, in a combination that generates the theatrical evidentia, or manifest presence before one’s eyes, of an entrance. The effect of this vivification results from the coming together of image and movement. Rousseau’s monodrama Pygmalion dramatizes the attempt to combine vivid clarity and energy in such a way that the inanimate image of the nymph itself begins to move—“se mouvoir et descendre”129—and convince even the incredulous sculptor, with irresistible persuasiveness, that her movement is real. Though the statue initially appears as “insensé,”130 as “immobile et “froid[e],”131 it acquires a living presence that expresses itself in striding, and not, as in Ovid, in touching.

128 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion: Scène lyrique, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Théatre – Poesies, Essais Littéraires, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1224–1231, here 1224. A historical translation into English exists: Pygmalion, A Poem, from the French of J. J. Rousseau (London: J. Kearby, 1779). But since it integrates many of the stage directions from the French into the verse narrative, the original will be cited here. The “advertisement” preceding the text notes: “As this translation as intended only for the closet, I have reduced into narrative such descriptions of the scene, action, etc. as served to embellish the theatrical performance, and have like wise made some small additions, which I thought not improper, to introduce and illustrate the story.” The original French is reproduced at the bottom of each page. 129 Rousseau, Pygmalion, 1230. 130 Rousseau, Pygmalion, 1227. 131 Rousseau, Pygmalion, 1228.

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Energeia must be supplemented by enargeia, or as Jan-Dirk Müller writes: “Something must be added.”132 The arguments that now follow focus less on the complex projections that bring about this miracle, and more on the components that furnish the entrance with its effect. Pygmalion can be read as the dramatization of art discourse inasmuch as it reveals the elements that are indispensable for making an entrance, while also specifying the relationship that must obtain in the entrance between vivid clarity and energy. The stage of this monodrama is characterized by a perfect interplay between the stability of sculptural form and the measuredness of movement. The enargeia of the beautiful image is delivered with a precisely measured amount of force, which ensures that the statue’s perfect form is embellished and not disfigured. Vehement movements are to be found only on the part of the artist in his despair at the barrenness of his own creativity. More precise indications about the tempo and intensity of this animation, however, are not to be gleaned from the text itself, but rather from its settings to music by Rousseau and others. A look at the work of the German composer Georg Anton Benda (1722–1795), for instance, who wrote musical versions of a number of monodramas, including Rousseau’s Pygmalion, gives one impression of the metrical pace this entrance was taken to follow. The musical passage that dictates the tempo of the animation is labeled “allegretto.” This tempo directs the statue to move at a leisurely pace aimed at maintaining a balance between the material of marble and life. “In musical terms, allegretto means somewhat lively, or cheerful, but still in a harmonious and sweet manner.”133 In Germany, this moderate model of Pygmalion came to function within the discourse of Classicism as a benchmark for what it means to make a successful entrance. Beginning with Rousseau’s Pygmalion, a classical topos took shape during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century that entirely

132 See Jan-Dirk Müller, “Evidentia und Medialität: Zur Ausdifferenzierung von Evidenz in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Auf die Wirklichkeit zeigen: Zum Problem der Evidenz in den Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Helmut Lethen, Ludwig Jäger, and Albrecht Koschorke (Campus: Frankfurt am Main, 2015), 261–290, here 268. On the relationship between image and movement in the context of Pygmalion, see Inka Mülder-Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions: Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der “Darstellung” im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 46ff. 133 “Allegretto,” in Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, vol. 45 (Leipzig/Halle: Zedler, 1732–1754), column 1239. See also Edgar Istel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Komponist seiner lyrischen Scene “Pygmalion” (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1901), for a discussion of the musical setting composed by Horace Coignet. Here, too, the music for the moment of animation is characterized as “dancing sweetly and delicately” (65).

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recast both theatrical play and dramatic progression as statuary events and forms. It is sculpture that became the reference medium for an art that strives, in text and performance, to maintain formal control over the body even in moments of utterly extreme and violent movement. If drama is defined as the genre of movere, of passions set in physical and mental motion, the medium of sculpture counters this movement with a fixed and solid container.134 The topos of the statue on the stage is rooted in the conviction that only stone is able to contain the inner and outer movements unleashed by dramatic action. In a conversation with Eckermann, Goethe, too, recommended that the actor “study carefully the antique sculptures which have come down to us, and . . . impress on his mind the natural grace of their sitting, standing, and walking.”135 Everything classified under movements—passions, gestures, and gaits—is to be modeled after the canonized stone figures of classical antiquity.136 The theater of German Classicism is thus oriented toward an art form devoid of any succession or movement in which, as Hegel notes in his Aesthetics, only a “first and easy beginning of action” is possible.137 In Pygmalion-like fashion, it reemphasizes the inchoative moment of the entrance: the beginning and impulse of stepping forth as though the statue were alive, together with the primacy of a stable form over the emotional and dramaturgical dynamic that comes with the progression of the dramatic action. This is especially true of the genre of tragedy, whose heroes, as Hegel writes in his Aesthetics, “have risen to become, as it were, works of sculpture, whether they be living representatives of the substantive spheres of life or individuals great and firm in other ways on the strength of their free self-reliance.”138

134 Ulrich Port, Pathosformeln: Die Tragödie und die Geschichte exaltierter Affekte (1755–1888) (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 161ff. Bernice Kaminskij, “Affekte im Drama,” in Drama: Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Andreas Engelhardt and Franziska Schössler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 321–339. 135 Johann Peter Eckermann’s account of Goethe’s remarks from April 1, 1827, in Eckermann, Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford (London: George Bell & Sons, 1874), 233. MA 19, 592–597, here 594. 136 On the following, see Juliane Vogel, Die Furie und das Gesetz: Zur Dramaturgie der “großen Szene” in der Tragödie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2002), 310, chapter “Slow Motion.” 137 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 706. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, in Hegel, Werke, vol. 14, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 357: “erster und leichter Beginn von Handlung.” 138 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 1195. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, Werke vol. 15, 522: “durch freies Beruhen auf sich große und feste Individuen, gleichsam zu Skulpturwerken hervorgehoben.”

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If the genre of tragedy demands that an individual step forth in corporeal totality from an undivided whole, then it is the “work of sculpture” that endows this individual with a fixed and solid shape. At the same time, the sculpture captures the lively yet measured motion of this stepping forth. Hegel also cedes the “summon[ing] into appearance as active” on which tragedy centers to the medium of sculpture.139 And he, too, delegates the act of individuation or “particularization” at the crux of his reflections to the material of stone.140 Here, too, this transferal is based on the assumption that only sculpture can progress through “the articulated (or, even better, an articulating) process of appearing”141 that endows an individual with liveliness and particularization. It is only the body of a statue, and precisely not that of an actor, that can shed the accidental qualities that cling to the human body. Here, too, the metaphor of a statue primarily serves to contain movement— whether it be the internal movement of a soul or the external movement of a body—within a sovereign and secure form: Then the sculptural figures come on this scene animated and, having developed their willing and feeling artistically, they make them objective both by expressive recitation and also by a pictorial play of features and inwardly motivated positions and movements of the rest of the body.142

Following a line of thought that derives from Hegel, however, it is possible to show how sculptural containment or the power to capture movement in form that is asserted by this Pygmalion scene gradually loses its force. Analyzing works by Joseph Anselm Feuerbach, and then primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche, this chapter will now retrace how the relationship between vivid clarity and force becomes unbalanced and is replaced by a new field of energies whose tempo can no longer be justifiably designated allegretto. This development is linked to a shift in the constitution of tragedy, as the genre came to be associated

139 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 1196. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, Werke, vol. 15, 523: “erscheinende Tätigkeit.” 140 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 1195. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, Werke, vol. 15, 522: “Besonderung.” See Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), XY; Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002), 15ff. 141 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 5. 142 English: Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1181. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 505: “In diesem Lokale treten sodann die Skulpturbilder beseelt auf und machen ihr Wollen und Empfinden in künstlerischer Ausbildung sowohl durch ausdruckvolle Rezitation als auch durch ein malerisches Mienenspiel und von innen her geformte Stellungen und Bewegungen des übrigen Körpers objektiv.”

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with a rending movement that abandons its figures to energies that destroy their contours the very moment an entrance is made. As will be shown below, the metaphor of the statue, which was intended to stabilize the tragic human form even amid a storm of affects, finds itself increasingly exposed to the dangers of a movement or kinesis that ruptures boundaries and threatens to level out all difference. In nineteenth-century discourse, tragedy is conceived as an energetic event—that is to say, as the expression of a rending force and thus as an excessive energeia— whose violence is revealed in what appears; and it is the conceptual and formal mastering of this violence that moves to the center of the discourse on tragedy. This development is connected not least of all with the discovery by classical philologists and archeologists of the day of an antiquity shaped by ritual, archaic practices and beliefs that perceived, behind the ancient world of ideals, a mythical violence which could no longer be pacified in Pygmalion terms.143 The more a Dionysian-Bacchanalian or Maenadian side of antiquity emerges, the more clearly the dimensions of tragic movement shift. Given such transformations in these energetic signs, entrances, too, come to be perceived as moments of possible transgressions. They increasingly become potential gateways for a penetrating or overshooting energy that threatens to deform the containment and boundaries of sculpture just as it violently tears away the very theater whose limits it breaches. At the same time, the features of a modern theater of war begin to emerge that is characterized, to cite Samuel Weber, by the “preponderance of energy over matter, of force over bodies, of power over place.”144

143 “Dionysos,” in Der neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike, vol., 3, ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmut Schneider (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1997), columns 625–649. On the role of Friedrich Creuzer, see Timo Günther, “‘Dionysos’: Zur Konjunktur einer neuplatonischen Denkfigur im Tragödiendiskurs der Moderne,” in Die Tragödie der Moderne: Gattungsgeschichte – Kulturtheorie – Epochendiagnose, ed. Daniel Fulda and Thorsten Valk (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 161–176, here 162. See also Oliver Leege, “Dionysos in der modernen Religionsgeschichte,” in Dionysos: Verwandlung und Ekstase, ed. Renate Schlesier and Agnes Schwarzmaier (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2008), 132–142; Peter-André Alt, “Katharsis und Ekstasis: Die Restitution der Tragödie als Ritual aus dem Geist der Psychoanalyse,” in Die Tragödie der Moderne: Gattungsgeschichte – Kulturtheorie – Epochendiagnose, ed. Daniel Fulda and Thorsten Valk (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 177–206. 144 Samuel Weber, “Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality,” in Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 97–120, here 98.

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Figure 28: Joseph Anselm Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo: Eine Reihe archäologischästhetischer Betrachtungen (Nuremberg: Friedrich Campe, 1833), frontispiece.

Joseph Anselm Feuerbach Hegel is the key point of reference for the concept of tragedy developed by the classical philologist and archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach (not to be confused with his son Anselm Feuerbach, a painter) in his 1833 treatise Der Vaticanische Apollo (The Vatican Apollo). In this study of movement in ancient sculpture, Feuerbach describes Greek drama in terms of sculptural evolution. His depiction, guided by topoi of classicist theater, presents tragic figures as statues that initially appear in clearly delineated form and in contrast to one another: Viewed as members of a large whole, the individual characters of Greek tragedy step apart from one another as distinctly defined individuals, yet without being elevated in a

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painterly fashion by means of artificial contrasts, and without obscuring or casting shadows on each other. The characters isolate themselves like statues, each separate and reposing on itself, none becoming lost in the twilight of an aerial perspective, all of them, even the secondary figures, in the most dignified completeness.145

Even if Feuerbach’s reflections are based upon the solidity of statue-like forms, he goes beyond Hegel in two decisive points. First, he foregrounds the sculptural dimension of tragedy to such an extent that its dramatic character is completely lost from view. Dramatic action draws his attention only insofar as it relates to a sculptural paradigm. And second, he attributes an emphatic quality to the movement of statues that aims for much more than Hegel’s conventional optics. Feuerbach’s writings pursue the stepping forth of Greek sculptures with a persistence that can only be called obsessive. Sharply rejecting widespread notions of “silent greatness,” he foregrounds an “energetic force” that makes statues appear to advance and thus to make an entrance (see Figure 28).146 As evidence, he lists a number of statues that appear to be raising their legs and thus prompt the beholder to perceive an illusion of movement. Contrary to the popular view of the time that statues were artifacts withdrawn into themselves and standing motionless, he emphatically insists on their mobility. Hence it is no surprise that the history he tells of Greek sculpture starts at the moment where the static images of Egyptian gods begin to take strong steps.147 This shift in focus is associated with a momentous change of perspective that alters the view not only of Greek sculpture, but also of the figures in tragedy that derive from it. Feuerbach perceives both circles of characters—in tragedy and in sculpture—not in terms of their being, but of their appearing, and this means in terms of their entering. The following passage about the Apollo of Barberini and a Minerva located in Dresden makes clear the extent to which Feuerbach’s theater of sculptures is itself a theater centered on making an entrance or appearance:

145 Joseph Anselm Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo: Eine Reihe archäologisch-ästhetischer Betrachtungen (Nuremberg: Friedrich Campe, 1833), 327f.: “Als die Glieder eines großen Ganzen betrachtet, treten die einzelnen Charaktere der griechischen Tragödie in fester Umgränzung auseinander, ohne darum durch gesuchte Kontraste sich malerisch zu heben, ohne sich zu verdecken und zu verschatten. Sie isolieren sich wie Statuen, jede gesondert auf sich selbst beruhend, keine in dämmernder Luftperspective sich verlierend, alle, auch die Nebenfiguren, in der gediegensten Vollständigkeit.” 146 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 11: “energische Kraft.” On the dramaturgy of the statue, see Vogel, Die Furie und das Gesetz, 307–349. On the Pygmalion complex, see Matthias Meyer and Gerhard Neumann, eds., Pygmalion: Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 1997. 147 See Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 17ff.

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The left foot, however, is raised up to take a step, and one cannot describe the majesty with which the statue seems to approach the viewer and then pause, in order to hear the word of a supplicant. There is, though, a Minerva in Dresden that appears to stride forward with even more powerful steps. She is conceived as a Promachos, rushing down from Olympus to come to the aid of men in battle. In both statues, the gods are unmistakably represented not merely as being, but as appearing; their position bespeaks the same claim captured in the famous phrase that the gods are wont to enter the tragic stage.148

Given these arguments, an analogy rapidly suggests itself between the entrance of a tragic character and the “appearance” of a Greek statue. In Feuerbach’s view, they each stage themselves with the same dynamic initial movement. Their comparability rests not only on the completeness of their contours, but above all on the energetic force that appears to propel their first steps. When Feuerbach engages with tragedy, he looks first toward the entrances of tragic heroes. To illustrate the way in which the related arts of sculpture and tragedy reciprocally energize each other, he cites examples from Sophocles’s Philoctetes, from the Eumenides, and especially from the verses that Orestes delivers upon entering in Aeschylus’s Choephorae: “heko . . . kai katechomei”—“I [return/] have returned to this land and am back again.”149 In Feuerbach’s arguments, these quotations evoke a heightened imagination of movement that is ultimately transferred from the statue to the actor as the ideal of a “a rhythmically measured, imposing strutting.”150 As the very title of Feuerbach’s treatise indicates, this idea of a majestic appearance is determined by the towering image of the Apollo Belvedere. All of Feuerbach’s arguments about form and movement are related to this prominent work of art. For critics in the eighteenth century, it had come to represent the epitome of ancient sculpture and was, by Feuerbach’s time, becoming nothing

148 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 21: “Der linke Fuß ist aber zum Schritte gehoben, und unbeschreiblich die Majestät, mit welchem die Statue dem Beschauer entgegenzutreten, und dann inne zu halten scheint, um dann das Wort eines Flehenden zu vernehmen. – Mächtiger ausschreitend zeigt sich eine Minerva in Dresden. Sie ist als Promachos gedacht, rasch zum tätigen Beistand vom Olymp herniedereilend. In beiden Statuen sind die Götter unverkennbar nicht blos als seiend, sondern als erscheinend dargestellt; ihre Stellung sagt ganz dasselbe, was jene bekannte Formel sagt, womit die Götter die tragische Bühne zu betreten pflegen.” 149 Aristophanes, Frogs, in Aristophanes, The Complete Plays, trans. Paul Roche (New York: New American Library, 2005), 590. On the temporality and significance of the word “heko,” which marks the first entrance in many Greek tragedies, see Susanne Gödde, Das Drama der Hikesie: Ritual und Rhetorik in Aischylos’ Hiketiden (Münster: Aschendorff, 2000), 38. 150 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 332: “ein rhythmisch gemessenes, imposantes Einherschreiten.”

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less than a “cultural power.”151 The form of entrance associated with this work is suitably triumphal. In the passage cited below, Feuerbach describes the figure as explicitly rising like the sun, in an entrance offering a paradigmatic example of a sinnliches Aufsteigen that balances form and movement:152 Ramdohr compares the first sight of our statue with the natural spectacle that presented itself as he saw the sun rise over the surface of the sea for the first time near Genoa. And so it is. Shining with solemn glory and striding across its high path, as Homer says of the sun, the Vatican Apollo steps toward us.153

At the same time, energies become palpable in Feuerbach’s descriptions that begin to disturb the balance of the forces entangled in this entrance. In venturing that, in Greek sculpture, “form exists only for the sake of movement,” Feuerbach posits an imbalance that can redound to the detriment of form.154 Especially in his representation of affects, one can feel the repercussions of a movement that is no longer fully controlled by the sculptural container. Feuerbach’s statues are threatened, at least potentially, by energies that generally endanger both the “fixed norm” of form and the integrity of their solid figure.155 At least apotropaically, with a defensive gesture, Feuerbach evokes the possibility of a “rending,”156 “violent,”157 or “demonic”158 movement that exceeds the “right measure” Greek sculpture was expected to maintain. Repeatedly, he warns of “too much expression and movement.”159 He writes in these passages of a “current enclosed in a bed that is too narrow, raging and seething away.”160 Ex negativo, but in strong images, he points to the possibility of a force that might develop and sweep aside the entrance protocol embodied in these statues:

151 Theodor Birt [pseud. Beatus Rhenanus], Unterhaltung in Rom: Fünf Gespräche deutscher Reisender (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1895), 35f. Quoted from Christiane Zintzen, Von Pompeji nach Troja: Archäologie, Literatur und Öffentlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna WUV-Universität Verlag 1998), 1 and 130. 152 “Auftritt,” in Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 1. 153 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 95f.: “Ramdohr vergleicht den ersten Anblick unserer Statue mit dem Naturschauspiele, das sich ihm darbot, als er zum erstenmal bei Genua die Sonne über die Fläche des Meeres aufgehen sah. Und also ist es. Glänzend feierlich und hochhinwandelnd, wie Homer die Sonne nennt, tritt der vaticanische Apoll uns entgegen.” 154 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 11: “Form nur der Bewegung wegen da sei.” 155 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 53: “fest Norm.” 156 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 53: “reißenden.” 157 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 37: “heftigen.” 158 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 27, 36: “dämonischen.” 159 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 78: “Zu-Viel des Ausdrucks und der Bewegung.” 160 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 72: “Strom, welcher in ein zu enges Bett eingeschlossen, nur tobend dahin schäumte.”

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Nothing would be more foolish than to find, in the principle of life discussed so far, something akin to a blind, tempestuous power, an artistic idée fixe, which need only be touched for it to unleash a whirling vertigo that would tear away all images of gods and men, or whatever else might stir or rouse itself.161

When Feuerbach compares the sudden shining of a Minerva with a “streaking meteor of fire,”162 other, more violent forms of entering become conceivable, which no longer fit into the scheme of manifest presence afforded by the “living individuality” to which both Feuerbach and Hegel are committed in their writings. And when a statue of Neptune is said to have its “body [thrown] back like a swell,” and “the full ferocity of an outraged element . . . appears to have been transferred into the movement of its master,”163 then this motion has destabilized form in a way that renders it unrecognizable. It was not until Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy of 1872, however, that the antagonism between a firm contour and violent movement would become the focus of a new conception of tragedy. In Nietzsche’s treatise, manifest presence and energy cease to work in tandem; or rather, they become equal yet antagonistic forces that are simultaneously unleashed and tamed in an entrance. The center of tragedy is now occupied by this “blind tempestuous power,” which appears on stage in an entrance that must be contained.

Enter Dionysus. A Storm of Images: Tragedy amid Iconoclasm Feuerbach’s discourse on the Vatican Apollo paves the way for Nietzsche’s early conception of the tragic. Nietzsche’s 1870 lecture “The Greek Music Drama” cites a key passage from Feuerbach that names sculpture as the sister art of tragedy.164

161 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 78ff.: “Nichts wäre thörichter, als in dem bisher besprochenen Principe des Lebens, gleichsam eine blinde stürmische Macht zu denken, eine fixe Kunstidee, welche nur berührt zu werden brauchte, um die Bilder von Göttern und Menschen, oder was sonst sich regen und strecken mag, rücksichtslos in taumelnden Schwindel mit sich fortzureißen.” 162 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 96: “jählings vorüberschießende[n] Feuermeteor.” 163 Feuerbach, Der Vaticanische Apollo, 80: “Körper zurückgeworfen [wird] wie eine Woge” and “die volle Wildheit eines empörten Elementes . . . in die Bewegung seines Beherrschers übergegangen zu sein.” 164 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Das griechische Musikdrama/The Greek Music Drama, trans. Paul Bishop (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2013). Friedrich Nietzsche, “Das griechische Musikdrama,” in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, vol, 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1980), 515–532, here 518ff.

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Nietzsche further follows Feuerbach in paying virtually no attention to the formal repertoire of Aristotelian tragedy. His arguments consider neither plot nor other Aristotelian structural elements of tragedy.165 Instead, his concept of tragedy is centered on an epiphany that is emphatically heightened to a level even beyond Feuerbach. Nietzsche’s model of tragedy is entirely based on the powerful appearance of a god, and his theater is fashioned solely for this entrance. His tragedy simply is the step taken by a god in entering, stepping forth, and seizing space, even if it remains undecided whether this is a vision or real presence. The god making an entrance here, however, is no longer Apollo, whom Feuerbach imagined appearing like a statue, imposing and majestic. Rather, it is Dionysus who embodies the force that Feuerbach had described as “tempestuous” and “rending.” In place of a sunrise marked by “clarity, visibility, and beautiful limitation,”166 an iconoclastic storm of images now threatens, which Nietzsche associates with the name Dionysus. The movement of Dionysus is described as a storming and raging, an overpowering bursting forth or rolling surge that threatens to shatter, as Nietzsche writes, “all the rigid, hostile barriers.”167 The force that Feuerbach had only permitted to appear from afar on the horizon of his deliberations, as a counterforce to the manifest presence of sculpture, has moved here to the center of tragic theory. The challenge of tragedy, however, does not consist of unleashing this destructive storm of images unabated on stage. Rather, its aim for Nietzsche is to symbolize the asymbolic itself,168 and to “re-direct” the iconoclastic driving force

165 See David E. Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” in Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel, ed. Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007), 199–212, here 203ff.; Karl Heinz Bohrer, Das Erscheinen des Dionysos: Antike Mythologie und moderne Metapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015), 170ff. This disengagement from Aristotle becomes explicit even earlier, in Nietzsche’s lecture “The Greek Musical Drama.” See Nietzsche, Das griechische Musikdrama/The Greek Music Drama, trans. Bishop, 28: “one could even say that, in its earlier developmental stages, it was not interested at all in action, in δρᾶμα [drama], but in suffering, in πάθος [pathos].” Nietzsche, “Das griechische Musikdrama,” 527: “Man kann sogar sagen, daß es auf ihren früheren Entwicklungsstufen gar nicht auf das Handeln, das δρᾶμα [dráma] abgesehn war, sondern auf das Leiden, das πάθος [páthos].” 166 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 23. 167 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, vol, 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1980), 9–156, here 29: “alle starren, feindseligen Abgrenzungen.” 168 Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” 206.

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of the Dionysian into “representations” in which image and movement are realized as equals.169 The tempestuous and unshaped forces surging closer in the theater are to be enclosed within the boundaries of an Apollonian entrance protocol. But conversely, Apollonian phenomena are to be opened up to Dionysian energies. The images of the Apollonian universe of art, which by themselves are immobile, receive animating impulses from a Dionysian force apostrophized as the energy of life. Entering under the direction of Apollo, Dionysus no longer speaks exclusively through “energies” or “forces” [Kräfte], as Nietzsche writes, but with the “clarity and firmness” of a tragic figure.170 Yet this process is not designed as an equilibrium. It is an agon that escalates in every entrance: in the moment of tragic individuation, the tensions that obtain between figuration and defiguration, dream and intoxication, form and movement, and triumph and pathos are discharged, and the tragic crisis, which formerly took place in the action, now passes over to entrance and appearance. The tragic step forward and out into the scene is thus doubly coded: The Birth of Tragedy conceives it as both splendor and violence. This step articulates an energy that is compelled to take a radiant form, while emphatically remaining in motion; it is at once triumphant and torn apart. Hence it is no surprise that Nietzsche, too, imagines the appearance of Dionysus with iconographic accuracy: as a triumphal procession in which the god approaches on a chariot that is not only “laden with flowers and wreaths,”171 but also “yoke[s]” the forces driving him forward.172 Under the impact of the Apollonian counterforce, Dionysus’s violent “rolling surge” manifests itself as a festive approach of a splendid but destructive image—as jubilatory appearance and iconoclastic force at the same time. No less than the most powerful form for making an entrance is chosen to illustrate the simultaneity of splendor and violence. And yet Dionysus is also presented as a figure of suffering whose passage through the principium individuationis compels him to directly experience the violence he

169 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Speirs, 40. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 57: “sie allein vermag jene Ekelgedanken über das Entzetzliche oder Absurde des Daseins in Vorstellungen umzubiegen, mit denen sich leben lässt.” 170 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Speirs, 46. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 64: “Deutlichkeit und Festigkeit.” 171 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Speirs, 18. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 29: “mit Blumen und Kränzen überschüttet.” 172 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysiac World View, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Speirs, 123. Nietzsche, Die dionysische Weltanschauung, in Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, vol, 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1980), 550–577, here 558: “ins Joch spannt.”

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embodies. In Dionysus, as Timo Günther writes, opposites collapse into each other while still preserving their polar tension.173 Peter Sloterdijk aptly speaks of a “binary energetic complex of dam and flood, restraint and intoxication.”174 Such a position assumes a merging of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, or even establishes a “stationary polarity” of antagonistic extremes.175 David Wellbery, however, has proposed a model of redirection or reversal that emphasizes the dynamic quality of this complex of dual energies, thereby highlighting the internal alternating tensions of the Dionysian-Apollonian doubling that is characteristic for tragedy.176 In his view, the cultural achievement of tragedy is that it turns annihilation into life:177 The affirmation of life is to be achieved only where negation in its utmost form—as the negation of not this or that state, but of existence as such—is redirected into affirmation. Tragic form is nothing but the jumping between positions within this paradoxical structure.178

Wellbery’s view proves convincing here above all in identifying a potential for movement that can be translated or redirected into a motion of turning, bending, or jumping. The epiphany of Dionysus does not realize itself by “calmly sit[ting],”179 as it does in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which Nietzsche quotes at the opening of The Birth of Tragedy. Rather, it manifests itself in an emphatic turning forward out of the ground and toward the spectator. Enargeia and energeia invert their polarities to regain, from “negation in its utmost form,” the “affirmation of life” expressed in a tempestuous entrance. It is for this reason, too, that Nietzsche focuses his sole discussion of an actual entrance in Greek tragedy on an example that deals with a return from 173 See Timo Günther, “Dionysos,” 165, referring to Neoplatonic versions of the Dionysian. On polarity, see also Bohrer, Das Erscheinen des Dionysos, 146. 174 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, 29. 175 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, 56. 176 See Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” 206. 177 See Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” 208: the Apollonian thereby also gains “depth of significance, and mobility.” This averts, Wellbery continues, “the danger of Apollonian paralysis and superficiality,” as well as the “danger that the Dionysian will be all too overwhelming and rending in its movement.” 178 Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” 206. 179 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Speirs, 17. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 28: “[ein] ruhiges Dasitzen.” On this point, see also Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation in 2 Volumes, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), vol. 1, 353–353: “Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis.”

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the dead. In this passage, the life-affirming reversal literally enters the scene. The scene is from the tragedy Alcestis by Euripides. In it, the wife of King Admetus dies in place of her husband only to return to life, upon the intervention of Heracles, after a period of time spent in Hades. Here, Nietzsche offers the only truly accented entrance to be found in The Birth of Tragedy: If we think of Admetus, lost in thought as he remembers his recently deceased wife Alcestis, and consuming himself entirely in mental contemplation of her—when, suddenly, the image of a woman, similar in form and with a similar gait, is led, veiled, toward him; if we think of his sudden, trembling restlessness, his stormy comparisons, his instinctive conviction—then we have an analogy for the feeling with which the spectator, in a state of Dionysiac excitement, saw approaching on the stage the god with whose suffering he has already become one.180

A negating of the world transforms itself once more into an “energy turned toward the world,”181 the raging of an unleashed energeia into a form of entering that restores a lost measure and vivid clarity. Yet the passage also betrays the suspicion that had been cast in the theater of the nineteenth century, or at the very latest since Goethe’s Faust, over the reality of entering: it was no longer something spectral or ghostly that discredited this reality, but visions. Nietzsche’s dramaturgy is a dramaturgy of visions: of the perception induced in spectators that had previously played a role in Feuerbach’s universe of statues, but now bring disrepute upon the theater as a site for making an appearance in the flesh. In both the Apollonian and the Dionysian theater, entrances are exposed as possible illusions produced by excited viewers and spectators, even when these visions pertain to concrete, tangible acts of entering the stage. And in both Nietzsche and Goethe, it remains impossible to decide whether the statue on tragedy’s stage sets itself in motion or whether it is not rather an illusion of the senses that causes the intoxicated spectator to see a god where there is actually nothing at all.

180 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Speirs, 45. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 63f.: “Denken wir uns Admet mit tiefem Sinnen seiner jüngst abgeschiedenen Gattin Alcestis gedenkend und ganz im geistigen Anschauen derselben sich verzehrend – wie ihm nun plötzlich ein ähnlich gestaltetes, ähnlich schreitendes Frauenbild in Verhüllung entgegengeführt wird: denken wir uns seine plötzlich zitternde Unruhe, sein stürmisches Vergleichen, seine instinctive Ueberzeugung – so haben wir ein Analogon zu der Empfindung, mit der der dionysisch erregte Zuschauer den Gott auf der Bühne heranschreiten sah, mit dessen Leiden er bereits eins geworden ist.” 181 Aby Warburg, “Francesco Sassettis letztwillige Verfügung,” in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml et al. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 234–280, here 260.

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In any case, what is certain is that if anyone appears on the stage of tragedy, then they are always more than the single actor that Nietzsche portrays as an enigmatically shrouded puppet. Here, again, an entrance functions as a phantasmagorical amplification that transfigures a “grotesquely masked human being,” as Nietzsche writes, into an epiphanic god, thereby also elevating this character beyond the limits of the human possibilities for making an entrance. The passage in Nietzsche reads in full: According to this insight and according to the traditional evidence, Dionysos, the true hero of the stage and centre of the vision, is initially, in the earliest period of the tragedy, not truly present, but rather is imagined as being present; i.e. originally the tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt is made to show the god as real and to present the visionary figure, together with the transfiguring framework, as visible to every eye; at this point “drama” in the narrower sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus is given the task of infecting the mood of the audience with Dionysiac excitement to such a pitch that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they see, not some grotesquely masked human being, but rather a visionary figure, born, as it were, of their own ecstasy.182

Nietzsche’s treatise The Birth of Tragedy thus articulates the consequences of a reflection on tragedy that now places appearance, not action, at the center of the process of tragic form, and that pays heed to action only insofar as it is “summon[ed] into appearance as active.” Beginning with Herder, who explicitly traced tragedy to the “impromptu dithyramb” and “single scene” or entrance [Auftritt], those texts that Peter Szondi brought together as an attempt, or Essay on the Tragic have revolved around the moment when the tragic subject first becomes visible on stage.183 With Goethe, Hegel, and Nietzsche, stepping forth—in the act of making 182 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Speirs, 45. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 63: “Dionysus, der eigentliche Bühnenheld und Mittelpunkt der Vision, ist gemäss dieser Erkenntniss und gemäss der Ueberlieferung, zuerst, in der allerältesten Periode der Tragödie, nicht wahrhaft vorhanden, sondern wird nur als vorhanden vorgestellt: d. h. ursprünglich ist die Tragödie nur ‘Chor’ und nicht ‘Drama.’ Später wird nun der Versuch gemacht, den Gott als einen realen zu zeigen und die Visionsgestalt sammt der verklärenden Umrahmung als jedem Auge sichtbar darzustellen; damit beginnt das ‘Drama’ im engeren Sinne. Jetzt bekommt der dithyrambische Chor die Aufgabe, die Stimmung der Zuhörer bis zu dem Grade dionysisch anzuregen, dass sie, wenn der tragische Held auf der Bühne erscheint, nicht etwa den unförmlich maskirten Menschen sehen, sondern eine gleichsam aus ihrer eignen Verzückung geborene Visionsgestalt.” 183 See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: 2: University Press, 2006), 292: “Greek tragedy developed, as it were, out of a single scene, out of the impromptu dithyramb, the mimed dance, the chorus.” Peter Szondi’s Versuch über das Tragische (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1964) has been translated into English by Paul Fleming as An Essay on the Tragic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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an appearance on the stage—becomes a critical, or more precisely, tragic element with such a powerful force of attraction that the constructive, tectonic, and plotrelated aspects of tragedy are pushed into the background. Whether it is theoretical or practical, the interest of the theater turns to the process of figuration on stage: it inspects the precarious conditions under which a tragic subject exposes itself by making an appearance in which it is left wavering between triumph and pathos. As this book has shown, the critical theatricality of the entrance transforms this action into a tragic entity in its own right—one that directly evokes the very background forces that oppose it. The analyses presented here have employed the concepts of detachment and individuation to denote the critical process at the threshold that allows a subject to advance out of the (back)ground and enter the scene. These now correlate with a conception of tragedy that grasps the act of entering itself as a transgression and elevates it to the level of a tragic event. Eventually, this shift of emphasis that has been explicated here—from progression to avancement, and from action to appearance—leads to a changed structural understanding of tragedy itself. With the accentuation of “appearance” in the full spectrum of its meanings and the crisis that besets the visualization of the tragic figure as it is realized in dramatic texts, the tragic process as a whole is reorganized. Around 1900, and even earlier, this process comes to favor a production of drama centered on arrivals and entrances.184 From Ibsen to Hofmannsthal and continuing to Beckett, it is arrivals marked by both triumph and pathos that will take center stage and absorb the Aristotelian energy of dramatic action. The development of the one-act play is also favored by the fact that the intensity of the arrival determines all the life processes of the dramatic universe, no matter whether an arrival takes place or not. Such arrivals are, incidentally, precisely those that do not entail equivalent exits. Dionysus remains the tutelary god of epiphanic moments for making an entrance. Under the conditions described here, exits are accorded no corresponding significance. It is crises of appearance, not of disappearance, toward which the practical and reflective work of drama is aimed. They are the tragic remnants of Aristotelian poetics.

184 See Aage Hansen-Löve, Annegret Heitmann, and Inka Mülder-Bach, eds., Ankünfte: An der Epochenschwelle um 1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009).

Bibliography Abbreviations CW FA

HA MA WA

Collected Works of Goethe. 12 vols. New York: Suhrkamp, 1983–1987. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurter Ausgabe). 40 vols. Edited by Friedmar Apel. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1999. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethes Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe). 14 vols. Edited by Erich Trunz. Hamburg: C.H. Beck, 1948–1960. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe). 21 vols. Edited by Karl Richter et al. Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1985–1999. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethes Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe). 143 vols. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887–1919.

Translations Consulted of Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in chronological order of publication) Collected Works of Goethe. 12 vols. New York: Suhrkamp, 1983–1987. Faust I & II Goethe’s Faust: Part One and Sections from Part Two. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Anchor Books, 1963. Faust: A Tragedy. Translated by Walter Arndt, edited by Cyrus Hamlin. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1976. Faust: Part I. Translated by Randall Jarrell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [1976] 2000. Faust I & II. With a new foreword by David E. Wellbery. Translated by Stuart Atkins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1984] 2014. Faust: Part One. Translated by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Faust: Part Two. Translated by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Faust: A Tragedy. In The Essential Goethe, edited by Matthew Bell, translated by John R. Williams, 249–370. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016 [version first published in 1999]. Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy. Translated by David Constantine. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy. Translated by David Constantine. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Faust: A Tragedy. Parts One & Two Fully Revised. Translated by Martin Greenberg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Iphigenia in Tauris Iphigenia in Tauris. Translated by Charles E. Passage. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1963.

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Index References to illustrations are in italics. action, and entrances 1, 11, 14 actors, as staffage 145 Aeschylus – Agamemnon 18, 169 – Nietzsche on 40 – Oresteia 229 – The Eumenides 250 – The Libation Bearers (Choephori) 18–19, 250 – The Persians 18, 229 Agee, Joel xxxi Allemann, Beda 210 Andreani, Andrea, The Triumphs of Caesar 201 antitriumphalism – Kleist 207 – Penthesilea (Kleist) 230, 232–3, 235–6, 241–2 – tragic drama as 227–9 Apollo – Der Vaticanische Apollo (drawing) 248, 250–1 – Der Vaticanische Apollo (text) 248–9 Apollonian counterforce, and Dionysus 254 appearances 58, 65, 69, 91, 95, 99, 105, 110, 136, 180, 181 – see also entrance/s Arendt, Hannah 230 – On Revolution 211 Aristotelian theater, plot 9, 10, 13, 14 Aristotle 1 – Poetics 12, 13 – on tragedy 12, 15, 49, 182 art, staffage in 146, 147–50 Aubignac, Abbé de, Pratique du théâtre 31 Auerbach, Erich 127 aufsteigen, sinnliches – definition xviii – as mode of entering 17, 29, 53, 234, 240, 251 Auftritt – as deceit xv https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110754490-006

– and ground (Grund) xiv – meanings xiii, xxiii – scene xiii–xiv – see also entrance/s avancer/avancement – double meaning 51–2 – in tragédie en musique 52 ballet de cour – ceremony/theater combination 33 – entrance 30, 39 Barthes, Roland 58, 63 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 121 becoming – and entrance protocols 106 – and entrances in Goethe 106–7 Belting, Hans 173 Benda, Georg Anton, music for Pygmalion (Rousseau) 244 Benserade, Isaac, Ballet royal de la nuit 32–3, 34, 36 Benveniste, Émile, on seizing space 7 bewegt xviii–xix Biondo, Romae triumphantis libri decem 227 Boehm, Gottfried – concrescence concept 128 – on ground (Grund) 23 Brandenburg Gate, without quadriga 237 Bredekamp, Horst 135 – “philosophy of leaves” 136 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful 73–4 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, entrance protocols 9–10 charisma, Weber on 212 the chorus – and entrances 31 – and the ground (Grund) 23 Christian theater, entrances 9–10 Classicism, German 245

286

Index

Cohen, Sarah 30, 189 concrescence concept, Boehm 128 Corneille, Pierre – Andromède – entrances foregrounded 50 – court perspectival stage 42–3, 45–6 – plot to spectacle shift 50–1 – and Aristotelian doctrine 50 – dramaturgy of éclat 39–40 – L’illusion comique 4 – Racine, comparison 39–41, 56 court perspectival stage – artificial infinity 74, 74 – cancelli 81–3, 84 – changes 68–72 – philosophical basis 73–4 – closing of finestra aperta 69 – Corneille’s Andromède 42–3, 45–6 – entrances 41–4, 47, 48 – of machine gods 48–9 – illustration 45 – and the princely ray of vision 44 – reggia 72–4 – restructuring by Galli Bibiena family 69–70 – scena per angolo, angling 70–2, 75 – as space of arrival 45 – spatial ambiguity 70 – visual axis, overextension 70, 71 – and Vitruvius 49 court society – entrances 29–30 – see also Weimar court court stage – entrance protocols xvii, 35–9 – entrances 30–1 – see also court perspectival stage cues, and entrances 11 dancing – entrance by 187 – Louis XIV, King of France 33, 34, 35 – Nine Men Dancing 187 de Quincy, Quatremère 216–17 despotism, entrance protocol for 78 Diderot, Denis, comédie larmoyante 115 Dionysus

– and Apollonian counterforce 254, 255 – center of tragic theory 253 – entrances 253, 254, 258 – as life energy 254 – suffering 254–5 Don Carlos see under Schiller drama, definition 245 dramatic pace – and entrances 14 – and sculptures 245 dramaturgy of feuillage, in tragic drama 135–8 Düntzer, Heinrich, Goethes Maskenzüge 189 Eckartshausen, Karl von, Aufschlüsse zur Magie 177 éclat, Corneille’s dramaturgy 39–40 Elias, Norbert 92, 186 – The Court Society 29 enargeia and energeia – interplay 5, 11, 243 – life affirmation 255 – tragic entrances 15, 149 English language, Latinate vocabulary xxix entanglement, and entrances 12 entourage, solar entrance protocol 38 entrance protocol/s 7–11, 25 – antitheatrical, Racine 59 – and becoming 106 – Calderón’s theater 9–10 – court stage xvii, 35–9 – decay 183–4 – for despotism 78 – Dionysian 208 – entourage 38 – Iphigenia 135 – landscape painting 142–6 – of life 26, 108–9 – Goethe 109 – Louis XIV’s court 30 – military triumph 27 – negative 72, 110 – Nietzsche on 208 – and presence xvii, 7 – and social distinction 9 – weak 104, 193 entrance/s

Index

– and action 1, 11, 14 – advance notification 89 – Alcestis (Euripides) 256 – Andromède (Corneille) 41–4, 47, 48, 48–9 – Apollo 248, 251 – Atys (Lully) 53–4 – ballet de cour 30, 39 – and the chorus 31 – Christian theater 9–10 – and court masquerades 184–6 – court society 29–30 – court perspectival stage 30–1, 41–4, 47, 48, 48–9 – and cues 11 – dancing, Nine Men Dancing 187 – definition 1 – Dionysus 253, 254, 258 – Don Carlos (Schiller) 90, 92–4, 95–6, 98 – and dramatic pace 14 – and entanglement 12 – etymology xxiii – Faust II (Goethe) 162, 165–7 – and figuration xiv, 117, 120 – Goethe’s texts 104, 106, 107–8, 108–9, 109–10, 117–18, 125–6, 126–9 – Helen of Troy (Goethe’s Faust II) 26, 107, 110, 165–7, 172, 174–82 – Herder on 3 – as hubris 15–17 – and identification 31, 31–2 – as illusions 256–7 – indeterminate, and smoke 174–6 – Kleist 230 – within landscapes 142–6 – and liaison des scènes 87–9, 93–4, 95–6 – limitations of present study 2–3 – Louis XIV, King of France 29–30, 33–5 – of machine gods 48–9 – masquerades (Goethe) 182–3, 184 – middle ground, Goethe 104 – neglect in theater studies 2 – as optical events 15 – Pandora (Goethe) 152–3 – and plot xiv, 2, 14–15, 40, 86 – power of 5, 11 – and presence xiv, 2, 4, 5, 15, 20, 35, 99, 179–80

287

– as rending forces 205–6 – Roman triumph 36 – scene-linking devices 86 – and seizing space 6, 36 – and shadows, Racine’s theater 55 – Shakespearean 9, 22–3, 127, 219 – and staffage 142–6, 149 – statue in Pygmalion (Rousseau) 243–4 – statues 248, 249–50 – The Sistine Madonna (Raphael) 162, 163 – The Triumph of Galatea (Raphael) 161, 161 – as tragic events 258 – as transgression 16, 247, 258 – triumphal, Penthesilea (Kleist) 233–5, 241 – unsuccessful 11 – via water 176–82 – Weimar court masquerades 190, 195 – see also appearances; entrance protocol/s; solar entrance protocol; tragic entrances Euripides – Alcestis, entrance 256 – Bacchae 19, 241 Evidenz xvi–xvii – “manifest presence,” translation xviii “face work” concept, Goffman 5 Fernow, Carl Ludwig 143 – on Poussin’s landscapes 152 Feuerbach – Joseph Anselm – Der Vaticanische Apollo (drawing) 248, 250–1 – entrance 248, 251 – Der Vaticanische Apollo (text) 248–9 – on mobility of statues 249–50 – on tragic figures as statues 248–9 feuillage – Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe) 139–41 – tragic drama 135–8 – see also garden Fielding, Henry 38–9 figuration xvi, 21, 258 – court 39 – and entrances xiv, 117, 120 – in Goethe’s theater 106, 178 – and ground (Grund) 21, 24, 27, 112

288

Index

– in landscape paintings 143 – and Louis XIV 39 – unpredictability of 137 flectere 37, 199, 205 Fletcher, Angus 188 fonds vagues – in Goethe’s texts 115–18, 123, 142 – see also ground (Grund) Foucault, Michel xxii, 63, 78, 97, 225 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia 76–7 – commissioning of Britannicus opera 76 – critique of despotism 77 – works – Anti-Machiavel 77 – Lucio Silla 76 – Montezuma 77 Friedländer, Walter 217 Gainsborough, Thomas – on staffage 148 – The Mall in St. James’s Park 138 Galli Bibiena family – colonnade systems 83 – restructuring of perspectival stage 69–70 Galli Bibiena, Ferdinando – L’architettura civile 69 – Prospettiva con scena di convito 74 – stage design with ballet 84–5, 85 Galli Bibiena, Giuseppe 69 – atrium with grand staircase 82 – colonnade 83 – knot defining structural tragic element 75, 79–80 – stage design – Britannicus 75, 76–9 – Semiramide 79 garden – diversification, Hirschfeld on 136–7, 138 – illusion of tragedy in 138 – as space of possibility 136 – theories 136 – see also feuillage Getreibe xxiv, 110, 125, 173, 181 Geulen, Eva 108, 111 Gissey, Henri, Louis XIV as the rising sun 34 Goethe, J.W. von

– “Amor as Landscape Painter” 147–50, 155, 159 – entrances – antitragic tendencies 109–10 – and becoming 106–7 – court regimes, comparison 118 – in embedded surroundings 126–9 – and figuration process 117 – forms of 117–18 – and ground 125–6 – incorporeal bodies 110–11 – indeterminate, and smoke 174–6 – and life 108–9 – middle grounds 104 – and mutable personas 107–8 – transformative 124–5 – Faust I 110 – poodle 121–4 – Faust II, entrances 162 – Helen of Troy 26, 107, 110, 165–7, 172, 174–82 – Masquerade 182–3, 184, 193–4 – Female Virtues masquerade 133–4 – figuration in 106, 176 – fonds vagues 115–18, 123, 142 – ground (Grund) in 106–7, 111–16, 118–19, 120, 121–2, 125–6 – Iphigenia in Tauris 103, 107, 134–5 – entrance protocol 135 – feuillage in 139–41 – Goethe as Orestes 141 – magic lantern, use of xxviii – masked processions 133 – “Paintings of Polygnotus” 167–8 – Pandora 152–6, 158–60 – entrances 152–3 – plot 152–3 – Poussinian landscape 153–4 – Pathosformeln in 149–50 – plot, lack of 26, 182 – Proserpina, Poussinian landscape 151–2 – Racine, comparison 103–4 – “The Roman Carnival” 191 – “Rules for Actors” 145 – staffage in 147 – surroundedness 129–32 – and tragic space 134

Index

– The Natural Daughter 105, 131, 132 – Torquato Tasso 103, 118–19 – Weimar masquerades, director 188–92 – Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 105, 113 – Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years 131 – “Zueignung” (“Dedication”) xxiv–xxv – translations xxv–xxviii Goffman, Erving, “face work” concept 5 Goldmann, Lucien 62–3 Görres, Joseph 211–12 Gottsched, Johann Christian 85 – Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen 86 Graun, Carl Heinrich, music for Britannicus 76 Greenberg, Martin xxvi, xxvii Greenblatt, Steven 227 Gros, Antoine-Jean – General Bonaparte with Soldiers Stricken by the Plague at Jaffa 215 – Schoch on 217 Gros, Étienne 51 ground/background (Grund) – in art/landscape 114, 128–9, 137, 142, 147, 151, 156, 163–4, 179, 243 – and Auftritt xiv – Boehm on 23 – and the chorus 23 – as Christian promise of divine salvation 37 – in Corneille as palaces 42 – as created by dramatic speech 55, 133 – as creative source or tissue 109 – and figure/figuration 20–6, 24, 27, 112, 115–7, 123–4, 181 – as foliage/garden 135–6, 138 – in Goethe’s texts 106–7, 111–16, 118–19, 120, 121–2, 125–6, 145 – indeterminacy 21–2, 176 – manifestations 23–4 – as media of atmosphere/smoke/water 26, 110, 116, 121, 126, 129–30, 142–3, 174–182 – and plot 56, 112 – in Racine as cover for figures 55, 57 – as the sea 171 – as site for retreat/background powers 95, 97–101, 103

289

– as space for threat of gods/hidden powers 40–1, 62–5, 73, 78, 105, 154–6, 172 – stage background (upstage) xiv, 106, 112–5, 118, 120–1, 125, 258 – structuring force xiv – in tragic drama 24–5, 109, 140, 168, 178, 258 – varieties of xv – of war xv, 207–8, 232–3, 242 – see also fonds vagues Gryphius, Andreas 86 Günther, Timo 255 Hackert, Jakob Philipp 147 Hagedorn, Christian Ludwig von, on Poussin’s landscapes 152 Hartmann, Ferdinand, Phoebus above Dresden design 240 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on Aesthetics 128, 137, 245 Helen of Troy, entrances (Goethe’s Faust II) 26, 107, 110, 165–7, 172, 174–82 Herder, Johann Gottfried – on entrances 3 – on tragedy 257 Hirschfeld, Christian, on garden diversification 136–7, 138 Hocke, Gustav René 57 Horn, Eva 212 Horace, The Art of Poetry 235 hubris – entrances as 15–17 – tragic entrances as 15–17 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 169, 171, 178, 179 identification, and entrances 31–2 Iser, Wolfgang 106 Jodrell, Richard Paul, Illustrations of Euripides 241–2 Journal des Luxus und der Moden 189 Kantorowicz, Ernst 37 Kaufmann, Walter xxvi–xxvii, xxix, xxx, xxxi Kermode, Frank 72 The King

290

Index

– creator of space 32 – as first actor 32–5 Kleist, Heinrich von – antitriumphalism 207 – Die Herrmannsschlacht 231–2 – editor, Phoebus 237 – entrances 230 – Penthesilea 206 – antitriumphalism 230, 232–3, 235–6, 241–2 – raptus 242 – triumphal entrances 233–5, 241 – Robert Guiskard 206 – counterpoint to Gros painting 220–1 – entrance crisis 222–5 – entrance of “great man” 208–10 – Napoleon’s proxy 226 – siege of Jaffa 213–15, 215 – source text 212–13 Kommerell, Max 178 Koschorke, Albrecht 236 Koselleck, Rainer 25 Kraus, Georg Melchior, Goethe as Orestes in Iphigenia in Tauris 141 landscape painting – entrance protocols 142–6 – figuration in 143 Langer, Robert von, “Raphael und Poussin” 163–4 laterna magica see magic lantern Lawrenson, Thomas 46, 55 Le Brun, Charles, Phèdre et Hippolyte, frontispiece 68 leaves see feuillage Lehmann, Hans-Thies 17, 18, 59 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 136 liaison des scènes – choreographic framework 87 – Don Carlos (Schiller) 90, 93, 95, 99, 101 – dramatic cohesion model 86–7 – and entrances 87–9, 93–4, 95–6 – plot unity 87 – and political power structure 87 – and unity of meaning 87 life affirmation – enargeia and energeia 255

– and tragedy 255 life energy, Dionysus as 254 Lohenstein, Caspar Daniel 86 Louis XIV, King of France – dancer 33, 34, 35 – entrances 29–30, 33–5 – and figuration 39 Löwith, Karl 209 Luhmann, Niklas 82–3 Luke, David xxxi Lully, Jean Baptiste, Atys (co-composer) 52 – entrances 53–4 – plot avancement 53 – time limitation 52 – tragédie en musique development 51 magic lantern (laterna magica) 199 – Goethe’s use of xxviii, 174, 175 – projection 177 Mantegna, Andrea, The Triumphs of Caesar 200, 201 – Goethe on 201 Marin, Louis 32, 37 – The Portrait of the King 30 Maskell, David 58 masquerades – entrances – court 184–6, 187, 188 – Goethe 182–3, 184 – Weimar court 188–91 Menke, Christoph 106 Meyer, Heinrich 143 Miller, Anthony, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture 228 Miller, Norbert 72 Montesquieu, on the despot 63 Müller, Karl Otfried, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur 12 natürlich xxviii–xxix Nero, Emperor, Britannicus 77–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich – on Aeschylus 40 – on entrance protocol 208 – “The Greek Music Drama” 252 – on tragic drama 253 – works

Index

– The Birth of Tragedy xxxi, 208, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257 – Thus Spoke Zarathustra xxxi “nostos” – examples 169 – meaning 168–9 – and tragedy 168–72 optical events, entrances as 15 Pathosformeln, in Goethe 149–50 “philosophy of leaves,” Bredekamp 136 Plastik xvi plot – Andromède (Corneille) 50–1 – Aristotelian theater 9, 10, 13, 14 – avancement, Atys (Lully) 53 – and entrances xiv, 2, 14–15, 40, 86 – and ground (Grund) 56, 112 – lack of, in Goethe 26, 182 – Pandora (Goethe) 152–3 – and tragic drama 13–14 – unity, liaison des scènes 87 Poussin, Nicolas – Landscape with Polyphemus 156, 157–8 – landscapes – Fernow on 152 – von Hagedorn on 152 – Raphael, comparison 161–5 presence – amplification 5 – and entrance protocols xvii 7 – and entrances xiv, 2, 4, 5, 15, 20, 35, 99, 179–80 – Evidenz translation xviii – royal 35, 36, 51, 62, 64, 96 – staging 9, 83 – in tragedy 167, 172 Protokoll xvi, xvii – see also entrance protocol/s quadriga – at Brandenburg Gate 239 – taken to Paris 237–8 – context 236 – in Phoebus above Dresden design 240

291

Quaglio, Lorenzo, stage design for Idomeneo 83–4, 84 Quinault, Philippe & Lully, Jean-Baptiste, Atys 52 Rabel, Daniel, Entrée du Grand Can et ses Suivants (attrib.) 187 Racine, Jean – antitheatrical entrance protocol 59 – Bajazet – backstage power 64 – seraglio setting 56–7 – Britannicus 76–9 – Corneille, comparison 39–41, 56 – entrances, and shadows 55 – Goethe, comparison 103–4 – Iphigénie en Aulide, concealed stage entrance 57 – performances on nonperspectival stages 55–6 – Phaedra – death of Hippolytus 68 – entrance of monster 64–7 – Phaedra’s hesitant stage entrance 57, 60–2 – and tenebrosi entrants 58–60 – theater of profondeur chiroscuro 54–8 raison d’état, and use of space 75–6, 80 Raphael – Poussin, comparison 161–5 – The Sistine Madonna 163 – entrance 162 – The Triumph of Galatea 161 – entrance 161 Rigaud, Hyacinthe, portrait of Louis XIV, 35 Rohr, Julius von, Einleitung zur CeremonielWissenschafft Der Groβen Herren 32 Roman triumph 227–8 – entrances 36 – and tragedy 228 – and war booty 38 Rosenkranz, Karl, Aesthetics of Ugliness, on Napoleon etc. 219 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Pygmalion, entrance of statue 243–4

292

Index

scene (Auftritt) xiii–xiv scene settings, and surroundings 126–8 Scheler, Max 24 Scherer, Jacques 55 Schiller, Friedrich – Bride of Messina 6–7 – Don Carlos xv, 40–1, 90–101 – and author’s impulses 91 – background elements 100–1 – challenge to liaison des scènes 90, 93, 95, 99, 101 – court ceremonial, transformation 97 – court society, disintegration 94–5 – disruption of access rules 92–3 – disruption of protocol 91–2, 95 – entrances 90, 92–4, 95–6, 98 – grand inquisitor, appearance 98, 99 – loss of control 94–7 – panoptic structures 97 – and spontaneity 91–2 – History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands 99 – Intrigue and Love 90 – “On the Sublime” 206 – on tragedy 206 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 162 Schoch, Rainer, on Gros’ painting of General Bonaparte with Soldiers 217 Schöne, Albrecht xxiv, xxvi, 122, 124, 184 Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation 255 schwanken 111 sculptures – and dramatic pace 245 – and stage movements 245–6 – see also statue/s Serlio, Sebastiano, Trattato sopra le scene 49 Shakespeare, William – entrances 9, 22–3, 127 – Fortinbras (Hamlet) 219 – Titus Andronicus, triumph and tragedy 228–9 Sloterdijk, Peter 255 social distinction, and entrance protocols 9 solar entrance protocol – amplification 38

– characteristics 37–8 – costume 38 – entourage 38 Sophocles, Philoctetes 250 space – seizing – Benveniste on 7 – and entrances 6, 36 – use of, and raison d’état 75–6, 80 “specter” xxix Spitzer, Leo 129 staffage – actors as 145 – in art 146, 147–50 – and entrances 142–6, 149 – Gainsborough on 148 – in Goethe 147 – increased significance 146–7 – Sulzer on 148 stage – de-aristocratization of 104–6 – movements, and sculptures 245–6 Starobinski, Jean 39 statue/s – making an entrance 248, 249 – in Pygmalion (Rousseau) 243–4 – stabilizers of tragic human form 247 – tragic figures as 248–9 Stein, Charlotte von 190 Sturm und Drang 88, 127 Sulzer, Johann Georg – General Theory of the Fine Arts 89, 114, 144, 146 – on staffage 148 surroundings, and scene settings 126–8 symphysis 128, 131 Szondi, Peter, Essay on the Tragic 257 Szondi, Peter xvi, 257 Thüring, Hubert 108 Torelli, Giacomo, stage design for Andromède 42, 45–6 – painted streetscapes 46 – and royal entrances 46–7, 47, 48 – and royal gaze 46 – and staged entrances 46 traffic xxii

Index

tragédie en musique – Atys opera 52 – characteristics 51 – development by Lully 51 tragedy – Aristotelian conceptions 12, 15, 49, 182 – Goethe’s theory 103 – Herder on 257 – and life affirmation 255 – and “nostos” 168–72 – presence in 167, 172 – as rending force 247 – and the Roman triumph 228 – Schiller on 206 tragic drama – as antitriumphalist genre 18, 227–9 – feuillage in 135–8 – ground (Grund) concept 24–5 – monster in the chamber 62–8 – Nietzsche on 253 – origins 12–13 – and plot 13–14 tragic entrances 8–9, 17, 18, 39 – and crisis 59–60 – enargeia and energeia 15, 149 – as hubris 15–17 – liminality of 21 – need for 14–15 – origins 12–14 – in shadow 54 – see also entrance protocol/s tragic events 18, 55 – entrances as 258

293

tragic theory, Dionysus as center of 253 translation issues – key words xv–xxii – primary texts xxiii–xxxi Valturio, De re militaria 227 Verkehrseinheit xviii, xix–xxii Villati, Leopoldo di, libretto for Britannicus 76, 78 Vitruvius, and the perspectival stage 49 vorschreiten xvii war booty, and Roman triumph 38 Warburg, Aby 150, 153 Weber, Max 247 – on charisma 212 Weber, Samuel 236 Weimar court masquerades (Goethe) 188–92 – disruptions 190 – entrances 190, 195 – herald’s function 195–8 – Plutus/money scene 198–9, 202 – Roman carnival 191–2 Weimar theater, Goethe’s prelude 203–5 – entrance of Goddess of War 204–5 Weise, Christian 85 Wellbery, David 255 Wolf, Friedrich August 238–9 Wolff, Christian 117, 121 Wölfflin, Heinrich 41 – Renaissance and Baroque xviii, xxi