Humanism, Drama, and Performance : Unwriting Theatre [1st ed.] 9783030440657, 9783030440664

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Humanism, Drama, and Performance Unwriting Theatre Hana Worthen

Humanism, Drama, and Performance

Hana Worthen

Humanism, Drama, and Performance Unwriting Theatre

Hana Worthen New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-44065-7 ISBN 978-3-030-44066-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Mental Finland, directed by Kristian Smeds, Royal Flemish Theatre, 2009. Courtesy of Smeds Ensemble. Photograph by Bart Grietens. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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Acknowledgments

Like any other, this volume has been thought by virtue of the writings and performances it engenders; my thanks to all who trained my attention on ways that singularize performance to the theatre. The volume’s chapters have been written in collaboration with people who are colleagues, more than colleagues, friends, and more than friends: Peter Connor, Helene Foley, Kristian Smeds, Peter Platt, and Peg Prideaux. I am grateful to each of you for your kindness and generosity, for sharing your lives as you have shared your expertise with me. I am also grateful to Stathis Gourgouris, who, serving on my tenure committee, read several iterations of this manuscript. Students in my Politics of Performance, Theatre and Democracy, Nazism in Performance, and Dramaturgy seminars at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York have been instrumental to the development of the project between these covers, as were the faculty and fellows of the Interweaving Performance Cultures of the Freie Universität in Berlin. I am sincerely indebted to all of you. W. B. Worthen shares in the living and the lived dimensions sustaining the pages here; with gratitude, with love, this book is dedicated to b.

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On the Cover

The cover image, taken from Kristian Smeds and the Smeds Ensemble’s Mental Finland (2009), provides a compact, visual constellation of the theoretical, practical, and embodied orientation of Humanism, Drama, and Performance: Unwriting Theatre. In this opening scene, a modern dance corps de ballet is transformed into a corps de police, a resonant image of the interplay of the gestures of aesthetic definition and cultural authority pursued in this book. A visual and acoustic assemblage, Mental Finland layers signifiers that—like the male body, shield, and tutu here— summon and multiply meanings irreducible to a singularizing identity, such as art or politics, pleasure or force, culture or power. Mental Finland, that is, challenges the interplay between performative ideology and performative practices that defines the history of humanism’s engagement with theatre. Mental Finland’s rhizomatic images unwrite the binary grammar— drama/spectacle, character/actor, actor/dancer, aesthetics/politics, artistic ensemble/political assembly, democracy/totalitarianism—defining humanist theatre, a regulatory conception of a universalizing “man” situating theatre outside its privileged instrument of subject formation (writing, reading, the book), understanding theatre as a derivative medium, functioning authoritatively when it echoes or materializes the script, and projecting theatre as an instrument for realizing the inherently liberalizing values of a humanized and humanizing art. Mental Finland precludes the performative confinement of the theatre to Plato’s cave,

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to the consensual ethics of a reproductive mimesis. In Mental Finland, performative embodiment marks an opening to alternative dynamics of seeing and perceiving; as a devised, episodic, and imagistic performance, it invites spectators to an experience that is not merely a dialectical reversal of the socially-consensual terms of representation, but that lies beyond them, an experience in which the bodies onstage and off, performers’ and spectators’ bodies, are not materialized as subordinate vehicles for the reproduction of licensed, singularizing meanings. Mental Finland’s bodies do not signify as the “others” of the theatre, as the instruments for the drama’s realization, or as the material vehicles for the affective reproduction of liberal-humanist values. The image of the militarized dancer localizes the rhizomatic interconnections of a performative embodiment open to implications otherwise closed by the field of the dramatic, theatricalized “human.” Poised at the opening of Humanism, Drama, and Performance: Unwriting Theatre, this image resonates with the trajectory of the book to come, and anticipates its conclusion, the possibilities that may emerge when humanism’s strategic unwriting of theatre is itself unwritten by performance.

Contents

1

Introduction: Unwriting Theatre Regarding opsis: Aristotle and Horace Brockett’s History of the Theatre and the True Ensemble A Critique of Humanist Theatre? Barish’s Antitheatrical Prejudice and the Liberal Ensemble Between Political and Theatrical Assembly References

1 7 13 20 26 31 54

2

Martial’s damnatio ad bestias Dramatic Spectacles Disciplining Spectacle References

63 65 74 94

3

Augustine’s spectacula Spectacular Performatives Naturalizing Drama References

99 101 113 131

4

Lessing’s Vermenschlichung Public Criticality Public Ecstasy References

135 138 148 160

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5

Pinkins’s Alienating Gestus Gestic Doing “The Natural Impulsiveness of the Female Animal” “My Mother Courage Was Neutered” Dialectics in the Wings References

165 167 172 179 183 194

6

Kivimaa’s elävä humanismi “Unyielding” Humanist Humanisms’ Strangers Postwar Internationalizing References

197 202 206 217 238

7

Disassembling Performance Carson’s Antigonicks Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind Smeds Ensemble’s Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten References

243 244 254 269 288

Index

293

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Helene Weigel and the Brett, which functions both as a handcuff restraint on Antigone’s wrists and as an instrument of and for Weigel’s acting. In Neher’s original design, it resembled an animal yoke across Antigone’s neck, heightening and psychologizing a suffering Antigone, a function displaced by the anti-realist and dialectically constellated Weigel-Brett-Antigone (Credit Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Brecht-Archiv, Brecht-Fotoarchiv 47/117 © by Ruth Berlau/Hoffmann) View from the supermarket parking lot into Macondo: the yellow fence, erected between the commercial parking lot of a supermarket and the immigrant settlement. The immigrant and refugee residents had long asked that the narrow passageway through the fence be widened, but it was only enlarged—to Kristian Smeds’s dismay—for the convenience of the Festwochen patrons (Credit Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten, 2011. Courtesy of Smeds Ensemble. Photograph by Ville Hyvönen)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Unwriting Theatre

But what, concretely, is this uncriticized ideology if not simply the “familiar”, “well-known”, transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself), the mirror it looks into for selfrecognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself? Louis Althusser, For Marx 1

I … still believe that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons from the past … and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism 2

Humanism, Drama, and Performance: Unwriting Theatre considers how the ideology of humanism appropriates theatre and theatrical performance, largely by privileging the textual dimension of dramatic writing, and how landmark texts of the disciplines of theatre, drama, and literary history echo this discrimination. Calling into question the humanist assumptions that regulate reflections on theatre, Humanism, Drama, and Performance analyzes that discourse in relation to three strains of ideological poiesis: literary, which segregates theatre and the practices of the

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_1

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spectacular from the function of the book and the internality of reading; dramatic, which approves the idiosyncratic capabilities of theatrical performance only to the extent that they instrumentalize literature; and theatrical, in which the medium of theatre is assimilated to the aestheticized conjunction of dramatic and liberal values, but only insofar as the “true ensemble” underwrites the political capacity of the public theatrical gathering, harmonizing actor, character, and spectator to the thematics of the drama. In the evolution of the arts, literary humanism regards the theatre as superseded by literature, as incapable of realizing the readerly, individuated intimacy of the drama understood as literature. While literary humanism cannot avoid dramatic literature, it can avoid theatrical performance, treating the social, cultural, and spectacular means through which theatre takes public presence as extrinsic to the drama’s literary identity, as unable to materialize the drama’s literary potentiality as theatre. Excluded in literary humanism, theatre in dramatic humanism is subordinated to the faithful execution of literature and in theatrical humanism it is rendered as the licensed site of introspective interpretation incarnating the liberal motivation of drama, mediating humanity-as-poetics. In dramatic and theatrical humanism, the dramatic text embodies the anthropocentric qualifications through which the mise-en-scène is appropriated and resonates with a correlating humanity. Theatre tempts the humanist imagination to produce notional audiences along a privileged binarism between the ensemble (an audience articulated as a supraindividual humanity prior to consciousness, inherent in the drama-as-word) and its nemesis, the assembly (an audience of rationalized individuals finding independent points of articulation within the liberal event of theatre). Figures for aesthetics and politics, the ensemble and the assembly are, though, to bring in Jacques Rancière’s reading of Plato’s Republic, “two interdependent forms of the same distribution, two spaces of heterogeneity,” which are “linked beneath themselves” and sequestered according to the “autonomy of the spaces reserved for art and its apparent contrary.”3 One of the dimensions of the humanist discourse on theatre has to do with how these potentialities are thematized, so that by the late eighteenth century the ensemble emerges as the “true” figure of the audience harmonized to and resonating with the conceptual humanity of the drama, an idealizing form of reception that casts the audience-as-assembly as illegitimate, the political other to the dramatic theatre’s defining aesthetic mission. The ensemble and the assembly,

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these incommensurable paradigms of cultural and political gathering, do not merely instantiate each other’s power; they also manifest the extent to which dualism relies on the performativity of separation by means of which the humanist conceit—the theatre—declasses its performative others, those desperately devalued performances and publics it devises to legitimize itself as irrevocable power. As Edward W. Said’s posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism argues, humanism needs to confront its identitarian unanimities, it needs to be reconceived to engage with the implications of its global agenda, a self-critical aesthetic epistemology and history. Yet, while calling for a self-aware “cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound” humanism, and critically approaching the methodology of Orientalism, “premised on the flawed nature of all representations and how they are intimately tied up with worldliness, that is, with power, position, and interests,” Said rather symptomatically overlooks that theatre provides him the mediating metaphor for the “flawed nature” of representation.4 Extending literary humanism’s principal exclusion by deploying theatre as a devalued echo of the literary, Humanism and Democratic Criticism carries forward the image of theatre Orientalism effectively appropriates. The Orient, according to Said’s analogy, “is the stage on which the whole East is confined,” embodying figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. An Orientalist is but the particular specialist in knowledge for which Europe at large is responsible, in the way that an audience is historically and culturally responsible for (and responsive to) dramas technically put together by the dramatist.5

Said’s theatre effectively registers a delusory practice, for the “dramas technically put together by the dramatist” are, like the language depicting the Orient, “not even trying to be accurate.” Indeed, the “figures” staged, measured, and controlled in the West’s gaze “are to the actual Orient” what “stylized costumes are to characters in a play,” clothing fictive personages for the consumption of the empowered spectator. Inasmuch as the “audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe,”6 this (in)humanity-as-theatre—epistemologically potent, yet spectatorially impotent—crystallizes its “passively, reactively, and dully”7

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knowledge-absorbing readers as an ensemble, the antithesis to a critically engaged and democratically oriented readerly assembly. Staging the systemic “moral and epistemological rigor”8 of intellectual and aesthetic colonialism through the vehicle of a notional theatre, Orientalism is contingent on an affective evocation of theatre as an essentially vitiating mode of (mis)representation, a mirror of self-reification which the West, to amplify Said through Louis Althusser, must “break if it is to know itself.”9 The discourse of orientalism theatricalizes the East; discourse on orientalism, despite arguing the Orient is free from the lumen naturale of Cartesian rationality, is nonetheless not free from an apposite blind spot, in that the register of its lux rationis, the light of reason, is motivated by the persuasive force of modern antitheatricalism. Said’s emphatically literary leanings validate his argument through the supposedly inconsequential use of (anti)theatrical metaphor and provide a pertinent example of how a self-consciously inclusive, perceptive, resistant, and democratic humanism derives its rhetorical power from packaging the seclusion of a cultural form—theatre—as a self-canceling image of consequential rationality. This image, as Humanism, Drama, and Performance suggests, nests not merely in postcolonial literary and drama studies but, somewhat counterintuitively, in theatre studies, inflecting performanceoriented theatre scholarship as well. While theatre can be drained as a plausible cultural practice and subordinated to the cultural centrality of reading, “intellectual performances on many fronts, in many places, many styles that keep in play both the sense of opposition and the sense of engaged participation,”10 its figuration as nature, body, sensuousness can also be utilized to model the privileged practice of literary-humanist self-fashioning. Reflecting on “English-ashumanism,” Andy Mousley’s 2011 introduction to Towards a New Literary Humanism invokes theatrical experience as a determining metaphor of literary intimacy, without establishing a continuity between spectatorial and readerly exposure, summoning an antitheatrical attitude idiosyncratic to literary humanism. Emphasizing that “we attempt to work out who we are and what the significance of life might be” through books, Mousley represents literature as the instrument that “stages” and “intensifies” the “various problems and challenges of modernity,” enabling us —the readers—“to feelingly experience the question of the meaning and purpose of human life.” Reading is an “immersive experience,” an “‘affectively charged sensuousness ’” sustained by the text’s “incarnation or embodiment of facts or ideas in characters.” Historically, immersion in theatrical

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spectacle has been seen to threaten the individual’s integrity, but immersion in reading, being engrossed in the virtual spectacle of the book, is understood to expand the cultural subject’s self-possession. Reading as a consolidating “form of emotional and sensuous immersion” assimilates and domesticates the “‘whole-person engagement ’” of the theatrical encounter, so that the book “may transport us” and “may sometimes estrange us,” may expand and deepen our “cognitive/emotional/psychological repertoires.”11 Reading is mapped to the paradigm of theatre but without the messy materiality—an actual stage, real bodies, and public sensuality—so troublingly part of theatrical performance. Even though this new literary humanism does not explicitly attack theatre, its rationality nonetheless relies on an old distinction: when the stage appears, it figures either as spectacular excess or lack, subverting the proper measure of cognitive and sensual experience, the “organic yoking together of thought and feeling” best elicited by subjection to “literary texts.”12 Literary criticism is, of course, free to understand reading in a shared phenomenological terminology with theatre: identification and alienation, embodied responsiveness, and qualified immersion are innate to both media. Where I see a persistent break in the literary-humanist encounter with theatre is in the application of a metaphoricity that (tracing both Aristotle’s philosophical and Augustine’s early Christian remediations of theatrical spectacle) absorbs theatre’s performative alterity, evacuating the interrelation between theatre and literature, treating what it assimilates to cancelation, while virtualizing theatre as a readerly gathering, a “form of surrogate community.”13 While my critique of literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms resonates with posthuman/ist critique in theatre studies,14 much of my argument takes a different tangent, identifying humanist orientations and their implications in valorizing the theatre as an anthropocentric—living —medium. Offering encounters with disciplinarily lost, disadvantaged, and remediated theatricalities, the introduction returns to the interpretive strategies encoded in and developed from Aristotle’s Poetics, notably the assertion of opsis, spectacle, as extrinsic to the literary work and experience of drama. Stepping away from dramatic humanism’s characteristic assimilation of Horace to Aristotle, I then turn to works in theatre history and theory, particularly Oscar G. Brockett’s History of the Theatre (1968) and Jonas Barish’s Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981), describing their tactical coordination of the theatre’s evolving remediation of the drama to the appropriate work of the audience, and of the theatre’s mature aesthetic

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control of the performing body to the humanizing effects of liberalism. Furthermore, I consider how a range of recent studies, including A Cultural History of Theatre (2017), edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis, negotiate between the disciplinary legacies and criticism of dramatic and theatrical humanisms, striking a stance critical of humanist theatre scholarship without quite displacing its aims and values.15 The humanist effort to locate theatre within the evolutionary idealist trajectory embedded in Brockett’s History and its successors or in the liberal aesthetic freedom of Barish’s Antitheatrical Prejudice also continues to haunt contemporary accounts of political philosophy scrutinizing public performance as collective and embodied action. A persistent sense of the compromised aesthetic ensemble as essential to theatre is visibly operative in Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), diluting the argumentative potency of radical democratic theories and their implication of practical sociopolitical change and the engagement of democratic theory with theatrical practice. Relying on an abstract notion of the theatrical ensemble as inimical to the political assembly, such theory is prevented from interrogating the theatre as a material site of action, particularly how its spectators may engage “forms of expressive freedom,” demand “the conditions for acting and living,” take up a “sudden,” “unforeseen form of political performativity,” and so enact the inherent potential to become an assembly.16 To move beyond the ideological—theatrical vs. political, ensemble vs. assembly—biases of humanism, the introduction concludes with a critical moment of contemporary performance dramatizing the reciprocal embeddedness of the theatrical ensemble and the public assembly, the visit of Vice President Elect Mike Pence to a New York performance of Hamilton in 2016, and the response of President Elect Donald J. Trump to the audience’s intermittent self-constitution as a politically engaged assembly. On this occasion, the performers and audience members realized a potentiality always present in the ensemble, that moment when the spectators take up their political constitution and act as an agonistic, differential, and differentiating force, as an assembly. Theatre offers a persistent testing of a humanist representation of the stage, the auditorium, culture, and democracy, a challenge to the binary thinking in which the recalcitrant audience is caught between the claims of the text or of the performance, between

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the rational individual and the impassioned crowd, and, indeed, between the ensemble and the assembly, a humanist logic that labors to dissolve the theatre as an instance of legitimate public sovereignty.

Regarding opsis: Aristotle and Horace Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) distinctive approach to tragedy in Poetics (c. 367–322 BCE) animates dramatic humanism, stabilizing a valid notion of drama philosophically competitive with theatrical performance.17 Although Aristotle’s defiance of Plato saves poetic mimesis, “appearances and their truth,” and rehabilitates “the discredited measure or standard of tragic and Protagorean anthropocentrism” as Martha C. Nussbaum has argued,18 this rehabilitation is conditioned—as far as Aristotle’s “finest tragedy” (καλλι´στη τραγδι´α) is concerned—by what will become a principal trope of humanist encounters with theatre: the abstraction of opsis, spectacle, and the public of the spectacle, of the theatrical, into the philosophical and poetic register of the literary drama. Laying the “foundations for the field of literary theory,”19 Poetics carries within itself a set of historical displacements, its own theatrical unwritings. As Elsa Bouchard has argued, in distinguishing “‘beautiful’ and ‘good’ tragedies,” Poetics establishes “a separate category of the ‘aesthetic’ in contradistinction to the ‘successful’ or the ‘popular,’” a qualitative hierarchy of philosophical to common taste, and thereby, too, of the elite to the public. Aristotle’s assertion of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as formally “‘the most beautiful [kalliste] tragedy according to art’” locates it within an abstract aesthetic category, and against Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris , “‘the most powerful [kratiston],’” denoting a positive spectatorial response in the theatre.20 Centering on “the most beautiful tragedy” as a contained literary design, Poetics remediates performance at the City Dionysia, “a means of providing a shared communication” sustaining the relations in the Athenian polis,21 to the formal qualities of the dramatic composition. By formalizing tragedy outside its festive theatrical occasion, Poetics maps the public—lived—tragic experience to the philosophical design of a self-contained, literary work. Even though the Greek dramatic competitions and the prizes awarded reflect the productions’ and performances’ deep implication in the sociopolitics of theatre,22 Poetics ’s focus on tragedy as a discrete genre represented by individual tragedies isolated from the structure of the trilogy—Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Tereus , Euripides’ Iphigenia

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in Tauris and Medea—alienates the plays further from their topical identity. Sequestering tragedy as the “self-standing ‘idea’” of scripted drama23 from the—religious, political, and civic—milieu of the theatre, Poetics implies the mise-en-scène as a secondary mode of expression, a platform for the mimetic representation of the drama already perfected in the ontology of the text. Simultaneously circumventing public “seeing” as a requisite channel for tragedy’s reception as well as the theatrical “seeing” distinctively shaped by the place (the theatron) and the human body, by defining catharsis as not requiring the stage, Poetics obviates the drama’s historical constitution as and by the theatre, creating an alternative site for tragedy, its inception and reception: the dramatic poem. Instantiating a conception of the drama as imagined by the playwright in the internal theatre of the mind’s eye, and then completed in the writing, tragedy can achieve “its effect even without actors’ movements, just like the epic; reading makes its qualities clear.” Further establishing the claim that possessing “all epic’s resources … tragedy has vividness in both reading and performance,”24 Poetics provides the foundation for the theatre’s absorption into literary (the text obviates the theatre) and dramatic (the text governs the theatre) humanisms. Enlightenment theatrical humanism, as I will discuss in Chapters 4 through 6, reinterprets Aristotle to reinterpret the mise-en-scène as the site of the moral cultivation of the spectator through performance. Inasmuch as the principal good of tragedy can be seized by the mind’s eye and by reading, the purpose of theatre becomes interpretive, tasked with reproducing consequences eventuating from the logos —the discourse, the soul, the reason, the law, and the power—of the textual composition, made directly available to readers and auditors, and only by extension to spectators in the theatre. A secondary, inessential vehicle of tragic mimesis, theatrical opsis (spectacle) is not integral to the effect of tragedy; tragedy is the regulating cause for but is liberated from dependence on theatrical performance.25 Edith Hall sees Poetics ’s “silences”—the erasure of the explicitly political context of the dramatic competitions, of the Athenocentric content and of the didactic purposes of tragedy for the citizens of Athenian democracy—less as a vulnerability of Aristotle’s treatise than as the condition of its potentiality, of tragedy’s transnational and transcultural generic futurity. Even though tragedy’s internationalization and his nonAthenian origin may figure into Aristotle’s depoliticizing approach to tragedy, Poetics accentuates tragedy as intrinsic to and as motivated by

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its written form, “a transhistorical and apolitical” dramatic genre “accessible to ‘everyman’, precisely because its reader is encouraged to assess tragedy in complete dissociation from civic concepts,” from the invariably local site of performance.26 Removed from its material environment, tragedy becomes universally accessible—but does so, Humanism, Drama, and Performance argues, within a literary ideology conceiving the drama as essentially unspectacular, apolitical, and conceptually complete in its written form. Alongside the axioms of humanist valuation, Poetics articulates the “finest tragedy” as an essential contour of human intellect and emotion, to be seized in a process that collapses the reader into the designs of the poet, and the reader’s lived material condition into tragedy’s living textual one. Writing a formal account of tragedy, Poetics unwrites theatre from the drama: both opsis and the civic relations of public performance are secondary to the apprehension of tragedy’s literary property. In literary humanism, drama works out in the script, as script, embodying the (affective) truth of the genre’s logos that defines its nature as literature; in dramatic humanism, drama works out in the body in speech, as speech, embodying the (affective) truth of the dramatic genre as logos, a discursivity that anticipates and transcends the performance’s affective use as rhetoric. Aristotle’s philosophical distinction of drama from opsis propels theatre’s absorption to a fundamentally literary discourse, inherently strengthening the humanist dualisms between the text and the performance, the literary and the rhetorical, and the true (aesthetic) and the real (political). Poetics ’s formalism has, since the Renaissance, been assimilated to the rhetorical dimension of Horace’s (65–8 BCE) Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, c. 10 BCE), as Stephen Halliwell has noted, part of a tradition of presuming the “uniform authority of classical sources” that regards “the principles of the two writers as fully compatible.”27 While neoclassical critics’ greater familiarity with Horace led to readings of Poetics emphasizing its rhetorical dimension, treating it as a series of poetic rules for affecting audiences, in theatre studies the rationality of dramatic humanism reverses this assimilation, reading Horace through Aristotle. Marvin Carlson’s magisterial Theories of the Theatre advances just this approach, asking which “major Roman critic” replicates Aristotle’s designs, giving “drama the central position.”28 Instead of conjoining the two authors, I want to revisit the rhetorical commitments of Ars Poetica as defining an alternative to Aristotle’s medial distinction between drama and opsis, a

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dramaturgical perspective concerned with the fashioning both of the poet and of the poem’s implementation as public performance. Less assuming the drama’s conceptual independence from its theatrical implication than Poetics does, Ars Poetica focuses an explicitly rhetorical concern with the effect of a successful poem, conceiving the poet’s miseen-page as both cause and consequence of its potential mise-en-scène: while the poem might be grasped in reading, the eventuality of its performance demands scrupulous attention to the text’s performative capacity affectively to engage an audience. Since both text and performance are means to securing the poet’s honorable reputation during and after his life, Ars Poetica animates a dramaturgical desire to craft a good poem aware of its immediate and its timeless engagement with the public, so that “when once seen” the work will be “called for and brought back to the stage.” Rather than being validated by its formal perfection, the drama is validated by the performance’s ability to address the “real” life of the ambient community. Imagined within the theatre’s greater social implication, the poet’s mise-en-scène is urged to embody “our” common law, justice, and sentiment, the characters construed to imitate everyday life and language, and the actors to adjust their diction, tones, and manners appropriately to the characters’ sociopolitical position, status, and age. The brevity, truthfulness, purposefulness, and pleasure of the poem guarantee the lifelike—realistic—nature of theatrical performance, which audiences “readily grasp and faithfully hold.”29 While Horace certainly imagines an audience of readers, the work of the poem is simultaneously shaped to the distinctive mediation of theatrical performance as a site for Roman patrician sociability. Horace dramatizes at least three tensions in the humanist engagement with drama and theatre. He grants the affective capacity of the performance as constitutive of the poem, which dramatic humanism overcodes as an effect of the poem rather than as its final cause. Horace also grants to the poet, in discussion with a critical partner, the technical faculty to enable the contemporary and posthumous success of the play both as text and as performance, a collaboration overcoded in dramatic humanism under the sign of authorship, and in theatrical humanism through the subordination of dramaturgy to the authorizing figure of the director. Finally, the humanist tension between liveness and mediation is symmetrical with a third dimension of Ars Poetica, as the immediacy of performance is at once ascribed to the poet’s design and expressive of the

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poet’s rhetorical purpose: mediated by writing, performance is at once prior to and beyond it. Addressing his immediate audience, an aristocratic father and his two sons, Horace suggests that the amicability sustaining Roman patrician sociability should motivate the poet’s creation as an act of fraternal obligation, an act requiring careful attention to the performative doing of the poem. Soliciting the engagement of a coequal public, the poet should call for the expert assistance of a committed “friend,” someone like Aristarchus, a well-known Homeric scholar of the second century BCE, a critical guide relentlessly evaluating the formal, mimetic, and affective dimensions of the composition. Like a modern dramaturg, imagining the consequences that the poem-in-performance might have on its audience, this friend trains the poet to please “our” mind and to satisfy “our” ear.30 Unlike Plato’s appropriation of theatre to the philosophical dramatic dialogue,31 or Aristotle’s philosophical grooming of the theatrical to a literary sensibility, Horace’s Ars Poetica presents a performative concern in which the friend responds to the poem’s form and recommends its shaping to the specific appreciation and responsiveness of the contemporary audience. Highlighting Ars Poetica’s dramaturgical, collaborative, and public account of poetic composition, even within the narrow circle of his patrician class, Horace opens a double perspective that avoids collapsing the alternative sources of Western theatrical and dramatic criticism: a formal, literary sense that the meanings of the play are latent in its written structure and organization and a rhetorical sense of the play as the instrument to produce embodied meanings in its audiences. Aristotle emphasizes the literary identity of “finest tragedy,” which in its perfection fulfills the formal consequence—catharsis —to a readerly audience, so that the efficacy of drama is not conceptually dependent on the ambient surroundings of theatrical performance. Ars Poetica provides a different means for the dramatic poet to secure the relation between content, form, and expression, articulating the poem with its potential consequences in performance. From this perspective, the drama is not primarily defined by its scripted and intellectual making; the poem is equally judged from the vantage point of performance it rather impels than implies, and performance in turn legitimizes the play’s public value. Although the term is anachronistic in this context, the dramaturgical dimension of Ars Poetica is critical to its purposes and significance. Modern dramaturgy conceives the drama as “a composition in itself”

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already providing “starting points for a development of the work into performance.”32 The friend’s critique, then, enacts what has become, since Lessing, articulated as an aspect of dramaturgical practice: responding to the poem’s subject matter and to its form, suggesting how both might be shaped to address the specific sensibilities of the contemporary audience. The subject, best derived from the study of the Platonic dialogues, should be properly researched; the style, uniform and restrained; the plot, with an integrated beginning, middle, and end, sustained through five acts; the chorus’s singing between the acts is discouraged, as is an easy recourse to the deus ex machina. In a move toward greater realism, the mise-en-scène should embody “our” common law, justice, and sentiment; the characters be construed to imitate everyday life and language; and the three actors (at most) imagined to adjust their diction, tones, and manners appropriately to the characters’ sociopolitical position, status, and age. Entrusted to the stage, the critically supervised dramatic poem instructs the spectators as they, in pleasurable consent, respond to a mise-en-scène that makes—in its patrician circularity—what is familiar new.33 This form of rhetorical self-awareness and critique is essential to the poet’s work; moreover, the dramaturg’s criticism helps prevent the kind of hybrid, multiple, contradictory address to the audience that distracts untalented, unskilled, arrogant, or otherwise unfit “crazy poets” from their proper attention to the poem’s final effect, which should confirm the flow of the proper life as well as the values of the artifacts that maintain it. A poet who refuses legitimate critique may seem inspired but, for Horace, is finally mad, “crazy,” imaged as a bear who breaks out of his cage only to send his auditors to flight, then transmogrifies into a “leech that will not let go the skin, till gorged with blood” sucked from his hapless, captive audience as he reads them to death. Ars Poetica urges the poet to study, to train his skill and purify his taste, and to accept responsible critique so as to avoid producing poetic monstrosities or becoming one himself. Rehearsing the generic hybridity of the opening image of Ars Poetica, the horse-necked befeathered fish-woman,34 this final masculine bear-leech chimera figures the work of a decayed and ineffective poetry, draining pleasure from the humanity it addresses. These hybrid performatives are consequential for literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms and for the discipline of theatre studies. Insofar as they insist on the functional necessity of generic distinction, purity, and hierarchy, these images figure the importance of generic categories to proper dramatic production, to authorizing the proper function of theatre, and to legitimating the

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proper theatre by way of its proper function. Horace’s chimeras silently make theatre history—the history of the theatre and a cultural history of theatre—possible. Tracing the humanist dualism of philosophy vs. practice, the significance of Ars Poetica in theatre studies is bypassed when Poetics ’s literary rationality evacuates Horace’s insistence on practice, on the performative purpose and milieu of the poet’s composition, purposes dramatized when the poet fails to engage the public scrupulously and successfully. The acculturation of a practical/rhetorical/performative (Horace) perspective to the dominant theoretical/formal/literary (Aristotle) understanding of dramatic theatre informs the epistemological structure of theatre history and theory, to which I turn next, addressing Oscar G. Brockett’s History of the Theatre and Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Taken in tandem, these very different works—one a widely used, urgently synthetic theatre history textbook designed for teaching purposes, one a beacon of original literary and theatrical scholarship—suggest the coalescing force of dramatic and liberal humanism in the postwar period, particularly in their paradigmatic assertion and defense of the theatre and its collective agency, the theatrical ensemble, as an object of disciplinary attention.

Brockett’s History of the Theatre and the True Ensemble For the fifty years since its appearance in 1968, Brockett’s History of the Theatre has been appreciated for its epic synthesis of Western and increasingly world theatre traditions, and singled out for its pedagogical service to theatre studies; indeed, I myself am indebted to Brockett’s History, studying it first in a Czech translation.35 As Joseph Roach pointed out in 1999, the magnum opus has “remained at once definitive and openended,” and unsurpassed,36 and its continuous revisions across ten editions materialize this ongoing adaptability. Nonetheless, this history of expansion and revision also highlights a singleness of purpose: the silent effort to realize the theatre’s evolutionary ambitions in the moment of the drama’s “maturity,” a climax determining the value of earlier Western and non-Western theatricalities and valorizing Western theatre’s future development. Rather than understanding this landmark publication as an illustration of how changing scholarship qualifies an instrument of teaching, I take it instead as an instance of how the plurality of theatrical expressions

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is unwritten from theatre history by the unilinear, nominal, and structural preferences codified by the differentiating logic of dramatic humanism. The slippery locution—the theatre—at the heart of History at once localizes an object of analysis and an organizing principle, articulating a teleological paradigm achieving its formal fulfillment in the arrival of the “mature drama” onstage and the “true ensemble” in the German Enlightenment playhouse, where performers and spectators were held in resonant communion through professional—literary and standardized— experience. In the national methodology of History (the chronological overview of the book is organized in chapters on global regions and nations), this vanishing point—the achieved reciprocity between the mature drama and the true ensemble—focuses the idiosyncratic power of dramatic humanism: the theatre conscious of its literarization frees itself from the performative forms that are at once necessary to its cultural development and rendered obsolete by the Darwinian destiny of the theatre’s history. The impact of dramatic humanism on History’s conceptual structure comes to the fore in “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” a central chapter leading the reader from the English traveling troupes performing in German-speaking lands in the early seventeenth century to the zenith of Weimar Classicism. Pursuing both a secular and a liberal-humanist agenda, History rapidly displaces Jesuit and courtly theatrical forms from its positive taxonomy, while less swiftly devaluing early modern forms of itinerant, popular, and bodily performances. The evolutionary epistemology of the theatre depends on creating moments of historical impasse. For example, when not playing at court, but for “a German-speaking audience” at markets and fairs, the traveling English companies’ foreignness and catering to the spectators’ ludic desires are seen as offering rather simplistic entertainment. The “unsophisticated playgoers” can only demand crude bodily genres (comedy, pantomime, dance, music, song), for these are all that the linguistically incompetent English performers can offer; the foreign does not command the “native” euphony needed to produce the qualified speech essential to a dramatic teleology. Since History compartmentalizes performance into national—English, Italian, French, and so forth—chapters, this organizational thrust necessarily undervalues the hybrid, plural, and collaborative practices of foreign companies, suppresses translinguistic and transcultural historical narratives, and downplays the importance of the embodied

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empathetic attunement arising from these performances and the alternative histories to which these practices might give rise.37 As secularism separates the theatre from the religious, liberalism from the aristocratic, and nationalism from the foreign, the aestheticism of the culturally elevated, the “high,” sanctions itself by coding its other as lacking, crude, inarticulate, bodily, and excessive, as “low.” Trapped in the body vs. mind dichotomy, History’s humanist valuation of clowning is another instance discounting the potential of corporeal communication, characteristically diminishing this form of theatre as inadequate to the appropriately logocentric purpose of theatre: it “depended little on language.” Like the foreign strollers, too popular to be discounted, the improvisational Viennese Hanswurst Joseph Anton Stranitzky (1676– 1726) can be acknowledged as a “special favorite,” whose physical, ironic, and spontaneous performance established “a vigorous tradition of improvisation,” but only to be blamed for why “written drama made little headway in Austria until after 1750.” An obstacle to the institutionalization of “written drama” that might otherwise have emerged at Vienna’s “first permanent public theater,” the Theater am Kärntnertor, the native aspect of Stranitzky’s clowning cannot undo the values predetermining History’s judgment; it merely summons a desire for unbridled entertainment. Instead of exploring the “vigorous tradition” or the multifaceted persecutions of the Hanswurst due to its political critique of the monarchy, History casts this figure as an impediment to the literary development of theatrical artistry and to the correspondent literary consciousness of the national playhouse audience.38 The telos of dramatic humanism writes its theatre: “several factors contributed to the theatre’s low state: a repertory designed to attract an unsophisticated audience; the uneducated actors, who were little better than sideshow performers; and conditions which made it impossible to rehearse and mount plays with care.” In consequence, “it is not surprising that aristocrats and churchmen held the professional theatre in contempt.” As the foreign, the physical, the popular (“special favorite,” “vigorous tradition”) are prerequisite to, yet canceled by, a humanist sentiment forecasting the native “mature drama” and its cognate embodiment in the “true ensemble,” this ill-spirited theatre (recalling how Horace’s hybrid chimeras violate decorum) is tellingly—reflexively—accused of causing the antitheatrical prejudice against its emerging double, a literarily inflected professional theatre. These liberal distinctions define the interpellative power of the

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disciplinary objects (playwriting, acting, and spectatorship) and interpretive categories (“regular drama,” “more mature drama,” “major drama,” and “minor drama”39 ) driving the exclusionary dimension of humanist theatre studies, principles also visible in the problematic role of class, race, and gender in fashioning the history of the theatre. According to History, in the Weimar Classicism arising “between 1775 and 1800, German drama attained maturity.” This initiating moment and axis of modern theatre reflexively enables and prohibits the troublesome theatrical materialities and their performativities afflicting the evolution of dramatic theatre. Normed to dramatic humanism, History cannot but open and close alternative histories, as is documented in its treatment of the playwright August Friedrich von Kotzebue (1761–1819). Valued for motivating a democratic theatre that urged the dissolution of class difference, Kotzebue knew how to titillate audiences without shocking them and how far he could depart from accepted conventions without confusing unsophisticated spectators. He combined sensational subjects, striking spectacle, and humanitarian sentiments so successfully that he helped to create the vogue for melodrama that was to dominate the nineteenth-century stage. Largely because of Kotzebue’s plays, German drama was by 1800 considered the most vital and popular in the world.40

Instantiating an intermediate phase in a teleology that must arrive at the “mature” tragedies of Weimar Classicism, Kotzebue delivers “humanitarian sentiments” to sophisticated and unsophisticated spectators alike, registering the progress and moderation of liberal-humanist theatricality. Indeed, knowing how to titillate without shocking his audiences, Kotzebue possesses the consciousness of dramatic “maturity” given weight by History, accounting for the Viennese Burgtheater’s impressive accommodation of Kotzebue (“one-fourth of all … performances were of Kotzebue’s plays”) and for his worldwide popularity. However, while Brockett lists the English translations of thirty-six of Kotzebue’s plays, the world popularity of Kotzebue between 1787 and 1867 refers only to Vienna (and presumably to England). Domesticating “the world” to a reduction imagined as submission to one author, History at once enacts a familiar humanist solipsism—identifying German drama, and so Western theatre, as an index of “world” culture—and marks the influential playwright as only a figure of passage in the coming of higher things.41

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History bestows the fulfillment of dramatic maturity on “Germany’s greatest playwrights” (6th ed.), “greatest literary dramatists” (10th ed.), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805). Owing to their attraction to the “spirit” of ancient drama, History illuminates their Weimar collaboration as civilizing the actors and leading the vocally and gesturally resonant ensemble of performers— actors and spectators—“beyond their normal perceptions into the realm of ideal truth.”42 Less probing aesthetic idealism than pursuing it, History takes Goethe’s commitment to the standardized audibility of his actors as licensing the phonosphere of dramatic maturity, as essential to both theatrical and disciplinary methodology. Theatrical maturation culminates in the “true ensemble,” a theatrical experience thematized and edified by the drama in its perfected, wellspoken form; as Goethe puts it, the “stage and the auditorium, the actor and the spectator form a whole.”43 Perhaps signaling caution by scarequoting Goethe’s “universal genius,” History nonetheless values the modern director for steering the plural materialities that the stage employs to reify the dramatic order, to orient the performance to “achieve a harmonious and graceful picture which, in combination with intelligent and euphonious line readings, would attune the spectator to an ideal beauty.” According to Brockett, Goethe “worked with individual actors” on the text, “sometimes over several months, on the interpretation of their roles prior to the first company rehearsal,” beginning with “a series of reading rehearsals during which” he “corrected line readings and interpretation, with special attention to the proper speaking of verse and to rhythmic patterns.” Goethe did not hesitate to promote the “grace, dignity, and ease” with which he rehearsed his actors, imbuing performances with “proper enunciation” instead of “regional dialects,” a standardization of “tempo,” “tone,” and “movement,” and an improved “posture and stance,” all remaking the actors’ acculturated bodies into an enculturated image of aestheticized “social behavior.” Through this practice, the lettered director “achieved the most integrated ensemble of his day,” the “true ensemble,”44 in which the performers—actors and spectators— are circularly maintained by the authenticity of the ensemble and the true knowledge sustaining that authenticity. History takes Goethe’s literarized modulation of the performing body within a dignified theatre practice to complete the development from oral to written, from improvised to scripted, from amateur to professional, from popular and aristocratic to professional and artistic, from the

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capriciousness of the low to the integrity of the high, from the enervating appeal of spectacle to the joy of graceful harmony: the “true ensemble” enacts a liberal humanization encoding true social and aesthetic integration. To be sure, History validates actors’ complaints that Goethe “devoted two-thirds of the preparation time to plays” he “admired” and that Goethe exhibited undemocratic leadership, treating the audience “as autocratically as he did the actors,” sometimes reprimanding them in the theatre for responses he deemed “inappropriate.” Yet, having displaced forms of performance relegated to the “low,” and fashioning Goethe’s directorial practice within an Enlightenment “organizational reason” impelling “everything to justify itself in terms of meaning and effect,” History finally rationalizes Goethe’s autocratic approach to a liberal-humanist pedagogical desire “to enlarge the experience of both his actors and his audiences.”45 Presented as foundational to modern theatre, Goethe’s practice articulates theatre as a discursive totality, a living ensemble regulating the popular and the bodily through their exclusion from true meaning; the ensemble problematically preserves the human body as a high-culture signifier, literarizing the actor’s embodiment and synchronizing its reception by a reciprocally embedded spectator. The nationalizing gesture implied in Goethe’s standardization of accent and movement, audibility and physicality, inscribes the “true ensemble” as the joint realization of the correlative teleologies of dramatic, theatrical, and national maturity.46 Over the seven editions published from 1968 to 1995 edited by Brockett, and the three editions (1999, 2003, and 2008) produced in collaboration with Franklin J. Hildy, the global purview of “history of the theatre” was consistently enlarged. However, even though the extension of History attempts to undo its colonial, religious, racial, and gendered inflections (dispensing with the first edition’s “Theatre of the Orient” title, for example), these emendations do not undo the humanist biases from which History of the Theatre unfolds; instead, they naturalize this underlying conceptual rationality through a less conspicuously ideological emphasis on geographical inclusion, on the one hand, and formalism, on the other. Let me raise two examples specific to this historiographical problematic by comparing the 6th with the 10th edition, where Brockett’s privileging of aesthetic idealism in his contextual reading of Goethe is contracted to Brockett and Hildy’s formalist account. First, the agreeable depiction of Goethe’s 1787 Iphigenia in Tauris as a work using “the framework of the ancient myth” to index “humanity’s

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ethical evolution from a narrow concern for self to an awareness of broader claims” is replaced in the 10th edition by “Iphigenia in Tauris (1787) is often considered one of his greatest achievements.” While the 6th edition dramatizes the idealist value Brockett assigns to Goethe and Schiller (“it was not the formal characteristics of ancient drama that attracted them so much as the spirit”), the 10th edition undoes this explicitly ideological register, accentuating instead the canonical, formal, and literary excellence of their collaborative efforts. Second, according to the 6th edition, for Goethe and Schiller, “the formal conventions of Greek tragedy served merely as devices to ‘distance’ the spectators from the play’s events so they might perceive the ideal patterns behind everyday reality.” In the 10th edition, however, “useful” replaces “merely”: “served as useful devices.”47 Again, “merely” implies a timeless and universal vision of cultural inheritance animating both Goethe’s work and Brockett’s discourse, an inheritance resignified by the shift to “useful,” which underlines the regulatory work of dramatic humanism through the formal properties of composition and style. These two rearticulations exemplify a tendency occurring throughout History’s editions: a hardly noticeable semantic modification drains the previous passage of what the later edition marks as its ideological character, reinforcing while obscuring the ideological work of humanism. Dramatic maturity locates literary form as the aesthetic law of the theatre. Taken in the aggregate, these revisions make tangible how dramatic humanism inclines the discipline of theatre history toward a principle of literary causality. Rather than subjecting History’s narrative to historiographical scrutiny, such trimmings and rewordings encode the historicity of History as a mystifying remastering. This eliding of evolutionary and idealist perspectives is particularly visible in the revision of History’s orienting preface. In the 6th edition, Brockett notes his attention to “those features” of theatre “that apparently influenced succeeding times.” The preface to the 10th edition downplays this implicitly Hegelian impulse in which the theatre comes to the recognition of its internal purposes. Instead of “tracking the development of theatre” and the efforts of “artists and artisans” seeking to “improve” on the theatre of the past, it promises only to document an uninflected “change”; theatre does not necessarily get “better (or worse)” but is only “always different.” Nonetheless, altering the humanist logic requires more than recoding evolution as an equalizing, though improving, “change”; it demands

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a thorough rethinking of the narrative’s historiographical perspective, precisely because the rhetoric of the 10th edition (its rhetoric of history) disclaims an investment in the “history of historiography (the methods for writing history),” proposing instead to offer a “survey of the basic information to which those methods for written history have been applied.” Reading these prefaces alongside one another underlines a historiographical shift from representing the theatre as a “sociocultural institution” (6th edition) to conceiving it as an “art form” and “cultural institution” (10th edition), a subtle realignment of the ways theatre is positioned: less as an aesthetic site necessarily networked into the social than as an aesthetic object important principally in the cultural sphere of the arts. Indeed, the 10th edition masks this rewriting by silently absorbing History’s earlier objectives: “Our goal has always been to survey the history of theatre as a cultural institution.”48 Yet, the facts of history remain inseparable from their telling. In the dramatic “human search for fulfillment” informing History of the Theatre’s organizing historiographical practice, the theatre is naturalized as a democratic, liberal-humanist cultural institution while eliding the normalizing techniques of exclusionary power enabling its respectability.49

A Critique of Humanist Theatre? The humanist logic of History of the Theatre raises, now, a sharp question: why, it might be asked, return to the ideology of humanism? After all, critical posthumanism and posthuman cultural—literary, theatrical, and performance—theory are already working from an ethical repositioning “enhanced by the contextual urgency of the Anthropocene condition,” advancing a deconstruction “of the Western Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal measure of all things,” rejecting speciesism and anthropocentrism, “species hierarchy and human exceptionalism.”50 As Humanism, Drama, and Performance argues, though, while the violence of humanism continues to be reassessed and post-disciplinary practices developed, humanist rationality still felicitously acts out disciplinary interrogations. Assuming an indelible border between the gravitational pull of humanist dualisms and Foucault’s now-foundational critique of humanism, these critiques evince revealing epistemological slippages, often silently animating the reexamination of the historical, cultural, and theoretical intersections of theatre history and performance studies.

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Kent Cartwright’s 1999 Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century takes up one distinctive strategy, suggesting that Foucault’s periodizing of medieval and modern and the coordinated poststructuralist critique of a transhistorical essentialism articulate a perspective already located within the historical humanism of the sixteenth century. Delegitimizing cultural materialist, new historicist, and Marxist perspectives, Cartwright sees the scholarly account of the socialization of early modern drama to be misrepresented by this “second-generation attack on humanism,” censure particularly leveled against Catherine Belsey’s 1985 The Subject of Tragedy. For Cartwright, Belsey’s effort to replace the liberal-humanist essentialization of human nature with a more contestatory, Foucauldian understanding of the contradictory subject, in reifying Foucault’s epistemic medieval/humanist dyad between the “fragmented being of the medieval moralities” and the “autonomous, empirical individual” of early modern drama, fails “to account for the permeability of the humanist self and the indeterminate unfolding of its possibilities.” Not only is a medieval worldview not opposed to a humanist one, he argues, but Renaissance humanists themselves emphasize the “social and historical” dimension of individuals in ways falsified by anachronistic critical labels such as “idealist and essentialist.” Taking the poststructuralist critique informing Belsey’s standpoint to blind her to the contradictory pluralities of the sixteenth century, Cartwright in a sense expands historical humanism: early modern humanism—or studia humanitatis —was an eclectic, centrifugal network of practices and attitudes only later homogenized by a nineteenth-century anthropological matrix.51 Anti-essentialist avant la lettre, then, Cartwright’s Renaissance humanism is not displaced by poststructuralist critique but capaciously contains it; this argument positions posthumanism as a dimension of historical humanism in order to transcend that critique by absorbing its rationality. Fluent in Foucault’s critique of humanism, the 2017 six-volume series A Cultural History of Theatre asserts itself as a revisionist attempt to dislocate the foundational humanist certainties of Brockett’s History of the Theatre. At the same time, while A Cultural History recategorizes the subject matter and multiplies its means of accounting for theatre as “a cultural practice that emerged in antiquity and today encompasses practically the whole globe,”52 and indeed relies on hybridizing semantics, it also retains attitudes, gestures, and methodological paradigms bound to humanist—dualist—conceptions of the theatre. Using Foucault as shorthand signals a resistance to philosophical, liberal humanism but does not

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itself recognize the limits of theatre as cultural practice when those limits are inscribed by the discipline’s ongoing relation to and struggle with dramatic humanism. Foucault’s critique of humanism as a viable power/knowledge instrument for theatre history and historiography is intermittently brought into service as a negotiable framework for the historiographical examination of self-disciplining and self-optimizing subjectivity, articulating a tension with an unforsaken humanism, characteristically visible in the fourth volume of the series, A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Mechele Leon. In her chapter “Communities of Production: Eighteenth-Century Acting Companies,” Deborah C. Payne invokes Foucault to distance the liberal-humanist claims of Enlightenment universalism, crediting him with the point that even as the Enlightenment promoted human rights, it also subjected “people to the hegemonic regimen of a single, universal code of behaviour” and imposed “various technologies of social control.” Humanist ethics also had, Payne suggests, specific consequences for the conduct of Enlightenment European theatre: “An overriding belief in humanism, the notion that Europeans shared a core morality that warranted protection through basic freedoms and rights, made for improved conditions for actors,” enabling the theatre to become a representative site of self-governance and the instrument for the spectators’ self-fashioning as “rational Enlightenment subjects.”53 Despite its effort to recast “evolutionary” historiography as Foucauldian genealogy, though, A Cultural History of Theatre remains troped by the impulses of an evolutionary rationality, one—as I will discuss in a moment—characteristic of Brockett’s History of the Theatre. In her treatment of “Repertoire and Genres: Cultural Logics and the Trick of Theatrical Longevity,” Lisa A. Freeman works to avoid a progressive teleology by looking at the preceding “dramatic lineages and performance genealogies” that influenced eighteenth-century theatre, in which the repertory signified “a movement forward even as it circled back repetitively to prior practices.” Yet this recursive, nonlinear structure nonetheless tracks a humanist logic. In her discussion of the stage history of The Fatal Marriage; or, The Innocent Adultery, Thomas Southerne’s 1694 adaptation to the stage of Aphra Behn’s 1689 novella The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker, Freeman plots the sentimental rewriting of Behn’s calculating Isabella into a figure of traumatic suffering through the adaptations of Southerne and David Garrick (1757), climaxing in Sarah Siddons’s celebrated 1782 performance. Siddons brought

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“the transformation of Behn’s amatory fiction into a domestic tragedy to its fullest realization,” concatenating the embodiment of “an evolution in acting style and audience taste to shape a repertory that was attuned not just to expression of sentiment but even more so to the display of sensibility.” While the “meaning of plays” could be revised by stage performance, Freeman’s sense of “performance genealogies” in this essay largely hews to an account of playwriting and revision (mainly setting aside the coevolutionary network of other popular, quasi-dramatic, or “illegitimate” forms of performance) and comes to fruition in the recognition of a commodified “display of sensibility” increasingly sought by Enlightenment audiences.54 Here, repertory and genre are understood to have an implicit teleology, shaped not by the maturing of the drama alone but through interaction with the processual development of acting. This genealogy of performance traces the evolutionary narrative of dramatic humanism apart from the “illegitimate” performance forms and expressions that nonetheless silently lend the dramatic genres their cultural—disciplinary—value. The effort to chart a systematic whole-of-theatre history, implied as much by the standardization of chapter topics across A Cultural History’s six volumes as it is by Brockett’s the, is to some degree offset in several recent collections, particularly in Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (2015) and Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices (2015). These collections extend what Foucault called the autochthonous transformation of historical knowledge, explicitly criticizing the nineteenth-century positivist rationalities still operative in theatre and performance historiography today, even in such urgently collaborative projects as A Cultural History.55 Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka’s Theatre/Performance Historiography suggestively refuses to separate—as both History of the Theatre and A Cultural History of Theatre do—theatre from performance. Particularly animating Gilles Deleuze’s plane of immanence, Theatre/Performance Historiography attends to time, space, and matter—“surfaces that consist of different historical depths”—in ways that prohibit a sundering of the past from the present, and instead project “the materiality of history as a state of unrest” to disrupt theatre and performance studies’ reliance on linear time and movement, on singularizing narratives coalescing with national exceptionalism, and indeed on the privilege of assigning to the human the principle of spatial and temporal organization.56

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The appreciation of difference through attentive engagements with the local, the discrete, and the contingent is dramatized by another boundary outside the framework of a “cultural history of theatre,” the boundary between human and animal performance. Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices provides an impetus to revisit the anthropocentric (and logocentric) implications of the foundational theories and methods of theatre and performance studies. Rejecting the Cartesian beast-machine for arrogating reason and feeling as exclusively human faculties, the volume takes up the “illegitimate” others—animals, animal acts, and circuses—upon which the legitimation of the human and the theatre have been built, performance forms that are sometimes mentioned in passing in both History of the Theatre and A Cultural History but that continue to define the humanist limits of the latter’s conception of culture. Rather than locating performing as an exclusively human property or limiting it to select primate species (the anthropological and linguistic gesture of performance studies), Performing Animality moves from “the production of knowledge about the animals” toward an “embodied proximity to animals’ own ways of thinking and performing,” developing Laura Cull’s “radically inclusive” performance, “open to perpetual mutation” through a mutual encounter with animals, unsettling that interminably unsettled term—performance— anew, as it renegotiates the boundary between the human and the nonhuman animals.57 Articulating the posthuman/ist turn in the humanities, locating human and “animal lives in a shared space of political and ecological precarity,”58 and interrogating human–animal performative relationalities toward a disciplinary revision of the theory and doing of performance, Performing Animality issues analytical terms and historical and contemporary avatars foregrounding the ethical concerns focused by animals in performance. Both History of the Theatre and A Cultural History aim to establish performance to qualify theatre history critically but rely on the uncontested or unexamined invocation of anthropo- and logocentric principles. Performing Animality instead interrogates performance at the limit of this humanist capture and moves beyond it. Finally, one of the most influential books of recent theatre studies, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (1999), similarly engages without quite dispensing with the binary interpretive categories of humanist theatre. Fashioning a theoretical paradigm reorganizing modern theatre and performance, Lehmann also engages a Foucauldian critique, here to drive a formal distinction between dramatic theatre governed by

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the text, using declamation and illustration to integrate the represented world and the spectatorial subject into the sensible regime of the dramatic, and the postdramatic disorientation of that theatrical and spectatorial interiority. That is, Lehmann does not so much challenge Brockett’s history of an evolving theatre climaxing in the “mature drama” as adds a new phase in that evolution, retaining the valorization of a theatre made to the measure of the human. A humanist dualism is particularly evident in the theoretical distinction between liveness and mediatization. Discriminating between the “cohesive totality” of the “representation of textual worlds” expressed by dramatic theatre and the “new multiform kind of theatrical discourse” enabled by the infiltration of new media since the 1970s,59 Lehmann takes the use of live and recorded media onstage, as Louise Lepage suggests, to “hybridize and reformulate the (post)human subject.”60 Similarly, understanding the dramatic theatre’s emphasis on the “anthropological” and the “real” to be undone or challenged by the “inauthentic” multiplicities generated by mediatization, Lehmann tends to replicate a sense of the dramatic theatre as a celebration of “liveness,” one that covertly assumes that such theatre is somehow unmediated, innately “human.” Indeed, for Ralf Remshardt, in assuming that electronic mediation “always reduces or compromises human agency in performance,”61 Lehmann preserves what Philip Auslander’s 1990s critique of Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked identifies as the “ontology of [living ] performance.” Auslander sees Phelan’s commitment to the value of living performance as carving the “liveness” of human performance out from the threat of less-than-human representational technologies; the “traditional assumption” (of an implied humanism) treats “liveness,” the “virtuous live performance,” as “menaced by evil mediatization,” for in this rationality, “once live performance succumbs to mediatization, it loses its ontological [human] integrity.” As Auslander notes, in the theatre, liveness is always mediated, “always already inscribed with traces of the possibility of technical mediation.”62 In light of Remshardt’s and Auslander’s critique, Lehmann’s and Phelan’s theoretical distinction between the embodied and the technological misrepresents these technologies’ mutual imbrication, preserving the categories of value characteristic of dramatic humanism, in which the humanized and humanizing drama exceeds its merely technical theatricalization. The essential immediacy and intimacy attributed to a properly theatrical immersion in the live reproduction of dramatic meaning coordinates with the liberal-humanist elicitation of authenticity, autonomy,

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and agency. When theatre is understood to remediate the drama, it compromises the genuine experience of humanity emanating from writing. Dramatic humanism understands humanity/selfhood in narrative terms: drama is the expression of a logocentric subjectivity-as-identity, an externalization of the self-as-author. A result of, and a platform for, intersubjective narratives, drama and dramatic performance reify life along the lines of Hegel’s Bildung, a notion within which one’s life focuses a committed project of reflective self-narration. Technological mediation, in this view, including the mediation of theatre, merely assists in the exhibition of the value of dramatic humanity; it cannot create it, although it can, according to a dualistic logic, seduce humanity from itself by its capacity for spectacularization. All of these studies—historical textbooks, revisionist historical scholarship, cultural interpretation, and theoretical inquiry—witness the challenges of attempting to unwrite theatre from the dualistic script of its accommodation to a humanist tradition.

Barish’s Antitheatrical Prejudice and the Liberal Ensemble Whereas dramatic maturity is the aesthetic category motivating the theatre in Brockett’s History and in its various successors, however unstable that succession may be, in Jonas Barish’s 1981 The Antitheatrical Prejudice, the individual functions as the political axis underwriting the theatre’s vested, self-regulatory value. Inasmuch as Barish extends Aristotle’s naturalized mimeticism (“the instinct of self-expression that lodges in all of us”) to the “potentially liberating humanity of the institution” of theatre, he understands theatre to provide a necessary outlet for human self-regulation, preventing “a man” from turning “into a piece of clockwork,” from losing “the faculty of self-distancing that constitutes part of his humanity.”63 For Brockett, the audience-as-ensemble correlates with the mature drama; for Barish, the ensemble-of-individuals correlates the creative freedom of the theatre, which is both a formative expression of and a therapeutic site for the subject of liberal humanism. To adapt Belsey, Barish’s “[u]nified, knowing and autonomous” individual creates theatre as its own reflection, one “which guarantees freedom of choice,” coming into being and functioning, like democracy, as the “unconstrained expression of human nature.”64 Barish’s Cold War theatrical ensemble of individuals harmonized to a liberalized freedom is set against Plato’s “inhibitory” Republic and

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“inquisitorial” Laws , both treatises displacing as transgression the freeplay of the individual’s creative “imagination,” the differential invention resulting from our mimetic propensity. Castigating imitation, and “taking the state rather than the individual as the standard,” Plato improperly subordinates ethics to the political makeup of art, assaulting the maxim of liberal humanism: “Not man but the state becomes measure of all things.”65 Platonic mimesis unmakes the individual by violating freedom of experience in the state-sanctioned processes of fixed human production: “Frustration, boredom, curiosity, excitement, adventurousness—all such responses are to be invalidated and in effect legislated out of existence.” Recalling the Plato popularized by Karl Popper in the 1940s, Barish’s Republic is inflected as a paradigmatic totalitarian state, driven by a consuming “antipoetic austerity,” a move “to aestheticize politics. The ideal city may exile the poets, but it does so in order to become all the more a poem itself, a beautiful and harmonious totality, every particle of which contributes to the total order.”66 Neither referring directly to Walter Benjamin’s 1935–36 National Socialist “aestheticizing of politics ” nor to the Communist “politicizing art,” Prejudice dispenses with both of these alternatives: humankind’s “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (National Socialism) and/or its aesthetic annihilation as a supreme political pleasure (Communism), alternatives enabled by the explicit conjunction of the aesthetic and the political foreign to the individualizing process Barish takes to be essential to the art of theatre.67 Appealing to his readers, Barish’s “we” binds them—us —to his rhetoric of liberal individualism. Plato’s antidemocratic republic mobilizes “its repressive mechanisms” against the liberal modernity we share, against what is “attractive to us” in terms of individual freedom, our commitment to the “emotional” and “irrational,” our pleasure in the “multiplicity” of a diverse society, an intrinsically egalitarian resistance to state control. As Barish puts it, “[w]hat makes democracy suspect to Plato is precisely what makes it attractive to us, its variety and freedom ... symbolized in the waywardness of the artist,” against which “the Republic is to mobilize its repressive mechanisms.”68 The artist’s freedom is cognate with the individual’s reasonably licensed irrationality, the intrinsic humanity we share and on which our historically justified democratic polity depends. Barish hails us through what Brecht resisted as “the singular of the plural form,”69 laboring to free theatrical expression by naturalizing it to the

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instincts of that singular plural, the liberal audience, the ensemble of the individualized we. The performance of the liberal-humanist ensemble requires “waywardness,” but waywardness does not alter—though it might expand—the experimental consciousness and emotional repertoire of the ensemble and its parts. Since theatrical mimesis trains “our responses,” provides “a lightning rod for potentially damaging feelings that clamor for expression,” its purpose is fundamentally therapeutic. Theatre regulates our nature, involving “imaginative displacement, adoption of unfamiliar psychic hypotheses, experiments with untried states of feeling,” which “release the individual from the cage of his ego or his fixed place in the social order.” Art works “chiefly on the irrational sides of us, giving license to our dreams and foul thoughts, to whatever in us is devious, intricate, and disordering.” Although the “waywardness” essential to liberal life must include the possibility of “at least potentially malign” effects of theatrical performance, what Barish understands as “malign” is what sustains the self-regulating tolerance and sympathy of liberal humanism70 ; theatre encourages degrees of “irrational” “diversity” and “variety,” but only to the degree that the “multiplicity” and “disruption” are contained, arresting, as Belsey puts it, “the play of signification in the interests of the truth it offers to teach.”71 The Antitheatrical Prejudice legislates self-transformation as a process of self-extension, in which the individual’s protean change is always already degree-bound, operating within the determining categories of licensed freedom. Despite the enthusiasm for the “wayward” artist-individual, what Barish’s liberal-humanist protheatricality declines is what Susan Sontag endorsed as the “erotic” element of art,72 the sensual experience of performance beyond the regime of the democratic we, beyond, in Stefan Herbrechter’s words, the “authoritarian control mechanisms to the idea of free creativity, which allows for selfoptimization.”73 Writing in 1961 in the UNESCO-sponsored collection The Humanist Frame, Stephen Spender located the challenges to modern, liberal art in the Cold War context as arising from the menacing risks to “individuation” posed across the postwar political spectrum: it “is not the threat to the individual that is a danger to art in modern times so much as the threat to the operations of individuation” itself, a threat promoted by the “diffusion of an orthodoxy in the way of seeing and feeling things without

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our having to use our imaginations.”74 In 1981, finding his contemporary stage to be strewn with performances that threaten imaginative individuation (Artaud and Brecht), Barish energetically polices the legitimate borders of liberal-humanist theatricality, canceling the theatre of “brute incomprehensibility,” theatre refusing “to speak to man” (Beckett), theatre rejecting “narrative, continuity of person, and sometimes formulable meaning of any kind” (Living Theatre, Open Theatre, the theatre of Jerzy Grotowski and Robert Wilson). Theatre is an institution of licensed, liberal-humanist “sympathy” registering the condition of human nature as “suffering,” the crisis of the subject’s unattainable identity with itself; it is “self-transforming,” but only within the parameters of the individualizing self-optimization of the presumed ensemble of a democratic Cold War humanity.75 The “protean instinct” intrinsic to “human nature” and essential to the (possibility and appeal of) theatre depends on the empathetic limits of the individual’s integrated subjectivity. For Barish, “we” cannot applaud the protean excess, the “cruelty” of Artaud’s antihumanism, a “doctrine” of theatre “without boundary,” in which the spectator’s “normal sense of himself” is unseated, a theatre that sends “seismic shock waves coursing through him, to teach him his helplessness in the face of the powers that rule human life.” Alternatively, Brecht’s epic theatre is not protean enough to accommodate “our sympathy,” which cannot be confined to the analytical property of Verfremdung; we displace the dialectical antithesis of intellectual critique, moving instead to unite in the sympathetic, “self-transforming powers of Shen-Te, or Azdak’s slipping in and out of his [Brecht’s] allotted roles.” To Barish, “alienation” indexes Brecht’s benighted effort to confine the spectator’s response within the politicized borders of judgment, an effort belied by the actions of Brecht’s characters, whose binary affectivities (Shen Te or Shui Ta, empathy or judgment) are brushed aside by our “reaching out toward the suffering creatures on the stage quite as if no mechanism of alienation had thrust itself between them and us at all.”76 Like Artaud and Brecht, having done away with normal “speech” and treating “text” both as “inessential” and as “a tyrannous system of prefabricated meanings,” the apparently eccentric theatricalities of the postwar avant-garde fall outside the liberal vision Barish takes as definitive of the theatre, reversing and so confirming the theatre’s essential identity through “a science-fiction-like attempt to reinvent the human, as if we were all suddenly to wake on a new planet, and had to recommence

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the history of the race anew, with no reference to the past other than that of repudiation.” Taking “refuge” in the “theater itself,” these theatricalities cannot figure the liberal-humanist theatre; they mark its limits, inescapably summoning an ineffable, and for Barish warranted, prejudice arising from “the deepest core of our being.”77 In concluding, The Antitheatrical Prejudice rapidly traces ontological, sociological, and psychoanalytic frameworks of explanation that chart the intersection between liberal humanism, theatricality, and disciplinary critique. In Barish’s existential parable, we come into the world encircled by watchful eyes, to whose expressions we quickly learn to adjust our own. Our efforts at self-definition consist of our attempts to cope with this amphitheater of gazes—to accept it, without evasion, as constitutive of us in the first place, but then to refuse to bow to its despotic edicts.78

Barish poses an existential dialectic here: the individual desires an authentic gesture of expression invariably compromised by the inherent theatricality of social and cultural life. Citing both Jean-Paul Sartre and JeanJacques Rousseau, Barish argues that “human consciousness arises in a theatrical context,” where the determining gaze of others threatens the individual with the pursuit of an inauthentic agenda, which can only be resisted by writing one’s own “script” in defiance of those demanding masks. In the ontological theatre of existential philosophy, “the intrinsic theatricality of our being” might still leave “room for heroic possibilities,” provided the actor recognizes this essential scene—in which action cannot be separated from acting—as “the hazard of being human.” Barish connects this existential perspective with a prominent line of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ sociology, which he rather dismissively associates with a conception of social behavior as “‘role-making’ or ‘role-taking,’” silently alluding to Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.79 Finally, tracing Freud’s Wolf Man, he suggests that the “thirst to be gazed at ” motivates the “unacknowledged exhibitionism” of both actors and spectators in psychological terms, the persistence of an infantile (and theatrical) narcissism that the ego must overcome to achieve individuated identity, and that yet persists as a form of antitheatrical “self-disgust brought on by our conflicted longing to occupy the center of the stage once more.”80 If “the day ever dawned when men became truly able to live ‘in themselves,’ like Rousseau’s imagined savages,” then “our special need for the

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theater as an art form might also vanish: it would no longer confront us with an account of our own truth struggling against our own falsity.”81 Against the violating amphi/theatrical gaze, the liberalization of theatre provides the means to write our authentic script; when appropriately disciplined to the evocation of individual freedom of expression, theatre is an extension of human nature through which we continually regulate that nature, through the simultaneously curative and constricting power of mimesis. Theatre, in this sense, provides the necessary means for the realization of human nature, the means to make visible and cognizable what would otherwise remain invisible and unseen to us; it provides the necessary self-regulating mimetic instrument, the liberating mirror in which we—I = we—see what otherwise would remain in us and for us unseen. Whether writing the history of the theatre or giving an account of antitheatrical attitudes, these foundational publications write a theatre of a we preceding and reducing the theatre to its own image, unwriting the multiplicity of theatrical expressions and human behaviors by normalizing liberal attitudes and values as essential to the dramatic work of theatre and its resonant sociality. It is worth remembering that although the English translation of Foucault’s 1966 Les Mots et les choses as The Order of Things dates to 1970,82 Brockett’s History of the Theatre and Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice illustrate alternative accommodations of aesthetic and liberal humanism to a disciplinary practice as yet untouched by critical and cultural post/humanisms.

Between Political and Theatrical Assembly In the theatre, the performativity of the spectators is not exhausted in the “‘familiar’, ‘well-known’, transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself),” as Althusser might say,83 nor does it exclusively articulate a body “of absolute immanence,” as JeanLuc Nancy might put it, “producing in essence their own essence.”84 The notion of an audience-ensemble imagines a social body as construed within, as identified with, the determining qualifications of democracy, dramatizing it as a liberal shape for spectatorial experience. As Anselm Heinrich’s essay for A Cultural History, “Institutional Frameworks: Britain and Germany, 1800 to 1920,” documents, in nineteenthcentury England the aesthetic properties of the theatrical ensemble were debated in political terms, feared as curtailing the political maxims of liberal humanism, “individual liberty as the principal property in human

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existence”; it was seen as John Stuart Mill’s tyranny of the majority over individuals.85 This historical controversy delineates how the categories of ensemble and assembly are interactive and mutually defining, frustrating the effort to maintain the spectators-as-audience as either an aesthetic or a political ideality. While I have used the term ensemble to characterize a specific modeling of the audience, ensemble as a term specifying a homogenizing approach to the design of the stage and the organization of the theatrical company emerges in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, beginning with the work of the Meiningen Company (1866–90), the ensemble is praised for its representational coherence and the capability of its mise-en-scène to generate a Schillerian aestheticized sociality shaped through, and finding itself in, the spectator’s state of self-empathic and self-attuning resonance within the theatrical event of the dramatic performance. In historical terms, the ensemble coordinates rising nineteenth-century attitudes toward positivism, social and environmental evolution, and historical research, projecting “scientific” naturalism into an emergent theatrical authenticity stylistically associated with realism. On the other hand, the regulatory dimension of the ensemble stage image is contested in terms of its political dimensions. Incipiently shaped in opposition to the individualism and commercialization of the star cult, claimed as a democratic opportunity to the acting company, the director’s privileged power to arrange “scenery, costumes and actors as parts of the whole” within a “unifying perspective” came to be seen in authoritarian terms. In the words of Peter W. Marx, since “every actor had to play the role assigned to him,” the director’s shaping of the aesthetic whole encroaches on the Enlightenment’s truism “of individual liberty as the principal property in human existence.”86 Despite this aesthetic-political involution of ensemble-assembly, the dichotomy remains in force, instrumentalized to separate the radically democratic notion of the action of polity-as-assembly from the radically undemocratic notion of the appearance of sociality-asensemble, a public bound to and resonating with the “humanism of the commodity,” as Guy Debord might say.87 In the space of theatre, these two tropes are not exclusive, but mutually embedded and defining. According to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, “co-appearance forms a stage that is not a play of mirrors … that truth of the play of mirrors must be understood as the truth of the ‘with.’” Taking the spectators’ and audiences’ performance as generative of theatre, I deploy Nancy’s “being-with” to open up ontologies of theatrical humanism: “the

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stage must be reinvented; we must reinvent it each time, each time making our”—plural and undetermined—“entrance anew.” As performance is not antecedent to the theatre it begets, neither is this we antecedent to its performance: its power of being becomes at the moment of its doing. At the same time, though, the many I s comprising it are not external to “the measure of the with,” for “[w]e are always already there at each instant” (Nancy), or as Butler puts it, “I am already an assembly.”88 I am always already an assembly, even though that I, the I of the assembly, has been unwritten in the theatre emancipated by the “true ensemble.” In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler discriminates theatre from the performance of an assembly in ways that both assimilate her understanding of theatre to a humanist paradigm and sketch the implication of the assembly for rethinking the conceptual work of (humanist) theatricality. Fashioning a we of radical democracy emphatically “bound up with a living practice of critique,” Butler’s we signifies from an ecological implication “in other living processes of which I am but one.” Refusing the identificatory rhetorical we, which asserts a commonality of interest by veiling a differential access to equality, Butler invests in a queer, embodied “interdependence” (in distinction to atomized “independence”) in order to move us from the “insufficiency of identitarian ontologies.” Unlike the integration—with the drama, its themes, the public, and humanity—promised by the ensemble, the performativity of the assembly urges the critical address of and a resistant capacity to the differential exposure of bodies these enactments accommodate and express.89 Butler’s assembly asserts a differential relation to theatre, figuring it through the familiar humanist dichotomies: the politically legitimized and efficacious, expressively embodied assembly vs. the always illegitimate, affectively seductive, and ethically suspect theatre. Resonating with Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” a critique of the social order’s ideological and affective separation of aesthetics from politics, the dichotomy between theatrical and social assemblies confirms Butler’s “a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached” to theatre and to public performance.90 In this distribution of the sensible, assemblies achieve a “‘critical’ function” when “bodies are seized and animated by those existing spaces in the very acts by which they reclaim and resignify their meanings,” but theatre is a problematic space, excluded from the resignifying power of the assembly. Its contractual (economic) and consensual (aesthetic and class) nature always already reaffirms

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the “theater of legitimacy” of hegemonic relations,91 the ideal encapsulated in Brockett’s true and Barish’s liberal ensembles. Yet, although performances in a theatre may be designed to further a neo/liberal agenda,92 in the theatre the disembodied abstraction, the ensemble, is always already an embodied political capacity, an assembly. Practicing theatre—going to theatre, being in a theatre—is not exhausted by but can also respond to the urgencies of aesthetic, social, and political precarities: it may localize and render precarious relations significant and actionable, even when those relations are framed within an assembly emerging in the theatre. In this sense, performance is not opposed to theatre but defines what the theatre is both materially and historically. As it does for Said, theatre can indeed provide the figure for the invisible operation of absent authority, for the transmission of cultural and political authority to seize the assembled bodies of the audience. Despite J. L. Austin’s, Jacques Derrida’s, and Butler’s explorations of the performative dimension of utterance, though, theatre is not principally a place where the body must be constrained to the felicitous reproduction of the legitimating order of the text-as-speech, merely used to do things with words. Nor is its physical, architectural, and symbolic location in the figural landscape of state power necessarily homologous with dramatic (Aristotle/Goethe/Brockett) and aesthetic liberation (Aristotle/Schiller/Barish) or with aesthetic captivity (Said). Rather, theatre has the capacity to be continuously reclaimed and resignified as a place of assembly, as it was, for instance, in the Czechoslovakia of the 1960s through the Velvet Revolution of 1989, during apartheid in South Africa, and currently in Belarus or Palestine. Literary and dramatic humanisms’ rationality nonetheless continues to unwrite theatre, as when Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator reasserts an opposition between the empowering assembly and the disempowering theatre, reimagining the spectatorial mode of action in literarizing terms.93 Neither Butler nor Rancière index theatre without drama, and both are suspicious, as Simon Bayly points out of Rancière, of the theatre’s tendency to become “too theatrey, too sutured to the delusions of belonging or over-earnest identification.” For all the difference between Butler’s metaphorical and Rancière’s conceptual deployment of theatre, it is the notion of the ensemble that defines theatre, even in their revaluation of the multitude as “an ever-emergent collective social subject that is unmediated, revolutionary, immanent and affirmative.” Posited as an

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inverted paradigm of the ensemble, their assembly radiates “the very possibility of a human future … in a manner that has to remain axiomatically unpredictable yet entirely necessary.”94 For Butler, theatrical assembly is contradictory because the space of public life is always already distributed by a theatrical sensible, the incapacity of theatre-as-ensemble to overcome the position imposed on it by the enervating categories of literary and dramatic humanism: private vs. public, aesthetic vs. political, and dramatic vs. spectacular. For Rancière, the “emancipation” of the spectator involves a categorical “self-evisceration” of theatre, in which the distribution of its categories of agency (active vs. passive) and experience (knowing vs. seeing) is not merely reversed (as in the “participatory theatre”) but remade. And yet, calling for an active mode of spectating that invalidates the theatre as an “allegory of inequality,” a “reign of vision,” and a “[pseudo-]living community,” Rancière nonetheless places the “theatrical stage” on “an equal footing” with oral storytelling, books, and visual art, all of which require “spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make their own story.” He concludes, “[a]n emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators.”95 Butler cannot yet appreciate theatre freed from the ensemble; Rancière can conceive theatre freed from passive delusion into active knowledge only through the transformation of theatre from a site of performance to a site of narrating and translating. And while I appreciate Rancière’s interdependent notion of translation, neither he nor Butler fully contest the dramatic humanist vision of theatre; as Bayly puts it, the confusion of genres characteristic of the question of aesthetics and politics informing theatre “must literally be brought to book, back within a clear-headed and egalitarian regime of the literary-critical, the writerly and the readerly.”96 Just as Butler sets aside the interplay of assembly and ensemble in her imagination of theatre, Rancière, more alert to the theatrical ensembleassembly, nonetheless represents the active performance of that gathering in the terms of dramatic humanism, as a mode of literary engagement, reading, writing, and translating. The political anxiety circumscribing the theatrical assembly dramatizes the challenges posed by theatre to neo/liberal aesthetics, enacted in one of the most urgent moments of theatre, or at least in a theatre: Vice President Elect Mike Pence’s visit to a performance of the musical Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York City on November 18, 2016,

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barely a week after the contentious victory of Donald J. Trump in the US presidential election. As was widely reported, when Pence entered the auditorium, he was met with boos and some applause from the audience before the show began. At the curtain call, Brandon Victor Dixon, the African-American actor playing Vice President Aaron Burr, read a statement from the cast to the Vice President Elect. Voicing their diverse political views—applause and booing—as a response to Pence’s politics, the Hamilton spectators engaged in what Chantal Mouffe terms the “agonistics” of democracy, expressing their political attitudes as plural, nonconsensual, and indeterminate.97 They not only responded to Pence but reacted to one another’s responses, becoming louder and more vigorous in their mutual contestation. Employing practices of agonistic democracy as practices of spectating, they resignified the liberal-humanist notion of theatre as an exclusively depoliticized space and the neoliberal notion of theatre as a space of mere entertainment, a space for prosuming—producing what is consumed—the experience of well-played drama as fully cognate with the interests of post-democracy. In doing so, they opened the theatre as an artistic medium and as a humanist institution to a discussion of its political potentialities in a historical moment of neoliberal governmental constitution in the United States: the incoming presidency of a celebrity businessman unconcerned with political competencies. The cast “statement” Dixon read at the end of the musical, called in the press “a plea for tolerance,” addressed Pence and “your new administration” from an all-inclusive and plural, “alarmed and anxious” we, cataloguing the trepidation that the upcoming government “will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights.” In one sense, Dixon’s remarks recall Richard Schechner’s 1980 unwriting of “classical humanism” at the emergence of performance studies as a field, in favor of urging a “planetary interculturalism,” incorporating “the planet and all what dwells therein” into a posthuman/ist maxim: “Measure humans against planetary needs, not the other way around. And see the planet against the field of the cosmos.”98 Dixon, that is, charges the theatrical assembly with the responsibility of negotiating “planetary” rights, contesting the oppressive “statutory pluralism” concealed within a neo/liberal-humanist claim to “universal validity.”99 Supported by what the New York Times described as the audience’s “enthusiastic applause and cheers,” both the statement and the reaction in the theatre register an apprehension that liberal “American values” (civil liberties and rights guaranteeing equality in terms of identity, race, and

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gender) and the universal human rights understood as cognate with them (“our inalienable rights” to live a livable life, to have equal access to a livable life, including equal access to clean water, soil, and air) had not been represented in Pence’s longstanding opposition to LGBTQ civil rights, and so might not be upheld by the incoming administration.100 The theatrical assembly abrades the social and theatrical distribution of the sensible. While the Hamilton spectators and “creators” appealed to individual and collective liberties and rights, their expression was recontained by a sense of theatrical propriety innate to the ensemble, an ironic reproduction of Butler’s “theater of legitimacy” urgently asserted in President Elect Trump’s two Twitter posts later the same evening. The tweets insist on a universalizing binary between what is good and wonderful (“Our wonderful future V. P. Mike Pence,” “a very good man, Mike Pence”) and what is offensive, both socially unacceptable (“very rude”), and lawfully punishable, harassment (“Pence was harassed … at the theatre by the cast,” “[t]he cast of Hamilton was very rude”). Tellingly, both tweets finally identify the our as merely ornamental, a rhetorical means to Trump’s authoritarian imperative, intensified by an exclamation mark: “This should not happen!” summons a future prohibition and “Apologize!” commands the submission of the perpetrator of a criminalized act, though no such act had been committed.101 As the tweets are from the future president of a neoliberal democracy, consciously disseminated (by proprietary technology and a commercially structured instrument) to reach as many citizens—actually, followers —as possible, they register an exercise of pre-executive power aiming to adjust, or even to suppress, US citizens’ right to co-govern, right to appear and to appeal publicly as both a spontaneously constituted political assembly and as political subjects with a constitutional guarantee of free speech, a right that is not canceled or delegitimated by being enacted in a theatre nor by the choice not to “follow” the president. The Hamilton co-performers—actors and spectators, including Pence—practiced theatre as a site of assembly, engaging a political potentiality differently denied by Trump’s imagination of neoliberal dominion and also by Butler’s sense of the humanist theatre as always already a site of dramatically conditioned reproduction. What both perspectives strikingly share is the withdrawal of theatre and performance as legitimate venues of politically consequential embodied action, “speech.” In asserting “The Theater must always be a safe and special place,” Trump’s second tweet addresses a political as well as a theatrical

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event, and illustrates the dynamic ideological interaction between conceptions of the theatrical public as a “true ensemble” and the public assembly.102 Trump’s assumption of a constitutively anodyne “Theater” (which in his orthography assumes the governing nominality of the Althusserian Subject) at once falsifies the historical role theatre has played in defining popular sovereignty (the spectrum running from the arrest of the African Theatre Company to the Astor Place riots is typical of the interplay of theatre and political action in the nineteenth-century US) and collapses the always present politicality of theatre into a neoliberal imperative of corrupting state forms and political practices sustaining liberal democracy. Here, “safe” equates with non-agonistic and “special” with uncritical, anti-intellectual consumption, the consumption of art and of citizenship as well. If in progressive discourse a “safe” space is a space that protects, enables, and gives voice to difference, the protection to which Trump’s discourse refers is at once a safeguarding from difference and from the political, from constituting oneself in a political relation to another co-citizen as a political subject. It is a protection from the set of civic and human rights the spectators and the “creators” of Hamilton evoked in their political acts, before, during, and after the performance. It is a protection from the fundamental liberties and rights that are constitutionally (though not unproblematically) guaranteed to the citizens of—and, indeed, to people in—the US. Trump’s protection from is important in one more dimension, for in being a response to a political articulation, it finally acknowledges the space of theatre to be a “political player,” not “irrelevant to the political.”103 The Hamilton event and its reception locate one consequence, at least, of the naturalizing of an apolitical liberalism to the purposes of the theatre of dramatic humanism, the theatre of Brockett’s “true ensemble,” of the aesthetic freedom of Barish’s individualized ensemble, and even of Butler’s opposition between the pacifying inside and the active outside of theatre. Trump, in a sense, evokes the humanist legacy of Aristotle: the proper object of theatrical performance or the civic theatre is the drama (set to music, in this case), held distinct from, in order to prevent, the potentially emergent assembly. The disagreement between Trump and the Hamilton cast arises from the permeability of cultural and political spheres, of the theatre and the state, and of the ensemble and the assembly.104 The history of humanism’s encounter with theatre is marked by the appreciation of this deliquescent border: to

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maintain the literary identity of the work beyond the theatre in literary humanism, to transfer the literary identity of the work to the theatre in dramatic humanism, and to register the literary value of the work in the production of the audience as ensemble in theatrical humanism. ∗ ∗ ∗ In the chapters to follow, I explore generative notions of theatre, and the ways literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms have mediated performance and audience along the scale from ensemble to assembly. Seeking lost opportunities, I examine the engagement of drama and theatre by these humanisms, revisiting key texts and performances to ask how these ideological variations arrogate the theatre by excluding and remediating—optimizing—spectacle and its public affectivity to rationalized, racialized, nationalized, and internationalized identities. I consider, in other words, the ways in which humanist ideology, and sometimes a vividly protheatrical humanism, works to unwrite theatre and, vice versa, how some performances unwrite that humanist unwriting, as well. Taking up Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum, On the Spectacles (c. 80), written to enhance the inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre, Chapter 2 contemplates the legacy of Aristotle’s drama/spectacle dichotomy, pointing to a tactical humanist omission from disciplinary critique: the damnatio ad bestias , a judicial, dramatic, and spectacular form of Roman capital punishment by wild beast. Although amphitheatrical performances typically mark the limits of theatre history, drawing a line between the legitimate cultural authority of Greek drama and the illegitimate force of Roman spectacle, I reopen Martial’s sense of the damnatio ad bestias as dramatic spectacle. I coin this term to suspend the humanist binary by which these judicial performances—executing condemned criminals in a dramatized scene according to a legal principle of imitative justice, the talio—are erased from the history of the theatre, for two interrelated reasons. First, the dramatic spectacle of the damnatio ad bestias historically articulates the drama with spectacle, suspending Aristotle’s foundational distinction between them, and, second, contesting the modern iterations of the “true ensemble,” it does so through the engagement of a politically brokered spectatorial public constituted precisely at the intersection inadmissible to humanism’s imagination of the aestheticized ensemble.

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“Augustine’s spectacula,” Chapter 3, brings into focus a critical element of liberal humanism’s unwriting of theatre, once again evoked by the division of drama from spectacle and the sacred from the secular: the assimilation of spectating into the privilege accorded to reading, a definitive practice of early Christian self-fashioning. I attend to St. Augustine’s redemptive self-narrative, how his Confessions (c. 397) rechannels the experience of competitive Roman cultural and sociopolitical (spectacular, theatrical, and oratorical) performances into the preferred forms of spiritual performances (conversion, confession, sacraments, and prayer) animating the early Christian ensemble of the faithful. Less dismissing spectacle than reworking its potential to shape the Christian reader’s and communicant’s sensibility, I argue that Augustine instantiates a medial critique in which, despite degrading the practices and effects of the Roman amphitheatres, theatres, and circuses, he finds their medium— spectacle/performance—to have a beneficial utility, not only in sustaining the ritual performativity of Christianity but also in modeling Christian reading and writing (including his own) as themselves performative activities. Augustine’s constant interplay between spectatorial and readerly paradigms tellingly frames a remediating intricacy radically oversimplified in the production of Augustine as the first Christian reader-oriented or indeed antitheatrical and antispectacular theorist; moving beyond these humanist binaries’ determinations, Augustine emerges as a theorist of performativity, and of performance as well. The intermedial liaison registered in Confessions provides, then, a second lost opportunity for the redirection of performance in the disciplinary discourse of theatre and performance studies, a way to avoid the commonplace humanist reduction of performance to enervating spectacle and the reciprocal promotion of reading as an unperformative or detheatricalized zone of unmediated self-discovery and self-development. If Chapters 2 and 3 address a tension between the humanizing power attributed to writing and reading and the dehumanizing force of spectacle, Chapters 4 through 6 engage theatrical humanism as a cultural, social, and political instrument, operating at the intersection of national and international production. Chapter 4, “Lessing’s Vermenschlichung,” takes up the invention of a humanist theatre as a potential site of compassionate critical reflection, where a spectatorial public affectively and critically interacts with the dramatic mise-en-scène. Both in his rhetorical address to a reader-spectator, and in his translational remediation of Aristotle’s separation of performance from the identity of dramatic

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form, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing works to articulate theatre as a humanizing institution, capable of resisting the spectators’ seizure by fundamentalisms. To consider Martial’s dramatic spectacle and Augustine’s remediation of spectaculum as missed opportunities, though, is also to see Lessing’s spectatorial public as exerting an Enlightenment commitment to intellectual self-empowering sovereignty, to the overcoming of dogma through the exercise of reason. Housing a public forum of critically affective presence, Lessing projects a theatre as an agency neither subversive of nor subordinate to the drama, but as an autonomous civic institution with humanizing potentiality. Lessing’s complex account of the sociotheatrical function of enacted dramatic writing stands apart from Schiller’s theatre of ecstatic identification and from Goethe’s systematic machining of the actor and the spectator to the demands of textual mimesis, a tension extended and redefined by their major successor in the invention of dramaturgy, Brecht. Chapter 5, “Pinkins’s Alienating Gestus,” takes up Brecht’s Verfremdung of liberal humanism in the form of epic-dialectical theatre. More urgently, though, it considers the challenges of engaging epic theatre historically, without assimilating it back into the dramatic humanism it both resists and—as Brecht’s Modellbücher (modelbooks) imply—animates, a humanism particularly encoded in the authority attributed to a universalized methodology, dialectics. Here, I attend to the challenge of decolonizing the raced and gendered structures of practical and interpretive authority inscribed in the constitution of epic theatricality by examining the complex invocation of and resistance to a “Brechtian” aesthetic by the leading actress of the Classic Stage Company of New York’s 2015 AfricanAmerican cast production of Mother Courage and Her Children, Tonya Pinkins. Striking an alliance with Pinkins’s revisionist Gestus entwining the dramatic and professional with the social and ideological situation of contemporary theatre, I promote an affirmative dramaturgy that thinks through the actress’s—Pinkins’s and Helene Weigel’s—voice haunting both feminist and Althusserian accounts of epic-dialectical theatricality. The liberal-humanist reduction of theatre history is vividly palpable in the omissions from what it memorializes, the nearly complete absence of the performative cultures of totalitarian regimes thriving on the instrumentalization of rationalism and idealism, a gap pertinently registered by contemporary collections such as A Cultural History of Theatre. In Chapter 6, “Kivimaa’s elävä humanismi,” I bring in the career of an influential institutional figure of mid-century European theatre as a way to

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engage this problematic of historical forgetting. The chapter centers on the initiator of the International Theatre Institute’s (a UNESCO agency) World Theatre Day, Arvi Kivimaa, and the strategic, “international” channeling of his WWII racialized humanism into UNESCO’s post-WWII humanist internationalism. Fashioning a cultural alliance with National Socialist racialized idealism in the 1930s and 1940s, Kivimaa’s postwar teatterin humanismi (theatre humanism) accommodated to the foundational principles of UNESCO’s scientific trans/humanism as shaped by its first Director-General Julian Huxley, at once obfuscating and inscribing the deep implication of its wartime antisemitism into his postwar internationalism. Analyzing Kivimaa’s writings, I underline the problematic of theatre humanism as historical revisionism in liberal, inter/national, and cultural politics and theatre/performance studies, and point to the necessity to open the history of theatre humanism to the indigestible histories it has—in an act of self-legitimation—unwritten. Chapter 7, “Disassembling Performance,” shifts my rhetorical strategy by turning to three contemporary performative and translational embodiments: Anne Carson’s engagement with Sophocles’ Antigone (2012, 2015), Thomas Ostermeier’s with Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2012), and the Smeds Ensemble’s with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (2011). Revealing the ideological constraints of dramatic and theatrical humanisms, each of these constellations negotiates theatre at the intersection of humanist determinations and posthumanist becomings. Decentering familiar modes and objects of theatre and culture (the reliance on the book as a means of singularizing performance; projecting a homogenized ensemble of experience inimical to politically defined assembly; the lamination of language, theatre, and nation through aesthetic pleasure), these performances resituate the canonical impulses of literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms through the material instruments of performance, the figuration of the spectator as a participant in the spectacle, and the sociocultural—the aesthetic and political—topography within which theatre takes place, remaking the place that theatre takes.

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Notes 1. Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 108. 2. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 10–11. 3. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 26. 4. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 11, 48. On the implications of Said’s critical revision of humanism for posthumanism, see Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 46–47, 152– 53. 5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 63. 6. Said, Orientalism, 63, 71, 71–72. In the early twentieth century, European audiences could see touring companies presenting themselves as “Oriental,” though, as Peter W. Marx suggests. Some of these troupes, such as that of Burhanettin Tepsi of Constantinople which visited Berlin in the 1910s, were actually “modernizers in the Ottoman Empire”; “Introduction: Cartographing the Long Nineteenth Century,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, ed. Peter W. Marx, vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 8. 7. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 11. 8. Said, Orientalism, 67. 9. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro,’” 108. 10. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 140. 11. Andy Mousley, introduction to Towards a New Literary Humanism, ed. Andy Mousley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1, 9, 12, 13 (“affectively charged sensuousness” is from Charles Altiery, “The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 [2007], 72; “whole person engagement” is from Valentine Cunningham, Reading after Theory [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 147), 14, 15. See also Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); and Andy Mousley, Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 12. In terms of excess, the new literary humanism intimates Iago, Richard III, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and John Ford’s Giovanni as “selves with an overblown conception of their human abilities,” as “spectacular individualists of the Renaissance stage” that summon a vividly emotional and intellectual response. The “modernist Brecht,” on the other hand, exemplifies an investment in tendentious politicality that effectively

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13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

subordinates the emotional to the intellectual; Mousley, introduction to Towards a New Literary Humanism, 13, 6, 13. Cf. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, “Romantic Humanism (Shakespeare-Marx-Cixous),” in Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 19–38. The old distinction between the book and the stage is perhaps best historicized in a 1901 article considering the dramatic text’s privilege in literary studies as discriminating against the public appeal of theatrical spectacle, which is depicted as influencing the writing of plays both in classical Athens and in Shakespeare’s London; see “THE SPECTACULAR ELEMENT IN DRAMA,” Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature (1901–1907) 137, no. 6 (December 1901): 748. Mousley, introduction to Towards a New Literary Humanism, 10. Mousley invokes Rita Felski, here, who also uses a performative vocabulary to conceptualize engagement with literature: “individuals are called to the burdensome freedom of choreographing their life and endowing it with a purpose. As selfhood becomes self-reflexive, literature comes to assume a crucial role in exploring what it means to be a person”; Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 25. On posthumanism’s animal turn, see Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld, eds., Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theatre (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017); Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). On posthuman/ism’s ecological turn, see Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). On posthumanism and digital culture, see Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer ParkerStarbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, eds., Mapping Intermediality in Performance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). Oscar G. Brockett, History of the Theatre (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968); Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis, eds., A Cultural History of Theatre, 6 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 10, 16, 18. I follow Stephen Halliwell’s dating of Poetics in Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 2000), 324–30.

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18. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 242. 19. Nikos G. Charalabopoulos, Platonic Drama and Its Ancient Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 105. 20. Elsa Bouchard, “Audience, Poetic Justice, and Aesthetic Value in the Poetics,” in Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 185, 187, 193. 21. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 93. 22. The didaskaliai, official records of plays produced and prizes awarded at the City Dionysia, date from c. 501 BCE for tragedy, c. 486 BCE for comedy; the tragic actors’ prize was instituted in 449 BCE. On the actors’ prizes as a monetary inflection of the cultural sphere attached to Athenian honor, the traditional preserve of the leisure class, as well as on actors’ nationality as a “matter of indifference” in distinction to citizenchoregoi and choreuts, see Eric Csapo, Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 105. 23. Bouchard, “Audience, Poetic Justice, and Aesthetic Value in the Poetics,” 186. The listing of individual tragedies alphabetically “from the time of Callimachus’ [c.305–c.240 BCE] Pinakes,” bibliographic tables of holdings of the Library of Alexandria, dissociates the plays from their production as well (200n44). Instead of a record of performance, the play became a “metaphor for excellence in literature”; Matthew Wright, “Literary Prizes and Literary Criticism in Antiquity,” Classical Antiquity 28, no. 1 (2009): 147. 24. Aristotle, Poetics, in Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius, Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, trans. Stephen Halliwell; W. Hamilton Fyfe, revised by Donald A. Russell; Doreen C. Innes, W. Rhys Roberts, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 139. “One should construct plots, and work them out in diction, with the material as much as possible in the mind’s eye. In this way, by seeing things most vividly, as if present at the actual events, one will discover what is apposite and not miss contradictions” (87, 89). 25. Hans-Thies Lehmann remarks on a distinction between opsis and nous or intellection: “opsis is fundamentally subject to error; everywhere and at all times, the senses can be wrong. On the other hand, nous, with its inner logicity, offers a site where truth becomes possible”; Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (London: Routledge, 2016), 27. 26. Edith Hall, “Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics ?,” in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Oxford

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27.

28.

29.

30.

University Press, 1996), 305. Writing enabled the mobility of specific tragedies, and by 370 BCE not only were non-Athenian dramas performed in Athens (often by traveling, non-Athenian actors) but dramas—tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies—were being performed across the Greek-speaking world, from Sicily to the eastern Aegean; see David Kawalko Roselli, “Publics and Audiences in Ancient Greece,” in Meanings of Audiences: Comparative Discourses, ed. Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone (London: Routledge, 2014), 21; Csapo, Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater, 85. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 297. Halliwell considers the reception of Poetics in relation to the Ars Poetica by Renaissance and neoclassical critics, emphasizing the extent to which their greater familiarity with Horace led to readings of Poetics that overemphasized its potentially rhetorical dimension, treating it as a series of rules for properly affecting the audiences of tragedy (288–300). Ars Poetica is consensually dated around 10 BCE (some scholars argue for 23–20 BCE); see Andrew Laird, “The Ars Poetica,” in The Cambridge Companion to Horace, ed. Stephen Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 133. Marvin Carlson, “Roman and Late Classic Theory,” in Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, ed. Marvin Carlson, expanded ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 25, 23–26. Horace, Ars Poetica, in Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 194 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 467, 447, 479. With “a black stroke” of his “pen,” the critical friend should excise the “lifeless,” “graceless” lines and other faults, “pretentious” ornaments, “doubtful” and obscure phrases, adapting the manuscript to prevent an “unlucky reception” of the work; Horace, Ars Poetica, trans. Fairclough, 487. The dramaturg-like-critic’s duties continued to be animated in Roman antiquity, perhaps most vividly evoked in Pliny the Younger’s Epistles (Letters ). Though written nearly a century later, Pliny’s portrayal of the obligations and assistance expected among amici describes a scene possibly akin to that of Ars Poetica, in which a close circle of friends rehearse constructive criticism so as to ensure the poetical quality of a text and its successful recitation, performance; see Pliny the Younger, Letters, Volume I: Books 1–7, trans. Betty Radice, Loeb Classical Library 55 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 41, 43; 105, 107; 159, 161, 163; 435, 437; 517, 519, 521, 523; and Pliny the Younger, Letters, Volume II: Books 8–10; Panegyricus, trans. Betty Radice, Loeb Classical Library 59 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 65, 67; 135, 137, 136–37. See also William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite

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31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

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Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 46. For Lessing’s discourse reflecting the friend-dramaturg and friend-critic, see, for example, “Ankündigung” to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” in Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden (München: Winkler Verlag, 1974), 276–79; “Notice” to G. E. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation, trans. Wendy Arons and Sara Figal, ed. Natalya Baldyga (London: Routledge, 2019), 35–37. On the Platonic dialogues as drama, see Martin Puchner, The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 35. Horace, Ars Poetica, trans. Fairclough, 445, 465, 467, 469. “If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing? Believe me, dear Pisos, quite like such pictures would be a book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams, so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape”; Horace, Ars Poetica, trans. Fairclough, 451. Oscar G. Brockett, D˘ejiny divadla, trans. Milan Lukeš (Praha: Divadelní ústav, 1999). Joseph Roach, “Reconstructing Theatre/History,” Theatre Topics 9, no. 1 (1999): 5. Oscar G. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” in History of the Theatre, 6th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991), 343–45; Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” in History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2008), 253–58. Christopher Innes’s “The Rise of the Director, 1850–1939,” in A History of German Theatre, ed. Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), offers another example of how the naturalistic teleology of “artistic development” of the “mid-eighteenth century” animates disapproving attributes characteristic of the negative taxonomy designating the performative forms displaced by dramatic humanism (172–73). For a less ideologically determined connection between English traveling troupes and the establishment of German professional theatre, see Ralf Haekel, Die Englischen Komödianten in Deutschland: Eine Einführung in die Ursprünge des deutschen Berufsschauspiels (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004).

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38. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 346–47; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 256–59. Perhaps the most famous historical example is that of 1737, when Caroline Neuber’s company symbolically staged and banished Hanswurst as part of Johann Christoph Gottsched’s program for an elevated dramatic comedy; see Anthony Meech, “Classical Theatre and the Formation of a Civil Society, 1720– 1832,” in A History of German Theatre, ed. Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 68. 39. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 346, 352–53; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 258, 263. 40. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 358, 359; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 267. On Kotzebue and Iffland as part of “the first flowering of a commercial theatre for the middle class in Germany,” see Meech, “Classical Theatre and the Formation of a Civil Society, 1720–1832,” 76. 41. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 359; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 267. 42. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe During the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 360, 361; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 267, 268. 43. Goethe’s “Rules for Actors (1803)” appears in English translation in Marvin Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 318; here I cite rule number 82. 44. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 362; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 269 (my emphasis). “Goethe turned his attention to transforming the second-rate Weimar troupe into a true ensemble. The actors’ varied regional origins and lack of education were evident in performance because of the wide range of accents and stage behavior” (6th ed., 361; cf. 10th ed., 269). 45. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 362; cf. Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 269. On the normative rationality of the Enlightenment, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (1944; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 114. On the relation between the popular and power, see Jason Price, Modern Popular Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

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46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

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2016), 1–28. Erika Fischer-Lichte analyzes how “the performative generation of materiality” has been textualized to the detriment of theatrical performance in The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 75–137. For Michael Patterson, the liberal-idealistic conception of “a true ensemble” originated earlier than it does in Brockett, arising from the Mannheim company’s “ensemble spirit,” associated with Schiller’s dramatic aesthetics; see The First German Theatre: Schiller, Goethe, Kleist and Büchner in Performance (London: Routledge, 1990), 26. Another liberal-naturalistic conceptualization “of true ensemble” is captured in Christopher Innes’s “Rise of the Director, 1850–1939”; Innes’s teleology of the “true ensemble” derives its causality from conjoining the Meiningen Company’s emerging “standards for stage realism” with the “democratic symbolism” of the design of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival Theatre (178, 180). Although Patterson, Schiller, and Innes place the origin of the “ensemble” in different locations, the idea of the “true ensemble” is essential to the production of liberal theatricality. Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe During the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 360, 361 (my emphasis); Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 268 (my emphasis). Brockett, preface to the 6th ed., xi–xii; Brockett and Hildy, preface to the 10th ed, xi–xii (my emphasis). Brockett, “Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe During the Eighteenth Century,” 6th ed., 363; Brockett and Hildy, “Northern European Theatre to 1800,” 10th ed., 269. For a succinct delineation of liberal humanism, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1985), especially 1–10. Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Critical Theory,” in Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 339. Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8–12. Gesturing toward a critical inflection of historical contingency, each volume gathers essays by a variety of authors, while the general editorial design governs the structure of the volumes and of individual essays. The “same chapter headings structure all six volumes: institutional frameworks, social functions, sexuality and gender, environment, circulation, interpretations, communities of production, repertoire and genres, technologies of performance, and knowledge transmission,” transnational tropes taken to overcome “purely regional, national, aesthetic, or generic categories” guiding books like Brockett’s History of the Theatre; see Balme and Davis, series preface to A Cultural History of Theatre.

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53. Deborah C. Payne, “Communities of Production: Eighteenth-Century Acting Companies,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Mechele Leon, vol. 4 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 141, 140–41,146. 54. Lisa A. Freeman, “Repertoire and Genres: Cultural Logics and the Trick of Theatrical Longevity,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Mechele Leon, vol. 4 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 161, 172, 177, 178, 180, 178. 55. Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, eds., Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, eds., Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson, eds., Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 56. Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, introduction to Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5, 3. On the intersection of positivist theatre historiography and scenography, see Pannill Camp, “A Critique of Historio-Scenography: Space and Time in Joseph-François-Louis Grobert’s De l’Exécution dramatique,” in Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter, ed. Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 199–217. 57. Laura Cull, “From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration: Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals,” in Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, ed. Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 25, 24. 58. Una Chaudhuri, “Embattled Animals in a Theatre of Species,” in Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, ed. Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 148. 59. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 21, 171, 22. Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre was originally published as Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999). 60. Louise Lepage underlines this dyad, unproblematically correlating the ontological paradigm of “posthumanism” with postdramatic theatre, “a more chaotic and emergent structure than is known by either drama or humanism”; “Posthuman Perspectives and Postdramatic Theatre: The Theory and Practice of Hybrid Ontology in Katie Mitchell’s The Waves,”

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61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

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Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 138. Ralf Remshardt, “Beyond Performance Studies: Mediated Performance and the Posthuman,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 54. Philip Auslander, “LIVENESS: Performance and the Anxiety of Simulation,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 197, 199, 198; Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 53. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 20, 65, 48. For Aristotle’s views of children’s mimesis in playacting and games, see Politics, in Aristotle: The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 192–94. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, 8. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 25, 16. Barish’s conception of the relation between artist and state, and between artist and audience, is also challenged by the “arithmetical neatness” of Socratic prescription, which “reduces each man to a single well-defined entity, firmly linked to his social role.” This conception “establishes an unambiguous numerical equivalence between the number of citizens and the approved occupations. It seems to promise a coherent social order, in which each man plies the trade for which nature has intended him, without envious or restless side glances at his neighbor” (23). Barish’s anxiety about man’s subordination to the state traces Schiller’s argument in “The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon,” where Solon “had respect for human nature, and never sacrificed people to the state, never the end to the means, rather let the state serve the people,” whereas “the laws of Lycurgus were iron chains, in which bold courage chafed itself bloody, which pulled down the mind by their pressing weight”; in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, trans. William F. Wertz Jr., vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Schiller Institute, 1988), 301; cf. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola: Dover, 2004), Letter 3, 27–30 and Letter 4, 30–34. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 23, 14. Barish’s reading is notable for the absence of a counter-approach emerging in the 1970s assessing Plato’s works less as resembling dictatorial statecrafts than as visionary paradigms prudently marked as ideal and so deliberately qualified as unattainable. As Trevor J. Saunders remarks, “to suppose that Plato ever thought that the Republic was attainable would be to suppose him capable not merely of optimism or idealism, but of sheer political naïveté”; introduction to The Laws, by Plato, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (1970;

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67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

London: Penguin Books, 2004), xxxiii. Barish’s thought, too, seems flavored by the accents of the student-led liberation movements taking shape on college campuses during the period, including UC Berkeley, where he taught in the English department from 1954 to 1991. Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner similarly note the book’s implication in Barish’s “historical moment”; “Introduction: Modernism and AntiTheatricality,” in Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, ed. Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 122. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 20. Bertolt Brecht, “Messingkauf, or Buying Brass,” trans. Romy Fursland and Steve Giles, in Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 57. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 20, 28, 22, 26, 30. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, 32. Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, with essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes (1967; London: Penguin, 2001), 105, 107–8, 111. Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 4. Stephen Spender, “Social Purpose and the Integrity of the Artist,” in The Humanist Frame, ed. Julian Huxley (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), 226. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 455, 457, 459, 456. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 457, 455, 458, 459, 456, 456–57 (my emphasis), 456. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 457, 459, 475. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 475. On Jean-Paul Sartre’s defense of existentialism as humanism, see Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959). Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 475, 476. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 477. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; New York: Vintage, 1973); originally published as Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

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83. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 108. 84. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 1–6, 2. 85. Anselm Heinrich, “Institutional Frameworks: Britain and Germany, 1800 to 1920,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, ed. Peter W. Marx, vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 40. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Bromwich and George Kateb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 76. 86. Marx, “Introduction: Cartographing the Long Nineteenth Century,” 17, 40. 87. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2010), n.pag., paragraph 43. 88. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 68, 71, 81 (my emphasis), 71; Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 68. 89. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 200, 199, 42, 68. As Anne Phillips suggests, “the body is, in principle, less open to exclusionary hierarchies than a humanness—or personhood—defined through cognitive capacities.” In the theatre, bodies are what “enables us to see beyond the stereotypes and suspicions of a shared humanity”; The Politics of the Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 108, 109. 90. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 12. 91. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 7, 85. 92. Of course, theatrical performance often does dramatize the implication of theatre in politics, especially when theatres and performances are used for political fundraising. In 1999, for example, Hillary Clinton celebrated her fifty-second birthday while raising “close to $1 million for her expected campaign for the United States Senate,” at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, which hosted a musical theatre revue, featuring, among others, Rosie O’Donnell, Joel Grey, dancers from Chicago; see Adam Nagourney, “At 52, First Lady Feels Like Raising a Million, and Does,” New York Times, October 26, 1999. 93. “An emancipated community is,” according to Rancière, “a community of narrators and translators”; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 22. 94. Simon Bayly, “Theatre and the Public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno,” Radical Philosophy 157 (September/October 2009): 25, 20. 95. Bayly, “Theatre and the Public,” 25; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 6, 22.

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96. Bayly, “Theatre and the Public,” 25. 97. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). 98. Richard Schechner, The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 10, 9. 99. Joseph Yacoub, “For an Enlargement of Human Rights,” Diogenes 52, no. 2 (2005): 82, 83. 100. Christopher Mele and Patrick Healy, “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence,” New York Times, November 19, 2016. 101. Donald J. Trump’s tweets are reprinted in Mele and Healy, “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence.” 102. Mele and Healy, “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence.” 103. Wendy Brown, “Political Idealization and Its Discontents,” in Edgework: Classical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 23. The audience that Trump’s “safe” and “special” theatre circumscribes is cognate with Brown’s articulation of the “model neoliberal citizen,” who does not strive with others with regard to “social, political or economic options” but is instead the “opposite of publicminded,” indeed barely seems to “exist as a public”; see “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework, 43. 104. Hamilton occupied an alternative site of political performance in 2015, when the cast was reported to have staged “a special performance for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, with Obama as the encore” at the Richard Rodgers Theatre that “drew roughly 1,300 donors who paid between $500 and $10,000 a pop.” Due to President Obama’s frustration with Republican denial of global warming and Russian sympathies, he was reportedly “[d]eviating from his typical fundraiser spiel,” and “seemed to let loose at Monday’s performance.” Here, the performance of Hamilton and the space of the theatre were openly acknowledged as viable platforms for politics, and used for political performance, messaging, and fundraising; see Josh Lederman, “On Broadway, Obama Takes a Bow Mocking Republicans,” Associated Press, News Archive, November 2, 2015.

References Aristotle, Poetics. In Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius, Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Translated by Stephen Halliwell; W. Hamilton Fyfe, revised by Donald A. Russell; Doreen C. Innes; W. Rhys Roberts. Loeb Classical Library 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Ackerman, Alan, and Martin Puchner. “Introduction: Modernism and AntiTheatricality.” In Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, edited by Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner, 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Althusser, Louis. “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” In For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, 93–116. London: Verso, 2005. Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. London: Duckworth, 2000. Aristotle, Politics. In Aristotle: The Politics and The Constitution of Athens. Edited by Stephen Everson. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Auslander, Philip. “LIVENESS: Performance and the Anxiety of Simulation.” In Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin Diamond, 196–213. London: Routledge, 1996. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Balme, Christopher B., and Tracy C. Davis, eds. A Cultural History of Theatre. 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Balme, Christopher B., and Tracy C. Davis. Series preface to A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Bank, Rosemarie K., and Michal Kobialka. Introduction to Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter, edited by Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, 1–14. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Bank, Rosemarie K., and Michal Kobialka, eds. Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, eds. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz. Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Bayly, Simon. “Theatre and the Public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno.” Radical Philosophy 157 (September/October 2009): 20–29. Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Routledge, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 99–133. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006.

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Bouchard, Elsa. “Audience, Poetic Justice, and Aesthetic Value in the Poetics.” In Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen, 183–213. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 339–42. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Brecht, Bertolt. “Messingkauf, or Buying Brass.” In Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, translated by Romy Fursland and Steve Giles, edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman, 11–96. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Brockett, Oscar G. D˘ejiny divadla. Translated by Milan Lukeš. Praha: Divadelní ústav, 1999. Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968. Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991. Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. 10th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2008. Brown, Wendy. “Political Idealization and Its Discontents.” In Edgework: Classical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 17–36. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005a. Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” In Edgework: Classical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 37–59. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005b. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Camp, Pannill. “A Critique of Historio-Scenography: Space and Time in Joseph-François-Louis Grobert’s De l’Exécution dramatique.” In Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter, edited by Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, 199–217. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Carlson, Marvin. Goethe and the Weimar Theatre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Carlson, Marvin. “Roman and Late Classic Theory.” In Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, edited by Marvin Carlson, 22–30. Expanded ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Cartwright, Kent. Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Charalabopoulos, Nikos G. Platonic Drama and Its Ancient Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Chaudhuri, Una. “Embattled Animals in a Theatre of Species.” In Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, edited by Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, 135–49. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Chaudhuri, Una, and Holly Hughes. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Chaudhuri, Una, and Shonni Enelow. Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Cochrane, Claire, and Jo Robinson, eds. Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Csapo, Eric. Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Cull, Laura. “From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration: Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals.” In Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, edited by Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, 19–36. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, n.d. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Freeman, Lisa A. “Repertoire and Genres: Cultural Logics and the Trick of Theatrical Longevity.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Mechele Leon, 159–202. Vol. 4 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959. Haekel, Ralf. Die Englischen Komödianten in Deutschland: Eine Einführung in die Ursprünge des deutschen Berufsschauspiels. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004. Hall, Edith. “Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics ?” In Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, edited by M. S. Silk, 295–309. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Halliwell, Martin and Andy Mousley. “Romantic Humanism (Shakespeare-MarxCixous).” In Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues, 19– 38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Halliwell, Martin, and Andy Mousley, eds. Critical Humanisms: Humanist/AntiHumanist Dialogues. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Heinrich, Anselm. “Institutional Frameworks: Britain and Germany, 1800 to 1920.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, edited by

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Peter W. Marx, 33–50. Vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Horace. Ars Poetica. In Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, 442–89. Loeb Classical Library 194. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Innes, Christopher. “The Rise of the Director, 1850–1939.” In A History of German Theatre, edited by Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger, 171–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Johnson, William A. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Laird, Andrew. “The Ars Poetica.” In The Cambridge Companion to Horace, edited by Stephen Harrison, 132–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lederman, Josh. “On Broadway, Obama Takes a Bow Mocking Republicans.” Associated Press, News Archive, November 2, 2015. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Routledge, 2016. Lepage, Louise. “Posthuman Perspectives and Postdramatic Theatre: The Theory and Practice of Hybrid Ontology in Katie Mitchell’s The Waves.” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 137–49. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Hamburgische Dramaturgie.” In Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, 276–698. Vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden. München: Winkler Verlag, 1974. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation. Translated by Wendy Arons and Sara Figal, edited by Natalya Baldyga. London: Routledge, 2019. Marx, Peter W. “Introduction: Cartographing the Long Nineteenth Century.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, edited by Peter W. Marx, 1–50. Vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

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Meech, Anthony. “Classical Theatre and the Formation of a Civil Society, 1720– 1832.” In A History of German Theatre, edited by Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger, 65–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Mele, Christopher, and Patrick Healy. “‘Hamilton’ Had Some Unscripted Lines for Pence.” New York Times, November 19, 2016. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013. Mousley, Andy. Introduction to Towards a New Literary Humanism, edited by Andy Mousley, 1-19. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Mousley, Andy. Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Mousley, Andy, ed. Towards a New Literary Humanism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Nagourney, Adam. “At 52, First Lady Feels Like Raising a Million, and Does.” New York Times, October 26, 1999. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Orozco, Lourdes, and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, eds. Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Patterson, Michael. The First German Theatre: Schiller, Goethe, Kleist and Büchner in Performance. London: Routledge, 1990. Payne, Deborah C. “Communities of Production: Eighteenth-Century Acting Companies.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Mechele Leon, 139–58. Vol. 4 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Phillips, Anne. The Politics of the Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pliny the Younger. Letters, Volume I: Books 1–7. Translated by Betty Radice. Loeb Classical Library 55. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

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Pliny the Younger. Letters, Volume II: Books 8–10; Panegyricus. Translated by Betty Radice. Loeb Classical Library 59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Price, Jason. Modern Popular Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Puchner, Martin. The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Raber, Karen, and Monica Mattfeld, eds. Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theatre. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Remshardt, Ralf. “Beyond Performance Studies: Mediated Performance and the Posthuman.” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 47–64. Roach, Joseph. “Reconstructing Theatre/History.” Theatre Topics 9, no. 1 (1999): 3–10. Roselli, David Kawalko. “Publics and Audiences in Ancient Greece.” In Meanings of Audiences: Comparative Discourses, edited by Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone, 20–36. London: Routledge, 2014. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Saunders, Trevor J. Introduction to The Laws, by Plato, xxiii-xlvi. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Schechner, Richard. The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Schiller, Friedrich. Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom. Translated by William F. Wertz Jr. Vol. 2. Washington, DC: Schiller Institute, 1988. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Reginald Snell. Mineola: Dover, 2004. Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination.” In Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, with essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, 83–118. London: Penguin, 2001. Spender, Stephen. “Social Purpose and the Integrity of the Artist.” In The Humanist Frame, edited by Julian Huxley, 221–32. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961. “THE SPECTACULAR ELEMENT IN DRAMA.” Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature (1901–1907) 137, no. 6 (December 1901): 748.

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Turner, Cathy, and Synne K. Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Wright, Matthew. “Literary Prizes and Literary Criticism in Antiquity.” Classical Antiquity 28, no. 1 (2009): 138–77. Yacoub, Joseph. “For an Enlargement of Human Rights.” Diogenes 52, no. 2 (2005): 79–97.

CHAPTER 2

Martial’s damnatio ad bestias

In his 1999 Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus (Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism), Peter Sloterdijk frames a media conflict in the emerging humanitas of ancient Rome: “the resistance of the books against the amphitheater,” the opposition between “the humanizing, patient-making, sensitizing philosophical reading” and “the dehumanizing, impatient, unrestrained, sensation-mongering and excitement-mongering of the stadium.” To define the conflict between the book and the amphitheatre, and so between reading and spectating, Sloterdijk presents an illustrative fable, in which a lost “humanist” finds himself among the roaring audience of a Roman spectacle. Upon his return home, he is ashamed of his involuntary participation in the contagious sensations, and can now claim that nothing human is foreign to him. But, thereby, it is affirmed that humanity itself consists in choosing to develop one’s nature through the media of taming, and to forswear bestialization. The meaning of this choice of media is to wean oneself from one’s own bestiality and to establish a distance between yourself and the dehumanizing escalation of the roaring mob in the arena.1

Sloterdijk insists on two simultaneous, “constraining” and “unconstraining” techniques of control sustaining “high culture”: the social engineering of reading, private response and contemplative self-fashioning, and © The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_2

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that of spectating, participating in the affective volatility of assembled public expression.2 In calling attention to lettered regulation, this media conflict summons the spectacular violence humanism both gathers and aims to control in its long engagement with the theatre. Indiscriminately targeting humanity, the amphitheatre arises as a dehumanizing medium, seducing the subject it creates away from the elevating encounters with those media— texts—through which “the human” can best be rationalized, humanized, and in the fullness in time liberalized. Rather than pursuing a critique of the transhumanist ontology pertaining to ethics and genetics, here I cast Sloterdijk’s turn to the antagonism upholding the discrete categories of spectacular and readerly media to challenge the borders that assume and secure them. Organized around a judicial type of punitive spectacle performed in the Roman amphitheatres, this chapter focuses on the damnatio ad bestias (condemnation to the beast) as principally documented in Martial’s (Marcus Valerius Martialis, c. 40–c. 103) Liber Spectaculorum (On the Spectacles, c. 80), for which the classicist Kathleen M. Coleman has coined the suggestive term “fatal charades.” Sentenced for crimes committed against their community, the damnati had “a debt to discharge to that same state and society,”3 to be repaid by their subjection to the force of the “natural” spectacle, dramatized and scenically designed to imitate the enormity of the transgression: they were cast as the protagonists of a fatal mythic, legendary, or literary scene (the death of Orpheus, for instance), to be executed—according to the script, and to the law—by wild beasts. I use Coleman’s term interchangeably with my own dramatic spectacles , a ligature perhaps better suited for theatre studies as it captures the efficacious hybridity of these performances. Spectacularizing a legal execution through the form of drama and deploying performance to require, to engage, and to shape the contours of a civic audience, dramatic spectacles contest a set of humanist biases—the segregation of the mise-enpage from the mise-en-scène, the drama from the opsis, the narrative from the technology, the human from the nonhuman animal, the fictive from the material, the private from the public—and so provide an opening for a revised, tangentially posthumanist, understanding of Roman spectacular performance. In so doing, the dramatic spectacles provide suggestive leverage on the ongoing humanist investments of theatre historiography.

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Dramatic Spectacles In their historical context, designed to maintain social order across the status hierarchy of Roman society, and enforcing an identification within that order through their performative appeal, the damnatio ad bestias are not sufficiently understood if relegated to the humanist category of “blood spectacles,” underpinned by the transmission of early Christian and modern humanitarian values. Lending unique access to the damnatio ad bestias, Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum provides an alternative orientation to a historical teleology rooted in Aristotle’s privileging of the dramatic and in the church fathers’ moral censure of spectacle, obviating a naturalized hierarchy of drama to spectacle upheld in the lineage of literary and dramatic humanism, and sustained in contemporary textbooks of drama, theatre history, and theatre theory. The dramatic spectacles, reliant on animal performers, collapse the distinction between nature and culture, animality and humanity; they depend on the technologies of their stage, using costume, scenery, and the disposition of an audience as a means rapidly to identify the actors—human and nonhuman—with a specific fictive agent and telegraph useful information about that “character” (social status and mythological identity) to an audience. The dramatic spectacles cast their “performers” as legendary or mythological characters, at once evoking the dramatic tradition (Aristotelian tragedy centers on a similar population) while reversing liberal-humanist priorities. Executed by nature, the damnati are deprived of the autonomy to subject the stage to human, dramatic agency, as the world of the spectacle acts upon them. The imitative form of Roman punishment, the talio, aimed to reciprocate the nature of the crime, a penalty made visible and thematically powerful by the dramatic spectacles, in which the convict’s sentence was dramatized as an evocative scene from Greek and Roman myths and legends. Without a state-run system of imprisonment for crime, such staged death fulfilled the requirements of Roman law and simultaneously provided “public service in the form of entertainment.” However pleasurable, since “the spectators by their presence endorse the workings of justice, and by their participation they help to fulfil its aims,”4 this judicial performance functioned as Foucault’s “technology of power,” as a legal, political, and social agency, restoring the injured party’s dignity through the force of a contextually just performativity.5 Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum takes the dramatic spectacles as replicating, reinforcing, and rewriting traditional narratives through performance:

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“Don’t let ancient Tradition vaunt herself, Caesar: whatever Legend sings, the amphitheatre offers you.” Coleman understands the damnatio ad bestias to break away from mere theatrical illusion as such, transcending the limits of theatrical mimesis by performing real acts on the subjects’ bodies, and climaxing in the death not of the character but of the “actor.”6 In describing the fatal charades/dramatic spectacles as designing the execution of costumed damnati within a theatrical set and mythic or historical story, Martial’s account reveals the necessary reciprocity of dramatic narrative with spectacular performance toward the production of an intended juridical effect. That effect figures the amphitheatrical audience as at once an ensemble, identified with and through the instrument of state justice, and as an assembly, highlighting the social and political force of participating as a citizen, warranting the spectacle of law and justice. The fatal charades go beyond the humanist artificiality of the discrete distinction between ensemble and assembly, drama and spectacle, harnessing dramatic performance to a historically conditioned display of justice, executing a vision of drama, theatre, and the law through the interplay between amphitheatrical technology, the means and signifying relations of the spectacle, and the structuring elements of the play. Liber Spectaculorum’s epigram 9, for example, frames the regulatory and “delightful” performativity of the mimetic carrying-out of the talio, depicting the “restored” or “twice-behaved” dimension of performance as it channels an enhanced reenactment of an earlier performance,7 a mime of the Roman bandit-chief Laureolus—who appears to have committed a crime against the authority of the state and society8 —into the Greek myth of Prometheus. Just as Prometheus, chained on a Scythian crag, fed the tireless bird on his prolific breast, so Laureolus, hanging on no false cross, gave up his defenceless entrails to a Scottish bear. His mangled limbs were still alive, though the parts were dripping with blood, and in his whole body there actually was no body. Then punishment? Either in his guilt he had stabbed his master in the throat with a sword, or in his madness robbed a temple of its hoard of gold, or stealthily set you alight with brutal torches, Rome. This miscreant had surpassed crimes recounted in tales of old; in his case, what had been legend really was punishment.9

To heighten the spectacular effect of his agony, the crucifixion of the damnatus, a slow suffering lacking in visual appeal, is doubly doubled: as

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“Laureolus” becomes “Prometheus,” the vulture becomes an exotic Scottish bear.10 The enactment of justice, well enough satisfied by the crucifixion alone, is reshaped and amplified by these dramatizations, which particularize, thematize, and magnify the force of law to the assembled public. The epigram lists the damnatus ’ offenses—stabbing “his master in the throat with a sword,” robbing “a temple of its hoard of gold,” or setting Rome “alight with brutal torches”—to justify the sensational exhibition, summoning future spectators by signaling the enormity of the punishment: murder, sacrilege, and arson were considered capital offenses against the community, deserving a creative representation of the crime. Setting these public executions into the civic framework of Roman justice and its enforcement, Thomas Wiedemann explains that having “rejected the rules of human society, such criminals no longer had any claim to the protection that society gives its members from the chaos of nature and consequently they were abandoned to the appropriate natural forces— wild beasts or flames—ad bestias, ad flammas.” These dramatic displays correlated the intensity of inflicted pain (regulated by the Law of Twelve Tables) to the offense committed, while restoring social order by canceling the damnatus ’ illegitimate “arrogation of rights” in the commission of her/his crime.11 The design of the executions dramatized the law’s power, staging and interpreting the performer’s crime for the purpose of the public’s legal, social, and political organization. Martial’s Laureolus epigram intersects amphitheatrical and theatrical forms, urging a continuity between a spectacular performance genre, historical penal forms, and the mime, which could be scripted or improvised from a plot. The performance of a theatrical mime about Laureolus was particularly debated in terms of its mimetic verisimilitude, as well as for the social impropriety of its performance in terms materializing the Romans’ understanding of dramatic spectacle. Remaining popular at least until the second century, this mime was first composed by one Catullus and enacted, in a nonfatal version for the Palatine Games in 41, only a few hours before Gaius’ assassination.12 On the one hand, the mime’s realism, taken to foreshadow the death of the emperor, impressed Suetonius, the technique of the actors in supporting roles vomiting blood in such a manner that “the stage swam” in it; on the other, Josephus found the exuberance of the stage blood unconvincing and artificial.13 More tellingly, Juvenal was provoked that “[n]ifty Lentulus,” an equestrian, “took the part of Laureolus and did it rather well: in my opinion,

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he deserves a real cross.” Taking the privileged performer’s acting in a mime as degrading to his social status, Juvenal calls for the talio, threating Lentulus with crucifixion as punishment for his effective theatrical performance; much as Martial speaks of “no false cross” (non falsa cruce), so, too, Juvenal speaks of “a real cross” (vera cruce).14 As performance genres and as figures in the social and civic imagination, the theatrical mime and the dramatic spectacle permeate and sustain one another, and accordingly point to the fluid interaction and mutual embeddedness of conceptual categories: drama (plot and character) and spectacle, aesthetisized ensemble and politicized assembly. Martial is indigestible to the liberal-humanist propriety of art, leading to efforts to protect the aesthetic value of his poetry by denying the reality that Liber Spectaculorum explicitly describes, evidently with pleasure. D. Kuijper, “supposing that Laureolus’ death was merely feigned, suggested that the actor was replaced by a stake round which the other actors clustered while ‘Laureolus’ was supposedly torn to pieces,” while H. J. Izaac “suggested that an actor played Laureolus until the crucial moment, whereupon he was replaced by a criminal.” But as Coleman argues, the “abundant evidence for the gruesome fate of the damnati” can no longer support interpretations taking Martial’s pithy accounts as literary invention, stripping the poems of their judicial spectacular signification and embedding them in the regimes of “poetic effect” that render them palatable to modern aesthetic sensibility.15 Like the dramatic spectacle itself, the aesthetic and the legal, the poem and the punishment cannot be separated in Martial’s work. Martial’s epigram 6, depicting a scene of female penetration by a bull, probably the sentence for a sexual crime, is pivotal in contesting the Aristotelian separation of drama from spectacle, and indeed the first-order Aristotelian separation of the human from the animal. The amphitheatre, in Martial’s depiction, trumps the myth, staging a punitive drama in which the real and the fictive dimensions of dramatic performance are interinvolved in a brutally literal way. The performance rewrites the myth and so, Martial implies, writes history: “You must believe that Pasiphae did couple with the bull of Dicte: we have seen it happen, the age-old myth has been vindicated.”16 A bull mounts a sentenced woman—cast as “Pasiphae,” an image of uncontrolled sexuality, and the mother of the Minotaur—while the spectators’ pleasure is vindicated by a strikingly hybrid enactment of culture and nature. As the criminal is executed as Pasiphae, so Pasiphae is condemned as a criminal. A woman is sentenced for promiscuity by being

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raped to death; in reenacting her “crime” of human infidelity, the role of human justice is “played” by the animal executioner, the bull. The human animality associated with Pasiphae is asserted by both the dramatic performance and the law it enacts. The problem posed here is not only that the artistic is joined to the legal cruelty but that culture is inseparable from nature, humanity from animality, and historical writing from performative doing: the dramatic spectacle collapses the Aristotelian separations upon which the ethics of theatre history relies. Theatrical performance depends on the materials—bodies, objects, technologies, spaces, and assembled publics—that convey, and are indivisible from, its representational doing. One dimension of the conceptual complexity of the dramatic spectacles is the precise calibration of the drama to the means of performance that enable the spectacles to do their work. Insisting on a proper interpretation and execution of Roman justice, the dramatic spectacles conducted that legal argument and its political framework through sensational—“erotic”—means. Underlining their connection to drama, Roland Auguet terms Coleman’s “fatal charades” “mythological dramas,” suggesting that though some were “no more than very loose and extremely simplified adaptations of theatrical successes,” they are linked “to some extent with the theatre” by the “existence if not of a plot then at least of a fairly detailed scenario that controlled their development.” Inherently “impure” and so conceptually unclassifiable through the purified categories of humanism, combining several types of contemporary theatrical and spectacular performance (tragic pantomime, venatio, and silvae), they also heightened their dramatic, conceptual effect through a troubling mimetic affectivity. Reifying the “very essence” of the “actor” as “to represent,” these events dramaturgically depended on “cunningly contrived surprises” and “contrasts” underpinned by “eroticism”: a muscular, half-naked man chained to a rock to be lionized before being executed by a beast in a sumptuous and lavish setting.17 Centering on “the death of the actor” as the focal point of “this form of theatre,” Auguet points to a “latent eroticism,” to the sensory and sensual mediation between performers and audience. The isolation of a “man of flesh and blood … afraid to die” is envisioned here against the “communal jollity of the crowd,” the “public” for which the “sight of blood had become a daily need.” Yet the performer is neither fully assimilated to the dramatic role nor merely the sentenced victim. The “quality” of the “performer” was much at issue, the strength of the penal body to

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withstand, for a while, the nonhuman executioner’s action upon it; a “certain resourcefulness that would delay the inevitable encounter” with the animal/s to the arousal of the audience was considered essential to the value of the performance. Despite the actual suffering and sacrifice of the damnatus /actor, Auguet’s psychoanalytic suggestion—that by “a mechanism analogous to that of ‘transference’ the agony of the actor confers on what was false a sort of reality in the second degree, the mystery of which excites the mind”18 —confirms a sense that the dramatic spectacle is cognate with the affective attribution of the actor’s embodied work to the fictive “character” sustaining dramatic theatre. In other words, the horrific performance of the woman sentenced to enact “Pasiphae” is formally—if not morally—cognate with, say, the work of Olivier’s body in conferring “a sort of reality in the second degree” to “Hamlet.” Recognizing the punitive theatrical logic of the damnatio ad bestias , Auguet nonetheless repeatedly alludes to a “common-sense” notion that “the life of a man has not always had the value that our own morality strives to give it.” Materializing a “theory of cruelty for aesthetic ends,” the dramatic spectacles are finally an illegitimate “art” made “‘out of torture,’” in which pointless death is “the instrument of a collective pleasure.” Auguet’s liberal-humanist “common-sense” competes with his historical analysis of the work of the dramatic spectacles, not least when it assigns to the amphitheatrical “gatherings something that exceeded moderation, a sort of barbaric extravagance” at once at odds with the dramatic and theatrical conventionality of the “mythological dramas” he is at pains to demonstrate, and that, he suggests, misleads the imperial public, weakening it in the face of the “totalitarian power” increasingly guiding the “assemblies.”19 Auguet critically frames the historicity and particularity unique to these performative events, and invokes the specificity of their religious and legal structure. Effectively demonstrating the implication of the damnatio ad bestias in the dramatic, technological, affective, and conceptual work of drama and theatre, Auguet simultaneously refuses that connection on psychological, moral, and aesthetic grounds. Man may be the measure of all things, but when man is made into a subject of dramatic spectacularity, that practice—however strongly its means, purposes, and operation appropriate dramatic theatre—can no longer be identified with the theatre or with its role in a cultural history. In Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum, dramatic spectacle requires the technological facility of the amphitheatre to do its work, work that takes place

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at the interface—the bloody interface—between the fiction and its materialization. The liberal-humanist aversion to the theatre as a technological rather than a purely literary space is also countered by the damnatio ad bestias as a model of theatrical performance in which the drama, its technologies of presentation, and the engaged responsiveness of an assembled public cannot be separated. Foregrounding this technological capacity of the amphitheatre, epigram 25 describes how the “earth suddenly gaped open and released a bear to summon Orpheus, it came from Eurydice,” and, as Coleman suggests of epigram 10, Daedalus, “equipped with wings,” might have been “elevated above the arena on a stage mechanism so as to stimulate flight,” and once landed might have been divested of wings before being confronted by a bear.20 Known for constructing the Minotaur’s Labyrinth, “Daedalus” might alternatively have been made to fly into the arena, landing in a maze to be hunted by a bear; the audience, sitting high above, would follow the suspenseful pursuit of “Daedalus” by “the Minotaur” in the winding turns of his mythological creation. In these literary examples, the technology of the Roman amphitheatre conditions the dramatic and judicial purposes and effects of the dramatic spectacles. Whether staging Daedalus aloft, the earth gaping for Orpheus, or Pasiphae’s bull, the spectacular technology can be divided neither from the drama nor from the social technology of the law—including the techne, the making of the good inherent in these technologies—and from the assembled public whose sensibility it co-shapes and co-thematizes. The damnatio ad bestias harness the means of the drama and the technology of theatre to an affective judicial purpose that cannot finally be severed from either of these means: using real bodies, doing real things to create an event in which, while the fictive and material elements can be distinguished, the border between the fictive and the real, the character and the actor, “acting” and really acting, is at issue. The damnati are trapped and killed by bestiae, enacting a dramatic spectacle required by Roman justice. The dramatized dimension of their death is aligned— however brutally—with one dimension of the appeal of dramatic theatre, registered historically by the ongoing question of whether, or how much, actors contribute of their own identities to the performance of a fictional character (Diderot’s dismissal of the possibility that Garrick felt the feelings of his characters; whether Method actors were psychologically harmed by identifying too closely with their roles; how race or sexuality should be played in the American theatre today). Like Auguet, Coleman

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takes the “excitement, realism, and bloodshed” of the fatal charades to set them apart from “proper theatrical performances” in the way that theatre histories have done: the damnati execute a principle of extratheatrical legal justice, a justice outside the fictional realm of the theatre and the moral prestige of the drama.21 The brutality of the dramatic spectacles excludes their consideration in the humanist historiography of drama; nonetheless, the efforts to distinguish them absolutely from dramatic theatre point to an ongoing endeavor to legitimate theatre by policing its characteristically permeable boundaries between the fictive and the real, theatrical, and social reality. (Would there be a problem with, say, a “marital charade,” in which the actors playing Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It were actually married at the play’s finale?) The selective transmission of Martial’s work by early modern scholarship clarifies the historical trajectory and ideological stakes of the disciplinary displacement of the dramatic spectacle from modern theatre studies. Martial’s text only became fit for the humanizing purpose of education when the medium of the book could absorb, redefine, edit, and tame its invocation of the medium of the performance. Providing a detailed overview of Martial’s European censorship from 1550 on, J. P. Sullivan suggests that the author’s wit and superb epigrammatic technique were familiar to all “the great Italian humanists from Petrarch to Poggio.” Fifteenth-century neo-Latin poets imitated Martial; Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) and Giovanni Tortelli (c. 1400–1466) quoted Martial in the De Linguae Latinae and Orthographia, respectively, and Niccoló Perotti (1430–1480) and Domizio Calderini (1446–1478), for instance, produced rival commentaries. However much he was regularly debated, his “obscenities” banned, and his books burned (annually in Venice), Martial became a standard figure in humanist education; by the sixteenth century, he embodied, according to Jacques Peletier, a “professeur du génie” (L’Art poétique, 1555).22 As Ann Moss suggests, though, whether one considers “the Academy at Geneva (1559), the Lutheran programme of David Chytraeus (1564), the syllabus in force at the municipal school at Bordeaux (first published in 1583 …), or the various states of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum, one is less struck by local or even confessional differences than by the overall homogeneity” of the literary texts produced for use in these schools, where Martial took his place alongside Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Terence, and Virgil as the educational foundation of Europe.23

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Indeed, Martial could be accommodated to humanist pedagogy only through censorship. The publication history of Liber Spectaculorum documents how Martial emerges in the early modern humanist tradition as a “purus putus Martialis,” the censored, castrated author Martial had himself warned against, a “neutered Priapus.”24 For instance, Martial’s work was, as Stefan W. Römmelt argues, revealingly subjected to censorship in Augsburg, where the Jesuits monitored the content and quality of books they brought to the market and developed as part of their extensive educational mission. In their collections, some of Martial’s poems were left out, rewritten, or, if included, omitted from further commentary, left unexplained and thus difficult to approach. Accordingly, producing prefaces to his 1599 Ingolstadt edition of Martial, and to the first (1602) and second (1611) editions of his commentaries, the Jesuit Matthäus Rader, an epigram expert, made sure to purge his productions for schools of the “harmful passions” so that only “the chaste, holy, and untouched” Martial would enter “these temples and shrines of wisdom, so that the youth, when they look for knowledge, may not lose their innocence.” This Martial is an agreeable, witty, and astute observer, a Martial of universal cultural and historical competence, valuable not only because there was no subject—theatre, circus, amphitheatre, naumachiae, orchestra, equestrian events, popular spectacles, fights—that he did not touch in his verse, but also because he was never taciturn about the wide array of life, whether in the city or the country, in Italy or far beyond.25 Although his preface to the 1599 edition portrays Martial as an author who unveils the multifaceted life of Roman antiquity, Rader silences Martial on one subject presented in his Liber Spectaculorum: the damnatio ad bestias , particularly the 6th epigram, “Pasiphae’s” coitus with the bull, including the epigram in the text but omitting it from his commentary. In the 1611 preface to the second edition of his Martial commentary, Rader engages in a fictitious dialogue with the Spanish lawyer Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado, who, despite plagiarizing Rader’s commentary in his own Martial edition, chastised Rader for inappropriate censorship. In defense of the Pasiphae epigram’s exclusion from his commentary, Rader simultaneously asserts his expertise in the entire Martial corpus and assembles an imaginary transcultural and interspecies solidarity to exclude Ramirez from humanity. After all, not only the “‘ears of the Christians’” and of “‘barbaric spirits and nations’” find epigram 6 offensive; “‘even the animals,’” if they could understand the epigram, would not “‘stand for it.’” As he stresses, “‘I have read the entire Martial, but I have, too, selected

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from the entire Martial the morally acceptable passages, selecting them from those that are morally objectionable; for this was the only way, to pick out the gems out from the rubbish. And so the frivolous writers were punished, so that we can use them in the classroom without risk.’” For Rader, being as corrupt as that epigram, Ramirez is himself beyond humanity, descending into madness, living in the toilet (cloaca) of the golden house of Nero.26 The burgeoning humanist enterprise of early modern Europe created the critical context for understanding Martial’s representation of the damnatio ad bestias. In sidelining the obscene brutality of these events, censorship also sidelines the damnatio ad bestias as an index of theatre, unwriting the dramatic spectacle as a paradigm of theatrical doing. The damnatio ad bestias were complex events designed to secure the audience’s sociopolitical interpellation in a manner essentially akin to other forms of cultural address: to legitimize the law, the reign of the given emperor, and the “ingenuity and benevolence” of the sponsor by training the spectators’ affective attention to reinforce a common civic sensibility. As ritualized enactments of the law, these performances are nonetheless bracketed from humanist thought insofar as they harness a politicizing, real spectacle distinguished from the aesthetic priorities encoded in the ideal of a harmonious “true ensemble” as the (imagined) embodiment of (universal) humanness, the governing principle of theatrical humanity.

Disciplining Spectacle As my treatment of History of the Theatre, A Cultural History of Theatre, and other textbooks implies, I take pedagogy and its instruments to reveal the commitments and self-understanding of a discipline. Indeed, drama anthologies, theatre histories, and compilations of theatre theory all witness the censored humanization of Liber Spectaculorum in the disciplinary discourse of modern theatre studies, where the dramatic spectacles must at once be acknowledged and canceled as part of the theatre. This Roman performative expression, the damnatio ad bestias , is symptomatically grasped within a degrading dualism: the punitive dramatic spectacle is either an illegitimate “bloody” spectacle and so merely inconsequential “entertainment,” or outside the proper understanding and experience of the theatre altogether.

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Given their literary orientation, it would be unsurprising that drama anthologies only minimally engage with the damnatio ad bestias; however, the comparison between the two drama anthologies prevalently used for introductory classes in English-language theatre studies reveals an unsettling development. The 2011 edition of The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, appearing since 1993, still briefly mentions “the actual execution of criminals as ‘characters’ in plays” and “the display of sexual acts onstage,” more or less echoing Livy’s critique of these acts as “degrading to public morality.”27 Casting a dichotomy between “nondramatic varieties of performance” or “entertainments” (chariot races, sea battles, animal hunts, and gladiatorial contests) and “dramatic performance,” the Norton Anthology of Drama, first published in 2009, omits the damnatio ad bestias altogether. This omission and the wider representation of Roman performance as “entertainment,” as I will suggest in various ways here, joins a vivid censure of the Roman Empire’s forms of performance as sensational spectacles to a liberal-humanist disapproval of the Empire as an implicitly undemocratic regime. As the Roman Republic is seen to give way to the Empire, so, too, “the unheard-of concentration of wealth and power” is understood to fuel “a tendency toward expensive and lavish spectacles, comparable perhaps to blockbuster Hollywood action films today,” spectacular “non-dramatic varieties of performance” that “came to overshadow” the principal genres of spoken theatre, “tragedy and comedy.”28 Animated by a rather tendentious analogy, the aesthetic form is understood as the direct expression of the political form; as the demise of the Republic correlates to the decline of the drama, so the rise of the Empire corresponds to the prominence of spectacle. This blithely convertible causality perhaps suggests the partiality of this truism, as does the incomplete historical parallel between politics and culture it registers, which can only assert the truth of its claims by withdrawing from their final conclusion. Although the decline of the drama is associated with the Roman Republic’s devolution, and Hollywood with the vacuous yet seductive Roman spectacle and the undemocratic processes it cannot but represent, spectacular film and theatre are not reciprocally traced to a cognate politics today. If the profligate Roman spectacles index empty entertainment to the threatening conjunction of “wealth and power,” shouldn’t the Hollywood blockbuster and the Broadway musical, by implication, register a contemporary decline from

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republican democracy to imperial neoliberalism? By treating this analogy as working only in one direction—asserting the likeness between Hollywood and Roman spectacle, but remaining silent on whether contemporary neoliberal democracy resembles the Empire—the Norton preserves its contents, literary drama, as having an ineffable connection to the democratic values of republican democracy. At once hyphenating, standing outside, and negating the binary logics—art vs. entertainment, aesthetics vs. politics—of humanism, dramatic spectacle dramatizes the inevitability of its exclusion from the humanist narrative of the stage.29 Generating an alternative disciplinary and ethical investment in both theatre studies and theatre practice, contemporary revisionist theatre history textbooks nonetheless also tend toward the liberal-humanist default, isolating and degrading Roman dramatic spectacles. In its privileged, literary treatment of Roman theatre, the 2006 collectively produced Theatre Histories: An Introduction relies on the enticing “popular blood spectacles” as the definitive term for all spectacular genres, as the Christian church fathers had done, with the consequence that the differences between various “spectacles”—between, say, the dramatic spectacle of the damnatio ad bestias and gladiatorial contests—converge in a single attribute, blood, an oversaturated and singularized signifier of excess. Closely bound to the “literate self-consciousness” of “interpretive communities,” Theatre Histories, for instance, understands the Roman naumachiae, the mock sea battles employed as the Empire’s legal vehicle for the mass execution of prisoners of war, as making an important conceptual and historical impact by staging “an emperor’s power to rewrite and control history.” However, its simultaneous classification as “entertainment” seems to sideline the capacity of this political, juridical, and cultural performative to write history, and so to enable performance to contribute directly to the fashioning of theatre historiography. Asserting the primacy of “critical reflection on the structure, form, artistic techniques, and/or conventions of performance,” Theatre Histories does interrelate dramatic writing and theatrical performance with other political and economic values. At the same time, though, insofar as the dramatic and the theatrical enact a conceptual dualism asserting their privilege over the spectacular, the spectacle cannot but be conceived as their opposite, and fall prey to the liabilities of entertainment.30 History of the Theatre sets the correlation between the rise of the spectacular with a moralized account of the decline of the Roman Republic

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to the Empire within a complex historical arc, the now-familiar identificatory elevation of Greek culture to the detriment of the Roman.31 Contesting and relying on this nineteenth-century neohumanist prejudice, History takes issue with aesthetics “reverently” praising the Greeks and “condescendingly” devaluing the Romans as “mere adapters,” a tendency perhaps best captured by August Wilhelm Schlegel’s 1809–11 Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which separates the Greeks, a “nation of artists” and the inventors of dramatic poiesis, from the Romans, their “copyists,” a “practical people” lacking in the creative spirit. “Of the ancient dramatists,” according to Schlegel, “the Greeks alone are of any importance. In this branch of art the Romans were at first mere translators of the Greeks, and afterwards imitators, and not always very successful ones.”32 Yet despite its dissent from this neohumanist anti-Roman sentiment, History’s narrative conforms to a set of liberal-humanist analogies determining its valuation of Roman dramatic, theatrical, and spectacular performances: the primacy of democracy to empire, of dramatic to spectacular performance, of major to minor forms of drama, of the human to the puppet theatre, of light to shadow, and ultimately of the West to the East, principles I explore below in conjunction with A Cultural History. The difficulty of reorienting the conceptual categories of theatre historiography—categories challenged by Martial’s dramatic spectacle—is dramatized by methodological commitments and displacements shared by History and A Cultural History. Examining Greco-Roman antiquity from the intersection of phenomenology and “dramatic genres,” in A Cultural History of Theatre, Martin Revermann at first appears to take an alternative perspective, suggesting that while “generic distinctions are helpful, they should not obscure the fact that there were constant overlaps, interactions and instances of cross-fertilization,”33 cross-fertilizations also noted in History, where the Roman theatre was sometimes tainted by “the depravity” of spectacle, while the amphitheatre was sometimes elevated as the site for the performance of plays or pantomimes, and mimes were performed in all venues.34 Yet, while it gestures toward the principle of generic hybridization, A Cultural History of Theatre documents the persistent utility of a hierarchizing logic of generic separation that prevents it from taking account of the “entertainment” genres it marginalizes. This constraint is especially tangible in the way Revermann introduces the damnatio ad bestias in the first, Antiquity, volume. Characterizing a “[c]ross-fertilization” between

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the five recognized forms of theatre following a devolutionary humanist logic—tragedy, comedy, satyr play, mime, and pantomime—unfolding from the literary and serious tragedy to the bodily pantomime and “the many para-theatrical entertainment genres of antiquity such as gladiatorial shows, animal hunts, chariot races, acrobatics, staged sea battles and choreographed public executions,” Revermann concludes by leaning on one “memorable” phrase from Katherine E. Welch’s study of Roman amphitheatres, describing the dramatic spectacles as “‘fabulous’ … if staged according to a mythical plot that had been theatricalized by pantomime and/or tragedy.”35 Thus the opening festivities at the Colosseum in 80 CE featured at least two such “fabulous” executions, along the Pasiphae and the Prometheus plot respectively, which Martial celebrated in two epigrams of his collection On Spectacles (nos. 6 and 9). We happen to know that both stories had been performed as pantomime in the theatre under Nero (and that both had also been treated in tragedy, by Euripides in his Cretan Women and Aeschylus (?) in the Prometheus Bound). These para-theatrical events staged in the huge Colosseum therefore gave the story a gruesome “reality show” character which was beyond the reach of any theatre.36

Even though Revermann briefly characterizes two of Martial’s epigrams, A Cultural History paradoxically refuses to analyze the damnatio ad bestias or other “para-theatrical” forms whose qualities locate these liminal genres outside the purified taxonomy of the theatre. Para-theatrical, after all, implies the properly theatrical of dramatic humanism silently driving the claims about illegitimate performance forms. A Cultural History demonstrates an awareness of such forms as well as a concomitant anxiety about taking account of them: the shorthand para-theatrical excludes these forms of performance from analysis and so from the cultural history of theatre at the moment of their apparent inclusion. Mentioned in passing, these para-theatrical events, purified to stand for “entertainment genres,” legitimize and authorize the unspoken telos of A Cultural History: the history of the theatre. Not surprisingly, once mentioned, these para-theatrical forms make no further appearance in this volume, nor can they, given the impermeability of their binary separation from the properly theatrical. Invoking Foucault, A Cultural History presents itself as engaged in a poststructuralist critique of humanism, but because its impetus is not to understand the disciplinary logic of theatre and performance

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studies, it often remains captive to that logic, even when it announces—as it does in mentioning Roman para-theatre—the possibility of an altered analytic and narrative approach to a cultural history of theatre. Policing theatrical propriety, it seems, is an important measure of disciplinary practice. Brockett’s History also illustrates the difficulty of eliding the binary rationality operative in theatre history in its brief consideration of the dramatic spectacles among other dramatic, quasi-dramatic, and spectacular entertainments. Brockett mentions only one spectacular performance, in which a criminal impersonating Orpheus appeared from below the arena level as if coming from Hades. He played music which enchanted rocks and trees so that they moved to greet him and animals crouched at his feet; then, at the end of this display, he was torn to pieces by a bear.37

Reenacting the early modern censorship of Martial here, History attributes this description to Martial without citing the source, Liber Spectaculorum. History creates an opportunity to interrogate the division between drama and spectacle, but like Revermann, Brockett brings in the dramatic spectacles only to discount them, here because their use of impressive scenic technology reverses humanist values, a theatre properly defined not by scenography but by the human-as-speech. Rather than seeing the human (drama) and the technological (spectacle) as mutually defining, History draws readers’ attention to the “intricate” machinery of the amphitheatre, the “sliding cliffs and a miraculous and moving wood,” as documenting a growing taste for “spectacular effects” and theatrical “excesses” characteristic of the Republic’s decline to Empire, “when spectacle and sensationalism seem to have been among the primary goals of the theatre.”38 Doing so, History makes tangible the idea that while the dramatic spectacles may share in the ocular orientation of any theatre, they lack the aural, verbally artistic dimension legitimizing humanist theatricality, theatre centered on the reproduction of writing as speech. In this sense, the disbarring of Martial and dramatic spectacle participates in History’s teleological gravitation toward the “mature drama” and its conceptualization of generic dramatic categories and their relation to one another: the privileged “regular drama” splits into hierarchically ordered “major forms” (tragedy and comedy) and “minor forms.” Atellan farce and mime figure as the “chief” minor forms; pantomime seems to be

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secondary; and “closet tragedy” such as Ovid’s Medea, “written only for recitation at banquets,” appears to occupy an ambiguous position, though Seneca’s plays—helping to “shape tragedy in the age of Shakespeare”—are “important.” Brockett’s “major” and “minor” anticipates Revermann’s hierarchy of genres, and his treatment of mime foregrounds this taxonomy’s ideological rather than historical orientation. Mime traces the political fortunes of Rome, “transformed into a literary type” in the first century BCE only to revert back “to a nonliterary type” under the Empire. Regressing to its less-developed avatar, the mime is nonetheless said to be so successful that it became, alongside pantomime, the prevailing performance form: the minor, however popular or dominating the performance horizon, merely reflects the cultural status of the major, however marginal the major may have been within the social institution of its contemporary theatre.39 Analogously, Revermann initially notes mime as resisting “rigid classification” despite being “considered to be the lowest of theatre arts”; this aesthetic ambiguity, however, silently hardens into a cultural identity, as mime then is later simply taken to be an inherently “lowly genre.”40 The Darwinian pedagogy of History relies on a “contest” between the spectacular and the dramatic, and between the popular and the regular, a struggle climaxing in the suppression of dramatic theatre in the Middle Ages, prior to its Renaissance rebirth and Enlightenment maturity. Evocative of Oswald Spengler’s “death-struggle” in The Decline of the West, History’s representation of the devolving “decline of the theatre in the western empire” prior to that resurrection is conducted through a corollary primitivizing of the theatrical values of the East, under the subheading “The Rise of Islam.”41 On the one hand, the account of the “decline” of Byzantine theatre credits “early Muslims” for shaping the lineage of European humanism. Having “great respect for learning,” Muslims “founded many universities; they preserved and transmitted much of the heritage from Greece, Persia, and Egypt to succeeding generations; and they made many contributions of their own to medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and geography.” On the other hand, “in a history of theatre” that enacts the history of Western theatre, “they” and “Islam” exert “largely a negative force,” principally because the Islamic prohibition against “direct representationalism” prevents the development of a “regular,” dramatic theatre.42 The East reciprocally confirms the West’s aesthetic principles, by figuring as a negative space, as a theatrical lack; History materializes the terms of Said’s orientalizing gaze, embodying the attitudes of the dramatic

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West by casting a nondramatic East as less-than-human, a theatre subject to aesthetic colonialism. Scanting the dramatic, characterizing work of the damnatio ad bestias , History’s anti-spectacular reflex is couched in a sense of the theatre as essentially defined by Western mimetic—anthropocentric—dramatic representation. In History’ s humanist perspective, technology tends to degrade or offset, or at best merely to enunciate, the pure human force of the drama; puppets might be described as a technology that evokes but finally displaces the human. In other areas, especially India, Indonesia, Turkey, and Greece [areas of Islamic expansion], shadow puppets became popular. But these puppets were kept as nonrepresentational as possible. They were two-dimensional cutouts made of translucent leather and manipulated with sticks. Furthermore, usually only their shadows—projected on a cloth by the light of lanterns or torches—were actually seen. In several countries shadow puppetry became a highly developed art [previous editions continue this sentence], though one considerably removed from the craft of the live actor.43

In accord with Samuel Weber’s sense that a “certain humanistic tradition” regards the “heterogeneity” of puppetry “with suspicion,”44 the coordinated conjunctions “but” and “though” here mark an unpronounced priority, measuring the “highly developed art” of shadow puppetry against and subordinating it to the anthropocentric value encoded by the mimetic “craft of the live actor.” Even though the latest edition trims this orientalization, the puppetry of the East, mere “manipulation with sticks” and “cut-outs made of translucent leather,” is still present as a secondary craft, reducing the living mimesis —the liveness —essential to humanist theatre to an insufficient two-dimensionality. Western theatre figures as the site for dramatizing man-as-speech, to which the inanimate technologies of spectacle should be subordinated; the theatre of the East relies on inanimate technologies, evidently reducing the theatrical human to a representational effect. The cultivated skills of the live actor placed at the center of the representational ensemble supplant those of the puppeteer, who, like the “actors” in Plato’s cave, manipulates unseen objects in order to produce mere technology, shadows, performing the East as removed from, yet legitimating, the living practice of theatre in the West. Crafting the

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live actor to the measure of the stage, History of the Theatre asserts the value of the human performer as the humanizing locus both of theatre history and of theatre itself. It figures the frontier between West and East, between what it presents as progressive secular/autonomous (democracy) and regressive religious/determined (Islam) forces, between the refined and the “crude,” the human drama and the technologized theatre. Even though noting that in “several countries shadow puppetry became a highly developed art,” History’ s arboreal classification nonetheless casts away the alternative epistemologies it acknowledges. In this sense, although it does not exactly square with Francis Fergusson’s promotion of the drama as an “irreducible idea” prior “to the arts, the sciences of man, and the philosophies, of modern civilization,”45 Brockett’s evolutionary history locates the mature drama and the mature live performance it demands in a cognate teleology, in which the drama—essentially distinct from its spectacle—is both the origin and the outcome of human civilization. History’s reduction of the damnatio ad bestias to a merely technological spectacle removes it from the human, dramatic priorities of theatrical evolution. And yet Martial is far from the final commentator on Roman spectacular entertainment; indeed, early Christian writers, typically taken simply to castigate the sinfulness of spectacle, actually engage with the performative work of the amphitheatre in ways resonant with Martial’s sense of dramatic spectacle. While treatments of Tertullian’s (160–220) De Spectaculis (c. 198) tend, as Marvin Carlson’s account in Theories of the Theatre does, largely to emphasize his critique of the theatre’s stimulation of “frenzy and the passions, encouraging a loss of self-control,”46 in fact Tertullian understands and appropriates the performative force of dramatic spectacle as a theoretical and practical instrument to regulate Christian socioreligious performance and sensibility. For inasmuch as De Spectaculis is sustained by an image of theatrum mundi, its climactic image of the Last Judgment, remediated as a paradigmatic, visionary, damnatio ad bestias , enacts the narrative of salvation through the means of dramatic spectacle. For Tertullian, the distinctive medium of the “demon’s” seductive influence is the spectacle; the sites of idolatry, fiction, fraud, and cruelty he presides over are the theatre, the amphitheatre, and the circus. Tertullian’s synthetizing of Roman ludi (festivals honoring divinities, including processions and games, specifically ludi circenses, chariot racing, and ludi scaenici, stage performances) and munera (monopolized by the Caesars as

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gladiatorial shows, but initially signifying private funeral rites) under the embracing term spectacula, public shows, signifies from within the Christian cosmology: all pagan, secular spectacula are alike in being enlisted in the service of the fallen angel, the demon. In Tertullian’s discourse, angered that God gave the world to man, “God’s rival” perverts God’s work, robs man “of his innocence,” in part by spectacularizing the “material” of the world. What violates “us,” in this logic, are “the things done” in these places, “by which even the places themselves” imbibe “defilement and then spit it out again on others”; “[w]e are defiled by the defiled.” Enlisted in the economy of original sin and man’s (predisposition to) voluptates, sensual pleasure, the spectacula signify through the dehumanizing effect they have on human integrity: illicit pleasure is the means by which (godly) knowledge is infected and undoes its own potentiality. If the world is God’s spectacle, in a reversed miniature, the “enemy’s” is the theatre.47 The early church fathers locate both pagan and Jewish cultures as drawn to sinful forms of collective performance opposed to the cleansing, salvific forms of emergent Christian performativity.48 Tertullian utilizes a scriptural analogy discrediting the Israelites’ “gathering” (the “session of the Jews in debate as to killing the Lord”) as a way to condemn the unholy power of worldly assemblies.49 Paradigmatically applicable “to all men,” this “gathering of the impious” shares in and defines the compromised situation of the bodies of the spectators in the theatre; whether one is “standing” or “sitting,” one takes share in its events. As “every public show is a gathering of the impious,” the “general class covering the single case,” so, too, the spectacula is the general class covering any case of spectacular and theatrical performance, stigmatizing the secular amphi/theatrical assembly in favor of the sociality—both heavenly and earthbound—of godly worshippers.50 Anticipating the gesture of contemporary theatre histories and textbooks, Tertullian collapses spectatorial and theatrical forms—from races in circuses, to wrestling in stadiums, to scaenica res or stage plays in theatres, to gladiatorial combats, beast hunts, and damnatio ad bestias in the amphitheatres—into a single paradigm: spectacle. Yet, for Tertullian, despite its convergence of idolatry, immorality, and seduction, dramatic spectacle provides the instrument to translate Christian ritual and the rhythms of Christian life as transcendent performance. As Christians were crucified, burned, or executed by beasts for their religious belief, the

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writings of early church fathers reversed the trope of Roman justice to dramatize the compassionate aspect of these scenes; that is, the fatal charades are still seen to perform as dramatic spectacle, but what they dramatize is martyrdom, rather than law and order, a miscarriage of human justice that dramatizes divine justice and so motivates the church fathers’ attack on the “public shows,” the pagan crowds’ compliancy, and the tyrants staging them.51 These unholy dramatic spectacles nonetheless enact, and produce, holiness. That is, while spectacula do their work through “communion with the devil,” they nonetheless provide an affective paradigm to be embraced. The Christians, apparently, have their spectacles, as Tertullian exults: “Have you a mind for blood? You have the blood of Christ” and all the “spectacles of Christians” are “holy, eternal, and free,” and of “great pleasures.” “Here find your games of the circus,—watch the race of time, the seasons slipping by, count the circuits, look for the goal of the great consummation, battle for the companies of the churches, rouse up at the signal of God, stand erect at the angel’s trump, triumph in the palms of martyrdom.” For those who may have a mind for literature, he suggests, “we” have for you “sufficiency of books, of poems, of aphorisms, sufficiency of songs and voices, not fable, those of ours, but truth.”52 Implying, as Augustine will do more persuasively (see Chapter 3), that within the walls of the church and its rites, Christians have their own performative forms, De Spectaculis climaxes in a spectacular Last Judgment, as a heavenly ensemble of the pious redresses the impious assemblies condemned in scripture. Both the crucifixion of Christ and the Day of Judgment appear as a version of talio, the punitive form of Roman mimetic justice executed via dramatic spectacle, offering Tertullian’s readers a visionary imitation of “things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard … things of greater joy than circus, theatre or amphitheatre, or any stadium,” and yet replicating these entertainments. How vast the spectacle that day, and how wide! What sight shall wake my wonder, what my laughter, my joy and exultation? … all those kings … along with Jove … the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus … the philosophers … the poets trembling before the judgment-seat, not of Rhadamanthus, not of Minos, but of Christ whom they never looked to see! And then there will be the tragic actors to be heard, more vocal in their own tragedy; and the players to be seen, lither of limb by far in the fire; and then the charioteer to watch, red all over in the wheel of

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flame; and, next, the athletes to be gazed upon … hurled in the fire. … Such sights, such exultation … all these, in some sort, are ours, pictured through faith in the imagination of the spirit.53

Tertullian precisely remediates the damnatio ad bestias as the performative form of the Last Judgment. Tertullian’s damnati face a reenactment of their crimes, now performed not before the seat of imperial power but before the seat of risen Christ. Tertullian reappropriates the dramatic spectacles to channel a form of secular into sacred performativity, and human into divine justice. And yet, much as it has unwritten Martial’s dramatic spectacle, a humanist tradition has merely absorbed and reiterated the surface of Tertullian’s critique, has been uninspired to engage the complex interplay between drama and spectacle suffusing Tertullian’s discourse, which redirects its readers/hearers to reimagine dramatic spectacle as Christian performative practice, embodiment, and teleology. ∗ ∗ ∗ The drama and the spectacle: whether framed in terms of cause (mimesis and imitatio), process of engagement (spectating or reading), or effect (catharsis or delighted instruction), the tension between and within these interlocking media provides the instrument for the ongoing inquiry into and regulation of “the human” practiced by Western humanisms, and by disciplinary inquiry in theatre and performance studies. Sloterdijk’s critique of philosophical humanism opening this chapter begins from a perception of conflict, of regulation and resistance: the extent to which the silent engagement with the authorized, regulatory discourse of writing defines and discloses a docile, tractable, readerly human subject whose individual engagement with the text becomes at once the vehicle and the signifier of an abstract regulatory humanity. Martial and Tertullian locate the consequences of withdrawing the damnatio ad bestias —a liminal genre contesting dramatic humanism’s binary division between writing and performance, drama and spectacle—from the proper (liberal-humanist) history of the theatre, of bypassing the theoretical and cultural power it clearly engaged for its contemporaries, and might restore to an ongoing conception of theatrical performance. For in its now-unacceptable justice and spectacular blending of aesthetic and judicial mimesis (talio), the productive tension of the damnatio ad bestias —a genre and a principle nearly erased in theatre/performance

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studies today—provides an instance of the complex challenge that dramatic spectacle raises to the liberal-humanist dualism operative in theatre/performance history and theory, a tension pertinently registered in key disciplinary notions: dramatic literature, performance text, dramatic theatre, or postdramatic theatre.

Notes 1. Peter Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 18, 18–19. Translated by Mary Varney Rorty as “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 12–28; for the quoted passage, see 16. For a discussion questioning Sloterdijk’s articulation of media with technological agency, particularly bioethics, see Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On how Sloterdijk’s work “nicely captures the association between humanism and the humanities, linking it back to the ‘civilising’ scholarship of the Renaissance and its Greek and Roman forebears,” see Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 107. 2. Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo,” 15. 3. K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” The Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 54. 4. Coleman, “Fatal Charades,” 56, 72. The Roman penal law was a dualstatus system, marking out different kinds of punishment to lower-status citizens, humiliores, and to the higher-status honestiores, those of curial, equestrian, and senatorial rank, though both of these categories, especially after the 212 Constitutio Antoniniana granting citizenship to all free men and women in the Roman Empire, were unstable and relative, depending on “‘property, power, and prestige’” (57). While citizens were subject to public law, noncitizens (slaves) were initially subjects to the masters or magisterial coercion and execution. In Roman public law, if exile was not granted, the death penalty for honestiores was beheading by sword, considered a quick and unspectacular mode of execution. Humiliores, however, could be executed in three ways, by crucifixion, by burning, or by wild beasts. Leanne Bablitz provides an expedient counterpart to the spectacles of Roman law staged in the amphitheatres, considering the early imperial Roman courtroom as “an arena where parties entered into combat”; Actors and Audience in the Roman Courtroom (London: Routledge, 2007), 199.

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5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 23. 6. Kathleen M. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, ed. with introduction, translation, and commentary by Kathleen M. Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), epigram 6, 62, 62–68. 7. Richard Schechner, “Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior,” in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 39–81. 8. R. K. Ehrman, “Martial, De Spectaculis 8: Gladiator or Criminal?,” Mnemosyne 40, fasc. 3–4 (1987): 423. 9. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 9, 82. 10. This revisionist impulse is also visible in epigram 10, where Martial gibes, “[s]eeing that you are being torn apart like that by a Lucanian bear, Daedalus, how you must wish you had your feathers now!” Although Daedalus constructed wings to escape his incarceration on Crete by King Minos, this epigram suggests an ironic revision of the myth, in which “Daedalus,” made unable to take flight, suffers in the amphitheatre a fate he could flee in the myth; Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 10, 97. 11. Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992), 77, 71. In addition to arsonists, murderers, and Christians, delatores, the informers of the emperor, could also be subjected to arena punishment. Instead of facing physical harm, though, the delatores were publicly humiliated and then discharged from the arena, facing a social death (83). 12. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 9, 82–83. 13. “In a mime called ‘Laureolus,’ in which the chief actor falls as he is making his escape and vomits blood, several understudies so vied with one another in giving evidence of their proficiency that the stage swam in blood”; Suetonius, Gaius Caligula, in Volume I: Lives of the Caesars: Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, trans. J. C. Rolfe (with my adjustment), Loeb Classical Library 31 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 503. “Here there were two new portents. In the first place a mime was presented in the course of which a chieftain is caught and crucified. Moreover, the play presented by the dancer was Cinyras [Josephus probably mistakes Cinyras for the Laureolus mime], in which the hero and his daughter Myrrha are killed. Thus a great quantity of artificial blood was shed, what with the crucified man and Cinyras”; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities: Volume VIII: Books 18–19, trans. Louis H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library 433 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 259, 261. 14. “Laureolum velox etiam bene Lentulus egit, iudice me dignus vera cruce”; Juvenal, “Satire 8,” in Juvenal, Persius, Juvenal and Persius, trans. and

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15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

ed. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library 91 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 338–39. D. Kuijper, “Non Falsa,” Mnemosyne 17, fasc. 2 (1964): 148–55; A. E. Housman, review of Martial: Épigrammes, trans. and ed. H. J. Izaac, The Classical Review 45, no. 2 (1931): 83, as cited in Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 9, 84. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 6, 62. The Pasiphae myth was disseminated in ancient literature, including Virgil and Ovid, and on Roman decorative wall paintings and friezes. As a more general motif, intercourse of women with animals circulated on Roman terracotta vases, as well. In her effort to discern how such sexual act could be produced, Coleman suggests that “the urine of an oestrous female” may have been smeared on the genitalia of the woman in preparing her body for the fatal performance in the arena; she might then have been “restrained at the appropriate height on a rack or trestle.” The smell of the cow combined, perhaps, with blindfolding of the bull might lead to the bull’s penetration, ripping the woman’s internal organs, resulting in her death (65). Roland Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), 100, 101, 103, 104. Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization, 103, 102, 104. Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization, 13, 104, 13, 16, 184. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 25, 182 and epigram 10, 97. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, 84. Shadi Bartsch tends to segregate the performance of dramatic literary theatre and the performativity of political performance, articulating this separation as a “confusion of interpretive frames,” despite their interplay in several areas of Roman society. In describing the Roman audience’s awareness of being watched by the Emperor as a “reversal of the normal one-way direction of the spectators’ gaze,” Bartsch also seems to take the ideological privacy of modern proscenium theatricality as a theatrical norm, much as she does in suggesting a “violation of the theatrical by the actual”; Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 11 (my emphasis), 51. J. P. Sullivan, Martial: The Unexpected Classic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 263–65, 270. The complex history of early Italian editions and commentaries of Martial is discussed in detail 264–66. Ann Moss, “Humanist Education,” in The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 145 (my emphasis). On “purus putus Martialis,” see Matthäus Rader’s letter to Justus Lipsius, July 27, 1597, quoted in Stefan W. Römmelt, “‘Als ob ich den

2

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

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ganzen Martial kommentiert hätte’: Matthäus Rader SJ, ein problematischer Schulautor und die jesuitische Zensurpraxis in Augsburg um 1600,” in Humanismus und Renaissance in Augsburg: Kulturgeschichte einer Stadt zwischen Spätmittelalter und Dreißigjährigem Krieg, ed. Gernot Michael Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 318–19. Translations from German are my own. On “neutered Priapus,” see Martial, Epigrams, Volume I: Spectacles, Books 1–5, trans. and ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library 94 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), epigram 35, 65. Rader, quoted in Römmelt, “Als ob ich den ganzen Martial kommentiert hätte,” 324. “Quid in Theatro, Circo, Amphitheatro, Naumachiis, Orchestra, Equestribus, Popularibus spectacur, dicitur, pugnatur, quod non tangat Martialis? Quid in aula, quid extra, quid in vrbe, quid extra vrbem, quid in foro, fanis, aedibus, hortis, suburbiis, thermis, quid domi, ruriue, quid in Italia, Hispania, Germania, Dacia, Scythia, Sarmatia bellatur, geritur, narrat ur, quod taceat Martialis ?” (Rader, quoted in Römmelt, 320–21). Römmelt, “Als ob ich den ganzen Martial kommentiert hätte,” 324–25. W. B. Worthen, ed., The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 6th ed. (1993; Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011), 27. J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner Jr., and Martin Puchner, eds., Antiquity Through the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of Drama, 2nd ed. (2009; New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 14. This parallel between ancient Roman and modern American spectacle is a familiar move in scholarly discourse. In the 1970s, for example, Auguet saw the “‘epic spectacle’” as “a forerunner of the Hollywood style”; Cruelty and Civilization, 26. Several historical factors play into the narrative of dramatic privilege and its intersection with political history: the foundation of the Roman Republic (509–27 BCE) extends the idealization of Athenian democracy, as the beginnings of Roman theatre in 240 BCE are conditioned by Roman expansion into Greek territories; and the spectacular genres of Roman performance, associated with the criticism raised by the church fathers, carry over a moral indignation toward spectacular performance and its impact on the individual subject. Phillip B. Zarrilli, ed., “Imperial Theatre: Pleasure, Power, and Aesthetics,” in Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 105, 99, 106, 99. Theatre Histories mentions “rope dancers” and gladiatorial shows in a competitive relation with staged plays for its audiences in “Comedies in the Republic,” and treats mime and pantomime in “Imperial Spectacles”; the “popular blood spectacles” are very briefly elucidated (103, 101, 104–6, 105–6). The consideration of performances in the Roman arenas is censored—their

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“sadistic details are sickening even to so-called hard-boiled modern of today”—in George Freedley and John A. Reeves, A History of the Theatre (New York: Crown Publishers, 1968), 37. Phyllis Hartnoll’s illustrated and popular The Theatre: A Concise History, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985) treats only dramatic genres, even though, or precisely because, the title points to a treatment of theatre; “The Greek and Roman Theatre,” 7–31. David Wiles’s “Theatre in Roman and Christian Europe,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), offers a succinct and performance-oriented characterization of the “diversity of dramatic modes” (58), comedy, tragedy, satyr play, mime, and pantomime. Although the anthology understands theatre in an equation with the dramatic, Wiles is attentive to the historical, sociopolitical, and medial milieu of the Roman (dramatic) theatre. Also, Wiles is to be credited with a continuous effort to direct his readers’ attention to diverse ancient sources registering the work of performance rather than the meaning and interpretation of the dramatic text alone. On the intersection of Roman spectacle and violence, see Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization; Alison Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Sissela Bok, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Reading: Perseus Books, 1998); Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1998); Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators. 31. Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” in History of the Theatre, 10th ed., 40–41. The alignment of Roman theatre with trivializing modern forms understood as entertainment persists in Brockett and Hildy, here compared to the televised repertoire: “We can probably grasp the essence of Roman theatre more readily by comparing it with American television programming, for it encompassed acrobatics, trained animals, jugglers, athletic events, music and dance, dramatic skits, short farces, and full-length dramas” (41). 32. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2nd rev. ed. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892), 34, 21, 34, 28; “We may safely affirm, therefore, that in the graces and elegances of execution, the Greek poets have always lost in the Latin imitations. These we must, in imagination, retranslate into the finished elegance which we perceive in the Greek fragments. ... Plautus and Terence are generally mentioned as writers in every respect original. In Romans this was perhaps pardonable: they possessed but little of the true poetic spirit, and their poetical literature owed its origin, for the most part, first to translation, then to free imitation, and finally to appropriation and new

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33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

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modelling, of the Greek. With them, therefore, a particular sort of adaptation passed for originality” (189). On the Roman playwrights’ (Plautus, Terence, and Caecilius) responses to models derived from Greek drama as part of a wider Hellenization of Roman culture, see Richard C. Beacham, The Roman Theatre and Its Audience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 27–55. Martin Revermann, “Introduction: Cultural History and the Theatres of Antiquity,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity, ed. Martin Revermann, vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 4, 5. For a more detailed analysis of Revermann’s separation of Roman para-theatrical forms from the properly theatrical ones, see Chapter 2. The “mimes reflected the taste of the period, as can be seen from the numerous beatings, fights, deaths, and other forms of violence included in them. But many of the examples often cited to illustrate the depravity of the theatre actually occurred in the amphitheatres, which were always more bloodthirsty than the theatres”; Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” 10th ed., 47. Citing Katherine E. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 146, Revermann’s endnote also refers to Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, 62–68 and 82–96 ([197]n8). Revermann, “Introduction: Cultural History and the Theatres of Antiquity,” 5. Revermann’s comparison of the damnatio ad bestias to a modern “reality show” raises the same problems of partial historical analogy I discuss above in relation to the Norton Anthology of Drama. Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” in History of the Theatre, 10th ed., 55. According to this epigram, Orpheus seems to have been presented in a forest scene, surrounded by animals, presumably to be soothed by his music. “Whatever Rhodope is said to have seen in one of Orpheus’ stage-performances, Caesar, the amphitheatre has displayed to you. Cliffs crawled and a wood ran forwards, a wonder to behold; the grove of the Hesperides is supposed to have been just like that. Every kind of wild beast was there, mixed with domesticated animals, and above the minstrel there balanced many a bird; but he fell, torn apart by an unappreciative bear. This was the only thing that happened contrary to the story”; Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm, epigram 24, 174. Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” 10th ed., 54. Notably, the phrasing of this sentence has changed from earlier editions, in which it was the “realism of spectacle and sensationalism” that “seem to have been among the primary goals of the theatre”; see the 6th ed., 68 (my emphasis).

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39. Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” 10th ed., 40–48. “By the time Rome ceased to be a republic in 27 B.C.E., regular drama had already declined markedly and the minor forms had become dominant. Of the more than 900 years over which the history of Roman theatre extends, only about 200 are of much importance for drama because it was during this time that most of the plays intended for performance were written” (43–44). And once more, by “the time Rome ceased to be a republic in 27 B.C.E., regular drama had already declined markedly and the minor forms had become dominant” (46). “If regular comedy and tragedy had diminished in popularity by the first century C.E., this was certainly not true with the minor forms that dominated the Roman repertory from the first century B.C.E. onward. ... It was not until the major forms began to decline that the fabula Atellana [Atellan farce] and the mime were first written down” (47). “Comedy and tragedy (or perhaps only scenes) continued to be performed during the empire, although they were less popular or frequent than mime and pantomime” (48). 40. Revermann, “Introduction: Cultural History and the Theatres of Antiquity,” 4, 12. 41. In the “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre” chapter, dramatic theatre falls victim to a tripartite opponent: the antitheatrical doctrines of a rising Christianity, “the decay” of the Roman Empire, and “pressures from barbarian tribes”; Brockett and Hildy, History, 10th ed., 60–61. This sense of the theatre as a scene of natural selection or ideological rivalry is a vivid moment of History’ s underlying evolutionary rhetoric: as the place of Atellan farce “was usurped by the mime,” so “the serious form of pantomime usurped the position formerly held by tragedy” (47, 48). Cf. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, abr. ed. Helmut Werner and Arthur Helps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially 319–53. 42. Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” 10th ed., 60, 66 (my emphasis). 43. Brockett and Hildy, “Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Theatre,” 10th ed., 67 (my emphasis). The now-eliminated phrase appears in, for example, Oscar G. Brockett, History of the Theatre, 7th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995), 78. 44. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 6. Weber does not define “heterogeneity,” nor does he elaborate on the “certain humanistic tradition” here. I assume his remark supposes the indiscriminate material capacity of puppets to take on the forms, whether representational or not, of diverse beings—spiritual, animal, and human—in either their pure or hybrid manifestations. That is, not only can the materiality of a puppet hybridize these three identities;

2

45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

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the inseparability of the human and the puppet performers condition their hybridization as well. Furthermore, one and the same puppet can partake in different rites and realities—religious, magical, spiritual, medical, private as well as public—and so enter into different existences, complicating the anthropocentric categories on which History’s rationality depends. In terms of dramatic humanism, it is symptomatic that even the first edition of History of the Theatre steps aside from studies such as Marjorie H. Batchelder, Rod-Puppets and the Human Theatre (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1947), which sets puppetry in a legitimating relationship to the “human theatre,” though not without subjecting it to a humanist evolutionary plot and taxonomic rationality. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1949), 9. Marvin Carlson, “Roman and Late Classic Theory,” in Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, ed. Marvin Carlson, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 28. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, in Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Tertullian: Apology, De Spectaculis; Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover; Gerald H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library 250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 237–39, 255, 269, 255. “For such is the force of [fleshly] pleasure that it can prolong ignorance to give it its chance, and pervert knowledge to cloak itself” (231). Cf. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1–8, trans. and ed. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, Loeb Classical Library 26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), Book 6, 259–67. R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101–3. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 239. Tertullian cites Psalm 1:1, “Happy is the man … who has not gone to the gathering of the impious, who has not stood in the way of the sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilences.” Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 241. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 68–97. The accounts of martyrologists witness their own dissatisfaction with the arena punishments of the Christians, occasionally marking audiences protests, but these “protests were evidently not forceful enough to save the martyrs’ lives”; Coleman, “Fatal Charades,” 58. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 295–97. According to Martin R. P. McGuire, as the church fathers were conceptualizing the good of divine Providence, they were, as is the case with Tertullian, also appropriating “human institutions suited for intercourse with men and which we cannot do without in this life,” such as theatrical and spectacular performance, as I suggest here. Humanism is, for McGuire, inconceivable without Christianity and its conflicts with Greco-Roman paganism. As a mission oriented toward the

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gentiles, Christianity was inevitably in conflict with, but derived its force from, Greek and Greco-Roman culture, especially from the philosophers of antiquity; “Mediaeval Humanism,” The Catholic Historical Review 38, no. 4 (1953): 400. 53. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 297–301. Tertullian’s depiction of damnatio ad bestias also appears in his Apology: “you really are still more religious in the amphitheatre, where over human blood, over the dirt of pollution of capital punishment, your gods dance, supplying plots and themes for the guilty—unless it is that often the guilty play the parts of the gods. We have seen at one time or other Atys, that god from Pessinus, being castrated; and a man, who was being burned alive, had been rigged out as Hercules”; Tertullian, Apology, in Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Tertullian: Apology, De Spectaculis; Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover; Gerald H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library 250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 79.

References Auguet, Roland. Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972. Augustine. Confessions, Volume I: Books 1–8. Translated and edited by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond. Loeb Classical Library 26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Bablitz, Leanne. Actors and Audience in the Roman Courtroom. London: Routledge, 2007. Bartsch, Shadi. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Batchelder, Marjorie H. Rod-Puppets and the Human Theatre. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1947. Beacham, Richard C. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bok, Sissela. Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment. Reading: Perseus Books, 1999. Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968. Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991. Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. 7th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. 10th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2008.

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Carlson, Marvin. “Roman and Late Classic Theory.” In Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, edited by Marvin Carlson, 22–30. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Coleman, K. M. “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments.” The Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44–73. Coleman, Kathleen M. M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectacvlorvm. Edited with introduction, translation, and commentary by Kathleen M. Coleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Edwards, Catharine. “Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, 66–95. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Ehrman, R. K. “Martial, De Spectaculis 8: Gladiator or Criminal?” Mnemosyne 40, fasc. 3–4 (1987): 422–25. Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1949. Freedley, George, and John A. Reeves. A History of the Theatre. New York: Crown Publishers, 1968. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Futrell, Alison. Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Gainor, J. Ellen, Stanton B. Garner Jr., and Martin Puchner, eds. Antiquity Through the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of Drama. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Hartnoll, Phyllis. The Theatre: A Concise History. Rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985. Housman, A. E. Review of Martial: Épigrammes. Translated and edited by H. J. Izaac. The Classical Review 45, no. 2 (1931): 81–83. Josephus. Jewish Antiquities: Volume VIII: Books 18–19. Translated by Louis H. Feldman. Loeb Classical Library 433. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Juvenal. “Satire 8.” In Juvenal, Persius. Juvenal and Persius. Translated and edited by Susanna Morton Braund. Loeb Classical Library 91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Kuijper, D. “Non Falsa.” Mnemosyne 17, fasc. 2 (1964): 148–55. Kyle, Donald G. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge, 1998. Markus, R. A. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Martial. Epigrams, Volume I: Spectacles, Books 1–5. Translated and edited by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library 94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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McGuire, Martin R. P. “Mediaeval Humanism.” The Catholic Historical Review 38, no. 4 (1953): 397–409. Mitchell, Timothy. Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Moss, Ann. “Humanist Education.” In The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton, 145–54. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Phillips, Anne. The Politics of the Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Plass, Paul. The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicides. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Revermann, Martin. “Introduction: Cultural History and the Theatres of Antiquity.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity, edited by Martin Revermann, 1–15. Vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Römmelt, Stefan W. “‘Als ob ich den ganzen Martial kommentiert hätte’: Matthäus Rader SJ, ein problematischer Schulautor und die jesuitische Zensurpraxis in Augsburg um 1600.” In Humanismus und Renaissance in Augsburg: Kulturgeschichte einer Stadt zwischen Spätmittelalter und Dreißigjährigem Krieg, edited by Gernot Michael Müller, 309–26. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Schechner, Richard. “Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior.” In A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, edited by Jay Ruby, 39– 81. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black. 2nd rev. ed. London: George Bell & Sons, 1892. Sloterdijk, Peter. Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. Sloterdijk, Peter. “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism.” Translated by Mary Varney Rorty. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 12–28. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Edited by Helmut Werner and Arthur Helps. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Suetonius. Gaius Caligula. In Volume I: Lives of the Caesars: Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library 31. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Sullivan, J. P. Martial: The Unexpected Classic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Tertullian. De Spectaculis. In Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Tertullian: Apology, De Spectaculis, Minucius Felix: Octavius. Translated by T. R. Glover; Gerald H. Rendall. Loeb Classical Library 250. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931.

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Tertullian. Apology. In Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Tertullian: Apology, De Spectaculis; Minucius Felix: Octavius. Translated by T. R. Glover; Gerald H. Rendall. Loeb Classical Library 250. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Welch, Katherine E. The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Wiedemann, Thomas. Emperors and Gladiators. London: Routledge, 1992. Wiles, David. “Theatre in Roman and Christian Europe.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, edited by John Russell Brown, 49–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wistrand, Magnus. Entertainment and Violence in Ancient Rome. Göteburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1992. Worthen, W. B., ed., The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Zarrilli, Phillip B., ed. “Imperial Theatre: Pleasure, Power, and Aesthetics.” In Theatre Histories: An Introduction, edited by Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, 99–147. New York: Routledge, 2006. Zarrilli, Philip B., Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. Theatre Histories: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.

CHAPTER 3

Augustine’s spectacula

While Martial triangulates the judicial symmetry of law, justice, and punishment animating the interpellative force of the dramatic spectacles, Augustine (354–430) is inspired by the appetitive excess of spectacle and theatre, the former’s arousal of a desire for mere sensation and the latter’s effect of artificial, delusory compassion. Alongside City of God, Confessions has traditionally been understood to take a thoroughly negative view of spectacle and theatre.1 Yet, for Augustine, both spectacular and theatrical performance have the potential to undertake productive forms of social performativity: they provide the motivation for the work of early Christian performance, modeling the transformative consequences of reading. Like Tertullian, intertwining spectacula with the work of evil, Augustine understands them to provide—as do books and the reading of both pagan philosophy and scripture—“a set of formative influences” shaping his and his peers’ lives,2 and a crucial paradigm for engaging the moderating performance of an “aural readership”3 and of the performative ensemble of Christian ritual as well. Conflating a variety of performative forms—mimes, plays, and pantomimes; gladiatorial combats; circus competitions—as spectacula, spectacles, Augustine reworks the appeal of Roman public shows toward a Christian performative expression and sensibility.4 This chapter particularly considers how Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397) rechannels the experience of Roman secular (theatrical, amphitheatrical, and oratorical) performances into forms of religious enactments (conversion, confession, sacraments, and prayer), in part through Augustine’s performative model © The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_3

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of oral and silent reading, interpreting and writing, and the medium of the book.5 Objectified within the economy of Johannine temptations (concupiscentia carnis, the desire of the flesh; concupiscentia oculorum, the desire of the eye; and ambitio saeculi, pride in achievements and wealth), the spectacula interest me, then, not merely in their im/moral dimension, for giving rise to a “desire to control, and observe, and experience sensually,” but also as an expedient advancing Confessions ’s objectives.6 The spectacula provide Augustine a performance paradigm finally outside the binarizing logic of literary and dramatic humanisms. Remediating performance in and through its narrative, Confessions exceeds the interlocking antithesis between reading and spectating, a bias inflecting a persistent dimension of the encounter between theatre and humanism.7 Inasmuch as Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum strikes a mutually reinforcing identity between drama and spectacle in the dramatic spectacle’s address to its audience, Augustine strikes a dynamic exchange between the medium of the spectacula, the Christian performativity Confessions promotes, and the performative consequences of reading. Augustine’s interplay between stages and pages, actors and spectators, spectators and readers, sustains a complex intermedial appropriation which absorbs spectacular and theatrical performances into the ensemble of Christian performative sociality as well as sociability. In Confessions , the media of stage and page and the secular and sacred performances they enable are less in structural conflict than they are mutually defining and enabling. To examine how a tactical misreading of the early interaction between categories of reading and spectating, and concomitantly between mise-enpage and mise-en-scène, continue to haunt a cultural-studies engagement with theatrical performance, the second part of this chapter turns to a volume in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, Tony Davies’s 1997 Humanism. Exploring the term in the “larger field of cultural representation,” Humanism reproduces a cultural dimension of the humanist ideology it otherwise subjects to lucid critique, materializing the erasure of spectacle by the literary, and so promoting a vision of reading and spectating that dichotomizes and simplifies Augustine’s more powerful and complex intermedial paradigm.8 In Humanism, the trace of theatre remains only to mark its eviction from the conduct of the critique itself.

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Spectacular Performatives Despite its suspicion of rhetoric, Confessions relies on the performative imitation of exempla: it appropriates their rhetorical function, social uses, and communicative power in a social and cultural context, toward a theological “act of ‘making the truth.’”9 Augustine’s narrative of his engagement with Christian belief and the figures animating his journey positioned throughout Confessions imply that each exemplum and the arrangement of all exempla are designed to produce a responsive act as the effect of performative reading, a practice of reading in which, to paraphrase J. L. Austin, reading something is potentially doing something. Undertaking reading as doing, Augustine’s readers or hearers are summoned not only to absorb doctrine but also to subject themselves to the structure and the experience of the narrative, which in its exemplary propositions makes a claim on their presence. The book—Confessions ’s narrative, structure, form, and the relation they forge to the world and beyond through the acts of reading—extends the “ideological expediency” of the exempla,10 and its efficacy arises from the capacity of the discursive composition to orchestrate a performance transcending the book: the reader or hearer posed in prayer, in unity with God, a unity “from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.”11 The subject at prayer is a performative figure—like Augustine—within and without Confessions ’s narrative and its structure. In the act of praying, performative formation, transformation, and ontology converge in “a moral obligation which must be enacted.”12 This redoubled dimension is critical to Confessions ’s active occupation between reading and performing, as the book gestures toward a performance it aims to inspire and to control: the implied reader is an implied performer, responding to Augustine in the act of reading and potentially—nearly perlocutionarily—directed by that reading to a specific structure of action in the future. Confessions records Augustine’s choices and practices of reading as critical to his and others’ intellectual and religious development, and to his and their return to God. For Brian Stock, the work grounds “the West’s first developed theory of reading,” and the “theoretical foundation for a reading culture,”13 as Augustine’s conversion out of the “shadows of falsehood,”14 unfolds through the pursuit of reading: either the historically uncommon (performance of) silent reading to oneself or the more commonplace hearing (a performance) of reading aloud.15 Throughout Confessions, Augustine narrates his outward and upward movement

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toward God as a series of interlocking, more or less chronological, literacy events: his acquisition of language, basic skills of writing, and reading; work with Greek and Latin literature (Vergil’s Aeneid), including drama (Plautus); study of books of rhetoric (Cicero’s Hortensius ) coupled with his first unsuccessful reading of scriptures; study of the Manicheans16 ; inquiry into astrological records; independent work with Aristotle’s Categories; examination of the libri Platonicorum (Platonic books, Plotinus and perhaps Porphyry); renewed interest in studying scriptures; reading the apostle Paul; and developing his own Platonic-Christian exegesis of Genesis while introducing the principles of reading, interpreting, and writing about such texts. Even though not all books or acts of reading are equally generative, books, reading, and their associated modes of interpretation are introduced as formative for Augustine and also as goods in themselves insofar as they are not equated with man-made letters (signs) but with God’s voice: God gathers the ensemble of the faithful through books. Even though, as Stock argues, Augustine’s “normal unit of thought is the book,” Augustine’s moral lesson turns out to be that while “nothing is learned from reading itself,” the performance of reading is essential to emancipating the reader from the letter into the spirit.17 Emplotting Augustine’s exploits of reading, Confessions presents and solicits reading as consequential. Studying Platonic books (in a Latin translation by Marius Victorinus) was crucial to Augustine’s intellectual conversion; had he studied and followed the scriptures first and “later chanced upon those books, they might perhaps have torn me away from the framework of my dutiful observance,” or led him to think that devotion could be absorbed from them.18 The critical skill required to grasp and compare the argumentative force of some books is instrumental; even though marked by a lack of divine inspiration, the libri Platonicorum nonetheless represent a medium through which Augustine progresses toward his liberation from them19 : “the best of philosophers” take a higher position in the hierarchy of books “by virtue of the nearness of their approximation to Christian theology.”20 Throughout Confessions, whereas books serve as a medium for self-development and self-reform within the regime of the divine, the sites of spectacula—circus, amphitheatre, theatre—work as a sensuous medium soliciting the fall of the ethical self. Nonetheless, as Augustine’s progression from secular to sacred texts implies, the medium does not determine its potential utility, a recognition that informs Augustine’s treatment of performance as well. Rather than merely displacing the spectacula, Confessions self-consciously leans on

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reading, hearing, praying, and writing as rehabilitative processes grounded in the transformative power of their performance, their practice as doing. In order to show how the objectives of Confessions are sustained by the instructional, spectacular, and sacramental potentialities of performance, let me turn to several exempla, particularly those involving Alypius and Victorinus in Books 6 and 8. Deploying a parabolic dramaturgy, as Lessing and Brecht will do, Augustine introduces his narrative double, his pupil and friend Alypius, a key figure in the scene of his own conversion, and significantly someone who became a bishop like himself.21 From their first meeting, Augustine sets Alypius within a performative, lecture-room environment, and within his remediation of the spectacula: “I was sitting in my usual spot and my pupils were present before me,” when Alypius “arrived, greeted me, sat down, and fixed his thoughts on the subjects under discussion.” Performing in front of his students’ gaze, explaining a text he stresses was in his hands by “chance,” Augustine is suddenly struck to draw “a timely analogy with the circus games,” an analogy which Alypius understands as about himself. Augustine’s analogy to the circus games bitingly mocked “those who were in the toils of that particular frenzy,” but instead of being rebuffed by Alypius, who at the time cultivated a “blind and headlong zeal for the vanity of the shows,” Augustine’s striking inspiration begins a bond of “love” between the two. The narrative mise-enscène frames Augustine’s performance, the explication of a passage from a book for which his analogy with the spectacula drives the point home. Even though the spectacula figures as negative, Augustine’s inspired use of the spectacula performs God’s work in at least three ways: it validates Augustine’s classroom performance; it prompts Alypius to find “fault with himself” and begin his conversion; and it initiates the ideal friendship of Confessions. God’s scenario interrelates divine and worldly performances in a harmonious ensemble of discovered faith.22 Responding to God’s call during Augustine’s class, Alypius “with courage and self-control” gave “his mind a shake and all the squalor of the circus games leaped away from him, and he went there no more.” The self-knowledge he won, though, is next interrogated in Augustine’s engagement with Alypius’ more complex encounter with spectacular performance, opening the opportunity to demonstrate how to overcome the alienating address of the spectacula, and illustrating how these secular performances might be remediated into the divinely ordained forms of experience proper to Christian sensibility.23

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Alypius’ “extraordinary appetite” for Roman spectacles is famously put on trial, as Augustine continues to narrate Alypius’ youthful adventures in Rome, at the Flavian Amphitheatre celebrated in Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum.24 Although Alypius’ peers violate his proto-Christian integrity, dragging his body against his will into the amphitheatre, he nonetheless plans to hold his senses in check. Keeping eyes closed, “I shall be both present, and absent,” he declares, imagining he will be able to defeat the action both of his friends and of the gladiatorial spectacula. Much as God’s power suddenly struck Augustine with inspiration to sanction his own performance in the classroom, here, the spectacula’s proxy—the assembled public—acts on Alypius with a reciprocal moment of demonic inspiration: at “one fall in a fight a loud roar from the whole crowd struck him with full force,” and Alypius, hitherto confident, “was overcome with curiosity.”25 At once he was struck by a wound to his soul that was deeper than the wound the combatant he was now eager to watch suffered to his body. He sank down, more pitiable than the man whose fall had given rise to the shouting. That noise entered into his ears and unlocked his eyes, to make a way for the striking down and subjugation of a mind that up to this point had been confident rather than courageous, and all the weaker for relying on itself when it should have relied on you [God]. For when he saw that blood, he drank deep of its barbarity and did not turn himself away but fixed his gaze and drank in the torments and was unaware, and found gratification in the wickedness of the contest, and became drunk on the pleasures of blood. Now he was no longer the same person as when he had come. He was one of the crowd that he had joined, a true companion of the friends who had taken him there.26

Dramatized as falling into a transformative surrender not to the word but to the sensual roar, Alypius is struck very differently than he had been by Augustine’s divinely touched interpretation of a text during their first encounter in class. He not only “watched,” he also “shouted, he burned” with excitement and “took with him from that place the madness that goaded him to return, not just with those friends who had first carried him away but even before them, and taking others along.” As Augustine asks, “Why say any more?” The event of the spectacle acts upon Alypius, who becomes “no longer the same person”27 ; Alypius’ earlier inspiration is undone, first by false friendship and then by the false, seductive

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efficacy of the spectacle. Incapacitated by it, hollowed out in his connection to God, Alypius becomes one with the roaring crowd. Falling, he becomes an agent of the spectacularized public, a responding presence to the immediacy of the spectacle. The medial working of spectacle is captured in its social mimetic capacity both to create an insatiable appetite for what it produces, shaping the “blood-thirsty” public on which it in turn feeds, and to “convert” the spectator through the aural (but not verbal) affectivity of the performing audience. The spectacula attract the eye and ear, arousing a desire for immersive repetition, the “pure enjoyment at another’s suffering,” suffering that is literally unrepeatable, as many of the human and animal performers in the arena expire.28 The spectacle creates a physiological hankering for physical sensation, a public experience once individual and communal. The pleasure aroused by the spectacular performance is magnified by the correlative reactions of the surrounding audience; the sonic roar of the crowd is felt, is operative, internally. This voracious desire is, like the spectators themselves, necessarily unsatisfiable, requiring endless deferral, as well as (mutually exchangeable) new spectators in and new victims for the arena. Alypius’ encounter in the amphitheatre is, for Stock, a “dress rehearsal”29 for his (and Augustine’s own) conversion and baptism, but this transformation marks the misdirected uses of spectacle and spectatorial performance: rather than leading from the carnal to the spiritual, this performance immures the spectator in bodily excitement, a renewed captivity to the illusory attractions of the world. Contracted within Augustine’s parabolic framing of Alypius’ movement from denizen of the amphitheatre to bishop presiding over the sacrament, the scene’s implicit reversal of eucharistic imagery nonetheless also implies a reciprocity between spectacular and sacramental performance. Here, in the amphitheatre, it is the eye that enables; there, in the “holy spectacle,” it is the soul. Here, it is the spirit that lives by the body; there, it is the body that lives by the spirit. Here, the spectators are degraded and isolated by their participation in the victim’s suffering, through the bloodthirsty unity of the crowd; there, “we are made better by participation in the Son through the unity of his Body and blood, which this eating and drinking signifies.”30 Alypius’ partaking in and subjection to the “blood spectacles”31 on which the efficacy of the arena depends provides a dialectical contrast to the “unbloody sacrifice of Christ’s body”32 administered and received in the holy communion. Here, blood is death;

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there, blood is life. Man-made signs vs. the “external sign[s] of an inner transformation,”33 the performance of spectacles vs. the performance of sacraments: the medial struggle in Confessions rejects the institutions it degrades while appropriating their processes—dramatic address, performative reading, and the forms and relationships of sociocultural representation. The antisacramental spectacle of the arena is dramaturgically pendant with Augustine’s treatment of another figural reflector, Victorinus, who in Book 8 moves from the practice of reinscriptive performance at the level of the external sign—the pagan letter, rhetoric, and sculpture—to a performance that puts the “inward virtue of faith” into effect, the ritual performance of baptism, becoming one with “the multitude who are free under the one God.”34 While Alypius’ spectatorial and spectacular failure serves as the means to magnify his eventual reintegration, Victorinus provides an instance of the complex medial interplay of the word with performance figured through “the triumph of humility,” baptism.35 The translator of the Platonic books that Augustine read at a crucial phase of his intellectual and spiritual formation, as well as an attentive reader of “the Holy Scriptures” and “all the Christian texts,” Victorinus dramatizes Augustine’s attention to the verbal and embodied action in the felicitous achievement of a Christian performative. Announcing first that Victorinus died a Christian, Augustine frames a parabolic narrative. A “worshipper of idols and a participant in the blasphemous rituals,” adhering to Egyptian cults and rites then popular in Rome, Victorinus was also rhetor urbis Romae, a distinguished professor of eloquence and literature, revered by “the citizens of this world” to such a degree that they installed a statue in his honor in Trajan’s Forum in 354 BCE.36 Victorinus’ portrayal as a pagan idolater who himself becomes idolized serves to heighten the proper performative dimension of Christian utterance and action, the significance of baptism, which Victorinus’ story illustrates. Long before Austin and Butler situated verbal and bodily utterance within the force of performativity, Augustine provides an analogous account of the felicitous performance of Christian identity. Augustine recalls how having accepted Christianity through extensive reading, Victorinus repeatedly, yet privately, told Simplicianus, “You know that I am already a Christian.” And Simplicianus used to reply, “I shall not believe or count you a Christian unless I see you in the Church of Christ.” But then he [Victorinus] would laugh and say, “So do walls define Christians then?”37

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Augustine argues here that Victorinus errs in taking “I am already a Christian” to be a simple constative, a true/false statement. For as Augustine’s Simplicianus contends, it is more visibly an unhappy performative, an utterance—like a promise—that performs only when the necessary conditions are met. What Victorinus is missing is “the performance of which” uttering “I am already a Christian” is subject to the circumstances through which such utterance gains the force of a felicitous performative act.38 As the force of the utterance depends on the baptismal rite having been performed within the walls of the Church, Victorinus is not as yet an appropriate subject/object of “I am already a Christian.” Staging this infelicity is part of Augustine’s theological design, less castigating Victorinus than reinforcing the notion that the claim “I am already a Christian” cannot be made unilaterally but is dependent on the regime of Christian sociality and the legitimating performative structure of that ensemble: the “many other things” that “have as a general rule to be right and to go right” if Victorinus is “to be said to have happily brought off” his new identity, “I am already a Christian,” as felicitous performative.39 Initiated “in the primary sacrament as a catechumen,” agreeing to “the rebirth of baptism,” Victorinus must undergo rites in which speaking and doing are harmonized within the propriety of Christian performance and, as a performative exemplum, ultimately contest the doubt he first asserts: “So do walls define Christians then?” As a catechumen, Victorinus was expected to take the sacrament “in a prominent place and in the sight of the Christian community at Rome.”40 As someone with a high social status, however, he had been offered “the chance to repeat the profession more privately”: setting Victorinus at the intersection of the ordinary and the exceptional allows Augustine’s exemplum to dramatize the performative dimension of Christian identification. For as the story develops, Victorinus is said to have changed his mind and “preferred to declare” his faith “in the sight of the whole company of saints,” in public. Victorinus’ change reveals Augustine’s larger conception of the uses of performance. As a “conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect” (Austin), the apparent infelicity of merely saying these words—“I am already a Christian”—privately rather than performing them publicly, out of the sight of the ensemble of the faithful, cannot guarantee their efficacy, which requires a public performance, one that resembles, counters, and goes beyond the “madness” of secular “blasphemous rituals.”41

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Public performance relates the performer to a present audience. Seeing and hearing Victorinus declare “the true faith with conspicuous confidence” summons a legitimizing response from the Christian public: a cry arose “on the lips of all those who were celebrating with him, ‘Victorinus, Victorinus!’ Their joy resounded swiftly because they saw him,” and “everyone was longing to gather him into the depths of their heart,”42 a joyful reversal of the engulfing roar of the amphitheatre. The baptism animates an a priori harmonized ensemble that sustains the transformative reperformance of Victorinus as a Christian; indeed, it anticipates the theatrical “true ensemble” of Goethe, Schiller, and Brockett, the absolute overlapping of form and meaning, the complete trans- and supraindividual identification in a singularizing value, a truth beyond empirical demonstration. Whether sacred or secular, the ensemble stands apart from Butler’s spontaneously formed and transient assembly, where each agentic body retains its sociopolitical position and historical specificity, performing with others in an event through difference, its form regulated by worldly precarities and ecological interdependencies, in which the form of the performance is emergent, incapable of guaranteeing a specific outcome, an a priori truth.43 As a performative act, sacramental performance displaces, integrates, and supersedes the power of other forms of public performance: pagan rituals, Roman spectacula, as well as the performance of worldly pride encouraged by rhetorical performance, as externalized by Victorinus’ statue. Secular and sacred spectacles are dialectical categories for Augustine, mutually constitutive, much as sin is a conceptual condition for salvation. Spectacle has the power to strike “at once” a “wound” into the spectator’s “soul”; although this ability is assigned to demons, it is preconditioned by the informing power of God. Spectacle also establishes a relation among its public performers, as the amphitheatre crowd becomes a recruiting agent of the spectacle itself, enlisting others to undergo this secular conversion. Likewise, while the baptismal rite’s efficacy depends on the convert’s motive, the memorization and repetition of the creed, the designated site, and the visual and aural signification for and participation of the congregation, Augustine also elaborates the consequential performance of this responsive public. The gathering performance of the worshippers’ “joy” is spectacular: “when joy arises among many people, even as individuals their joy is more copious, because they fire themselves up, and are also inflamed by one another.” The Christian community’s spiritual capacity to reintegrate the lost souls figures as an extension of the Word of God, which summons and calls, kindles and captures, gathers “everyone into one inclusive embrace,” the differently spectacular

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embrace of the trans- and supraindividual ensemble of the faithful. The demonic efficacy of spectacula, the dark capacity of the crowd created by the spectacle to enlarge itself through the involuntary subjection of others, is reciprocated here by the “many people” of the Christian community, gathering the initiates “into the depths of their heart,” “reaching out to grasp” them, not through the carnalizing “roar” that assaulted Alypius but through a spiritual “joy,” a sympathetic touch.44 Augustine’s “audacious and insightful” perception here, as Barish remarks, has to do with the conceptual mobility of the structures of performance, rather than with a simple dismissal of theatre.45 Far from dismissing spectacula, Augustine’s figural scripting of secular and sacramental performances conceives them as codependent, as alternative uses of a common medium.46 Moreover, much as the sacred performativity of Christian ritual is implicated in the design of spectacle, so the practice of Christian reading is troped on, but differentiated from, secular spectating. Like Church performance elevating the faithful gathering within the divine ensemble, Christian reading requires a spiritual sensibility that may be achieved only beyond the literal text, beyond the performance of reading. For “to take something literally (ad litteram accipere) is to take the sign for the things signified (signum pro rebus accipere)”47 ; as Augustine points out, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.”48 Literal reading prevents one from raising “the eye of the mind above the eye of the corporeal creature to drink in the eternal light.” This trajectory—reading from captivity to the worldliness of the sign to the freedom of the spirit—replicates the performativity of the sacraments: whoever “receives them, instructed in that to which they refer, recognizes that they are to be venerated in spiritual freedom rather than in carnal servitude.”49 The “the sacraments are related to the things they signify as letter is to Spirit,” Phillip Cary notes; “both words and sacraments belong to the same genus, signs,” in which proper performance leads to transformation, since “the thing signified by a visible sacrament is not the grace of God but the soul’s inward act of worship.”50 Augustine takes the verbal and physical dimensions of sacramental performance to involve an engagement with, and eventual transcendence of, the mutable and the temporal, the signs inscribed in the text or the behavioral signs of performance. For Augustine the efficacy of performative utterance and behavior is located not in the external sign but in the complex interaction of the word, its felicitous delivery, and the proper attitude toward the present action and future consequences in faith: “the

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water and the whole corporeal action that is performed when we baptize, which is done and passes away [et fit et transit ], is not eternal”; the same is true of the syllables which resound and pass away so quickly when the word “God” is said, syllables which must be spoken if the sacrament is to be consecrated.51 The ontology of performance, as Peggy Phelan suggests, may become “itself through disappearance,”52 but in that act of disappearance something remains or is gained. Reading through the word toward the spirit, sounding the sacramental words and performing the ritual actions: in these acts, carefully structured by Augustine, the bodily signifiers of narrative are transformed into the performance of the spirit. For Augustine, “[a]ll these things are done and pass away, resound and pass away, but the virtue that works through them remains continually and the spiritual gift that is insinuated through them is eternal.”53 As a medium, performance has its uses. Augustine’s alertness to the various demands of secular genres of performance is underlined when the spectacular paradigm of Alypius is doubled and strengthened through Augustine’s own attraction to the dramatic theatre, the spectacula theatrica. Theatrical mimesis summons a titillating desire “to suffer such things as I used to watch,” to experience an immobilizing empathy with the fictive suffering of others rather than an efficacious sympathy for the actual suffering of others that would motivate will, responsible social action, and agency in the world. Unlike the ritual performance of sacraments, gathering “everyone into one inclusive embrace,” theatrical performance polarizes its subjects, spectators and actors, along an axis of self-consuming empathy. In tragic performance, the “audience is not being summoned to assist, but merely invited to feel distress,” to be “full of pity,” and “because this state of showing pity incorporates aspects of distress, it is for this reason alone that distress can be desirable.”54 The mimetic subjection to this ontologically (Plato) and ethically (Christian) compromised pity is a contagious and disabling means of performance: “even though a person who is distressed at someone in a pitiful state is to be commended for the charity they show, it would be far preferable if that person who shows sincere pity had nothing to be distressed by in the first place.”55 Augustine regards spectacle as a transformational medium capable of being redirected to sacred purposes; the theatrical performance of tragic drama is similarly liable to such repurposing via the remediation of the cathartic function of tears. The theatre of tragic empathy redirects the

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human capacity for active sympathy to its own ultimately antisocial ends, and Augustine—taking the role of universal spectator—recounts his own subjection to tragic acting as exemplary: “an actor’s performance reduced me to tears, the more pleasure it gave me, the more completely it captivated me.” Theatrical representation and the actor’s performance work through a reduction of humane sympathy that is also a cause of excess; theatrical performance diminishes Augustine by stimulating emotional over-arousal, and a self-generated pleasure at that emotion, a perception imaged and enacted by his own tears. Visibly and publicly altered by the performance, the spectator’s iconic tears testify to tragic performance’s improperly cathartic efficacy, registering the unethical subjection of the human being through inactive, merely pleasurable, solipsistic sympathy. The teary identification legitimizing the relation between the spectator and the stage enacts a moment of living performance that is, finally for Augustine, not “really life at all” but merely a symptom of the “love of distress,” a “disgusting disease,” an “inflamed swelling and decay and repulsive pus.”56 In the tragic theatre, tears signify the spectator-subject’s alienation from the spirit, the spectator’s entrapment in the carnality of the performed, in the dramatic sign. Religious tears, such as those shed at a baptism, are precisely what theatrical tears are not, an outward expression witnessing inner transformation toward active change, an unmediated performative.57 In the scene of Augustine’s own baptism, as “voices flowed into my ears, and truth was distilled into my heart,” they caused an overflowing of feelings of devotion: “my tears flowed freely, and shedding them did me good.”58 When truckled to “the sham service of the demonic forces,”59 theatrical performance perverts the natural function of tears. In prayer, though, tears manifest a spiritual process, testifying to what is intimate and sacred, the movement from the material world to the absolute, God’s presence in the human heart. Augustine’s attention to the various transformations that performance can sustain for its participants, its range of ways of implicating the spectator in a performing public, complements his attention to the performative practices of the book, reading. The performative mise-en-page entwines the theological and the theatrical as a doing; as O’Donnell remarks, Confessions is “perhaps the only place in our literature where a Christian receives the eucharist in the literary text itself.”60 Barish takes Confessions, in this regard, to exhibit “a personality in its own way theatrical in the extreme,” a theatricality conveyed by “the highly rhetorical cast of the

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whole work.” Much as Augustine’s vividly impersonated style operates as a means to introjection and of transformation, it also exemplifies an active reading practice for his readers.61 As Augustine’s conversion depends on interrelated techniques and modes of reading and performing, so, too, the performativity of Confessions depends on readers’/hearers’ sympathetic interpellation toward doing. To accomplish this book, readers read performatively. Through an engagement with its words they become through and in their performance, a performance that leads from the materiality of the letter to the inward spirituality of prayer. For Barish, Augustine’s self-dramatizing rhetorical performance, staging “his own psychic journey in the hope of luring others toward his own present state of achieved felicity,” has a theatrical and a performative purpose as well. Augustine’s persona provides an instrument for the reader who will then undertake a performance—through the medium of the text/book—by learning to do things not solely with words, but through and beyond them. Less an “instinctive theatricality”62 than an act of invitation, Augustine’s performance works to draw the reader into the book, training an alternative mode of reading focused not on the delights of the letter but on the performance it enables through Augustine’s narrative remediation of the spectacula, and the potential reperformance of the reader as a tearful spectator. Confessions aims to produce the readers’ transformation into a self-integrative sociality animated by the recognition of their alienation from God: “you placed me before my very eyes so that I could see how vile I was.”63 Silently or aloud, active reading requires an encounter with the self-as-other resembling the reciprocity of confession and prayer, a process that leads not to the enclosure within the private self but to the discovery, rehearsal, and maintained liberation of the “true” relational subjectivity. To be a human person is to effectuate oneself out of the secularly mediated being that is not the being, being in and for the ensemble of the faithful. Specifically addressed by the prayers interwoven throughout Confessions, the reader is invited, enabled, to do something different, to move from listener to agent, to perform oneself, to pray. Confessions can be understood to contribute to the humanist separation of the stage from the book only if its remediation of the transformative power of spectacle, its engagement of performance as a medium for spiritual practice—learning and action—is erased. Inasmuch as Aristotle’s interested distinction between the intrinsic properties of

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tragic drama and an inessential opsis has been remediated to philosophical and critical inquiry, so Augustine remediates the secular performance into the performance of prayer, maintaining an ongoing reciprocity between secular and sacred performativity, and between spectating and reading, a reciprocity in which readers engage the book as a positive site and means of performance.

Naturalizing Drama Here, I want to bring a pertinent text to bear, Tony Davies’s 1997 Humanism, which undertakes a multifaceted critique of humanist attitudes while nonetheless preserving a humanist suspicion of theatre in its vividly theatricalized account of the principal site of humanist performance: internalized reading. While Augustine sees reading and spectating, the book and the spectacle, as interpenetrating acts and sites of performance, Davies reifies the book (much as Stock’s Christian humanism conjoins Augustine’s “normal unit of thought” to “the book”64 ) as “the center of humanist activity” and the reader as the “ideal subject of the humanist’s discourse.” Whether intentionally or not, Davies represents reading as at once encoding and negating theatre, part of his wider negation of the material and historical interplay between the stage and the book.65 Davies’s otherwise attentive critique of humanism is grounded on one of the privileged assumptions of literary humanism since Aristotle, that the conceptual identity of the drama is intrinsic to its text, and that reading provides the most immediate encounter with the work. Indeed, although the early modern dramatic theatre might well be brought into a critical survey of humanism—to problematize the opposition between the classically influenced, learned humanist drama and the popular forms of theatre; to examine the respective dramaturgies, theatricalities, and notions of spectatorship of learned and popular performance; to consider the effect of this hierarchical distinction (humanist vs. popular) in relation to concepts of drama and theatre in adjoined historical periods of literary and theatrical study—in much critical practice, the incorporation of drama into literary studies detheatricalizes dramatic writing, understanding the regularized, printed, transmitted play as a work of literature, materializing a distinctive identity apart from the stage. Arrestingly, Davies’s analysis of reading’s complicity in humanism takes up this act of historical deflection by turning to two works representative

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of the performance-driven appetite of the theatrical economy of Elizabethan London, plays which did not emerge as instruments of cultural representation as books but gained their initial reputation through the medium of theatre, Christopher Marlowe’s (1564–1593) Tamburlaine (1587) and William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Hamlet (first performed in 1600 or 1601).66 In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, these and other dramatic works first existed as a palimpsest of theatrical writing: the various “foul papers” and fair copies sold to the theatre company and the individual sides or parts copied out for individual actors, a circumstance made more complex when plays were written by several writers and delivered separately to the company and had—as was common practice—prologues, epilogues, and songs (often written by other hands, too) added to or subtracted from the gathering of writing used to make the play.67 Documents functioning within the practical relations of theatre work, designed to harness the energy of actors and the attention of spectators, these theatrical writings were preserved and altered, domesticated as agents of an emerging print culture and its distinctive forms of cultural representation. A print-inflected erasure of theatrical performance at the instigation of early modern dramatic writing comes to the fore in the dialogue Humanism creates between Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and nondramatic humanist texts, especially conduct literature, books directed to shaping social performance. Framing “early humanism” as “a question of language” and of “eloquence,” of “speaking out” conditioned by “viewing knowledge as inert and occluded until shared and tested in the common medium of written or spoken debate,” Davies presents the humanist purpose of reading as “not only to learn but also to return that learning to the vivid medium of speech, and so to make it, and the learner, humanly visible (‘Speak, that I may see thee’),” a making-visible through performance deeply intertwined with masculine, race- and class-based hegemony. Considering Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 English translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s (1478–1529) Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano, 1528) and the ways it influenced contemporary English writing, Humanism ably demonstrates how its “ideal of human fullness … becomes instead a figure of discord, articulating the contradictions of aristocratic masculinity”68 in the performances it trains its readers to produce. This skeptical critique of a courtly and ethical regime richly combining misogyny and philogyny depends, though, on the humanist instrumentality of the book as a design for social performativity.

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The shapes of early modern sociocultural performance arise as the consequence of books such as The Book of the Courtier, John Florio’s Second Fruits (1591), and Giordano Bruno’s The Heroic Frenzies (De gli eroici furori, 1585), and Davies finds a cognate enactment in “the most reckless and eloquent of Elizabethan heroes,” Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, whose “aspiring masculinity,” torn “between the active and the passionate, the soldier and the lover,” materializes the tensions animating the advisory rhetoric of conduct literature. In Davies’s succinct reading, Tamburlaine’s irresistible arithmetic of conquest dramatizes the nervous selffashioning masculinity of humanist writing and also discloses the ethnic exclusions animating Western humanism, the still-prevailing anxieties of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 nourishing an anti-Islamic and orientalizing fear informing the humanist imaginary. Using Marlowe’s play as an instrument to criticize the gendered, cultural, and geopolitical orientation of early modern humanism, Davies nonetheless remains silent with regard to one of the exclusions his argument extends. For while the “clotted syntax” of Tamburlaine’s “hammering” language enacts a persuasive “rhetorical virtuosity,” the one scene of Tamburlaine’s performance in the “vivid medium of speech” omitted from Humanism’s critique is the stage. Inasmuch as Tamburlaine is a self-fashioning Machiavellian, he is not (“[u]nlike his author”) “much of a reader”69 : while Doctor Faustus longs to be “ravished” by reading, Tamburlaine fashions himself through spectacular and violent theatrical display that humanist discourse, finally, finds unmentionable.70 The treatment of Tamburlaine enacts the rationality with which literary humanism displaces the theatre and theatrical performance as critical sites for complex cultural representation and critique. Instead of scrutinizing how Tamburlaine’s character is conditioned by the visual and gestural economy of theatre, which might allow a reassessment of “his author” solely as a man of the book and so of the boundaries between literary humanism and theatre, the critical subjection of Tamburlaine transpires exclusively through literary imagination and reading, evoking a Tamburlaine of the “passage,” of the mise-en-page, a Tamburlaine separated from the initial medium of his “cultural representation,” the mise-en-scène. Acknowledging Marlowe—as the title page of the 1590 first edition of Tamburlaine did not, omitting his name—as the author of these “two great dramatic spectacles,” and of the “magnificent rhetorical and dramatic energy” of Tamburlaine, Davies symptomatically ignores the text as an instrument for fashioning the dramatic energy of the spectacle. Even when the visual relations of theatre creep in, as

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when Tamburlaine “humiliates his imperial captive, displaying him in a cage and goading him to a shameful suicide,”71 the theatrical implications of this stage-within-the-stage for spectatorial reception are erased.72 While Augustine sees reading and spectacle interactively, Davies preserves a strict division between them. What contributions might be made by the physicality and the materiality of theatre, or by the challenges to speaking, rhetoric, movement, and embodiment posed by the role of Tamburlaine, famously seized by Edward Alleyn, are set aside here, as are the ways performance worked as a mode of cultural representation in what is often taken rightly or wrongly as the nationalist environment of the public stage.73 Davies’s Tamburlaine of literary humanism is fully incorporated as dramatis persona, aesthetically and critically complete as a literary character. Situating the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century “printing shop”—the “mini-polytechnics” of both “humanist knowledge” and practice—as “the key humanist institution,”74 Humanism’s promotion of an intrinsically poetic, nontheatrical drama is part of a cultural trajectory in which the editorial tradition running from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries demonstrates an effort to rescue “texts from the corruption of performance,”75 rather than understanding the dramatic writing—as Augustine inspires his readers to read Confessions —as something in between and as one thing that is two, or perhaps better, a thing that is always more than two and more than one can interpret. This sense of the inherent corruption that performance exerts on writing is intrinsic to the emerging ideology of print culture. In the 1590 edition of Tamburlaine, the printer’s introductory letter “To the Gentlemen Readers: And Others That Take Pleasure in Reading Histories” notes that he has “(purposely) omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures” which he found “more tedious unto the wise” though “(haply) they have been of some vain conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were showed upon the stage in their graced deformities.” For the printer, Richard Jones, “now, to be mixtured in print with such matter of worth, it would prove a great disgrace to so honourable and stately a history,” a disgrace to his gentle readers and the trade he hopes to gain from them, and a disgrace to him, too, so assiduously concerned with “advancing and pleasuring of your excellent degree.”76 The desire to purge the drama from the deformity of its theatrical condition is part of the history of its performance in print, and its address to, and fashioning of, its humanist readers.

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Davies’s reading practice of Tamburlaine climaxes the long process of printed drama’s appropriation to a literary identity excluding the theatrical performance (literary humanism) or subordinating it to the logos of dramatic literature (dramatic humanism). The challenging assimilation of Marlowe’s biography and writings to the Victorian imagination occupied nineteenth-century editors, alongside the better-known and considerably more massive effort to reproduce Shakespearean drama within an ideology of “Shakespeare.”77 Expurgated versions—most famously Thomas Bowdler’s nineteenth-century editions of Family Shakespeare—were, as Leah Price suggests, designed for the purposes of edifying reading in the family circle, excising “cross-gendered linguistic embarrassment” while participating both in the “idealization of reading aloud” and the production of readers as consumers, and as consumers of Shakespeare-asliterature.78 Narrative versions of Shakespeare’s plays, such as the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare (1807) and the inclusion of “sublime” passages from the plays in elocutionary handbooks, had the force of assimilating a nontheatrical, and often nondramatic Shakespeare to the uplifting moral sentiments of a liberal-humanist imagination.79 Price notes that anthologized selections of “the beauties of Shakespeare” altered the plays’ contexts, while projects “translating drama into narrative” form tended to moralize Shakespeare.80 Even as various versions of Shakespearean drama endured onstage, Shakespeare underwent a shift from stage to page, from plurality to singularity, that tended to reinforce a wider cultural discrimination of drama from theatre and individual interpretation from collective participation.81 By the turn of the nineteenth century, the prevalence of print as a medium of and for literary distribution and consumption, as well as the expansion of literacy, ensured a not merely double identity for the drama across Europe: it could be experienced in the public performance of the theatre, in the private performance of reading, and in the semi-private confines of home performance itself made possible by the printed drama. The onset of this medial complexity contributed to a changing understanding of the work of theatre and of acting, as the poet and the conceptual value of the poet’s text gradually assumed a central position in the logic of theatrical production, scripting the actors’ bodies and the spectators’ attuned interpretation to the dramatic logic. While in the late sixteenth century Tamburlaine depended on Alleyn’s “powerful voice and the sheer force of his physical presence,”82 by the second half of the eighteenth century

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an actor’s performance was increasingly valued for serving the mimetic integrity of the drama. In Alleyn’s performance of Tamburlaine, spoken, enacted verse magnified how the spectators experienced the power of that hybrid figure, the interplay between grandly elegant enactment and the enunciation of discursive grandeur, between actor and character, Alleyn and Tamburlaine. What Alleyn-Tamburlaine said and did was what the spectators saw and heard; Marlowe’s outsized, magnificent language at once capitalized on Alleyn’s phenomenal body, thematized it, dramatized it, and depended on it. Separating Tamburlaine from the stage, Davies’s Humanism at once artificializes the conditions of theatrical writing within which Tamburlaine was produced and dramatizes a longer trajectory, in which theatrical performance comes to be understood as a subordinate medium, its significance determined by the order and values of writing, and by the interplay between the discourse of print and democratizing literacy.83 Humanism articulates and implements a print-inflected dramatic humanism, in which the written text is less the actor’s instrument than the actor is the instrument of the text, charged with communicating its intrinsic meanings, meanings already available to the play’s readers. Witnessing the theatre of mid-eighteenth-century Paris, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) points to a transformation of the apparatus of cultural representation which, Humanism implies, continues to operate today. In The Paradox of Acting (Le Paradoxe sur le comédien, 1773), Diderot famously regards the actor’s task as representing the signs of his character’s passions, creating the illusion of the character’s feelings without feeling them himself; the actor’s body is read, like a page, for the transient signs of passion.84 To the extent that facial expression and vocal intonation respond to the playwright’s words, Diderot’s actor is imprinted by the text, obliged to reproduce and signal its tones, meanings, and emphases. Insofar as movement and gesture were conceived as a “natural” language—transcending the cultural idiosyncrasies of verbal languages—the author’s text was also understood to impose itself on a physical regime that could be universally read. As a “fixed, repeatable, theatrical sign,” the actor resembles the word, signifying as “‘a looking-glass, as it were, ready to reflect realities, and to reflect them ever with the same precision, the same strength, and the same truth.’”85 A semiotic instrument, the actor’s embodiment of the drama prevents the “invasion of the real into fiction,” as does Diderot’s sense of the necessity of the principle of the fourth wall.86 The work of the theatre undergoes assimilation to the work of the book as actors, subdued

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to the representation of a literarized character, address their spectators as theatrical readers. This “reconceived art of acting,” Erika Fischer-Lichte famously remarks, transformed the actor’s body “into a ‘text’ consisting of signs for the emotions and mental states that build a character.”87 Only when clothed in, corporealized by the power of the letter can acting cocreate the ethical regime of the sensible guiding the readerly, interpretative ensemble of the theatre. While the actor is irrelevant to the critique of literary humanism, the solitary, internalized reader is not; at the same time, given the hybrid nature of dramatic text or theatrical writing, the reader’s activity is often dramatized in symptomatically theatrical terms. In distinction to the interactive rhetorical encounter demanded by the performative persona of Confessions , in Humanism reading is staged as an inwardness so urgently modeled against the paradigm of the absent theatre that it can best be figured through the representation of women reading, in paintings by Rembrandt (1606–1669), Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), and Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684).88 What gives these paintings their power as figurations of humanist reading is how they are staged to an audience of individuals affectingly communing with the embodied reading depicted before them: “The painter is absent; and the spectator is a privileged, invisible witness, an involuntary voyeur, of a moment of pure inwardness.” The voyeuristic spectator, engaged with the inward life of the character, betrayed through the painter’s cunning act of feigned disappearance, emerges in the silent redefinition of the spectator as reader. The female reader in the painting, “in silent colloquy with an unseen interlocutor, becomes the focal site of a new interiority.” What those readers in their speaking silences remind us is that at the centre of humanist activity is the book. All its values, its virtue and eloquence, its recklessness and moderation, its piety and obscenity, are textualized: grounded in books, taught through books, rehearsed, elaborated and disputed in books. A book, for the humanist, is a living thing; and a living thing is nothing other than an animated book.89

Inasmuch as Humanism foregrounds the literary dimension of working “poets” like Marlowe and Shakespeare by ignoring the functional implication of their writing in the institution of theatre, casting the reader as the imagined “spectator” of these paintings appropriates the term in a way that at once recalls and finally discharges the theatre from the field of humanist representation altogether.

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Although Davies sees the spectatorial relations imagined by such paintings as a means of both feminizing the activity of spectating and masculinizing the humanist perspective outside the scene as “a discipline of mastery,”90 the “spectator” of the painting is nonetheless quietly reclaimed as an “unseen interlocutor” whose mastery is also identified with the activity of the painting’s subject, not speaking but merely reading the not-so-animated page of the picture plane. This spectator bears little resemblance to the interactive reader of Augustine’s Confessions, to the lively audiences of Roman secular and Christian sacred spectacles, or to the noisy groundlings of Alleyn’s Rose or Richard Burbage’s Globe, responsively engaged with the outsized enactment of Marlowe’s or Shakespeare’s mighty lines, or with the visibly public performances of audiences in illuminated theatres from the later seventeenth to the nineteenth century, where theatrical attendance was as much about being seen as it was about seeing the play. Davies’s spectatorial scene anachronistically sets the painting’s stage of spectating in the visual economy of modern proscenium theatricality and its propriety: sitting hushed, alone, in the dark, consuming the visible commodity of the stage, reading the mise-en-scène as a kind of—“living”—“animated book.” The medial interactivity of reading and spectating seized by Augustine locates a moment in which narrating and performance, reading and spectating, are marked as different but complementary media for human self-creating, integrating the human person and its presentation. In Confessions reading is conceived as an integrative and curative act of Christian performance complemented by the remediation of secular to sacred modes of spectating; as Augustine puts it, “[c]ontrast that holy spectacle with the pleasures and delights of the theatre. There your eyes are defiled, here your hearts are cleansed. Here the spectator deserves praise if he but imitate what he sees; there he is bad, and if he imitates what he sees he becomes infamous.”91 Invoking the language of theatrical experience, spectacle, Davies’s Humanism nonetheless evicts theatre and its co-performers on and off the stage from the representational field of humanist reflection and self-fashioning. It dramatizes the influence of a living humanist ideology in which performative paradigms of seeing and hearing are absorbed into the scene of reading, redefined as an individual, solitary, and silent experience distinct from the theatre, and from the tangible agency of the audience, even that rowdy audience whom Marlowe and Shakespeare imagined their plays could gather to attention, hold together, entertain.92

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* As Sloterdijk suggests, the performativity of humanism aims to move others through sophisticated writing, whose ability “to remain communicable is a result of the capacity to make friends through its texts.” Indeed, the making of friends defines writing as purposive. The text sets in motion a process, “shoots an arrow,” an actio in distans, with the objective of revealing an unknown friend and enticing him into the circle of friends. In fact, the reader who sits down to a thick book can approach it as an invitation to a gathering; and should he be moved by the contents, he thereby enters the circle of the Called, making himself available to receive the message.

Since the literary cannot entirely erase the theatrical (as Rader attempted to do to Martial or as Davies nearly does with Marlowe), it reconceives the present agency of the theatrical public as a virtual ensemble of readers, an imaginary circle of individuals joined across time and space, at their displaced, distant sites of reading, summoned by the book into the corporate being of a disembodied readerly audience. This “gathering”—“the communitarian fantasy,” “a cult or club fantasy”—reframes the privileged elite of the ancient world as the “cult of the literate” characteristic of literary and dramatic humanism in the modern era.93 For Augustine, though, reading is not conceived in a strict, dialectical opposition to spectating: reading aloud proceeds among his friends, amounting to a “sweet and sacred spectacle.”94 The reader engages the persona of the writer, seizes the dramatized performative transformations both for ill and for good, takes a spectatorial and a self-reflective perspective on his own alienations from God and from Christian civic virtue, and, negotiating the prayers placed in Confessions, intuits and learns to take up the text as an action, as prayer, that finally leads out of reading to doing. Theatre houses a gathering in real time, of real bodies, in which the drama is part of the event but not necessarily a determining part; depreciating the theatre’s difference from the abstracted, virtual community of readers, literary humanism nonetheless keeps theatre close as a defining alternative. If, as Sloterdijk suggests, “the means of communion and communication by which human beings attain to that which they can and will become”95 defines the intersection of medium and humanism, then the media of the practice of the human—even displaced or disregarded media

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like theatre—remain essential to humanist thought. As Humanism suggests, unwriting theatre remains a visible part of humanist discourse, and a stubborn strain in the critique of humanism as well.

Notes 1. For an account of the traditional interpretation of Augustine’s charges against theatre, see Donnalee Dox’s The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). In Confessions, the sites of and the spectacula themselves are less explicitly underlined as the demonic instruments and representations than they are in The City of God; nonetheless, there are several passages making this connection. According to R. A. Markus, after 399 Augustine became increasing critical of the spectacula; The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107–23. Augustine regards most forms of (pagan, secular) cultural practice—the theatre, acting, painting, sculpture—as offering merely external signs, to be classed among the “‘superfluous human institutions’” he preferred to exile from the Christian republic; Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2.24.39 (On Christian Doctrine), quoted in Mark Vessey, “History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions,” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, eds. Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 246. Augustine utilizes well-established topoi to boost this antitheatrical perspective: familiar attitudes toward the senses, the unchecked passions, the rebellious nature of the will, the theatre as a demonic apparatus, and the falsehood of theatrical representations, as popularized by Neoplatonists, Tertullian, or Cyprian of Carthage. Richard Lim fleshes out the “established commonplaces,” such as Lucius Apuleius of Madaura’s Metamorphoses and its portrayal of curiositas as the “‘natural’ human quality” leading the protagonist to “misadventures from which ultimately only the intervention of a benevolent deity brings true deliverance”; Seneca’s Epistle 7, “On Crowds,” with its concern that “the free play of the emotions” both “destroys individual reason and reduces a thinking person normally capable of moral judgment to a member of the proverbially unthinking crowd”; and the “christianizing moral” in Isaiah 57:13, accentuating the proper resistance of man to place “his faith in himself but seek refuge in God alone”; “Augustine and Roman Public Spectacles,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey, with the assistance of Shelley Reid (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 145.

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2. Lim, “Augustine and Roman Public Spectacles,” 138. Lim provides a succinct overview of Augustine’s relation to public shows in Confessions and in his sermons as well (142–49). 3. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 184. 4. For a detailed account of the usage of spectacula by the Latin church fathers and their polemics against Roman cultural performances, with a major focus on Augustine, see Werner Weismann, Kirche und Schauspiele: Die Schauspiele im Urteil der lateinischen Kirchenväter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustin (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1972). 5. Throughout, all quotations are from Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, trans. and ed. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, Loeb Classical Library 26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) and Augustine, Confessions, Volume II: Books 9-13, trans. and ed. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond, Loeb Classical Library 27 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). The accepted period of writing Confessions is 397–401; James J. O’Donnell, Introduction and Text, vol. 1 of Augustine: Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xli. 6. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 121. On the three temptations, in 1 John 2:16. 7. I use the term “remediation” to point to the dynamic interaction between the medium of writing and the medium of performance, especially the ways reading responds to and represents performance; on remediation as “the formal logic by which new media fashion prior media forms,” a logic that need not involve a sequence of media, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 273. 8. Tony Davies, Humanism, 2nd ed. (1997; London: Routledge, 2008); quotation from the series preface. 9. O’Donnell, Introduction and Text, xxx. 10. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 32. The moral exemplum, as Scanlon suggests, at once recounts “the enactment” of the moral principle it illustrates and addresses its audience, “enjoining its audience to heed its lesson, and to govern their actions accordingly” (33). 11. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 167. 12. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 34. 13. Stock, Augustine the Reader, 1. 14. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 129.

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15. On ancient reading practices and the debate about whether reading was conducted aloud or silently, see William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On Manichean and Neoplatonic readers, see Robert J. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969); on Confessions as a protreptic genre oriented toward Manicheans, see Annemaré Kotzé, Augustine’s Confessions: Communicative Purpose and Audience (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 16. To heighten his critique of Manicheans, Augustine ranks verses, poems, and “the flight of Medea” as superior to Manicheans writings; Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 109, 111. 17. Stock, Augustine the Reader, 3, 125. 18. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 7, 347, 349. Augustine remarks how he “grew to be gentle by means” of scriptures, how he was enabled by his memory of being affected by the Platonic books to differentiate later between “presumption and confession,” and to recognize the difference between the “direction” and the “Way” of “looking at” and “living in” “the land of bliss” (347–49). 19. “[T]heir pages do not contain the devoted countenance, the tears of confession, your sacrifice, the troubled spirit, the heart repentant and humbled, the salvation of your people, the city that is your bride, the pledge of the Holy Spirit, or the cup that is the price of our ransom”; Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 7, 351. 20. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985), 47. O’Donnell refers to Augustine’s City of God, but his view also applies to Confessions. 21. In Book 8, Alypius accompanies, from a distance, Augustine’s conversion in the garden of Milan (in 386), and in Book 9 is baptized in Milan with Augustine and his son Adeodatus by Bishop Ambrose (in 387). Alypius became the Bishop of Thagaste in 394, and Augustine became Bishop of Hippo in 396. 22. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 261. 23. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 263. 24. According to Lim, the Alypius exemplum of the virtue of self-control hinges on “perhaps the most vivid portrayal within Augustine’s corpus, if not in all of ancient literature, of the impact of the public spectacles upon an individual spectator”; “Augustine and Roman Public Spectacles,” 145. 25. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 263, 265 (my emphasis). 26. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 265. 27. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 265, 267, 265.

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28. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 121. 29. Stock, Augustine the Reader, 89. 30. Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, 26.19 (Tractates on the Gospel of John), quoted in Phillip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 252. 31. Philip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 105. 32. Michael P. Foley, “The Sacramental Topography of the Confessions,” Antiphon 9, no. 1 (2005): 138n48. 33. Cary, Outward Signs, 244. 34. Cary, Outward Signs, 239, 232. 35. Stock, Augustine the Reader, 93. 36. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 8, 361–63, 361. For background on Victorinus, and a figurative analysis of the conversion stories in Book 8, the implication of the readers in their “situational logic” by means of what Mark Vessey calls “narrative dramatology or dramatic narratology,” see “History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions,” 237–57. 37. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 8, 363. In this anecdote, Augustine represents a conflict between those, like Victorinus, who believed that one could pursue Christian “doctrine without the cult” and those who did not; James J. O’Donnell, Commentary on Books 8-13, vol. 3 of Augustine: Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21–22. 38. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8. 39. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 14. 40. Stock sees Victorinus as resisting “public display”; Augustine the Reader, 93. 41. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 8, 365, 361. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 14. 42. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 8, 365. 43. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 68. 44. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 265; Book 8, 371; Book 6, 253; Book 8, 365. 45. Noting that Augustine takes the “self-congratulatory euphoria” of the crowd as a potential “paradigm for the gathering of religious worshippers,” Barish notes, “[h]owever the theater itself may offend, it addresses itself to, it utilizes, human impulses that are capable of being turned to

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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sanctified ends”; The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 59. Since Augustine scripts the sacramental process to have a performative structure, it seems at once too general to take Augustine’s invocation of the theatre as merely depending on its human impulses, as it is to understand Augustine as merely rejecting “contemporary theater” altogether, as Michael P. Foley does; “Augustine on the Use of Liberal Education for the Theater of Life,” Arts of Liberty 2, no. 1 (2014): 20. Augustine’s account of spectacles, their absorption into the performance of sacraments and prayer, recalls Erich Auerbach’s discussion of “figural interpretation,” as establishing “a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act”; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, with introduction by Edward Said, trans. Willard R. Trask, 50th anniversary ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 73. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 3.9 (On Christian Doctrine), quoted and paraphrased in Cary, Outward Signs, 233. Augustine, Confessions Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 6, 247–49. Augustine echoes 2 Corinthians 3:6. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.9, 3.13, quoted in Cary, Outward Signs, 233, 234. Cary, Outward Signs, 234, 238, 164. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum 19.16 (Against Faustus the Manichaean), quoted in Cary, Outward Signs, 238. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum 19.16, quoted in Cary, Outward Signs, 238. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 97; Book 6, 253; Book 3, 93, 95. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 97. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 97. On tears in Augustine’s Confessions, see J. Balogh, “Unbeachtetes in Augustins Konfessionen,” Didaskaleion 4 (1926): 5–21, especially the subchapter “IMBER LACRIMARUM: Zur Frage des altchristlichen ‘Gebetweinens,’” 10–21. On religious tears more generally, see Piroska Nagy, “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West,” in Ritual in Its Own

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58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

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Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, ed. Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 119–37. Augustine, Confessions, Volume II: Books 9-13, Book 9, 29. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 3, 99. O’Donnell, Introduction and Text, xxxvii. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 52 (my emphasis). Barish also notes that Augustine finds the “institution [theatre] he is criticizing” useful (65). Compare Augustine’s instrumentalization of performance in his aptly named Soliloquies, which pioneers a genre of redemptive writing that Michael P. Foley describes as “a model comedy for the reader to act out on his own ‘stage’”; “A Spectacle to the World: The Theatrical Meaning of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22, no. 2 (2014): 259. Foley tends to conflate “drama” and “theatre”; in his account of Augustine’s effort to use the experience of writing to anticipate a new way of performing in the “theatrum of the living,” the reader’s participation in reading the “comic drama” of the Soliloquies is identified in participating in a “new theatrical art form” (259). But this theatre has none of the material, embodied dimensions that are definitive of the seductions and power of performance; instead, for Foley, theatre seems to signify merely acting-under-observation, either in social life, or in the sense in which the human drama is enacted before the divine spectator, God. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 53. Augustine, Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8, Book 8, 387. Vessey describes this passage as one in which Augustine “becomes a narrative-dramatic character to himself,” undergoing a “self-integrative alienation”; the spectatorial scene of seeing that Augustine imagines is withdrawn here into the preferred language of a literary encounter with an unperformed drama, a drama of characters, not of actors. A similar withdrawal is underlined by Vessey’s use of the phrase describing Victorinus, “he had a character part to play,” in lieu of the more familiar, and theatrical term, “a role to play”; “History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions,” 238, 239. Stock, Augustine the Reader, 3. Davies, Humanism, 93, 92. Davies lists eighteen playwrights in his index: John Arden, Edward Bond, Bertolt Brecht, Shelagh Delaney, Miguel de Cervantes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Oliver Goldsmith, Maxim Gorky, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Friedrich von Schiller, William Shakespeare, François Marie Arouet Voltaire, Arnold Wesker, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Stefan Zweig. The majority are mentioned only in passing, and only two—Marlowe and Shakespeare—have specific plays

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69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

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indexed for larger discussion. Other figures who wrote plays—Niccolo Machiavelli, for instance—are not indexed as playwrights. Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Davies, Humanism, 75, 92, 81. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 162. Davies, Humanism, 82, 84, 86, 92, 85. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1969), 1.1.6. Davies, Humanism, 86, 84, 87. See the title page of Tamburlaine the Great (London: Richard Ihones, 1590); reproduced in Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, ed. Anthony B. Dawson (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 1. These implications are well-described by Mark Thornton Burnett: both “plays exploit a variety of spectacular elements as parts of their ‘astounding’ effect”: the Prologue invites the spectators to “‘View’ … the Scythian, the suggestion being that the actor playing the part is visually imposing”; “the stunning intensity of Tamburlaine’s looks” endows the hero with “non-speaking authority” which precipitates the performance of other characters encountering it, as in Agydas’s suicide. In his “self-display” and his anticipation of “being put on ‘view’ as an ‘emperor,’” Tamburlaine “profits from a heightened theatricality.” “It is perhaps in his enemies that Tamburlaine finds the fittest objects for spectatorial involvement. Not only does Tamburlaine cause his enemies to be gazed at as belittled versions of their once lofty selves; he simultaneously scripts a series of vulgarized pageants in which former opponents are forced to perform”; at other occasions, he engineers “spectacles that echo Christian ceremonies”; see “Tamburlaine the Great, Parts One and Two,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 137–38. Marlowe conceived Tamburlaine specifically for Alleyn, “an actor of remarkable physical stature and bearing, so that he leant the role a striking and outsized presence.” For Kent Cartwright, Alleyn “fulfills an unusual demand for verisimilitude. His voice, physique, and manner provide the basis in reality for the celebrations of Tamburlaine in the drama, so as to make inherent in the play the issue of authenticity”; Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 202. Davies, Humanism, 72, 73, 72. Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82.

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76. Richard Jones’s prefatory letter is reprinted in Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, ed. Dawson, 5. 77. For a detailed reading of the discursive formation surrounding Marlowe’s assimilation to literary history in the nineteenth century, see Thomas Dabbs, Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991). 78. Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 87. Thomas Bowdler, ed., The Family Shakespeare in One Volume, in Which Nothing Is Added to the Original Text, but Those Words and Expressions Are Omitted Which Cannot with Propriety be Read Aloud in a Family (Henrietta Bowdler, ed., 1807; London: Longman, 1861); Thomas Bowdler, ed., The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: Adapted for Family Reading (London: Griffin, 1861). 79. Charles [and Mary] Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare: Designed for the Use of Young Persons, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1807). 80. Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 82. Cf. William Dodd, The Beauties of Shakespear: Regularly Selected from Each Play. With a General Index, Digesting Them under Proper Heads. Illustrated with Explanatory Notes, and Similar Passages from Ancient and Modern Authors, 2 vols. (London: T. Waller, 1752). 81. For a history of this process, see Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989). Taylor’s account of this “shift” is, in a sense, retrospective; the moment of articulation for stage-centered or performance-oriented Shakespeare studies was the late 1960s and early 1970s, marked by J. L. Styan’s The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Nonetheless, the tension between “literary” and “theatrical” versions of Shakespeare and his career persists, given new energy by Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; 2nd ed. 2013). For a reading of Erne’s perspective on performance, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30–55. See also Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: The Pressures of Stage and Page (London: Routledge, 2004). 82. S. P. Cerasano, “Tamburlaine and Edward Alleyn’s Ring,” in Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 171. Analyzing the size of Alleyn’s signet ring, Cerasano concludes that “Alleyn’s physical size helped to create the portrait of the conquerer for which Tamburlaine was known in the 1590s (179). 83. Failing to mention the author, the 1590 octavo publication of both parts of Tamburlaine does note that the deeds of the play “were sundrie times shewed vpon Stages in the Citie of London. By the right honorable the

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84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92.

93.

94.

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Lord Admyrall, his seruantes”; see Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, ed. Dawson, 1. For a detailed history of the incorporation of the drama into the book, see Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480– 1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 9. Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, 9, quoted in William B. Worthen, The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 90; on Diderot, see 88–93. On Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751), see Erika FischerLichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 61–62, 79, 192; quotation is from 60. On Diderot’s On Dramatic Poetry (1758) and the sense that the play should be performed “‘as if the curtain were not drawn,’” see Helmut J. Schneider, “Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the 18th Century,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82, no. 3 (2008): 382. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power of Performance, 78. Treating the beholders or viewers of paintings in terms of spectatorship is not unusual; this trope has had considerable impact in image and fine art studies, most famously in the (not surprisingly antitheatrical) dialectic between a readerly absorption and a spectatorial theatricality in Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Davies, Humanism, 93 (my emphasis), 93–94 (my emphasis). Davies, Humanism, 94. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 103.1.13 (Expositions of the Psalms ), quoted in Hugh Pope, Saint Augustine of Hippo: Essays Dealing with His Life and Times and Some Features of His Work (Westminster: Newman Press, 1949), 246–47; cf. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 57. I have in mind here Victor Turner’s discussion of “entertainment” as a means to “hold apart” that is also a holding-together; see From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 41. Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 12, 13. For the “sweet and sacred spectacle” of reading aloud, see Augustine, Epistle 27, quoted in Stock, Augustine the Reader, 129. In 397, Augustine writes to Paulinus of Nola that after his letters have been read aloud “to the brethren at Hippo,” the brethren “are said to ‘carry away’ his words

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for study even as they themselves ‘are carried away’ by what they have heard” (ibid.). 95. Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo,” 16.

References Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Introduction by Edward Said, translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Augustine. Confessions, Volume I: Books 1-8. Translated and edited by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond. Loeb Classical Library 26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Augustine, Confessions, Volume II: Books 9-13. Translated and edited by Carolyn J.-B. Hammond. Loeb Classical Library 27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Balogh, J. “Unbeachtetes in Augustins Konfessionen.” Didaskaleion 4 (1926): 5–21. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bowdler, Thomas, ed. The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: Adapted for Family Reading. London: Griffin, 1861. Bowdler, Thomas, ed. The Family Shakespeare, in Which Nothing Is Added to the Original Text, but Those Words and Expressions Are Omitted Which Cannot with Propriety be Read Aloud in a Family. London: Longman, 1861. Burnett, Mark Thornton. “Tamburlaine the Great, Parts One and Two.” In The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, edited by Patrick Cheney, 127–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Cartwright, Kent. Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cary, Phillip. Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cerasano, S. P. “Tamburlaine and Edward Alleyn’s Ring.” Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 171–79. Dabbs, Thomas. Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-Century Canonization of a Renaissance Dramatist. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991.

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Davies, Tony. Humanism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Diderot, Denis. The Paradox of Acting. Translated by Walter Herries Pollock. London: Chatto & Windus, 1883. Dodd, William. The Beauties of Shakespear: Regularly Selected from Each Play. With a General Index, Digesting Them under Proper Heads. Illustrated with Explanatory Notes, and Similar Passages from Ancient and Modern Authors. 2 vols. London: T. Waller, 1752. Dox, Donnalee. The Idea of the Theatre in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Foley, Michael P. “Augustine on the Use of Liberal Education for the Theater of Life.” Arts of Liberty 2, no. 1 (2014): 18–34. Foley, Michael P. “The Sacramental Topography of the Confessions.” Antiphon 9, no. 1 (2005): 30–64. Foley, Michael P. “A Spectacle to the World: The Theatrical Meaning of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22, no. 2 (2014): 243–60. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Johnson, William A. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Kotzé, Annemaré. Augustine’s Confessions: Communicative Purpose and Audience. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Lamb, Charles [, and Mary] Lamb. Tales from Shakespeare: Designed for the Use of Young Persons. 2 vols. London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1807. Lim, Richard. “Augustine and Roman Public Spectacles.” In A Companion to Augustine, edited by Mark Vessey, with the assistance of Shelley Reid, 138– 50. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Edited by Sylvan Barnet. New York: Signet, 1969. Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two. Edited by Anthony B. Dawson. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Markus, R. A. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Nagy, Piroska. “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West.” In Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, edited by Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist, 119–37. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. O’Connell, Robert J. St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969. O’Donnell, James J. Augustine. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985. O’Donnell, James J. Commentary on Books 8-13. Vol. 3 of Augustine: Confessions. Edited by James J. O’Donnell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. O’Donnell, James J. Introduction and Text. Vol. 1 of Augustine: Confessions. Edited by James J. O’Donnell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Pope, Hugh. Saint Augustine of Hippo: Essays Dealing with His Life and Times and Some Features of His Work. Westminster: Newman Press, 1949. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Schneider, Helmut J. “Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the 18th Century.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82, no. 3 (2008): 382–99. Sloterdijk, Peter. “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism.” Translated by Mary Varney Rorty. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 12–28. Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: The Pressures of Stage and Page. London: Routledge, 2004. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stock, Brian. Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Styan, J. L. The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. Vessey, Mark. “History, Fiction, and Figuralism in Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions.” In The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and

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Historiography, edited by Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, 237–57. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Weismann, Werner. Kirche und Schauspiele: Die Schauspiele im Urteil der lateinischen Kirchenväter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustin. Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1972. Worthen, William B. The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Zarrilli, Philip B., Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. Theatre Histories: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.

CHAPTER 4

Lessing’s Vermenschlichung

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) negotiates, as William N. West suggests of early modern European theatre, a humanist tension between an “ideology of theater proper—what a theater might mean or what it could be expected to do” and the actual theatrical practices and forms of expression that prevent it from appearing.1 Lessing’s theatrical humanism projects dramatic performance as a liberalizing institution, educating through a distinctive reinterpretation of theatrical responsiveness—Vermenschlichung, the depletion and conversion of inhumane power to benefit humanity—that intersects compassion (acknowledgment of the needs of others), human dignity (tolerance of the personal existence of even intolerant humans), and criticality (intolerance of intolerant ideas, choices, and deeds). This sympathetic orientation is radically distinct from the affectivity of the damnatio ad bestias , the dramatic spectacle celebrated by Martial (Chapter 2) and remediated by Augustine into the performative rituals of early Christianity, triangulating instrumentalized nature (animal co-performers as executioners; suffering human bodies), jurisdiction (legally condemned bodies), and theatricality (dramatic, spectacular, and technological means) to calibrate the Roman citizenry to the objectives of imperial power (Chapter 3). Summoning a self-regulating Enlightenment public into existence, Lessing models a practice of spectatorial doing, acculturating the national spectator toward a cosmopolitan—if symptomatically ableist and gendered—critical compassion.2 To educate and liberate Menschlichkeit,

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humane humanity,3 requires playwrights, directors, actors, and the Publicum (the German retains the “public” sense of a theatrical audience) actively to engage in a conjoined project of self-actualization; theatre trains the involuntary “feeling of human sympathy that wells up in us,”4 and grooms this compassion toward self-reflective ends. Premised on what Hannah Arendt characterizes as Lessing’s Selbstdenken, an “independent thinking for oneself” with others,5 this blend of cognitively attuned togetherness also expresses, in Agnes Heller’s terms, Lessing’s Vermenschlichung der Macht , the pluralization of powers that otherwise would lead to dehumanizing effects of fundamentalisms: if a “humanization of power is possible, then one shares it” in the conjoined praxis of the theatre’s participatory sociability.6 Until he famously turns against the Publicum toward the end of the 1767–1769 Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy),7 Lessing aims to establish the regulatory competence of theatre through the shared interplay of individual and civic obligation among its makers and participants. Imagining a theatrical accountability alternative to forms—religious, social, and cultural—of dogmatic togetherness sustained by singularizing identification, Lessing summons a Publicum willing to step away from, indeed to be alienated from, “unmediated communitarian attachments” to become “more sensitive to the [shared] world,” as William Smith might say.8 In distinction to an ensemble tautologically reflecting and fulfilling literary, dramatic truth, his Publicum emerges through the dynamic encounter of aesthetic and philosophical ideality with material theatrical practice. Encouraging the spectators to engage the stage and “one another in an impartial state of mind,” as his 1778 “Ernst and Falk” continues to suggest,9 Lessing’s theatrical humanism envisions a national theatre of cosmopolitan affiliation, unwriting captivity to dogmatic certainty by exercising compassion through critical, self-reflective, and sociable processes. Lessing’s pivotal conception of a reasonably compassionate theatre is divided from Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) conception of a restorative theatre by the traumatic violence of the French Revolution. Indeed, Lessing and Schiller articulate the civic dramaturgy of theatre in relation to alternative, contingent views of spectatorship; from the humanist perspective, the former shapes the Publicum toward a self-reflective assembly, while the latter inclines toward an intuitive ensemble. Taking theatrical performance to provide the focus for the collective exertion of critical intelligence, Lessing resists a notion of theatre predicating spectatorial

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responsiveness entirely on the ethos of Rührung (sympathetic touch), understood as the feeling into an abstract humanity, a discursive sociality bound in a unified affection, a “symbolic body representing humankind” achieved “through the drama’s and the performance’s own psychological transparency.” As distinguished from Schiller’s theatre of Vergeistigung, “spiritual transference between ‘souls’” or intuitively motivated theatre of “collective fusion,”10 Lessing’s dramaturgy of Vermenschlichung asserts a differentiating togetherness that requires a compassionately cognitive performance of its public. While affective response is understood to harmonize the audience to the embodied feelings of the drama, the exertion of critical reason is an individuating experience among and with others. Lessing’s critical compassion, then, models a theatre of harmonized difference or harmonized individuation, in which both actors’ and spectators’ performances engage the drama without being fully controlled by it; both work, provisionally at least, to adjust the application of dramatic performance to the theatre of Vermenschlichung. Moving from Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) to Schiller, this chapter opens by suggesting how Lessing uses his rhetorical address to the reader to model the complex acts of dis- and reaffiliation required of the spectator’s sympathetic reasoning. Indeed, Lessing ascribes a distinctive social function to dramatic writing, which cannot do its essential work exclusively on the page but—in a critical revision of Aristotle’s opsis —requires access to the doing of performance. Finally, as a way to liberalize the spectatorial Publicum, Lessing’s critical, interpretive actor has the responsibility to register and engagingly improve the idealizing impulses of the drama, even though the performer’s body threatens to reduce the cultivating purposes of dramatic theatre to the display of nature. This vision of a critical actor is clarified against the backdrop of Goethe’s systematic effort to discipline the recalcitrant plurality and materiality of acting bodies to the mirroring law of the dramatic logos and of Schiller’s theatre of aesthetic exaltation. Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller negotiate theatre’s conflicted potentiality as an instrument for the expression and cultivation of a liberalizing and liberalized humanity. Lessing’s theatrical humanism trains the spectator’s dual identification as a reader-spectator, projecting compassionate cognition as its integrative principle. In comparison, Goethe’s theatrical humanism involves authorial mimetic processes domesticating the reasoned inquiry of Lessing’s actor to the artful law of the letter by way of a self-enclosed acting technique: the actor interprets himself into the

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living spirit of the dramatic composition, disciplining his rehearsal and performance within and without the theatre. Whereas Lessing’s individuated Publicum is acutely and materially positioned to produce a theatrical institution continuously involved in the pluralization of singularizing doctrinal, social, and cultural powers, Goethe’s audience is a locus of singularization, organized to discipline life’s materiality through mimetic and textual processes. Schiller’s aesthetic humanism similarly envisions theatre as a systematized singulative, but unlike Goethe’s, its administration exploits the sensory rather than the interpretative regulation of theatrical practice. Along the dualistic rationality separating the mutual embeddedness of the bodily and the cognitive, Lessing’s, Goethe’s, and Schiller’s theatrical humanisms are analytically distinguishable, documenting the negotiation of theatre between assembly and ensemble collectivities. Centering on these humanisms, this chapter is less occupied with breaking down the hierarchizing separations structuring their power; rather, it teases out these humanist variations in order to decenter the legacies of their prevailing assumptions in theatre and performance studies.

Public Criticality Imparting the dramatic conditions in which the liberal life is to be lived, Lessing conceives theatrical performance to manage Menschlichkeit (humane humanity) by directing poetic justice toward the aesthetic, cultural, and civic maxims of “bourgeois justice.”11 As Natalya Baldyga has argued, informed by “aesthetic concerns” and “ideological underpinnings,” the conception of the audience and of acting as a practice presented in Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy aims to create “a bourgeois German community united by common feeling,” through means of “sensate cognition,” a “sympathetic vibration” between the organisms of actor and spectator/s.12 Developing dramatic character as a public, intervening site of ethical engagement, Hamburg Dramaturgy advances performance as enabling an affectively mediated yet also critically distantiated experience of spectatorial affiliation, projecting a theatrical sociality as a nationalized cosmopolitan humanity. Fashioning the theatre and the nation, Lessing uses the resources both of print and of the theatrical performance to model the identification and distancing required for the practice of a civic performance that is not separable from the theatrical, compassionate and critical, performance

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of the spectating he envisions: Hamburg Dramaturgy’s address to the readers-spectators trains an embodiment of dignity linked to criticality, the right to think and to doubt, to argue, through and in reading and through and in a theatrical performance. Less concerned with the medial division between practice and theory, reading and spectating, drama and performance, Hamburg Dramaturgy summons a performative reading, locating the Enlightenment requirement for the individual spectator’s “candid judgment” (unverhohlnes Urteil ) and dramatizing how to carry out that “modest freedom” (bescheidene Freiheit ).13 Prompting a spectatorial positioning of his readers, Lessing trains “a critical distance toward the printed documents” and social topographies that encourages their “active examination,” as Dorothea von Mücke points out in another context.14 How does Lessing’s dramaturgy of the Publicum call that theatrical public into being? Exemplifying the challenges of appropriate spectating by speaking to his readers in the voices of different publics (critics, Germans, theatre practitioners, citizens, human beings), as different I s and wes, Lessing hails his readers-spectators through an ongoing, kaleidoscopic, and rationalist repositioning that simultaneously projects his theatre of Vermenschlichung as akin to Brecht’s theatre of Verfremdung, alienation. Disqualifying French neoclassicism—its devaluation of the spectator through the design of the purified genre, action, and character—from German stage, Lessing affiliates himself with the theatrical public he fashions: “As long as they [the characters à la French neoclassicism] are agitated, we spectators will surrender to the same agitation, we will have to feel it as well.” Alternatively, defending the use of prologues, or even gods, Lessing anticipates Brecht’s narrative theatre, preferring that “at the beginning we learn the resolution and the whole catastrophe.” Knowing how the theatrical performance will unfold, spectators can consider the dramatic action in “the manner in which it would occur,” in order for them to “compare what they [the characters] really are to what they do or want to do,” and so to take up a more “dynamic” interpretive and attentive experience—Selbstdenken—than the “brief surprise” generated by neoclassicism’s “little artifices.”15 In addition to demonstrating how identification reduces spectatorial response to a mere mimetic reaction rather than critical reflection, Lessing amplifies his spectatorial address by assuming a two-fold I conjoining the “free thinking” individual to the playwright and the dramaturg, firstperson perspectives furthermore defying the “majority” of the German

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connoisseurs, who are triply compromised by their unwillingness to recognize the inherent devaluation of the spectators’ role as a result of their subjection to a theatrical convention, which being French betrays what is specifically local, German. I am far from thinking with the majority of critics who have written about the art of dramatic writing that the resolution must be hidden from the spectator. On the contrary, I thought that it would not be beyond my capacity if I undertook to write a work in which the resolution would be revealed in the very first scene, and the most intense interest would arise out of this very circumstance. – Everything must be clear for the spectator. He is the confidant of every single character – he knows everything that will occur and everything that has already occurred; and there are a hundred moments where one cannot do better than to tell him directly what is going to happen. … . And if the audience’s engagement depends on such things, is it not better that we learn of them beforehand through the intervention of a god than not at all? And finally, what is really meant by the mixing of genres? In textbooks they are distinguished as precisely as possible from each other; but if a genius with higher purposes allows several of them to flow together in one and the same work, we should forget the textbook and simply ask whether he has achieved these higher purposes.16

Dramatizing the movement from the dramaturg’s I (“I am far from thinking with the majority of critics who have written about the art of dramatic writing”) and the playwright’s I (“if I undertook to write a work”) to a concerted we, Lessing aims to establish a trusting bond with his readers by uniting himself first with the spectators and then with potentially reformed critics in the common cause of a national, rational, and compassionate performative. This bond sustains the performative reading which, instead of leading beyond the text and through prayer toward the divine affectivity of Augustine’s ensemble, leads via the “higher purposes” of a unified work of art to an emphatically critical—national-cosmopolitan— spectating as a mode of doing. Lessing’s rhetoric rehearses the transformation of the audience that print/reading and theatre/spectating must enable if theatre is to become a culturally justifiable institution. Taking a cognitive perspective on the characters’ performativity, the audience’s sympathy is refined and entwined with critical understanding, a response to humanity combining compassionate proximity with rational distance. Freeing the I from the

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limitations of dogmatic power (critical judgment preventing the engagement of the spectators’ equal judgment) or the power of internalized assumptions (regarding theatrical traditions), the reader-spectator joins a mutually constituted public distantiated but not separated from the stage, an attuning body—an embodiment —of reasoning I s distributed into a continuously self-reflective we. Even though his instrumentalization of cultural nationalism and didacticism (“we should forget the textbooks”) problematizes his cosmopolitanism by way of a binarizing take on the French neoclassical telos, Lessing’s theatrical humanism simultaneously carries forth a theatre whose Vermenschlichung is immersed not in cultural, social, or professional conventions but in the hybrid experience of empathetic thinking, a prerequisite to critical self-understanding and so self-regulation. Lessing’s theatre humanism requires theatre, but that theatre does not fully define its public; rather, the public’s continuous rehearsal of itself in the space of theatre defines that theatre. To clear a space for this becoming, Lessing embarks on a reinterpretation of Aristotle’s displacement of theatrical performance as extrinsic to dramatic form, in order to render performance as essential, not irrelevant, to the public work of drama, by analyzing two translations of Aristotle’s Poetics, André Dacier’s 1692 La poëtique d’Aristote and Michael Conrad Curtius’s 1753 Aristoteles Dichtkunst. Focusing on the diminished opposition between the dramatic form (dramatische Form) and the narrative form (erzählende Form) introduced in Dacier’s and Curtius’s translations, Lessing emphasizes how each translation fails to address the ways form—narrative oriented toward the past, and dramatic oriented toward the present—articulates the specific, public, work of catharsis. While Dacier obliterates Aristotle’s “hiatus” when he renders tragedy as the mimesis “d’une action—qui sans le secours de la narration, par le moyen de la compassion & de la terreur,”17 Curtius asserts tragedy as the mimesis of “einer Handlung, welche nicht durch die Erzählung des Dichters, sondern (durch Vorstellung der Handlung selbst) uns, vermittelst des Schreckens und Mitleids, von den Fehlern der vorgestellten Leidenschaften reiniget.”18 (In their translation of Hamburg Dramaturgy, Arons and Figal render Lessing’s quotation of Curtius as “of an action, which not through narrative but [through the representation of the action itself] by means of terror and pity purifies us of the faults of the represented passions.”19 ) In Lessing’s corrective rendering, tragedy “is the imitation of an action that, through compassion and fear (and not through narration), effects

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the purification of these and similar passions.”20 By failing explicitly to distinguish narrative from dramatic form, Lessing argues, both translators “have pulled in things that belong to poetry in general but not specifically to tragedy as tragedy.” For if tragedy “nourishes and strengthens human propensities,” and so activates “the love of virtue and hatred of vice,” then, Lessing asks, what “poem should not do this? But if every poem is to do this, then this cannot be the distinctive characteristic of tragedy; it cannot be what we are looking for.”21 Although Dacier’s and Curtius’s translations emulate the literary orientation of the Poetics , in which catharsis can be achieved without opsis, for Lessing, what tragedy does not share with written or recited poetry is precisely the necessarily spectacular and public means of drama. Pity/compassion and fear cannot be stimulated by a narrated action located in the past, but only when the present action is brought out through the dramatic form, a form which conceptually requires public performance: the “dramatic form is the only one that allows compassion and fear to be aroused, or at least these emotions cannot be aroused to such a high degree in any other form.”22 If, in Lessing’s understanding of Aristotle, catharsis arises “through compassion and fear (and not through narration),” it not only defines the conceptual purposes of tragic drama but also locates the temporal power of the genre, providing the means for qualitatively sustaining togetherness, sociality, in the theatre. Manifestly recasting Aristotle’s priorities, Lessing deploys catharsis as a formal, spatial, and temporal feature of dramatic performance. Since “our compassion is hardly, or not at all, aroused by narration but rather almost solely by the sight of what is occurring in the moment,” by opsis in the present and as presence, it witnesses the implication of performance for the drama; catharsis enables and sustains an ethical—exclusionary, hierarchical, sympathetic, and critical—fashioning that can only transpire through theatrical performance.23 For Lessing, the excitation of an embodied, present-tense pity/compassion and fear defines the “laborious work of dramatic form,” which requires public performance to achieve its distinctive civic and moral (humane) effects, animated in the playing across the proscenium. Why bother with the laborious work of dramatic form? Why build a theater, costume men and women, rack one’s memories, invite the whole city to one place, if I do not want to produce anything more with my work and

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its performance than some of the feelings that could be produced by a good story, read by anyone curled up at home?24

If reading the play “curled up at home” were sufficient to the demands of the dramatic form, there would be no need to differentiate the dramatic genre from narrative, and, significantly, no need for the extensive social investment required for the theatre. The self-presence of “the whole city,” practiced and enhanced in the theatre, is a modality of togetherness required by dramatic performance rather than extrinsic to it. While the literary humanism of Aristotle’s Poetics exiles the polis and suppresses the religious, sociopolitical, and cultural functions of both theatre and its opsis as inessential to the work of the drama (see introduction), Lessing—appropriating Aristotle to his Enlightenment sensibility and qualifying performance by suggesting that in Athens, “even among the rabble moral sentiment was so fine and sensitive”—promotes a theatrical humanism asserting tragedy as the mediated instrument of cosmopolitannational, compassionately critical performativity and the theatrical public as the definitive site for the experience (and coproduction) of that civic performative.25 Lessing’s Mitleidsdramaturgie, dramaturgy of compassion, summons a universalizing example to justify its socio-theatrical application. An attentive reader of Augustine, Lessing remediates Aristotle’s exclusion of the “villain” who undergoes a change from fortune to misfortune as a proper subject of tragedy to sculpt a new genealogy of catharsis by retranslating existing translations unfaithful, he claims, to Poetics . He specifically challenges Curtius’s neoclassical sense that the audience can sympathize with such a character if his downfall is the result of accident, but not if it is the result of deserved punishment. This limitation to “accidental” circumstances arbitrarily limits the work of compassion, Lessing argues, for “even when the misfortune that befalls a villain is a direct consequence of his crime, we cannot help but suffer with him at the sight of his misfortune.” That is, the poetic justice of the “villain’s” suffering is irrelevant to the audience’s natural exertion of compassion, though the universal depth and critical meaning of that compassion can be trained through the performance of tragedy by the dramatic form. Where Lessing recalls the dialectical impulse of Aristotelian catharsis is in suggesting that fear is essential to the “most beautiful” tragedy but plays a role subordinate to compassion: a “believable fear for ourselves” can “fan” the “flame of

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compassion,” so that dramatic form can stimulate affects, “the highest degree of compassionate feelings.”26 For Lessing, the “villain” provides a test case, bringing into focus the social audience’s necessary and inevitable exertion of compassion, and the role of compassion in the humanizing theatre. Indeed, taking an instance of judicial, punitive performance—the public hanging—as exemplary, Lessing deploys Theodore Goulston’s (c. 1575–1632) 1623 Latin translation of Aristotle’s term ϕιλανθρωπoν, philanthropy, as “‘quod humanitatis sensu tangat,’” as “‘that which moves [a person] through a sense of humanity,’” to argue that even when the condemned “villain” is rushed to the gallows by the crowd, the “sight of his misfortune”—the impending performance of punishment —inevitably provokes humane and humanizing “compassionate stirrings” universally nested in our hearts. Aristotle called these stirrings philanthropy, “love,” Lessing claims; and “it is this love,” he continues to say, “that we can never completely lose towards others,” and which “[w]e are correct” in calling “compassion.”27 Lessing’s scene of public execution instructively calibrates with the exclusion of the damnatio ad bestias from licensed representations both of humane punishment and of liberal theatricality. As Foucault suggests, with the invention of modern penal discipline in the eighteenth century, the “law must now treat in a ‘humane’ way an individual who is ‘outside nature,’” precisely excising ritualized, spectacular, and “‘inhumane’” sanctions like the damnatio ad bestias from the rationalization “and regulation of the effects of power.”28 This rationality is, as the previous chapters have shown, paralleled in the discipline of theatre studies in which an Enlightenment conception of an involuntarily compassionate humanity silently unwrites the merciless spectacle of Roman executions from the proper discipline of the theatre, its theatricality, its spectating. Rather than being politically groomed by the unfeeling excitement of dramatic spectacle, Lessing’s spectator—at the hanging and at the theatre—cannot escape the humanizing impulse “to suffer with him [the ‘villain’] at the sight of his misfortune,”29 the impulse that continues to ground the “analytical space”30 of the discipline of theatre history, operative in Martin Revermann’s introduction to the first volume of A Cultural History of Theatre. Hyphenating the damnatio ad bestias (among other Roman spectacles) as “para-theatrical events” into theatre studies, Revermann’s para actually sets them “beyond the reach of any theatre,” and so beyond the disciplinary cognition of theatre studies.31

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Understanding the work of dramatic performance to gather the expressive ideals with which the audience is compelled to sympathize, Lessing locates the actor at the nexus of his humanizing project, a human figure caught between the real and the ideal, the bodily and the transcendent, nature and culture, sympathy and reason, the internal and the external, and between the prescriptions of the text and the demands of humanizing enactment. In lieu of taking the drama entirely to govern performance, in Lessing, if a dramatic text were to violate “the feeling of human sympathy that wells up in us” motivating the dramatic form, the actor is “boldly” encouraged to “take the liberty here to do what the writer should have done,” to introduce a remedial movement or gesture, an “emotional look” that would correct the author’s oversight, enabling the dramatic action to fulfill its proper purpose as public performance: it “should always be more in our interest to show humanity than manners!”32 Lessing’s actor enacts what Tzvetan Todorov characterizes as the Enlightenment directive to “freedom, choice, and the exercise of the will.” Collaborating with the dramatic logic, the actor may resist the playwright’s authority, materializing a theatrical situation that should be, as an option open to any individual, “valued more than the situations in which the subject acts by necessity or under constraint,”33 even under the momentarily misguided constraint of the text, or of manners, or, as I will suggest in a moment, under the more pervasive constraint of Goethe’s prescriptive direction. Poised alongside the spectator as a potential co-author of the theatrical event, becoming an agent of what it means to be “specifically human,”34 the actor’s humanizing work is simultaneously threatened by the embodied medium of acting itself. For the body also localizes the agency and potential failure of acting, collapsing “the difference between nature and imitation” into the natural, the bodily, an abjection that has the potential to produce only “repulsion and a refusal to identify” among the judicious audience.35 While the socializing effect of theatrical performance may require the actor to correct some aspect of the play, the idealizing performance is constantly compromised by a corporeality understood to exceed and so to endanger the critically empathetic enactment of the character. Indeed, while the actor’s performance constellates trained behavior to produce the effect of a natural order, the humanist incapacity to confront the inequalities or discriminations inherent in its notion of the human is, as Karen Jürs-Munby might put it, nowhere more visible than in Lessing’s

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treatment of actresses. Mlle Felbrich, playing Agnes in Johann Friedrich Löwen’s The New Agnes, has the “[a]ge, figure, expression, voice – everything comes together in her”; yet “even if these natural gifts allow her to perform much of this role automatically,” what draws Lessing’s praise is that Felbrich’s refined performance does not overstep the modesty of femininity, revealing “not more nor less than should be revealed in an Agnes.”36 Recalling Horace’s Roman stage gentility, the dramatic ideal is held hostage to the socio-physical decorum of the performing woman, who can, it seems, embody only part of that complex avatar: an actress may have the “bold” gaze and “quick and valiant” movements required for “the proud passages” of a character, or the “modest fire” in the eyes, the “decency and dignity” needed to “do complete justice to the tender passages,” but not both.37 The vocal dimension of actors’ performance is particularly suggestive of the ideological tension between the ideal and the natural, for it stimulates compassion only when trained speech takes on the appearance of “natural music,” produced by means of “Mouvement der Stimme,” the tempo of the voice, rather than a rhythm or beat assigned by the script. As Lessing puts it, only “when it is combined with absolutely all of the possible changes in tone – with respect not only to high or low, strong or weak, but also to harsh or soft, sharp or round, even clumsy or smooth,” can the voice produce “that natural music … to which our heart unfailingly opens.” Actors must learn the art of producing composed nature, “all of the possible changes in tone” that engage the “natural music” to which the spectators’ hearts involuntarily open; without this disciplined address, a compassionate response might not transpire.38 Lessing’s unfailingly opening heart, though, implies failure; as with the actor’s gestural correction of the script, the humanizing transmission of the drama depends on the skilled, perceptive, embodied, regulated, and affecting speech. While a musical score determines the tempo and rhythm of expression, the dramatic text requires the actor to reconceptualize the verbal “score,” learning where to “linger over the more substantive” lines, “stretching and honing them and making sure that each word and each letter in each word counts.” Since the “degrees of difference are infinite,” they cannot be “fixed” by “any artificial divisions” or by purely technical means; they require the actor’s trained sensitivity. Lessing clearly prescribes an approach to speaking that is at once methodical but not mechanical, a training that harnesses the actor’s body to its best effect.39 Only if “speech flows from a heart penetrated with feeling,” not merely

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“from well-prepared memorization” but from the trained application of the actor’s art, can the spectators sense that this music “originates in the heart,” and so have their inner humanity aroused, be touched through what they already possess, compassion.40 While Lessing regards the actor as creatively implementing the drama through a critically trained sensibility open to compassion, Goethe trains his performers to a mimetic regime of professional standardization transparent to the living spirit, the essence of humanity, embodied in the dramatic script. In its overtly regulatory dimension, Goethe’s 1824 essay “On Acting” departs from the troublesome co-creative authority of the actor with the author in Lessing’s theatre of Vermenschlichung. “To develop a proper mimetic technique,” Goethe guides the actor to stand “before a mirror and speak the passage,” or, better, “just think the words.” Seeking the appropriate “declamation,” pursuing the technical range of vocal tonality, the actor should first concentrate on “the meaning of the words,” the “thought,” the theatre of the mind by means of which the actor is led to accept the logos of the play as his logocentric nature. The actor inhabits “movement that is artistically analogous to the meaning of the words,” movement mirrored back to the actor that confirms a textualized “adopted personality,” absorbing the dramatic character. Goethe widens this mimetic circle, by urging the actor to deploy this reflection in his “daily activities—as if he were engaged in a constant rehearsal.”41 The actor’s constant reflective simulation, it should be noted, escapes egoism: the actor is not fulfilled as an individuated presence but continually rehearses the means of his lived absenting for the living work as a harmonious whole. Goethe conceptualizes the audience as the mimetically governing singular-plural; “the eye of the spectator” demands “pleasant groupings and poses” in the mutually formative theatrical event. Standing for Goethe’s ideals, this discursive—monocular—audience is implied in the “living figure” the actor “supplies” to the stage, through which theatre amounts to an empty technology, a mirror, “a bare tableau,” rather than an interested agency as Lessing and, later, Brecht see it. The elevated nature through which Goethe’s emblematic actor stands for the “whole”—the “stage and auditorium, actors and audience”—depends on a technique which must appear to be erased, even though his acting depends on the affordances of that reflective technology: the “rule must become the imperceptible basis of living action.” The actor’s living appearance, in this sense, depends on the proper use of the technology of

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theatre, the mirror through which he learns to perceive himself as “natural,” and the mirror he becomes in reflecting “character” to the audience. Becoming through the mirror and mirroring of the text, the actor allows the drama to play across his body, much as Goethe elsewhere sees the actor as the drama’s piano, transmitting “the spirit of the composition” through the trained responsiveness of the body, the actor-as-instrument serving ends other than his own. The mirror, like the piano, is the naturalizing instrument of the mind, and of the body subjected to its ocular affordance, fashioning the conditions for the “true ensemble” by reflecting the dramatic logos as its source.42

Public Ecstasy As a contrapuntal response to the popular violence of the French Revolution, Schiller’s theatre humanism compensates for the over-arousal of the Terror by enlisting an experience of “ecstasy,” a regulating force for an alienated humanity and the spectators’ transcendent convergence. A somatic practice, Schiller’s theatre of Vergeistigung provides the instrument for sociopolitical reform by investing in an aesthetic activation of the body by way of the “living form” to rechannel the modern postrevolutionary estrangement of humanity from itself, from the social order, and so from its full potentiality, an estrangement sustained by economics (property), politics (despotism and tyranny), and the law (legal violence and punishment).43 Conceptualized to remedy these external alienating institutions, aesthetic experience brings the individual as a social being into balance and as a political being into true and thus just action through the immersive subjection to the living theatre. Schiller’s sensory aesthetic education (Greek aesthesis: sensation and perception) positions the spectator less to critique the “realness of reality,” as Lessing avers, than to engage a feeling of standing out from external circumstances, a feeling of returning to, and becoming one with, the “beautiful soul,” a feeling of “world-historical personality, living and acting lovingly in the simultaneity of eternity,” as William F. Wertz put it.44 As each person “carries in disposition and determination a pure ideal man within himself, with whose unalterable unity it is the great task of his existence, throughout all his vicissitudes, to harmonize,” the purpose of aesthetic education— and of theatrical catharsis —is to groom that inner ideal into a common socialized expression.45

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Schiller, like Lessing, used print to co-create a socially responsive spectatorship; yet in distinction to Lessing’s appeal to the readers-spectators’ cognitive positioning, Schiller addressed the singers-spectators’ sensory experience. An early example actualizing the theatre’s commitment to the somatic regime—the public’s aesthetic mediation—that Schiller would explore over the next decade is the second, “improved” 1782 edition of Die Räuber (The Robbers ). Augmented with “several songs … arranged for the pianoforte, which will enhance its value to the musical part of the public,” the printed play advances a performative practice from reading to singing, to a physical embodied doing and its experience through and beyond the text. At the same time, it embraces the potential of the ecstatic experience of singing as a catalyst motivating the contextual message of the drama outside its narrative temporality.46 While Augustine feared that the sensory appeal of theatre might render the audience’s conception of tragic suffering gratuitous, Schiller’s 1784– 1802 “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet ” (“The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution”) situates the theatre’s sensual appeal as summoning an innately human, idealizing impulse that galvanizes an immediate and shared immersion “in a universal sympathy” that transcends the individual spectator’s modern alienation. The happy man is calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled, savages made man, and, as the supreme triumph of nature, men of all ranks, zones, and conditions, emancipated from the chains of conventionality and fashion, fraternize here in a universal sympathy, forget the world, and come nearer to their heavenly destination. The individual shares in the general ecstasy, and his breast has now only space for an emotion: he is a man.47

Perhaps like those joined in song around the pianoforte, filled by the power of a “wonderful emotion for which reason has no conception and language no name,” as his 1795 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) will articulate it,48 Schiller’s theatrical spectator occupies a general communal ecstasy; transformed from the degraded life of the manic or the egoistic, the effeminate or the savage, from bondage to convention and trends, the spectator becomes one with the virtues of humanity. An aesthetic product of somatic self-attunement as self-reform, the spectator becomes a man (Mensch) in mankind, attains the state of being humane.

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Opening the head through the heart is particularly performed through weeping, which provides a distinctive moment for localizing the affective register of Schiller’s theatrical humanism. Weeping for his own pleasure, as I suggested in Chapter 3, Augustine’s tragic spectator stood apart from the socially oriented empathy leading to charitable action toward others in the world outside the theatre. For Augustine, weeping in the theatre is gratuitous, a form of emotional arousal that witnesses the theatre’s unethical constitution of the spectator’s solipsism rather than an outgoing compassion, a truly sociable engagement with others. In Schiller, the spectator’s weeping signifies an alternative social expression and relationality, as the “unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another,” the character, and so returns through that expression to his humane potentiality.49 Yet, even in Schiller’s ek-stasis, as the spectators stand outside of themselves in historical time, they also stand outside of themselves in the material theatre, where living beauty leads them to feel their way into another’s suffering, to weep as another who is always already internalized in each of them. Through this moving-out from the alienated self as a moving-into the abstract one, theatrical performance rehabilitates the spectator to a true self, ready for just civic life. The theatre trains an ennobling compassion, freedom, altering the nature of the physical, sensuous disposition of the human. Schiller’s understanding of weeping at tragedy opens on the remediation of the socializing function of compassion into the potentiality of theatrical ecstasy recalling Lessing’s account of compassion animated by the sight of a public hanging. Characterizing Enlightenment attitudes toward the “principle of moderation in punishment,” Foucault exemplifies how this principle is “articulated first as a discourse of the heart. Or rather, it leaps forth like a cry from the body, which is revolted at the sight or at the imagination of too much cruelty.” For Foucault, the humanization of punishment was more properly a stabilization of liberal, compassionate penality in an alternate practice, one that retrained the “spectacular, unlimited, personal, irregular and discontinuous” exhibition of monarchial sovereignty into the more backstage, limited, impersonal, regular, and continuous power of the modern bureaucratic state. The exertion of compassion—at the hanging, or displaced to the “rehabilitative” practices of the penitentiary—witnesses meaningful public action within the “distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up,”

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a distribution focused (and concealed) by modern penality but coextensive with other forms of modern social organization,50 including theatre’s orchestration of the body as a site for and of public ecstasy. Form has consequences, summoning compassion whether through the panoptical form of the penitentiary or the beautiful form of the aesthetic. Like Foucault’s penitent prisoner, Schiller’s weeping spectator signifies a lived and a representational event, the inner movement toward ethical self-governance; rehearsed in the theatre, this affectively constituted selfrehabilitation leads to individual, social, and political stability. Weeping externalizes an involuntary hineinfühlung, feeling oneself into something (the dramatic character, the artistic work) so that it becomes experienced in one’s “soul,” the sense captured by the term Rührung, to be touched by lively affection through and beyond words, rather than modern interpersonal Einfühlung, empathy. Rührung is externalized as a qualitative display from within one/self, testifying to the therapeutic ennoblement of human character through the inward outreach of the “[e]nergy of spirit,” to an aesthetically fashioned “heart” now open to the freeing action of socially and politically sound reason.51 In the theatre, Schiller’s aestheticized Rührung is the means to draw this affective and elevating “fraternization” into being, the “living presence” of a public form—the “true ensemble”—of togetherness that, having ventured “out beyond actuality,” becomes itself in “Truth.”52 In Göran Therborn’s terms, weeping qualifies —attributes qualities that qualify, entitle—the theatrical subject for appropriate social action.53 Inasmuch as Rührung leads to the achievement of human potentiality, it enables man’s “third” or “moral character,” a “free personality” “somewhat further from the matter” of inner nature and “somewhat nearer to it.” Immersed in becoming this “third character,” theatrical spectators “become aware of their latent capacity for self-determination,” their inherent ability to form a democratic polity, a sociality ostensibly free of the erupting violence that crystallized in the spectacle of the Terror. In political terms, once harmonized through such a physical state of controlled exaltation, such aesthetically attuned individuals command an expansive, dignified humanity, disciplining the internal relation to their own nature, the interrelation between themselves, and between themselves and the cultural (the theatre) and the political (the state, the government, and the law) institutions they form. The form of the beautiful has its uses.

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Schiller’s beauty in appearance, of course, is anything but free. Cutting away from Lessing’s critical orientation toward a theatrical Vermenschlichung that would be rationally and affectively “discovered by you” rather than “imposed upon you,”54 the political dimension of Schiller’s theatre of Vergeistigung imposes a sensual apprehension asserting, as Wolfgang Welch suggests, an “anti-sensible absolutism.”55 Schiller’s immersive theatre—“Beauty [is] our second creator”56 —disguises the political work it performs, locating one of the ongoing measures of theatrical humanism: its liberalizing aesthetic is about intuition freed from doubting thought; it projects a generally uplifting experience of artistic ennoblement, not the integrative engagement of affective critique. Art claims to universal ideality, but it can do so only by overwriting its location in the gritty, material and violent, world it allegedly transcends. Formulated at the moment of print’s emerging equipoise with the theatre as a vehicle for the dissemination of plays, the theatrical humanisms of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller differentially train a liberalizing attention to the institution of theatre, modeling contradictions complicating sites of human action in the theatre—writer, dramaturg, director, actor, character, spectator, and audience—that continue to animate academic inquiry into theatre as a potential practice of humanizing, liberal sociality. The actors may decide the affective reach of their action, strike the relationship to the audience, and may also incline to dissolve as sociable individuals, and dissolve into the mirroring mimesis of the writer’s/director’s living work, the drama/the mise-en-scène. The inscription of theatre to Lessing’s humanist value projects its spectators as forming a critical, affectively self-thinking assembly of free individuals differentially harmonized and socialized by the idealizing performance; in Goethe and Schiller, the theatre’s humanist value arises from its capacity to free the public from social plurality and political alienation through a mimetic and an ecstatic identification with that living universal. The compassionate reason, or reasoning compassion, that Lessing installs as the principle of the spectator’s responsive action—the feelingful criticality animating the public gathering of “person, citizen, patriot, and friend”57 in the socializing space of the theatre—is in many ways contested or simply bypassed in the subsequent aestheticization of liberal-humanist theatre, which tends to echo both Schiller’s ecstatic immersion and Goethe’s self-enclosed mirroring through the notion of a distantiating identification allowing for the affectdriven interpretation essential to the properly artistic means of the theatre. Well into the twentieth century and beyond, the Enlightenment trope of

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the “true ensemble” integrates an elevating communion with dramatic performance as the consensual purpose of meaningful theatrical art, not least when that sharing of pleasure-as-intimacy is mediated through an affective national subject, the “true Englishman,” for instance, or—precisely from that “true” perspective—the “stage Irishman.” The following chapters engage the consequences of these theatrical humanisms at the intersection of at the intersection of three ideological frames: Marxist (Chapter 5), National Socialist, and transhumanist (Chapter 6). The sense of an ecstatic theatre of emotional identification, Einfühlung, is remediated by Brecht’s account of the Gestus, which nonetheless raises the question of whether, as a formal device of dialectics, epic theatre requires critical reformulation to avoid an ahistorical stasis. The tension between a critical and an emotive theatricality—articulating both liberal theatrical value and its dark kin, the “ecstatic” performativity of National Socialism—is differently remediated through the institutionalization of evolutionary/scientific trans/humanism by the International Theatre Institute and its parent organization, UNESCO, instrumental to the internationalizing cultural politics of post-Cold War Europe and North America.

Notes 1. William N. West, “The Idea of a Theater: Humanist Ideology and the Imaginary Stage in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 246. 2. Lessing’s liberal humanism depends on its own exclusions, even if expressed proverbially. Antitypes, such as the unidealizable in/animate bodies of its others, of vain professional actors, and the “limping” embodiment of second-rate writing, deform the arts, and are silently disacknowledged, cast aside from the idealizing work of the theatre: “When limping men run a race, the one who makes it first across the finish line still limps”; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation, trans. Wendy Arons and Sara Figal, ed. Natalya Baldyga (London: Routledge, 2019), no. 7, 55; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” in Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden (München: Winkler Verlag, 1974), no. 7, 306. These exclusions are cognate with Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf’s account of “the cult of emotion,” identifying “a corresponding social membership” according to which “the bourgeoisie belongs” and “all other social groups are left aside; they are not

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

among those included in the play” or in the theatre; see Mimesis: Culture—Art —Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 166. On the relation between the social bond and the performance of middle-class theatricality, see also Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 107–9. The bürgerliches Trauerspiel is one element of the middle-class compassionate register; for an analysis of this dramatic form, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre, trans. Jo Riley (London: Routledge, 2002), 146–201. Unless otherwise noted, translations from German are my own. Natalya Baldyga succinctly sums up Lessing’s Mitleid dramaturgy, urging for a theatre that “can transform a regular person into the mitleidigste Mensch—the most sympathetic person who is also the beste Mensch—a person whose more highly developed sensibility strengthens his or her personal morality, impelling him or her to come to the aid of fellow citizens”; “Corporeal Eloquence and Sensate Cognition: G. E. Lessing, Acting Theory, and Properly Feeling Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Theatre Survey 58, no. 2 (2017): 180. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 76, 243; Lessing, “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 76, 590–91. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 8. As I point out below, Selbstdenken, this “entirely free thinking” (8), nonetheless depends on Lessing’s social, dramatic, and aesthetic exclusions and hierarchies of value, notably focused on acting and gender. Agnes Heller, “Enlightenment against Fundamentalism: The Example of Lessing,” New German Critique, no. 23 (1981): 20; cf. Heller’s German version, “Aufklärung gegen Fundamentalismus: Der Fall Lessing,” Lessing Yearbook 19 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 29–44. The 104 essays in the Hamburg Dramaturgy move to conceptualize a dynamic relation between theatre practice and a theoretical perspective on the aesthetic, cultural, and political work of a national stage, a national stage still without a nation in Lessing’s time. William Smith, “Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Virtue, Irony and Worldliness,” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (2007): 46. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Ernst and Falk: Conversations for the Freemasons,” trans. William L. Zwiebel, in Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Continuum, 1991), 287. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Ernst und Falk: Gespräche für Freimäurer,” in Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden (1778; München: Winkler Verlag, 1974), 1085. Helmut J. Schneider, “Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the 18th

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11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

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Century,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82, no. 3 (2008): 395, 385, 395. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 4. Baldyga, “Corporeal Eloquence and Sensate Cognition,” 170, 176. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 7, 55; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 7, 305. Dorothea E. von Mücke, The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 239. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 48, 162– 63 (my emphasis); “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 48, 474–77. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 48, 162– 63 (my emphasis); “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 48, 474–77. “La Tragedie est donc une imitation d’une action grave, entiere, & qui a une juste grandeur: Dont le style est agreablement assaisonné, mais differemment dans toutes ses parties, & qui, sans le secours de la narration, par le moyen de la compassion & de la terreur, acheve de purger en nous ces sortes de passions, & toutes les autres semblables”; André Dacier, trans., La poëtique d’Aristote (Paris: C. Barbin, 1692), 70–71. “Das Trauerspiel ist nämlich die Nachahmung einer ernsthaften, vollständigen, und eine Größe habenden Handlung, durch einen mit fremden Schmucke versehenen Ausdruck, dessen sämtliche Theile aber besonders wirken: welche ferner, nicht durch die Erzählung des Dichters, sondern (durch Vorstellung der Handlungen selbst) uns, vermittelst des Schreckens und Mitleidens, von den Fehlern der vorgestellten Leidenschaften reiniget”; Michael Conrad Curtius, trans., Aristoteles Dichtkunst (Hannover: Johann Christoph Richter, 1753), 11–12. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 77, 245; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 77, 594. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 77, 244; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 77, 593; tragedy “ist die Nachahmung einer Handlung—die nicht vermittelst der Erzählung, sondern vermittelst des Mitleids und der Furcht, die Reinigung dieser und dergleichen Leidenschaften bewirket.” Helen Zimmern translated this passage as “of an action—which not by the means of narration but by the means of pity and fear effects the purification of these and similar passions”; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy (New York: Dover, 1962), no. 77, 187. Famously, the given passage of the Poetics poses intrinsic challenges to translation. In Thomas Twining’s 1789 English translation, emphasizing the elevating and instructive dimension of catharsis, this passage

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reads, tragedy, “then, is an imitation of some action … in the way, not of narration, but of action—effecting through pity and terror, the correction and refinement of such passions”; Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry: With Notes on the Translation, and on the Original; and Two Dissertations, on Poetical, and Musical, Imitation (London, 1789), 75. By S. H. Butcher’s 1895 English translation, the passage becomes, tragedy “is an imitation of an action … in the form of action not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper katharsis, or purgation, of these emotions”; Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art: With a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics (London: Macmillan, 1895), 223. Gerald F. Else’s 1950s– 60s translation perhaps underscores the challenges of translation itself, as tragedy is “enacted by the persons themselves and not presented through narrative; through a course of pity and fear completing the purification of tragic acts which have those emotional characteristics”; Aristotle, Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 25. In the 1970s, for M. E. Hubbard, tragedy is “a mimesis of a high, complete action … in dramatic, not narrative form, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions”; “Aristotle: Poetics,” in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom (1972; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 57. In the 1980s, for Stephen Halliwell, tragedy, “then, is a representation of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude … in the mode of dramatic enactment, not narrative—and through the arousal of pity and fear effecting the katharsis of such emotions”; The Poetics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 37. In Malcolm Heath’s 1990s translation, tragedy is “performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions”; Aristotle, Poetics (London: Penguin, 1996), 10. 21. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 78, 248– 49; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 78, 600. 22. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 80, 252; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 80, 604–5. 23. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 77, 244, 245; “Aristotle noted that compassion necessarily demands the presence of a misfortune; that misfortunes occurring long ago or looming in the distant future either cannot awaken in us any compassion at all, or only a much weaker compassion than a present misfortune does. Consequently, it is necessary to represent the action by which we want to arouse compassion not as having already occurred – that is, not in the narrative form – but rather as currently occurring – that is, in the dramatic form. And this fact – that our compassion is hardly, or not at all, aroused by narration but rather almost solely by the sight of what is occurring in the moment – is what justifies him in substituting the feature itself for the form in his

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24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

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definition, because the feature is only capable of this one form. If he had thought it possible that our compassion could be aroused through narration as well, then it would have been a very mistaken omission indeed if he had said ‘not by means of narration, but by means of compassion and fear’” (245); “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 77, 594; “Aristoteles bemerkte, daß das Mitleid notwendig ein vorhandenes Übel erfordere; daß wir längst vergangene oder fern in der Zukunft bevorstehende Übel entweder gar nicht, oder doch bei weitem nicht so stark bemitleiden können, als ein anwesendes; daß es folglich notwendig sei, die Handlung, durch welche wir Mitleid erregen wollen, nicht als vergangen, das ist, nicht in der erzählenden Form, sondern als gegenwärtig, das ist, in der dramatischen Form, nachzuahmen.” Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 80, 251; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 80, 604. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 2, 42; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 2, 286. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 76, 243; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 76, 591. For the “most beautiful” in Aristotle, see Elsa Bouchard, “Audience, Poetic Justice, and Aesthetic Value in the Poetics,” in Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 185, 187, 193. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 76, 243; on Goulston’s translation see footnote 8; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 76, 591. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 92. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 76, 243; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 76, 591. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143. Martin Revermann, “Introduction: Cultural History and the Theatres of Antiquity,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity, ed. Martin Revermann, vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 5, 11, 5. For a more detailed analysis of Revermann’s separation of Roman paratheatrical forms from the properly theatrical ones, see Chapter 2. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 76, 243; no. 17, 80; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 76, 590–1; no. 17, 345. Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 34. Todorov, Imperfect Garden, 34. As Karen Jürs-Munby suggests in her treatment of Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing’s concept of theatre shifts from the material focus of the early

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36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

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essays (numbers 1–25) to a more explicitly ideological register, particularly revealed in the idealizing structure of dramatic character and gender performativity; “Of Textual Bodies and Actual Bodies: the Abjection of Performance in Lessing’s Dramaturgy,” Theatre Research International 30, no. 1 (2004): 28. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 10, 63; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 10, 318. The quotations are from Jürs-Munby, “Of Textual Bodies and Actual Bodies,” 23; cf. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 25, 101. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 8, 58; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 8, 310. On Lessing’s combination of internalist and externalist theories of acting, see Baldyga, “Corporeal Eloquence and Sensate Cognition,” 168–74. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 8, 58; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 8, 310. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Acting (1824),” in Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff, vol. 3 of Goethe’s Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 221, 217, 222, 223. Goethe, “On Acting (1824),” 223, 224, 217. Cf. my discussion of Schiller’s theatrical humanism with Nicholas Saul, “Aesthetic Humanism (1790–1830),” in The Cambridge History of German Literature, ed. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 208. William F. Wertz Jr., “A Reader’s Guide to Letters on the Aesthetical,” Fidelio 14, no. 1–2 (2005): 83. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 4, 31. Cf. Schiller’s discussion of “the effect of melting Beauty on the tense man, and the effect of energizing Beauty on the languid man,” which he transcends “in the unity of the ideally Beautiful.” In an analogous way, after identifying “two opposite forms of humanity” he dissolves them both “in the unity of the ideal man” (Letter 16, 84). Friedrich Schiller, 1782 preface to The Robbers, in Early Dramas, vol. 3 of Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller (New York: P. F. Collier, 1902), 139. The first edition of Die Räuber: Ein Schauspiel, envisioned as Lesedrama, appeared in 1781. As Schiller describes it in the preface, The Robbers was intended for reading: he saw it “merely as a dramatic narrative in which, for the purpose of tracing out the innermost workings of the soul, advantage has been taken of the dramatic method, without otherwise conforming to the stringent rules of theatrical composition, or seeking the dubious advantage of stage adaptation.” Here, he introduces

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the play as inimical to the aesthetic and moral character of the material theatre, warning that the play’s “contents,” particularly a few “characters” would, if presented onstage, “offend the finer feelings of virtue and shock the delicacy of our manners”; 1781 preface to The Robbers, in Early Dramas, vol. 3 of Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller (New York: P. F. Collier, 1902), 133. The play premiered on January 13, 1782, to a sold-out Mannheim National Theatre. However, Schiller was, like Lessing at the end of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, frustrated with the Mannheim public’s conventional expectations toward the theatre. Perhaps not surprisingly, because of the volatility of its rebellious Sturm und Drang thematics, the play was routinely adapted, tamed, and censored for the stage, as was the case in Mannheim. Despite Schiller’s initial collaboration and indeed despite his later objections, the Mannheim director, Intendant Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg cut the songs that Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg had originally composed as part of his resetting of Die Räuber in the Eternal Peace (Ewiger Landfriede) after 1495. In 1782, Schiller published a separate edition following the Mannheim adaptation, entitled Die Räuber: Ein Trauerspiel. The Mannheim text is reprinted in Schillers Räuber: Urtext des Mannheimer Soufflierbuches, ed. Herbert Stubenrauch and Günter Schulz (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1959), 32–135. For his part, Zumsteeg published a collection of his songs from the play. The songs of The Robbers spread among the people and were adapted by rebellious youth; see Waltraud Linder-Beroud, “‘Das Theater glich einem Irrenhause’: 200 Jahre Receptionsgeschichte der ‘Räuber’ und des ‘Räuberliedes,’” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 27/28 (1982/1983): 148–61. 47. In June 1784, Schiller gave a lecture entitled “Vom Wirken der Schaubühne auf das Volk” (On the Effects of the Theatre on the People) at the Kurpfälzische Deutsche Gesellschaft; the revised lecture was published as “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” in Schiller’s Rheinische Thalia, 1785. A substantive revision appeared as “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet,” in Kleinere prosaische Schriften, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1802). The quotation is from Friedrich Schiller, “The Stage as Moral Institution,” in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1974), 445. For Lessing’s notion of the theatre as “the school of the moral world,” see Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 2, 40; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 2, 283 (“die Schule der moralischen Welt”). 48. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 15, 81. 49. Schiller, “The Stage as Moral Institution,” 445 (my emphasis). Whether weeping is a sincere display of sensibility or a manipulative display of

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feigned sensibility is a trope of eighteenth and nineteenth century theatre criticism; see Jim Davis, “Social Functions: The Social Function of Theatre,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, ed. Peter W. Marx, vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Theatre, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 53–56. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 91, 88, 202. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 8, 49. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 11, 60. See Göran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980), 17. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 49, 164; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 49, 478. Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage, 1997), 66. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 21, 102. Prologue spoken by Madame Löwen at the opening of the Hamburg National Theatre on April 22, 1767; reprinted in Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Arons and Figal, no. 6, 52; “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” no. 6, 301.

References Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, 1968. Baldyga, Natalya. “Corporeal Eloquence and Sensate Cognition: G. E. Lessing, Acting Theory, and Properly Feeling Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Germany.” Theatre Survey 58, no. 2 (2017): 162–85. Bouchard, Elsa. “Audience, Poetic Justice, and Aesthetic Value in the Poetics.” In Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen, 183–213. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Butcher, S. H., trans. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art: With a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics. London: Macmillan, 1895. Curtius, Michael Conrad, trans. Aristoteles Dichtkunst. Hannover: Johann Christoph Richter, 1753. Dacier, André. La poëtique d’Aristote. Paris: C. Barbin, 1692. Davis, Jim. “Social Functions: The Social Function of Theatre.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, edited by Peter W. Marx, 51–76. Vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Else, Gerald F., trans. Poetics. By Aristotle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. History of European Drama and Theatre. Translated by Jo Riley. London: Routledge, 2002.

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture—Art—Society. Translated by Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “On Acting (1824).” In Essays on Art and Literature, edited by John Gearey, translated by Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff, 216-24. Vol. 3 of Goethe’s Collected Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Halliwell, Stephen, trans. The Poetics of Aristotle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Heath, Malcolm, trans. Poetics. By Aristotle. London: Penguin, 1996. Heller, Agnes. “Aufklärung gegen Fundamentalismus: Der Fall Lessing.” In Lessing Yearbook 19, 29–44. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Heller, Agnes. “Enlightenment Against Fundamentalism: The Example of Lessing.” New German Critique, no. 23 (1981): 13–26. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hubbard, M. E., trans. “Aristotle: Poetics.” In Classical Literary Criticism, edited by D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Jürs-Munby, Karen. “Of Textual Bodies and Actual Bodies: The Abjection of Performance in Lessing’s Dramaturgy.” Theatre Research International 30, no. 1 (2004): 19–35. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Ernst and Falk: Conversations for the Freemasons.” Translated by William L. Zwiebel. In Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, 277–306. New York: Continuum, 1991. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Ernst und Falk: Gespräche für Freimäurer.” In Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, 1075–109. Vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden. München: Winkler Verlag, 1974. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburg Dramaturgy. Translated by Helen Zimmern. New York: Dover, 1962. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation. Translated by Wendy Arons and Sara Figal. Edited by Natalya Baldyga. London: Routledge, 2019. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Hamburgische Dramaturgie.” In Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, 276–698. Vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden. München: Winkler Verlag, 1974. Linder-Beroud, Waltraud. “‘Das Theater glich einem Irrenhause’: 200 Jahre Receptionsgeschichte der ‘Räuber’ und des ‘Räuberliedes.’” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 27/28 (1982/1983): 148–61.

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Mücke, Dorothea E. von. The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Revermann, Martin. “Introduction: Cultural History and the Theatres of Antiquity.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity, edited by Martin Revermann, 1–15. Vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Theatre, edited by Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Saul, Nicholas. “Aesthetic Humanism (1790–1830).” In The Cambridge History of German Literature, edited by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, 202–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Reginald Snell. Mineola: Dover, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich. Preface to the 1781 edition of The Robbers. In Early Dramas, 133–37. Vol. 3 of Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller. New York: P. F. Collier, 1902. Schiller, Friedrich. Preface to the 1782 edition of The Robbers. In Early Dramas, 139. Vol. 3 of Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller. New York: P. F. Collier, 1902. Schiller, Friedrich. “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet.” In Kleinere prosaische Schriften. Vol. 4, 3–27. Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1802. Schiller, Friedrich. Schillers Räuber: Urtext des Mannheimer Soufflierbuches. Edited by Herbert Stubenrauch and Günter Schulz. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1959. Schiller, Friedrich. “The Stage as Moral Institution.” In Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, edited by Bernard F. Dukore, 440–45. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1974. Schiller, Friedrich. “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” Rheinische Thalia (Mannheim) 1, no. 1, 1785. Schneider, Helmut J. “Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the 18th Century.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82, no. 3 (2008): 382–99. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Smith, William. “Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Virtue, Irony and Wordliness.” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 1 (2007): 37–52. Therborn, Göran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1980. Todorov, Tzvetan. Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism. Translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Twining, Thomas, trans. Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry: With Notes on the Translation, and on the Original; and Two Dissertations, on Poetical, and Musical, Imitation. London, 1789.

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Welsch, Wolfgang. Undoing Aesthetics. Translated by Andrew Inkpin. London: Sage, 1997. Wertz, William F., Jr. “A Reader’s Guide to Letters on the Aesthetical.” Fidelio 14, no. 1–2 (2005): 81–106. West, William N. “The Idea of a Theater: Humanist Ideology and the Imaginary Stage in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Drama 28 (1997): 245–87.

CHAPTER 5

Pinkins’s Alienating Gestus

If Schiller’s theatre of aesthetic exaltation relies on the potential of beauty in appearance to draw spectators to feel their way into a trans- and supra-individual continuum, “that happy equilibrium which is the soul of beauty and the condition of humanity,” Brecht’s theatre of Verfremdung, estrangement, draws the spectators to feel and to think their way out of that humanity and its production of consciousness. Remediating Schiller’s dialectical resolution of “sensation and thought” into a “third,” “seamless” “whole,” Brecht adapts Marx’s Enfremdung into the formally irresolvable Verfremdung, resisting the reification of Rührung as Einfühlung, as a mimetic movement toward self-optimization through identification with the character, emotionally immobilizing the theatrical ensemble and so withdrawing it from just action within and without the theatre. Yet while Verfremdung aims to undo this “fixed and ‘universally human’” dramaturgy1 within which “the human is the variable and the surroundings are a constant,”2 it is not free from Hegelian Aufhebung, sublation, reviving a transcendental impulse both in its notion of the proletariat as the subject and object of history, and of the irresolvable, even revolutionary, Gestus as the subject and object of epic theatricality. Brecht’s epic-dialectical theatre directly engages with the traditions of theatrical humanism, redefining its terms while projecting a theatre less escaping its anthropological footings than sheltering a man of gestic potentiality without, as Georg Lukács might say, “making man himself [and the Gestus ] dialectical.”3

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_5

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Lessing’s theatre humanized the spectator in part by summoning the actor to rework the failings of the playwright’s script, so that the performance of the drama could achieve “its most noble aspect” as “a supplement to the law.”4 In Brecht, the dramatized, teleologically causal, acts toward social and political justice—the final obliterating Einverständnis (agreement) between the Young Comrade and the agitators in Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken) or Azdak’s judgment in Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle)—refuse to be legislated permanently into law by the gestic thrust of dialectical futurity. The justice that aims to be just is conditioned by its own critical alterability, as Étienne Balibar might say,5 and so are the epic instruments of the Verfremdung. The dialectical tension between epic and what Brecht calls Aristotelian or dramatic theatre, then, raises the question of its critical alterability: now that “Brechtian” or “epic theatre” is, sometimes at least, a genre of liberalized commodity theatre, can the instrument of epic theatricality be historicized, rethought to conduct Verfremdung on the contemporary practice of epic theatre itself? And how might the epic theatre’s implication in dramatic humanism, particularly the authorizing function attributed to the text, participate in that refiguration? To engage epic-dialectical theatricality’s implication in theatrical and dramatic humanism, this chapter develops from a contemporary event of theatre, a public moment rethinking epic theatre’s legacy undertaken by the African-American actress Tonya Pinkins, initially cast as the eponymous anti/heroine in Brian Kulick’s 2015–2016 New York Classic Stage Company (CSC) Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder). Learning that her “perspective as a Black woman” and on the Congolese environment in which the play was reset had no traction in the production, Pinkins departed the show after her contracted performances,6 using the reasons for her exit to motivate a larger public debate. In an alliance with the 2015 #BlackGirlsMatter and #BlackLivesMatter movements, the actress publicly challenged the institutional and authorial structures of power and their role in sustaining the representational materiality of the theatrical mise-en-scène. Initially publishing an open letter in Playbill giving her artistic differences with Kulick as a cause for her leaving, she animated what I call an affirmative dramaturgy, a mode of discursive reflection on theatrical work, here coordinating the registers of a materialist Black feminist critique of white masculine theatre practices unresponsive to historically, socially, and aesthetically conditioned racial and gendered professional injustices in the United States.7

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The potential resonance of Pinkins’s address to epic theatricality takes shape in a specific theatrical culture, and the terms of that culture are dramatized by the intertwined Gestus of her social and critical performance, a gestic act that at once involved the sociopolitical with the aesthetic while staging the humanist investments of the theatre itself, here, of the epicdialectical theatre. Her gestic public discourse strikes a decisive resistance to the authorized theatrical ensemble, promotes a realignment of textual authority with progressive history, and subjects Brecht’s epic theatricality to an alternative engagement with race and gender in performance. Pinkins refused to have her voice in the production silenced. To historicize the embodied stakes of her affirmative dramaturgy, I intersect the cultural reception of African American stage vocality with the pressure exerted on Helene Weigel’s voice early in her career to become the mouthpiece of Brecht ’s epic theatricality. The Brechtian stage Gestus liminally coordinates the objectives of the text with the mise-en-scène; it is also engaged by, as Pinkins suggests, the performer’s decisive bodily invention. Exploring the material and representational containment of the performing female voice, I inquire into a critical feminist and Marxian tradition that has tended to unwrite the actress’s voice—as both Weigel’s and Pinkins’s careers show—into the patriarchy of the Gestus, implicating it in dramatic humanism. The consequences of this swerve away from the materiality of the stage are suprisingly detectable in a “rare example of Marxist criticism practiced upon theatrical performance,” Louis Althusser’s 1962 essay, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht; Notes on Materialist Theatre,”8 with which I conclude this chapter, showing how Althusser at once regards performance as equitable with a structural resistance to the effects of ideology and at the same time as encoded within the dramatic text.

Gestic Doing Remaking theatrical practice as a consequential means of historicizing inquiry, producing a dialectically rationalized—intellectual and sensory—experience of a “changeable human,” the epic theatre’s doingthrough-performance organizes communication in episodic rather than in cause-and-effect dramaturgy, signaling alternative modes of characterization in acting. Framing the mise-en-scène as a discursive platform,

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epic theatricality focuses on alienating the spectator’s habitual responsiveness, through a distinctive tool: the socially, politically, and aesthetically concentrated Gestus.9 The Gestus marks four dimensions of doing: the actor’s social agency as a laborer, the actor’s artistic agency in making character, the character’s represented agency, and the spectator’s social and aesthetic responsiveness. Yet the gestic act allowing the audience as a differentiated political body to become is circumscribed by thought-as-dialectics, which “posits from the outset its identity” with “a meaning or ‘logic’ to history which is transcendent to the collectives or ‘blocks of agency’ involved in its creation.”10 That is, the Brechtian Gestus opens interpretive potentiality inscribed in a “latent ideal that is always already there awaiting our discovery,” a potentiality—latent in the historical moment of its theatre, society, and location—distinct from possibility, a “contingent potential, not of the thing but of our encounter.”11 Although the “unpredictable ambiguity” of gestic “resonance,” as Lynette Hunter notes, “can generate a sociosituated politics of affect in which the performance opens up to what it does not know,”12 that resonance is not entirely undetermined possibility. For while the Gestus engages its co-performers to experience the reflective possibilities arising in their self-estranged encounter with its enactment, as an object grounded within a purposeful and rational worldview and indeed within a specific paradigm of use-value and professionalism, a given Gestus is grounded in dialectics as potentiality, resonating within a specific structure of assertion as if it were unanticipatable but nonetheless circumscribed. Insofar as the Gestus opens a critical potentiality, as an objectified manifestation of irresolvable dialectics, it also articulates universalized thought as a device essential, in Brecht’s case, to theatrical practice. Both the re-historicizing and the re-technologizing of the CSC Mother Courage production demanded an altered conceptual engagement with the play’s dramatic material. According to Pinkins, as the CSC rehearsals proceeded, she came to realize that, like the production’s resetting from the Thirty Years War to an unnamed conflict in the Congo, the portrayals of the “African continent” and of “Blackness itself” were ethically (and so politically) compromised, representing less as “specific and infinitely diverse” than as “singularly nonspecific” “cultural misappropriation[s].” Feeling that her “perspective as a Black woman was dismissed in favor of portraying the Black woman through the filter of the white gaze,” she came to find it unbearable to work in and for the show.13 Exiting

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the show on January 3, 2016, she was subsequently replaced by another African-American actress, Kecia Lewis. Brecht’s theatrical instruments have long been packaged as signifying a political—undemocratic—style within the armature of liberal-humanist theatricality, in which epic theatre is conjoined to a diversifying yet inconsequential practice of critically emptied “political correctness.” When Pinkins publicly addressed the professional and interpretive tensions motivating her decision to leave the show, she specifically criticized racialized and gendered practices in the theatre industry and the lack of access to artistic decisions made in the production process, a Gestus conjoined to the “representation” of her character: “it was not relayed to me until final tech rehearsal that the vision for this Mother Courage (the Black Mother Courage in an African war) was of a delusional woman trying to do the impossible.” In view of the actress’s lived approach to her role, Pinkins found it ethically (and so politically) untenable not to co-produce her Mother Courage as an “icon of feminine tenacity and strength, or of a Black female’s fearless capabilities” onstage.14 Brecht abstracted Courage as a contested, potentially instructive instance of the in/humane costs of participating in the war-businessmaternity nexus. Pinkins, dismayed by what she took to be the production’s inadequate representation of a Black Courage, wanted to use its immediate historical, social, and professional contexts to develop a Haltung or gestic attitude to alienate the play. Since “race and sex play a pivotal role in determining who holds the power to shape representation,” when “Black bodies are on stage, Black perspectives must be reflected,” and a “Black female should have a say in presenting a Black female onstage.”15 Pinkins’s charge is less an interpretation of the play than an address to the ideological structure of localized theatre practice— who or what speaks for the conceptual design of the show and for the bodies on display—and to the uses of drama as a lawful form of experience contingent on the sociopolitical and theatrical histories of power. Pinkins protests her acting’s—her labor’s—withdrawal from effecting a more just, material, worldbuilding. Not only does she present her acting as a form of labor industrially taken as subordinate to the directorial vision empowered to “embody” the production’s conceptual work in the miseen-scène; she also confidently animates acting along the lines of Douglas Robinson’s thinking about Marx’s Enfremdung. For, in an important sense, the privileging of the conceptualizing function as belonging to the director and his representation locates the actress-as-worker within Marx’s

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account of alienated labor. Pinkins’s gestic performance was “made real … in and by and through the very fact that” this laborer—the AfricanAmerican actress—“is made unreal” by the scene of her alienated labor: the mise-en-scène. If the theatrical representation, the-show-as-product, “is by definition that which has been detached from the [actor-as-]laborer and attached to labor, and … labor belongs to the owner,” the director, then the significance of the performer’s labor, of her work within the representation, is alienated from the actor, as “the laborer has no ‘own,’ can own nothing of … her own; what might ideally have been … her own is by law in fact other, strange, alien, fremd—has been entfremded, estranged, or entäußert, alienated.” As Pinkins and Brecht understood, albeit in different ways, this is a “violent remaking” of “a disciplinary system that defines and creates laborers in terms of these estrangements and alienations, that creates the subjectivity of laborers in terms of the objectification of their labor as other, as alien.” The more an African-American actress masters a theatrical representation that inherently appropriates— de-historicizes, de-genders, and de-racializes—her work, her creative conceptualization, that representation seeks less to de-anesthetize the spectators “through a (de)alienating theater” than it draws them to feel their way into this disempowering equilibrium; it prompts them to merge with the representation to their own transformative disempowerment16 and to the detriment of theatre as a vehicle of and for socio-political, transformative, and justice. Pinkins’s retooling of Gestus and the challenge it poses to the institutional and authorial appropriation of epic theatricality emerges more clearly in the context of CSC’s series of Brecht’s plays, or better, their journalistic reception, particularly by the major liberal newspaper in the United States, the New York Times. Mother Courage and Her Children (2015) was the fourth production in a series including Galileo (2012), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (2013), and A Man’s a Man (2014). If these reviews have a common theme, and they do, it is that epic theatre violates the proper work of the commodified liberal-humanist theatre, in which spectator’s freedom from the political must be protected from the epic theatre’s requirements: to recognize and reject the anesthetization of the self by first-person acting, and through “the externalization or alienation of the actor’s ‘I’ as the character’s ‘I,’ the creation of an alien or othered self through the surrender of the own self.”17 Reviewing the CSC’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, Charles Isherwood manifests how the demand of stage dialectics operates a theatrical experience as illegible to liberal consciousness as epic performance is to

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humanism. Wearing “you down with its sometimes laborious storytelling and narration,” epic theatre offers an altered experience of plot violating the sense that proper drama leads to a definitive—empathetic—climax, the singular effect of the action’s cause. Like “many Brecht plays,” the Chalk Circle characters, too, are not theatrically compelling to Isherwood, for they lack psychological plausibility, are “all too obviously ranged on the side of good and evil.” Indeed, in its “archly naïve quality,” the writing of Grusha and Simon prevents the actors from rendering the love story “human,” and so prevents the spectators from having a meaningful theatrical experience. For Isherwood, the apparently excessive (“laborious”) design of the narrative as well as the deficient (“obviously”) design of the characters motivate an essentially negative spectatorial experience by weakening the projected experience of a psychologically driven epistemology (Einfühlung ) he takes as definitive of stage performance’s successful engagement with the audience ensemble.18 The CSC’s effort to update Brecht’s plays is seized elsewhere in Isherwood’s reviews for the Times, all revealing an anxiety regarding the Gestus by assimilating its alienating potentiality to the affective economy of US cultural industries, the Broadway musical theatre and Hollywood film. Capitalizing on stardom as artistic value, the CSC commissioned Duncan Sheik, best known for his massively successful musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, to create new music for Caucasian Chalk Circle, A Man’s a Man, and Mother Courage. Regardless of the epic-dialectical, critical, potentialities that Sheik’s music might have engaged in the CSC’s productions, Isherwood’s reviews mainly underline the composer’s commodity value. Isherwood highlights the Chalk Circle score as reflective of the success of Spring Awakening , and the A Man’s a Man score as justified by the international popularity of the composer’s work, by Sheik’s American Psycho opening in London. Inasmuch as Isherwood approves the work of music in these two productions through the (distracting) aura of the Broadway globalizing musical-theatre apparatus, he also assimilates the actors, their work, and the theatre to success in another industry, film. In Chalk Circle, “[Christopher] Lloyd, best known for his mad-scientist role in ‘Back to the Future’ movies, brings a funny, crusty exuberance to Azdak’s almost Groucho Marxian (Marxist?) shtick.”19 Epic theatre is valued for approximating commodity theatre rather than for exploring the possibility of prompting a yet-to-bepracticed theatrical sociability.

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“The Natural Impulsiveness of the Female Animal”20 The gestic challenge posed by Pinkins’s claims of being “controlled” by the representational practice of the CSC’s Mother Courage tellingly motivates the response of the arbiters of theatrical culture, notably Isherwood, whose review, “A ‘Mother Courage’ Deployed to Africa,” appeared in the New York Times three weeks after Pinkins had departed the production.21 Isherwood writes after Pinkins’s open letter in Playbill had become publicly known, her statement coordinating a materialist Black feminist critique of white masculine theatre practice as the scene of historical, social, and professional injustice in the United States.22 Indeed, in tacitly chastising Pinkins for endangering CSC’s “searing production,” Isherwood represents the specifics of the “traditional artistic differences with her director” Pinkins had raised as simply not worth exploring, merely “traditional,” part the professional business—the unremarkable alienated labor—of theatre. What deserves his readers’ attention is not the gendering and racializing aspect of that business but the “nontraditional rancor” of “the star who was first cast” as Mother Courage, of Pinkins’s public voice. While the actress asks who/what speaks or ought to speak the production, whose voice carries its work, Isherwood dismisses her concern, extolling the hierarchies of theatrical practice status quo and so dramatizing the ideological conditions—a liberal-humanist sensibility masking an undercurrent of misogyny and racism—precisely called into question by Pinkins’s critique of the production’s dramaturgy. In Isherwood’s discourse, the director and the theatre critic ought to control the meaning of the theatrical event; the upstart, unruly African-American actress mistakes her place in the mode of production by claiming her part in it, by claiming her labor as hers, by claiming that she speaks and speaks for the production, too. “Am I a dog or a slave to be misled so as to be controlled in my artistic expression?,” Pinkins asked.23 Implicitly refuting Pinkins’s remarks, Isherwood’s review only ostensibly centers on Kecia Lewis’s “fine” acting work as the newly cast African-American Mother Courage. When he notes that Lewis’s acting “would be impressive under any circumstances,” yet is particularly so given “the drama surrounding her undertaking the part [which] makes the achievement all the more remarkable,” Isherwood values Lewis’s “commanding performance” as a tour de force in contrast to Pinkins’s perceived violation of the norms that should govern the

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Black actress’s professional life in the theatre. Isherwood’s valorization of Lewis’s performance pointedly reveals the consequences of white patriarchal culture’s rationality. Acclaiming the performance’s delocalized power (“under any circumstances”), the reviewer emphatically positions Lewis’s “remarkable” “achievement” against the “drama” Pinkins created “surrounding her undertaking,” implicitly pitching one actress of color against another ultimately to assimilate both to the whitening order of masculine theatrical things. This gesture, as I will discuss in a moment, is not far removed from the patriarchal normativity employed by Brecht and his era to regulate the actress’s embodied voice by channeling it into the objective of stage speech. Isherwood’s Lewis is captured within an inherently threatening gendered and racialized inferiority, cast to appear and speak publicly only when she does not speak as herself but remains “fully in character,” integrated into the director’s “searing production”: her “fine performance” requires the actress’s separation from power, acting as a speechless act. Since Lewis replaced Pinkins on short notice, Isherwood pardons her need for some “necessary aids” to sustain the smooth run of the performance. Yet this pardon is condescendingly withdrawn when Lewis’s real, lived, voice is heard. At the moment when she needs prompting and asks for it, Lewis—the African-American actress—is animalized, “barking the word ‘Line’” (my emphasis). Pinkins had previously refused to be debased—like “a dog or a slave” (my emphasis)—by the dehumanizing distribution of gendered and racialized power in theatrical production, power here reflexively confirmed by Isherwood. When Isherwood’s Lewis speaks out of character, as herself, she dramatizes the Black actress’s position in production, her voice animalized, mere barking; when fully controlled by the apparatus of an appropriate, and appropriating, theatre technique, Isherwood’s Lewis is theatrically humanized, said to display a “powerful voice, by turns scathing, lyrical and mournful” (my emphasis). Covertly positioned to negate the powerful Black female modeled in Pinkins’s affirmative discourse, Isherwood’s “powerful voice” is a trained voice, recording both the demand for, and the effective work of, Lewis’s assimilation to the system of production, the hard-earned effort of an actress with a “long background in musical theatre.” Properly created by, subordinated to, the apparatus of legitimate theatrical labor, then, Lewis’s voice precisely affirms Pinkins’s point regarding the ideological terrain occupied by Mother Courage, in which to accept the rigor of training

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is to be rendered speechless; to speak as oneself, and for oneself, translates into a barking “rancor.” Applauding the CSC Mother Courage as an unequivocally “terrific production,” Isherwood’s review is assertively grounded in the gesture of refuting Pinkins, replaying a racializing and patriarchal, liberal-humanist logic that compliments Lewis’s performance only to mask the telos of that logic: to govern the performance, the representation, and the speech of African-American actress/es through a segregating dehumanization engrained in the labor relations of the theatre. Pinkins’s public speech instantiates the specific precarity of the Black voice in the US theatre, focusing the racialized pressure the New York Times, via Isherwood’s review, continues to exercise on it. AfricanAmerican theatre initially claimed its civic politics through the double inflection of the stage voice, its ability to speak both in character and for the Black community, a tendency audible in its originary moment. The 1821 Richard III by the New York African Theatre Company (AFC) not only distinctively modified the script “to reflect the local occasion of its performance” but, oriented toward the sociopolitical efficacy of the stage, the AFC used its performance of Shakespeare to underline “the claim of black citizenship in the U.S. nation” by asserting a professional, legitimizing vocalization. In a response contiguous with Isherwood’s discourse, the press reception of the production—typified by Mordecai Noah’s notorious review—represented the authority of the drama as undoing the Black actors’ performative doing, signifying the illegitimacy of their speaking by ridiculing their ability to reproduce the diction of Shakespearean whiteness: “Now is de vinter of our discontent made glorus summer by de son of New-York.” For Noah, African-American stage speech threatened the aura/lity of whiteness, the racialized social and political accessibility to culture, an inferiority marked by the AFC’s alleged “inability to understand and perform Shakespeare.” Establishing the script’s authority to locate African-American performance outside (white) humanity, in part by inaugurating what Elizabeth Dillon calls the “print version of minstrelization,” Noah’s vocal travesty speaks to the unjust rationality felicitously performed in Isherwood’s discourse as well. Both reviewers disempower the Black voice, rendering it as a site of speechlessness.24 “My Mother Courage was left speechless,” Pinkins says; yet she refuses to be bereft of speech, apparently agitating Isherwood and leading to his ostensible praise and symbolic silencing of Lewis’s “powerful voice.” This ongoing racialized procedure articulates with the deeply gendered dimensions of the acculturation of epic theatricality to the practices of

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the commodity theatre. It particularly correlates with the paradoxical absenting of Helene Weigel’s voice from the cultural force attributed to her “definitive” performances of Brecht’s (not her own) landmark dramatic roles, an absenting also resonating in feminist radicalizations of epic-dialectical theatricality, themselves reflecting the operative rationality of dramatic humanism. In feminist criticism, Mother Courage has been sharply delineated as a “demonstration” object,25 denoting Brecht’s dramatic deployment of female characters as instruments of applied Marxism, a politics naturalizing the displayed female body as the “favorite medium”26 of the affective economy of masculine desire. Correlatively re-utilized (Lennox) and re-radicalized (Diamond and Solga) within the gestic potentiality inscribed in the script, the dramatic Mother Courage has also been envisioned as a “proto-feminist” (Solga), imagined out of the text and into the contemporary social world, so to speak, as a dialectical possibility contesting the patriarchal values and sentiments of femininity, including the self-sacrificing paradigm of maternity that Mother Courage both invokes and assails.27 This kind of critique, though, expressive of dramatic humanism’s location of meaning in the textual dimension of performance, is inherently inclined to bypass the actress’s stage work, particularly the corporeal instrument of her dissent: her performing voice. In its encounter with the authorial text, this approach overwrites Weigel’s performative—material—contribution to Brecht’s epic theatre. At the intersection of body and text, the female voice on stage provides a public site upon which the patriarchal normativity aims to imprint itself and so provides, too, for that normativity’s coercive articulation and its measurement. As Mary Beard has described in relation to ancient Greek philosophy, authorized speech, the privilege to articulate the political muthos, is a logocentric technology belonging to the citizen-man, calibrated to exclude women’s speech (barking and yelling) from public audibility. As I will suggest in examining the reception of Weigel’s voice, Isherwood’s gendered (and raced) Lewis “barking the word ‘Line’” exemplifies the ongoing pressure restraining the vitality of an actress’s voice, and all that is carried by that voice, from the efficacy of epic-dialectical theatricality and its performativity. Early in her career, Weigel’s voice was a powerful corporeal instrument, intervening in, as Beard might put it, the Western, “democratic,” tradition of gendered aurality. In the 1920s, following the dictum that “a woman should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes,”28 German

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theatre reviewers characterized Weigel’s voice as “shockingly explosive,” “very loud,”29 having a “hard tone of conscious eccentricity.”30 “Yelling is her normal tone of voice,” Bernhard Diebold wrote in 1921,31 and “Weigel seems to place worth on being the noisiest actress in Berlin, her horrible yells should be stilled as quickly as possible,” Norbert Falk proposed in 1928.32 The actress’s social, gendered, even “human” sonorous intractability, though, was a performative sonority too provocative to be silenced. It just needed to be reasonably tamed: she appeared “[m]ean not from malice, but from animality.”33 Weigel’s lived, non-conforming voice could not but embody a threatening amplification and inferiorizing reduction, femininity-as-animality, a qualification manufacturing the invitation to the liberal-humanist patriarchy to exert of its own power in the form of theatrical guidance. Weigel’s idiosyncratic stage vocality was a force of titillating anxiety to the press, arousing a desire to subdue her to the reviewer, the author, his play, and/or the stage director. As Max Geisenheyner put it in 1920, “[h]er roaring, wailing, and sobbing were subterranean: a little volcano began to erupt. Words, indeed whole sentences were flung out with such vehemence that often their sense was lost.” Howling, erupting, Weigel’s voice signals an immaturity requiring advantageous acculturation: she “is a true artist who, guided by the right hands, could grow amazingly.”34 A stimulating challenge, the actress is encouraged to recognize her high “degree of vocal suppleness” and to embrace her intuited “high measure [of] the art of instrumentalized speech.”35 Through an appeal both to external and internal control, Weigel’s voice was authorized by its enfolding into the gendered register of appropriately dramatic humanity, Brecht’s writerly objectivity. Already in 1928, Monty Jacobs’s review of the Volksbühne production of Mann ist Mann (A Man’s a Man) rerouted Weigel’s stage performance as Widow Begbick into Brecht’s mouthpiece: “Brecht wants his comedy to show that life on earth is dangerous. […] But when he says it through Helene Weigel’s mouth, each theatregoer believes it instantly, with a shudder.”36 Under the pressure of mouthing Brecht’s roles throughout her career, Weigel’s sonority took on the disinterested audibility symptomatic of Brecht’s epic-dialectical performativity. Assuredly, as the English dramaturg Kenneth Tynan remarked on his visit to the Berliner Ensemble in 1961, “[w]hat Brecht prescribed, his widow, Frau Weigel, embodies.” Her “acting is earthy,” and her Mother Courage “so utterly devoid of personal assertiveness that the life of the character appears to derive from the wares she handles and the trade she plies.”37 It

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is, perhaps, representative that Weigel’s most famous vocalization was no vocalization at all: Mother Courage’s silent scream at the death of Swiss Cheese. In the 1960s, Tynan appreciated Weigel’s performance as “devotedly Brechtian,” as essential to the historical, dialectical embodiment of “the maxim that there is no such thing as a character ungoverned by a social context”; Mother Courage is not an individual “separable from history and social circumstance” but a figure whose “function determines” her action and so the degrees of social consciousness.38 Tynan’s appreciation of Weigel’s embodiment of Brecht’s prescription provides leverage for a comparative reading of Pinkins’s work on her role. Pinkins would not silence her voice, would not succumb to a “devotedly Brechtian” packaging of the experiential and argumentative intelligence of an AfricanAmerican actress to the production’s gestic objectivity. In taking voice, Pinkins locates a powerful moment of disruption of the ideological work of the theatre and of the “traditional” practice of supposedly contestatory epic-dialectical performativity. Initially welcoming Kulick’s update of Brecht’s “tale of war … to the modern-day conflagration in the Congo”39 as “an opportunity” for “[m]y art meeting my activism,” Pinkins disagreed with its timeless temporality (“years on end”) and vaguely defined (“African countries”) spatiality, insisting instead on the production’s historical and geographical specificity. She understood the conjoined positions of Mother Courage, of an African-American woman, of an African-American actress, to provide gestic leverage on the globalizing implications of the production, and their implication of the New York audience. Claiming an interconnection between national economic profitability, the Congolese wars, her professional and racial identities, and the situation of the theatre, Pinkins welcomed the opportunity to constellate this complex relationality into the dialectical fabric of the CSC epic mise-en-scène. As she remarked, “the chaplain’s line, ‘[i]f you want to sup with the devil, you need a long spoon,’” is “analogous to America’s participation in the war in the Congo through our appetites for electronic devices that require the resources of coltan, which is raped and pillaged along with the bodies of Black women and children.”40 Shifting the focus of Mother Courage and Her Children, her affirmative and relational dramaturgy interweaves the materiality of the Black female social and professional body, the mothers subject to war, the Earth subject to natural resources extraction, and the audience’s economic investment as irreducible precarities in the production’s gestic actualization. Taking an

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“epic” point of view, Pinkins calls on this Mother Courage to activate the social, political, and aesthetic moment of its staging, to foreground an interdependent us —production team, performers, characters, spectators— as inseparable from the “political economy of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo” where “terror has been abetted by the global market for columbite-tantalite, or coltan,”41 a mineral improving the function of capacitors universally used in the electronic devices driving the digital technologies that we all have in our pockets, in our cars, and that, not incidentally, drive the operation of our theatres as well. Not erasing or diminishing but underlining the injustice inscribed into African-American motherhood,42 Pinkins conceives Mother Courage less as the object of dialectical criticism than as a dialectical instrument, a subject dissenting from its objectification in the local economy of the African-American female body and in the global structure of economized warfare. Taking a geopolitical orientation, much as Pinkins locates the production’s action in relation to the contemporary economics of coltan, she enrolls her body in a complementary but alternative affective register: “Mother Courage is the epitome of every poor, undocumented, battered, trafficked and immigrant woman hustling to provide for her family however she must.” Lending her Black female body to bridge populations “differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death,” she engages what Judith Butler calls the “disavowal of those living and interdependent relations upon which our lives depend.”43 Pinkins’s Mother Courage is not the reiterating enactment of the play’s prior, potential dramatic dialectics but a site of urgently dialectical embodiment, speaking to global, local, and professional injustices through its operative materiality, not becoming the play’s representational hostage. When Black women’s bodies appear on stage, Pinkins argues, “[r]ace and sex play a pivotal role in determining who holds the power to shape representation.” A “delusional” Black Mother Courage reifies Black materiality—Black “existing and mattering,”44 Black life as human life— within an act of racialized and gendered segregation from power. Insisting that the performer’s sociopolitical and cultural lived experience—an African-American actress performing in twenty-first-century America— necessarily grounds the political and the ethical dimensions of performance, she disputes the presentation of Mother Courage within the established thematic and formal understanding of Brecht’s epic idiom, in which the play’s dialectical techne delivers “the warning that Courage has learned nothing.”45

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Although her characterization of “fearless” Mother Courage as an icon of “feminine tenacity and strength” might appear to drain Mother Courage of the irony with which Brecht is widely thought to have dressed the role, Pinkins applies both the tradition of Black American women’s history and culture and the experience of racial discrimination to remediate an absence in the dialectics of Mother Courage and Her Children today. She brings to bear less the naïve heroism of Mother Courage than a refusal to do—to perform, to embody—Mother Courage within the propriety of disembodied (i.e., white and male) dialectics, making both the actress and the character appear “as obedient to a politically useful scenario” by virtue of which Black actresses are separated from the voice of theatrical power.

“My Mother Courage Was Neutered” The African-American actress’s voice locates the intersection of the textual and the performative, writing and the body, and provides a site for the literal articulation of critique, perhaps alongside, perhaps against, “what Brecht prescribed.” The political and ethical issues animating CSC’s Mother Courage and Pinkins’s departure from it galvanize questions of agency, questions that extend to a contested sense of the proper function—and potential uses—of the text in the power dynamics of theatrical production. Pinkins’s affirmative dramaturgy, addressing the “artistic visions” of the “white theatre creative[s]” and arguing to free the “images of Black women” from being “held hostages in cages of white and/or patriarchal consciousness,” provided the focus of director Brian Kulick’s public response. Replying to Pinkins’s contestation of his vision of a “delusional” Mother Courage, Kulick mapped his professional, directorial work within the logic of dramatic humanism, as engaging the tension between doing justice to the text and rendering it for a contemporary audience. In taking up Mother Courage, Kulick was intrigued by the “basic question that I started this process with: Can you treat a Brecht play like we now treat a Shakespeare play? In other words, is a Brecht play as open as a Shakespeare text where you can set it in another time and place and see how the play speaks through the lens of that new setting?”46 Although Kulick is engaged by the impact of a “new setting” on the theatre’s work, it is finally “the play”—not the actress—that “speaks”; “the play” may speak through the lens of a new setting, but that lens merely

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magnifies alternate elements of what it already contains. Speaking as a director, licensing theatrical meaning, Kulick authorizes (and legitimizes) the evolving mise-en-scène through the living drama rather than lived experience, simultaneously asserting the priority of the dramatic to the material work of performance. To Pinkins, resetting the play in Congo does not so much magnify aspects of Brecht’s dramatic action as radically revise the work of the play as theatre, proposing a global economic thematic (coltan mining), an aesthetically topical modeling (Courage as strong Black mother), and a dissenting professional paradigm (the actress speaks for herself), all repoliticizing the formal assumptions of epic theatricality and re-staging the disposition of power in the theatrical event. Yet in dissenting from the “traditional” apparatus of institutionalized power (and alienated labor) in the theatre, the law of the director, Pinkins also asserts an “alliance” with the authority grounding dramatic humanism, with the law of the text, a tactical alliance that enables her to take a gestic stance against the interpretive hierarchies of theatrical practice. My subordinated position was most clearly communicated to me when I attempted to perform a task Brecht specifically wrote for Mother Courage: snatching a fur coat off an armed soldier’s back. The actor playing the soldier argued, “I’m a man. This is a war. She gotta respect that. I’d have to kill her!” I fired back, “Brecht wrote it. Mother Courage can snatch the fur coat and not get killed. Brecht is illustrating her as a ‘hyena of the war.’” I told the actor I was going to snatch the fur coat, and if he “had to kill me,” the play would have to end seven scenes earlier than Brecht had intended. I snatched the fur coat at the performance. The actor found a way to continue the play. However, the director said that in future I couldn’t do it because “the actor said he would kill you.” What?47

Negotiating the multiple and contesting (male) authorities at work in the theatrical production process—author, director, and actor—Pinkins invokes the text to prevent her Mother Courage from being “neutered” or, indeed, killed. Pinkins defends her Gestus —the war steals from Courage, Courage steals from the war—as a way to reproduce the work Brecht has already scripted, summoning the author in a tactical effort to register and undo interlocking hierarchical binaries of liberal-humanist, aestheticized power:

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actress/director, actor/actress, mind/body, ideality/materiality, representation/presentation, and fiction/real. Taking the perquisite of Mother Courage to transcend that of the soldier in wartime, Pinkins performs a lived Gestus in rehearsal, the scene of professional theatre-making, dramatizing the actress’s resistance to the actor (“the actor”—not, apparently, the character—“said he would kill you”) and to the director, whose authority over the mise-en-scène conventionally mediates the authority of the script to the stage. Although Pinkins invokes the justifying authority of the text in ways that may seem to contradict her radical politics as well as the ethos of Brecht’s playwriting, her seizure of the legitimating instrument of power (the text) sustains her seizure of the power to speak—as an African-American Courage—for the play. Calling on the text, Pinkins’s affirmative dramaturgy arrogates textual authority to the social-aesthetic Gestus of her performance as a working professional. She strikes a similar stance by mobilizing the legal authority of the Brecht estate to militate against the director’s interpretive decisions. I was even told that the cuts related to Brecht estate rights and permissions associated with our transposition to the Congo. So I contacted the attorney for the Brecht estate to fight for the integrity of the text that Brecht wrote. The attorney assured me that changing the Thirty Years War references to Congo War references was acceptable to the estate, and that all such matters were artistic decisions between artist and director. Well, not this artist. My Mother Courage was neutered, leaving the unbridled Mother Courage wasting away inside me.48

Warranted by “the integrity of the text,” Pinkins may seem to understand the drama against the model of Brecht’s ongoing revisions of his plays, as something final, achieved, self-enclosed, and as closed off from her agency by the director’s institutional command of the production script. Arguing that the mise-en-scène must accommodate the political and social realities of its moment of production (coltan mining; the perspective of an AfricanAmerican actress), though, her claims go beyond the subordination of the material process of labor to the reiteration of dramatic wholeness. Pinkins’s affirmative dramaturgy summons the law of the drama to transcend it in the Gestus of justice: she uses the “text” to contest dramatic privilege that serves only the structure of professional legitimation.

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Indeed, Pinkins’s tactical invocation of the integrity of “the play” as a way to justify her re-historicization of its epic possibility is perhaps cognate with the slippage between epic performativity and dramatic humanism in one of Brecht’s most suggestive performances. While the critical potential of epic performance compacted in the definitive term Gestus arises in the doing, in the dialectical activity of writing and acting and scenic space, it may also be marked or located in the script, as Brecht suggests by turning to the humanist instrumentality of the book, the Modellbücher (modelbooks). Brecht’s Modellbücher, documenting his own productions and providing instruction for later directors, imply an effort to program the distinctive work of the Gestus into performance through an alternative form of intermediating textuality, one conjoining a visual record to specific lines of the drama. Condensing these insights on the page, Brecht expands the force of the book in the theatre, negotiating a medial dialectic in which photographs gain an authority to communicate with the reader, and with actors and directors, alongside the words of the drama. The Modellbücher at once contain or represent a performance in the book and provide a book whose range of materials—the play, photographs, questions promoting a dialectical attention to the words and the images—exceed that performance, dislocating the autonomy of the book, Aristotle’s separation of the drama from the spectacle, and in turn the binary on which this independence depends. Consider the Berlau-Neher-Brecht Antigonemodell 1948, in particular its scene delivering news of Haemon’s death to Creon. On the right-hand, recto page, is a large-format photograph of Creon collapsing on the news, being borne up by two attendants. On the facing, left-hand, verso page, Brecht lists two questions and answers in sequence. Question: Answer: Question: Answer:

Should Creon, in his misfortune, awaken the sympathy of the audience? No. Was it possible for the performer to accomplish the blocking of this sympathy? Decide according to the photographs.49

Brecht appears to assign a spectatorial freedom to the reader-viewer, who should “decide” whether the image approaches the critical Gestus, one

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that frustrates and redirects the sympathetic engagement with Creon’s self-generated suffering. By codifying the process of gestic alienation, Brecht also might be said to step back from the more radical structural efficacy of the Gestus, in which the performance opens the relations between the co-performers to the possible, and then inscribes that capacity as a moment of potential significance into the fixity of print. The Modellbücher challenge the humanist separation of the book from the performance, of reading from spectating, of critical writing from critical doing, while marking without determining the critical potential of the theatrical Gestus. Describing, demarcating, depicting, and perhaps liberating the gestic performance, they negotiate the force of the book in preserving, transmitting, and renovating (if potentially docilizing) epic theatricality, a force that Pinkins’s rehistoricization of Mother Courage attempts to summon as well.

Dialectics in the Wings The theoretical stakes of Pinkins’s resistance to the authorized theatrical ensemble, her suggestive realignment of textual authority with progressive history, and her effort to subject Brecht’s epic theatricality to a gestic engagement with racial and gendered history gain material traction against the dematerializing aspects of Louis Althusser’s influential 1962 engagement with drama, performance, and ideology, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht; Notes on a Materialist Theatre.” When the Piccolo Teatro of Milan staged Giorgio Strehler’s (unnamed in the essay’s title) production of Bertolazzi’s El nost Milan at the 1962 UNESCO Theatre of Nations festival, the production was severely criticized by the Parisian critics, “depriving it,” according to Althusser, “of the audiences it deserves.” For Althusser, the critics’ condemnation of the play as merely a “‘mélodrame misérabiliste’” was unfounded, inasmuch as “anyone who has ‘lived’ the performance or studied its economy can demolish this charge. For if it does contain melodramatic elements, as a whole, the drama is simply a criticism of them.”50 Defending the production by addressing the “economy” of theatrical performance, Althusser nonetheless also assumes the reservations of dramatic humanism, for his engagement leads back to “le drame tout entier,” the drama as a whole, the medium through which “distance is produced and represented, at

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once criticizing the illusions of consciousness and unravelling its real conditions.”51 For Brecht the text is both the cause of and a means for performative inquiry by the assembled co-performers, actors and audience, an instrument to produce “a clash between two tones of voice, alienating the second of them, the text proper.”52 While Pinkins evokes the drama’s authority in order to warrant her material renovation of the clashing tones of the play’s epic theatricality in an unanticipated moment and site of history, what draws Althusser’s essay toward a dramatic humanism is its valuation of the drama “tout entier” as determining the performance and its lived experience. Although Althusser’s championing of Bertolazzi leans on the lived experience of Strehler’s production, he assigns the critical dimension of that experience to the governing influence of a “latent structure” (ideology) that, beyond the words of the drama, is a property of the author’s creation, and informs the embodiment of the mise-en-scène that realizes it. Althusser worries, in fact, that at “this point someone will want to stop me, arguing that what I am drawing from the play goes beyond the intentions of the author—and that I am, in fact, attributing to Bertolazzi what really belongs to Strehler.” The opposition he articulates between meanings implicit in the text and those generated by the performance, though, is finally “meaningless,” not because the performance reconstitutes the text but because what is “at issue here is the play’s latent structure and nothing else,” a structure in which even “Bertolazzi’s explicit intentions are unimportant.” [W]hat counts, beyond the words, the characters and the action of the play, is the internal relation of the basic elements of its structure. I would go further. It does not matter whether Bertolazzi consciously wished for this structure, or unconsciously produced it: it constitutes the essence of his work; it alone makes both Strehler’s interpretation and the audience’s reaction comprehensible.53

For Althusser, Strehler makes a dependent, derivative event; his work interprets and so realizes an ideological structure identified through Bertolazzi’s work, however unaware of that structure Bertolazzi may have been. What enables the performance to do its work (for Althusser, the overcoming of the spectator’s tragic condition) emanates from the inscribed structuring essence that determines its actualization as performance. What Althusser shares with dramatic humanism is the sense of the

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theatre’s transparency to a latent essence-structure housed in the drama, rendered visible through the harmonizing and unifying ministerial technology of the theatrical ensemble.54 The line of Althusser’s argument is that the “latent asymmetricalcritical structure, the dialectic-in-the-wings structure,” the “decentered structure” of the mise-en-scène provides for a “critique” in the theatre, by properly rendering the “disconcerting reality … which is waiting for recognition.”55 This deep structure lies beneath Bertolazzi’s words and is expressed by Strehler’s production, which provides a striking superstructural “interpretation” of it. The potential charge that he might be “attributing to Bertolazzi what really belongs to Strehler” is irrelevant for Althusser, because Strehler merely renders Bertolazzi’s dramatic framing of this structure onstage: living the performance is cast as recovering an ideological critique emanating from outside that experience. For Althusser, the antecedent structure determines the communication of the performance, and may become more perceivable through the clarifying attention of the director, even when the formal structure of the drama is altered, as Althusser implies in quoting Strehler’s program note. Inasmuch as Lessing licenses the actor’s look or gesture to correct the affective shortcomings of the drama in order to promote the spectator’s engagement with the dramatic form, so does Althusser approve Strehler’s note that “[w]e have decided to make some rearrangements in the construction of the play so as to stress this secret structure”56 ; the changes help reify and express the “secret” internal function of the work. The performance is, in this sense, always already immanent in the ideological un/conscious of the drama, a structure both independent of and dependent on the drama’s formal design, which drives its recapitulation onstage. Althusser’s structure depends on an Aristotelian attribution of the action imitated by the tragic plot to the structure of the incidents. While the plot is sufficient to activate the cathartic purposes of tragedy, catharsis is amplified if the audience perceives the “deeds and speeches” of characters to advance the work of that structure, so that “the drama seems to reproduce natural causality,” the representation of natural law.57 The natural causality captured in the propriety of necessity and probability eventuates through the rationality of the plot, which is itself the principal vehicle for the imitation of the action. Whereas for Aristotle the plot articulates the abstract action, for Althusser the drama (which, in contrast to the implications of Aristotle’s thinking, can be cut, rearranged to improve

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the perception of the action) encapsulates the concealed ideological structure determining the conduct and significance of the performance. In this sense, Althusser does not disentangle the work of theatrical performance from a mimetic dependence on the logic of drama. To the extent that the performance carries out the essence of Bertolazzi’s work (itself both the expression of and a break from an antecedent ideology), Althusser’s analysis draws the performance into the conception of the dramatic humanist ensemble, measuring the performance as a means of justly delivering the lived experience of the drama. The slippage between the author’s work and that of the performance emerges as Althusser asks not only what the author has already done with “this tacit identity” but what “the actors set to work by the Dramaturg, by Brecht or Strehler, [will] do with it.” Locating performance as at once dependent on the structure (ideology) animating the author’s design and as a distinctively institutional means of managing consciousness, Althusser’s unresolved, perhaps unrecognized, perhaps desirable slippage in “the play” points in another direction, too, as play here appears to mediate between the text (the play as the drama, the script) and its playing (the play as performance). [W]e can see that the play itself is the spectator’s consciousness, for the essential reason that the spectator has no other consciousness than the content which unites him to the play in advance, and to the development of this content in the play itself: the new result which the play produces from the self-recognition whose image and presence it is.58

Play here translates Althusser’s “pièce,” which has much the same ambivalence in French, referring at once to the dramatic text and/or to its performance. Althusser sees the spectator’s recognition as troped by that originary structure, in which “the spectator has no other consciousness than the content which unites him to the play in advance, and the development of this content in the play itself: the new result which the play produces from the self-recognition whose image and presence it is.” Perhaps it would be fair to say that the authorial drama, the play, informs the consciousness and recognition of the spectator through the process of playing, which is understood to confirm and extend its reach. Pinkins’s summoning of the authority of the text to warrant her rematerializing of the play’s performative relations is, in this sense, cognate with a similar tension in Althusser’s essay. Recognizing the dialectical element in Brecht,

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Althusser strikes a paradoxical tension between the authorizing ideological structure contained by the play and the sense that the production of a “new consciousness in the spectator” is not only “incomplete” but “moved by ... incompletion itself,” the “inexhaustible work of criticism in action,”59 what might be called criticism in the action of playing. Despite the sense that the spectator “has no other consciousness than the content which unites him to the play,” that consciousness remains incomplete, an emergent potentiality of the dialectics of this play’s playing. To strike a parallel with Étienne Balibar’s understanding that, in contemporary democracies, justice is achieved against the law and must be achieved continuously,60 performance—and perhaps especially epicdialectical performance—must, like justice, continually exceed, challenge, remake the law, both the law of the drama and the implied laws of established theatre practice. In this sense, if one understands drama (or its ideological structure) as waiting to be revealed by the lens of performance, then performance is immobilized, bound to the reiteration of the unjust laws of a theatre aestheticizing life. Asking the Brecht estate to intervene, Pinkins works to subvert the directorial practice that left her Black Mother Courage “speechless, powerless, history-less” while at the same time summoning a law—the play as “Brecht wrote it”—that her own claims to livable justice exceed as they attempt to re-instrumentalize and re-radicalize the historical and political urgency of epic theatricality, ground it in the experience/s of life. The reproductive character of theatre based on the “integrity of the text” enacts a theatre of the textual surrogation of life inherently inimical to the call for livable life, a critical immediacy developed in the gestic principle present in Pinkins’s pushing against the CSC production’s universalizing thematics and dialectics and her calling out of its raced and gendered disregard for the Black actress’s bodily materiality. Pinkins’s affirmative dramaturgy suggests that epic performatives are not immutable, seated in the spatiality of the drama. Epic performance may not strive merely to reproduce the play, to reiterate known and felt thematic certainties to assuage the spectators’ aesthetic isolation in the theatre and so to assure the drama’s commodification as theatre: in the case of Mother Courage, the expectation of a liberal-humanist, selfcontained perspective on warfare mediated apart from the temporal and geographical specificity we share with the contemporary conflicts from which we live. Instead, the biopolitical—historical, institutional, gendering, and racializing—and “timeless” practices territorializing Blackness must be engaged, as both the Congo and Mother Courage become not

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Brecht’s figures for interminable and incomprehensible warfare but figures drawing the play and the production into a critical relationality to our history. ∗ ∗ ∗ An affirmative dramaturgy does not retreat to the impersonal, to what precedes and prevents an understanding of art within the ecology of interconnected life. Instead, it interweaves critical affect and thought while it reaches for relations across material difference: difference, and the interdependence it motivates, generates political and ethical possibilities, here, alternative possibilities for remaking epic theatricality. This remaking extends from the theatre back to the realm of critical discourse, reshaping the dualist legacy of theatre in humanism. As a white, “European,” academic, I cannot assume the experience of Tonya Pinkins, but I can intersect and collaborate with her public discourse’s reframing of the unjust processes making our lives—the life we differently share and that always already exceeds us, to nod to Althusser—less livable.

Notes 1. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces Alienation Effect,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 140. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Penguin Books, 2016), Letter 26, 100; Letter 18, 64– 65. 2. Bertolt Brecht, “On Experimental Theatre,” trans. Marc Silberman and John Willett, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, trans. Jack Davis, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Victoria Hill, Kristopher Imbrigotta, Marc Silberman, and John Willett, 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 142; Bertolt Brecht, “Über Experimentelles Theater,” in Schriften 2: 1933–1942, ed. Inge Gellert und Werner Hecht, in collaboration with Marianne Conrad, Sigmar Gerund, and Benno Slupianek, vol. 22.1 of Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 553, 552. 3. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Merlin Press, 1968), 187 (my emphasis). As Kate Soper suggests, the Hegelian “synthesis of the in-itself of nature and the for-itself of humanity” depicts “the ‘human’ as able to transgress its ‘culturality’ in

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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an extension of itself with the ‘natural’, and the ‘natural’ as engulfed in the ‘humanization’ of a thought which posits from the outset its identity with the ‘human.’” This “humanist premise” lies “at the very root of Marxism,” since “it is through human practice that things are developed and transformed, and by reference to human needs and goals that the effects of that transformation are measured and assessed”; Humanism and Anti-Humanism (La Salle: Open Court, 1986), 120. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation, trans. Wendy Arons and Sara Figal, ed. Natalya Baldyga (London: Routledge, 2019), no. 7, 54; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” in Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden (München: Winkler Verlag, 1974), no. 7, 304. Étienne Balibar, “Justice and Equality: A Political Dilemma? Pascal, Plato, Marx,” in The Borders of Justice, ed. Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). Tonya Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” New York Amsterdam News, December 31, 2015–January 6, 2016, 12. Andrew Gans and Robert Viagas, “Exclusive: Tonya Pinkins Issues Unedited, Full Statement Detailing Abrupt Departure from CSC’s Mother Courage,” Playbill, December 31, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/ article/exclusive-tonya-pinkins-issues-unedited-full-statement-detailingabrupt-departure-from-cscs-mother-courage-com-377196. Mohammad Kowsar, “Althusser on Theatre,” Theatre Journal 35, no. 4 (December 1983): 461. For Brecht, both “good” and “bad” art is consequential. “Quite apart from the fact that one can be gripped by bad art as easily as by good, even if one isn’t gripped something happens to one”; “Two Essays on Unprofessional Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 150. Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism, 150. Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 2. Lynette Hunter, Politics of Practice: A Rhetoric of Performativity (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 31. On the challenges posed by the apparent closure of “orthodox Brechtianism,” see David Barnett, “Dialectics and the Brechtian Tradition: Some Thoughts on Politicized Performance,” Performance Research 21, no. 3 (2016): 14. Barnett’s discussion of the “simplification of dialectical analysis” as “teleological” is also relevant here (7). Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 32, 12. The “decorative motif” of “Blackness” extended to the

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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advertising material surrounding the CSC Mother Courage. As Pinkins put it, embellishing itself with blackness, the “poster shows my face plastered on an image of the African continent, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo highlighted” (32). Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 12 (my emphasis). Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 12. Douglas Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 192– 93. Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature, 219. Charles Isherwood, “A Little Groucho Marx, a Little King Solomon,” New York Times, May 30, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/ 31/theater/reviews/the-caucasian-chalk-circle-at-classic-stage-company. html. Isherwood, “A Little Groucho Marx, a Little King Solomon.” Werner Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 241, reprints the review of Helene Weigel’s performance in Der Weibsteufel, by Karl Schönherr, directed by Alois Großmann, Neues Theater Frankfurt, November 1919. Charles Isherwood, “A ‘Mother Courage’ Deployed to Africa,” New York Times, January 24, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/thea ter/review-a-mother-courage-deployed-to-africa.html?_r=0. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Isherwood below are to this review. Gans and Viagas, “Exclusive: Tonya Pinkins Issues Unedited, Full Statement Detailing Abrupt Departure from CSC’s Mother Courage.” Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 32. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 229. Mordecai Noah’s review is reprinted in George A. Thompson Jr., A Documentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 61–62. Sara Lennox, “Women in Brecht’s Works,” New German Critique 14 (Spring 1978): 84. Sarah Bryant-Bertail, “Women, Space, Ideology: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder,” in Brecht: Women and Politics/Brecht: Frauen und Politik, ed. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett, Brecht Yearbook 12 (Detroit, USA: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 45. See, for instance, two extraordinary essays: Kim Solga, “Mother Courage and Its Abject: Reading the Violence of Identification,” Modern Drama 46, no. 3 (2003), 341, and Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist

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32.

33.

34.

35.

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Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism, TDR 32, no. 1 (Spring 1988). Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto (New York: Liveright, 2017), 16. Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts, 249, reprints Norbert Falk, review of Titus und der Talisman, by Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, directed by Karl Etlinger, Schauspielertheater Berlin, B. Z. am Mittag, November 17, 1923; the review is translated in Sabine Kebir, “‘Shockingly Explosive’: The Young Weigel,” in Helene Weigel 100, ed. Maarten van Dijk, Brecht Yearbook 25 (Waterloo, Canada: The International Brecht Society, 2000), 147. Werner Hecht, “Die Geburt des dramatischen Genies,” Notate (April 1990), 2, quoted in John Fuegi, Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 120. Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts, 244, reprints Bernhard Diebold, review of Der König, by Hanns Johst, directed by Rudolf Frank, Neues Theater Frankfurt, Kammerspiele, Frankfurter Zeitung, January 24, 1921; the quoted sentence is translated in Fuegi, Brecht and Company, 120. Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts, 260, reprints Norbert Falk, review of Mann ist Mann, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Erich Engel, Volksbühne Berlin, B. Z. am Mittag, January 1928; the quoted sentence is translated in Fuegi, Brecht and Company, 120. Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts, 244, reprints Bernhard Diebold, review of Der König, by Hanns Johst, directed by Rudolf Frank, Neues Theater Frankfurt, Kammerspiele, Frankfurter Zeitung, January 24, 1921 (my emphasis). Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts, 242, reprints Max Geisenheyner, review of Die Ratten, by Gerhart Hauptmann, directed by Alois Großmann, Neues Theater Frankfurt, Mittagsblatt, March 8, 1920; Geisenheyner’s review of Weigel as Pauline Piperkarcka is translated in Kebir, “‘Shockingly Explosive,’” 146. Hecht, Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts, 243, reprints E.R., review of Gas II, by Georg Kaiser, directed by Arthur Hellmer, Neues Theater Frankfurt, November 3, 1920; the review is translated in Kebir, “‘Shockingly Explosive,’” 146. Similarly, Weigel was seen as a “chanteuse of Brechtian song, which rings clear and sharp from her mouth” (Manfred Georg, Volkszeitung, January 5, 1928) and as achieving “a glittering performance whose pacing and expression corresponded perfectly to the author’s intentions” (“A.A.,” Lokal-Anzeiger, n.d.); both reviews, as well as Monty Jacobs’s undated review (Vossische Zeitung ), are quoted and translated in Kebir, “‘Shockingly Explosive,’” 153.

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37. Kenneth Tynan, “Carrying the Torch,” Observer, January 29, 1961. 38. Tynan, “Carrying the Torch.” 39. Classic Stage Company’s repertoire advertisement brochure, “The 2015/2016 Season,” author’s archive. 40. Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 32. 41. Jeffrey W. Mantz, “Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 16, no. 1 (2008): 34. 42. As Dorothy Roberts argues, from the point of view of the reproductive technologies of slavery, of the “Whites’ domination of slave women’s wombs,” Black women’s mothering has been historically controlled, exploited, and denied, as the Black female body was instrumentalized in the economic profiteering of the slave owners, a dispossession still resonating in social politics, in Black women’s reproductive rights. Medical sociology, for example, pertinently demonstrates the continuing disparities in Black and white motherhood in the US, where, regardless of economic status, Black mothers and their infants are up to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers and their children. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 61. 43. Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 12. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 44. 44. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 37. 45. Ruth Berlau et al., Theaterarbeit: 6 Aufführungen des Berliner Ensembles (Dresden: VVV Dresdner Verlag, 1952), 299. 46. BWW News Desk, “Director Responds to Tonya Pinkins’ Reasons for Leaving CSC’s MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN,” Broadway World, December 30, 2015, https://www.broadwayworld. com/article/Director-Responds-to-Tonya-Pinkins-Reasons-for-LeavingCSCs-MOTHER-COURAGE-AND-HER-CHILDREN-20151230. 47. Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 32. 48. Pinkins, “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?,” 32. 49. Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher, Antigonemodell 1948, ed. and photographs by Ruth Berlau (Berlin: Gebrüder Weiss, 1949), n.p. 50. Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 95, 97. For the French original, “Le ‘Piccolo’, Bertolazzi et Brecht (Notes sur un théâtre matérialiste),” in Pour Marx (Paris: François Maspero, 1965), 129–52; “Mais il suffit d’avoir ‘vécu’ le spectacle, ou de réfléchir à son économie, pour

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

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s’en défaire. Car s’il contient des éléments mélodramatiques, le drame tout entier n’en est que la critique” (133). Contrary to Althusser, at least one reviewer saw Strehler’s El nost Milan as one of the “high spots” of the 1962 Theatre of Nations festival; see Howard Taubman, “Moscow’s Maly Theatre Offers Two Dramas in Paris Festival,” New York Times, June 21, 1962. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 111. Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces Alienation Effect,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. Willett, 138. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 105. In a reading of Althusser and Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind, Peter M. Boenisch has recently analyzed this essay to engage what he calls the potential “politicity” of performance. While he understands theatrical performance to have the potential to open “gaps” in the ideological structuring of the real, he follows Althusser in attributing that work to the agency of the “purely fictional play,” understanding performance in the discourse of dramatic humanism, in which the “politicity” relies on the aesthetic recoding of the play. Peter M. Boenisch, “‘An Actor, But in Life’: Spectatorial Consciousness and Materialist Theatre: Some Notes Apropos Althusser,” in Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy, ed. Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 85, 96–97. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 107. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 105–6n5. O. B. Hardison Jr., commentary to Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature, trans. Leon Golden (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 207. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 115. “il apparaîtra que c’est la pièce elle-même qui est la conscience du spectateur, — pour cette raison essentielle que le spectateur n’a d’autre conscience que le contenu qui l’unit par avance à la pièce, et le devenir de ce contenu dans la pièce même: le nouveau résultat que la pièce produit à partir de cette reconnaissance de soi dont elle est la figure et la présence”; “Le ‘Piccolo’, Bertolazzi et Brecht,” 151. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 115. Balibar, “Justice and Equality: A Political Dilemma? Pascal, Plato, Marx,” in The Borders of Justice, 13.

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References Althusser, Louis. “Le ‘Piccolo’, Bertolazzi et Brecht (Notes sur un théâtre matérialiste).” In Pour Marx, 131–52. Paris: François Maspero, 1965. Althusser, Louis. “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” In For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, 93–116. London: Verso, 2005. Balibar, Étienne. “Justice and Equality: A Political Dilemma? Pascal, Plato, Marx.” In The Borders of Justice, edited by Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar, 9–31. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Barnett, David. “Dialectics and the Brechtian Tradition: Some Thoughts on Politicized Performance.” Performance Research 21, no. 3 (2016): 6–15. Beard, Mary. Women and Power: A Manifesto. New York: Liveright, 2017. Berlau, Ruth, et al. Theaterarbeit: 6 Aufführungen des Berliner Ensembles. Dresden: VVV Dresdner Verlag, 1952. Boenisch, Peter M. “‘An Actor, But in Life’: Spectatorial Consciousness and Materialist Theatre: Some Notes Apropos Althusser.” In Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy, edited by Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, 81–99. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn. Translated by Jack Davis, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Victoria Hill, Kristopher Imbrigotta, Marc Silberman, and John Willett. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften 2: 1933–1942. Edited by Inge Gellert and Werner Hecht, in collaboration with Marianne Conrad, Sigmar Gerund, and Benno Slupianek. Vol. 22.1 of Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. Brecht, Bertolt, and Caspar Neher. Antigonemodell 1948. Editing and photographs by Ruth Berlau. Berlin: Gebrüder Weiss, 1949. Bryant-Bertail, Sarah. “Women, Space, Ideology: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder.” In Brecht: Women and Politics/Brecht: Frauen und Politik, edited by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett, 43–64. Brecht Yearbook 12. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. BWW News Desk. “Director Response to Tonya Pinkins’s Reasons for Leaving CSC’s MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN.” Broadway World, December 30, 2015. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/ Director-Responds-to-Tonya-Pinkins-Reasons-for-Leaving-CSCs-MOTHERCOURAGE-AND-HER-CHILDREN-20151230.

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Classic Stage Company. “The 2015/2016 Season.” Brochure. Diamond, Elin. “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism.” TDR 32, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 82–94. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Fuegi, John. Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Gans, Andrew, and Robert Viagas. “Exclusive: Tonya Pinkins Issues Unedited, Full Statement Detailing Abrupt Departure from CSC’s Mother Courage.” Playbill, December 31, 2015. http://www.playbill.com/article/exclusivetonya-pinkins-issues-unedited-full-statement-detailing-abrupt-departure-fromcscs-mother-courage-com-377196. Hardison, O. B., Jr. Commentary to Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature. Translated by Leon Golden. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Hecht, Werner. Helene Weigel: Eine große Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. Hunter, Lynette. Politics of Practice: A Rhetoric of Performativity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Isherwood, Charles. “A Little Groucho Marx, a Little King Solomon.” New York Times, May 30, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/thea ter/reviews/the-caucasian-chalk-circle-at-classic-stage-company.html. Isherwood, Charles. “A ‘Mother Courage’ Deployed to Africa.” New York Times, January 19, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/theater/reviewa-mother-courage-deployed-to-africa.html. Kebir, Sabine. “‘Shockingly Explosive’: The Young Weigel.” In Helene Weigel 100, edited by Maarten van Dijk, 140–59. Brecht Yearbook 25. Waterloo, Canada: The International Brecht Society, 2000. Kowsar, Mohammad. “Althusser on Theatre.” Theatre Journal 35, no. 4 (December 1983): 461–74. Lennox, Sara. “Women in Brecht’s Works.” New German Critique 14 (Spring 1978): 83–96. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation. Edited by Natalya Baldyga. Translated by Wendy Arons and Sara Figal. London: Routledge, 2018. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Hamburgische Dramaturgie.” In Kritische Schriften; Philosophische Schriften, 276–698. Vol. 2 of Werke in drei Bänden. München: Winkler Verlag, 1974. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Merlin Press, 1968. Mantz, Jeffrey W. “Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 16, no. 1 (2008): 34–50.

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Pinkins, Tonya. “Who Loses, Who Thrives When White Creatives Tell Black Stories?” New York Amsterdam News, December 31, 2015–January 6, 2016. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Robinson, Douglas. Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Keith Tribe. London: Penguin Books, 2016. Solga, Kim. “Mother Courage and Its Abject: Reading the Violence of Identification.” Modern Drama 46, no. 3 (2003): 339–57. Soper, Kate. Humanism and Anti-Humanism. La Salle: Open Court, 1986. Taubman, Howard. “Moscow’s Maly Theatre Offers Two Dramas in Paris Festival.” New York Times, June 21, 1962. Thompson, George A., Jr. A Documentary History of the African Theatre. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Tynan, Kenneth. “Carrying the Torch.” Observer, January 29, 1961. Voegelin, Salomé. The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

CHAPTER 6

Kivimaa’s elävä humanismi

I have spoken for many years about … humanism … . a deeply democratic religion of life: human beings must have the opportunity to evolve beyond their birth origin and beyond the confines of pragmatic conventions. Arvi Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 19721 (Theatre humanism)

I know Cocteau, but I do not love his kind … . He does not exist for other people. Other people exist for him. Arvi Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 19432 (The mainland of light and darkness)

On March 27, 1962, “President Kennedy sent his personal greetings” to the “distinguished participants in a program celebrating World Theatre Day,” instituted in that year by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), a branch of UNESCO, the New York Times reported.3 The previous year, World Theatre Day had been chosen at the ITI congress in Vienna “on a proposal from Finland, to coincide with the opening of the 6th season of the Theatre of Nations in Paris,” the Irish Times recounted.4 In 1961, the World Theatre Day was indeed proposed by the celebrated “European humanist,” the President of the Finnish Centre of the ITI, Arvi Kivimaa (1904–1984), and in 1962, its inaugural message delivered by an “outstanding international figure” celebrated for his avant-garde theatre and film work, Jean Cocteau.5 © The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_6

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The 1960s’ ITI conjunction of Kivimaa and Cocteau is intriguing. For even though both had been entangled with National Socialism, Kivimaa’s 1943 Valon ja pimeyden manner (The mainland of light and darkness) locates Cocteau as the nemesis of the “European humanism” he then propagated within a broader account uniting German, French, and Finnish artistic and national cultures in the light of the Finnish–German 1941–1944 “gun-brotherhood” with the Third Reich and its New Europe, an emerging “racist bloc against both liberal-democratic and capitalist powers of the West and the Bolshevik alternative in the East.”6 Animated by the racialized dichotomy between German/Nordic Kultur (culture) and French Zivilisation (civilization), Kivimaa finds Cocteau’s work to figure the cultural “emptiness created by civilization,” a “mechanized and soulless worldview”; Cocteau represents “a Europeanness that has not realized its obligation at the very moment when modern time has provided it with the most excellent technical means to fulfill the requirements of spirit,” the spirit of “living patriotism” arising from the purity of the “very heart of the French people” that should plant the “seed of France’s ‘new’ Europeanness.”7 Valon ja pimeyden manner’s treatment of Cocteau brings several related themes of this chapter into focus: Kivimaa uses the discourse of elävä or living Kultur less to compromise modernism than to stigmatize Jewish, Slavic, and homosexual artists—like Cocteau—along the National Socialist lines of “degenerate,” i.e., modernist and Communist, art, providing a means to redefine the notion of “love” as part of forging the racialized European humanism he engaged as an international founding member of the Third Reich’s 1941 Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung (European Writers’ Union). For “centuries,” according to Kivimaa, “love has meant for all French people, and especially for their writers, life’s most important event, life itself. The light radiating from this love explains the riddle of life.”8 Defining this radiant “love” as one of the “requirements of [living] spirit,” Kivimaa turns to Cocteau’s 1938 Les Parents terribles, figuring the play as a document of nonreproductive sexuality, a “deadly Eros,” “the loss of life,” a vision of love that is nothing more than a “strangling passion for desire out of which freedom is impossible.” While Kivimaa’s approach to Cocteau might be understood as consolidating sexuality under a Protestant heteronormativity, it also aligns with that of right-wing French critics such as Lucien Rebatet, whose review of Cocteau’s 1941 La Machine à écrire (The Typewriter) in Je Suis Partout summarized the drama as a characteristically negative portrayal of the

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French people, “‘the usual sort of pervert’s theatre,’ which epitomized ‘twenty years of abasement and the indulgence of all the depravities of body and mind.’” This “clown,” according to Rebatet, “could have been charming. At fifty, the age of full maturity for real man,” Cocteau “is no more than a degenerate simpleton.”9 As for Rebatet, so for Kivimaa, Cocteau is a “cold poet, an experimenter, a modernist for the sake of modernism, a jobber, a cynic,” whose “spirit may be defined in many ways,”10 unsavory ways given his undue involvement with Jewish and Russian artists. Marked outside biological propagation and inside Jewish and Russian collaboration, Cocteau is critically indigestible to the speculative totality of Kivimaa’s elävä humanismi or living humanism. While Kivimaa depicts Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles as a “cold” and “fulsome” “concrete cave” from which the “emptiness created by civilization stares out,” he takes the performance of actress Alice Cocéa (later arrested as a collaborator), who also directed the Paris production he allegedly saw, to incarnate “her people’s state of soul.” Like a genius playwright, who infuses his heart into the heart of his characters, Cocéa is endowed with the capacity to project her heart into Cocteau’s lifeless (mis)creations, to make out of his “pretensions and false emotions” a “sprouting garden glistening with magic flowers.” An “attraction in herself,” the “small,” “slender,” “dainty,” “pansy-like” “actress-director” compacts and genders Kivimaa’s “living patriotism,” her appropriate femininity uniting the biopolitical and the aesthetic to remediate the “spirit” of Cocteau’s lifeless drama. To Kivimaa, Cocéa “deliberately” overcomes Cocteau’s “mediocre expression and thus radically” aligns “the human image of the play” with the authentic soul of the French people, a pure or living soul Valon ja pimeyden manner charts forth. For much as “auditorium after auditorium loves” its unification with the living theatre, if there is no correspondence between the essence or spirit of the living form and the living people, the people cannot but rebel against it; they demand the “honesty” reflected by a nationally and racially identified performance.11 Kivimaa’s Valon ja pimeyden manner promotes, as Benjamin G. Martin might say, “European harmony while assuaging concerns about the ‘contamination’ of traditional national identities,” projecting a commitment to a shared culture “without ‘spiritual degeneration.’”12 Closing his 1943 discussion of Cocteau, and portraying himself in the proximity of “a famous French writer on the east side of the Rhine, near Bodensee,” an authority speaking from within both the French culture and, evocatively, the German territory, Kivimaa claims to be drawn by

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the “law of opposition” from his contemplation of the glistening snowcapped Alps to Les Parents terribles, as the Nordicized Kultur asserts itself over the degenerate French Zivilisation. Here, Kivimaa employs a rhetorical technique prominent in his writing, using an epistemically and culturally superior interlocutor to ventriloquize a racialized attack on artists and their art who, like Cocteau, do not comply to the National Socialist transcultural worldview. Such artists ought to be banned from the people’s living community through an affective mixture of popular consensus and a national and cultural authority. As Kivimaa’s discourse performs it in Valon ja pimeyden manner, his “famous” friend avers, “I know Cocteau, but I do not love his kind … . He does not exist for other people. Other people exist for him.”13 Citing the friend’s expertise seemingly frees Kivimaa from taking a racial stance, allowing him to assert knowledge and sensibility through his own learning. From within the racialized geopolitics of the 1930s and its emerging New Europe, though, Kivimaa’s anagnorisis correlates with the instructional knowledge the narrative aims to transmit to his Finnish readers, information of which he is the author, the authority on the racialized performativity that the suggestive design of his humanist discourse extends into and exerts upon the Europe it builds. As I will show in this chapter, the elävä or living or spiritual aspect of ITI/UNESCO World Theatre Day instigator Arvi Kivimaa’s wartime new Europeanness is inseparable from, indeed carries forth, racial dynamics. Attacked by Kivimaa and by the French rightwing press, and remembered by Albert Speer as without “charm and wit” at a Paris reception of the German and French cultural elite, Cocteau was nonetheless, like Kivimaa, also entangled with National Socialism, part of the Occupation’s “coterie of social collabos ” anticipating a future with the “hope of a new France in a united fascist Europe.”14 From the viewpoint of UNESCO’s postwar and Cold War international politics, the coupling of Kivimaa and Cocteau is less exceptional than symptomatic,15 throwing into relief the applied purchase of the Organization’s foundational “philosophy” synthesized by its first Director-General Julian Huxley (1946–1948) as an evolutionary, scientific trans/humanism.16 At the beginning of the 1960s (as at the end of the 1940s) Huxley’s trans/humanism provided an ideological and pragmatic platform to absorb and to retool the twentieth century’s politically compromised ideologies: National Socialism, variants of Fascism, Communism, and incommensurable humanisms. From this perspective, then,

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the concourse of Cocteau and Kivimaa may witness a capacious moment in the history of UNESCO’s applied humanism, precisely necessitating what Huxley imagined as “the reconciliation of extreme positions and the adjustment of conflicting interest” in order to forge what “[m]an cannot avoid,” namely “the progress of convergence which makes for the integration of divergent and hostile groups in a single organic world society and culture,”17 a reconciliation, I suggest, Kivimaa’s postwar “deeply democratic religion of life” only superficially emulates. Kivimaa has a distinctive place in postwar Finnish culture, and since most of the sources from which I build my argument are accessible only in Finnish, I begin by contextualizing the current critical reception of Kivimaa and his career, particularly the bypassing of his racially inflected writing before and during WWII. I consider how the rationality of a national historical methodology leads to the reductive notion of a licensed “antiJewishness” by virtue of which antisemitism in Finland continues to be denied. Subsequently, in “Humanisms’ Strangers,” I show how the operative concept of Kivimaa’s elävä teatteri (living theatre) aligned with the Third Reich’s Kultur to provide an exclusionary form of cultural production, exiling the racialized and politicized strangers—homosexual, Jewish, Slavic/Russian, and Communist/Russian artists—it derogatively created in a gesture of self-authorization. Having documented the racial inflection Kivimaa promoted in the 1930s and early 1940s, in the final section, “Postwar Internationalizing,” I take up the persistence of these attitudes in the ostensibly liberalizing humanism of his postwar publications and their engagement with UNESCO’s applied cultural humanism. While Julian Huxley’s evolutionary trans/humanism retains the archeological remains of earlier forms of expression, Kivimaa’s humanism works to obliterate the record of the past as a way (successfully) to promote himself as an “unyielding” humanist with a “requirement for humanity” continuous throughout his career.18 Rather than hailing Kivimaa or systematically avoiding (and so disclaiming) the racializing work of his writing, I explore the limits of Kivimaa’s theatre humanism at the moment when its racial diagnostics ought to be transcended, when Huxley’s accent on cultural interrelation requires not merely a national display but a focus on the “problem of the relations of cultures,” a “problem of international understanding” that refuses to generate cultural “others.”19 Kivimaa, I argue, precisely declines to occupy this position, as his wartime embrace of an exclusionary antisemitism is reanimated as a postwar “Finnish humanness,” providing the ethnicizing force of the living theatre suffusing his

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contribution to the internationalizing (and potentially rehabilitative) gesture invited by UNESCO/ITI. In the dialogue between Huxley and Kivimaa, a specific crisis of postwar applied theatrical humanism emerges: the inflection of theatre at the interface between liberal notions of a nation state’s internationalizing art export as the expression of cultural equality and an essentializing ethnic nationalism.

“Unyielding” Humanist In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the locus of Kivimaa’s “wide European humanism” was neither universal nor apolitical, nor did it support “the opportunity [for all people] to evolve beyond their birth origin and beyond the confines of pragmatic conventions,” as his 1972 Teatterin humanismi (Theatre humanism) later claimed, squaring the “appreciation of the living tradition” with his “unprejudiced, courageous, and lasting interest in art and culture.”20 Only by turning a blind eye to the wartime excisions of Kivimaa’s writing and their postwar reiterations, to assert what I have called elsewhere a “contingent humanism,”21 can Kivimaa’s European humanism, sometimes conflated with his internationalism, be unproblematically seen to conjoin his 1920s’ aspirations of European modernism to his efforts to integrate Finland into postwar Europe, as has been customary in Finnish literary and theatre studies, which simply suspend the racialized transcultural agenda he pressed before and during WWII.22 As the antisemitism engrained in Kivimaa’s humanism has been painstakingly bypassed in theatre scholars’ accounts of his career today, it also continues to be reduced, in historical studies, to a “resigned indifference” to a naturalized “anti-Jewishness” common among “German-sympathizing Finns” before and during the war, as the historians Markku Jokisipilä and Janne Könönen argued in 2013.23 Setting the apolitical universalism and the “anti-Jewishness” Kivimaa’s humanism animates apart from institutional and transnational “antisemitism,” though, not only reflects the academic acceptance of Kivimaa’s retrospective and rehabilitative legitimization in postwar Finland. Distorting the character of his written work, it also points to the insufficient application of national methodology and its academic product, national/ized history and historiography. Rather than investing in ignoring or disclaiming the racializing work in Kivimaa’s wartime and postwar writings, at once making its implications inaccessible and entangling “science” (as Huxley might say) into their affectations, I turn to Kivimaa’s wartime and postwar publications

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to examine how a racialized and racializing rationality grounds his teatterin humanismi (theatre humanism) and elävä teatteri (living theatre), apparently—but only apparently—approximating to the role of Huxley’s applied humanism in the international arena of UNESCO. The destruction of Finnish governmental archives at the end of WWII is often adduced as an excuse for leaving the wartime legacy of Finnish– German cultural collaboration and of antisemitism in Finland unresolved. Keeping this claim in mind, it is important to recognize that Kivimaa’s work has long been available and accessible in published sources, sources which could have been, but were not, utilized to address the “national” past and its involvement with National Socialism. One reason for this scholarly omission perhaps arises from Kivimaa’s own rehabilitative procedures. Some of Kivimaa’s postwar publications claim to reprint his wartime prose without significant revision; consulting both versions, though, reveals the postwar suppression of the National Socialist ideology he had earlier pursued. Alternatively, Kivimaa also asserts a continuity in his “humanism,” one that methodically upholds an ignorance of the implication of his 1930s’ and 1940s’ writings in Third Reich cultural politics. Along these lines, much as Kivimaa’s 1937 Teatterivaeltaja (The theatre wanderer) explicitly affirms that there is no reason to abandon the “requirements of the living theatre [elävä teatteri]” introduced in his 1929 travelogue Helsinki, Parisi, Moskova (Helsinki, Paris, Moscow), so his 1952 Näyttämön lumous (The enchanted stage) and 1972 Teatterin humanismi (Theatre humanism) resynthesize the Third Reich’s “European humanism” of his 1942 Eurooppalainen veljeskunta (European brotherhood) and his 1943 Valon ja pimeyden manner (The mainland of light and darkness) to approximate to UNESCO’s postwar cultural internationalism.24 The reassessment of Kivimaa is made more challenging by the extent to which the objectives of and shifts in his wartime and postwar inter/national humanisms have been absorbed by a national methodology of historical interpretation to the geopolitical—geographic and demographic—circumstances of Finland throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century: the vicissitudes befalling Finland from the 1939 Hitler–Stalin Pact; the 1939–1940 defensive Winter War against the Soviet Union; the 1941–1944 Continuation War in alliance with the Third Reich; the 1944 separate peace treaty with the Soviet Union stipulating the conditions for the withdrawal of German troops stationed in northern Finland eventuating in the Lapland War against the Third

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Reich; the 1945–1946 responsibility trials, pressured by the Soviets and the Allies, concerning the political leadership’s role in promoting the Third Reich alliance; the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance between Finland and the Soviet Union (expired in 1991); the postwar “neutrality” reluctantly responsive to Soviet influence over foreign and domestic affairs until the collapse of Soviet Union in 1989.25 Rather than considering the ideological complexity of Finland’s WWII re/positioning, as John Sundholm clarifies, a prominent statesanctioned postwar memory politics accentuates Finland’s precarious position as a geographically strategic small nation to avoid the “embarrassing question” of the alliance with the Third Reich by transferring—through history and historiography—“Finland from a territorial to a personal category” of agency, constituting “the nation as a victim, and even as a ‘moral witness’” to a national “impossible ‘choice.’”26 Kivimaa’s postwar rehabilitation silently emulates this anthropomorphizing mapping. Alongside these political alignments, Kivimaa held significant institutional positions both in Finland and in Germany in the prewar and wartime period, including in the Finnish army propaganda unit. Even though, or perhaps rather precisely because, his postwar prose pointedly ignores or denies the cultural politics of his wartime discourse, it closely tracks with Sundholm’s account of Finland’s affective reduction to the nation as victim of and witness to historical crises. Having taught Finnish language and culture at the University of Greifswald (Germany) during the period 1932–1934, Kivimaa then stepped into a series of leadership positions in artistic and cultural institutions: from 1937, he served as the Director of Tampereen Teatteri (Tampere Theatre), and from 1940 to 1949, as the Director of Helsingin Kansanteatteri (Helsinki Folk Theatre). At the outset of the Continuation War (also termed the Finnish– German “brotherhood”), he was an international founding member of the Third Reich’s 1941 Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung (European Writers’ Union), imagined to replace PEN. With the German military setbacks on the eastern front in 1943–1944 and Finland’s military and political reorientation, Kivimaa’s associations were reoriented as well, allowing him to occupy significant posts of inter/national cultural and artistic leadership after the war, serving from 1950 to 1974 as Director of the Finnish National Theatre and from 1957 to 1965 as Co-President of the ITI and President of the ITI’s Finnish Centre. Akin to his founding membership in the Third Reich’s European Writers’ Union, he was an initial member

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of the Finnish National Commission for UNESCO (1957–1970), and from 1965 to 1968 its Vice-Chairman; after the war, he was active in PEN. As he played an important institutional role in the “branding” of Finland during the war in the Finnish army propaganda unit, both during and after the war Kivimaa used his leadership roles to give voice to cultural and artistic policy. According to Louis Clerc, Kivimaa was among those who “after 1944 gathered into an organization of public relations specialists, Tiedotusmiehet ry,” literally, the Information Men Association, officially the Society of Public Relations. Kivimaa articulated his humanism among these onetime propaganda- and now information-experts, personalities—writers, politicians, and academics—invested after the war in coordinating a state-centralized “representation of the nation,” a coordinated inter/national policy “selling Finland’s image to foreigners,” as “an essential aspect of ‘national enlightenment’ and as a duty each Finn had to fulfill.”27 Asserting Finland’s kinship with the Third Reich during WWII, Kivimaa projected Cold War Finland’s political neutrality visà-vis the Soviet Union for foreign audiences and fashioned a sense of national self-definition for the domestic Finnish public, simultaneously gaining access to the machinery for his own quiet rehabilitation and its inter/national dissemination. Kivimaa’s postwar humanism articulates with, yet is irreducible to, UNESCO’s humanist internationalism. Offering a site for postwar reconciliation, Huxley’s trans/humanism was relational, seeking to prevent future cultural conflict and violence by rendering national cultures as mutually interpenetrating and internally diversified formations. Kivimaa’s remediation of his wartime racialized humanism into UNESCO’s sphere of influence continued to code a nationalized monoculture as inwardly and outwardly policed, in tension with Huxley’s requirement that humanism not generate culturally indigestible others for the sake of cultural privilege or cohesion. At once marking a deliberate effort to produce and to mask the politics of its earlier aims, Kivimaa’s strategically deployed humanism echoes Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense that humanist ideology represents “a thought that does not critique or think through its own provenance and its own relation to reality.”28 Less a philosopher than a humanist ideologue, Kivimaa understands that humanism is a powerful inter/national tool; if skillfully instrumentalized, it forecloses internal and external critique, functioning as the “machine par excellence

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through which the community produces its meaning of itself,” postulating a “meaning for man” and identifying “this meaning with the system that produces meaning in the community, with the ‘we’ through which the community speaks.”29

Humanisms’ Strangers Kivimaa’s humanism remains traced by the “line which cancels” it, as Stuart Hall might put it, nonetheless permitting its values “to go on being read.”30 Systematically exiling Jewish and Russian strangers from his living theatre, Kivimaa’s wartime writing shared in the National Socialist production of “the new human type” (ein neuer Menschentyp, uusi ihmistyypi) projecting the outcome of European “historical” necessity, a stratagem dependent on its antitype, “the Jew.” From the perspective of the Third Reich’s New Europe, state borders are permeable, but the borders between races are not. Having traveled to Weimar for the inaugural meeting of the Axis’s European Writers’ Union in 1941, Kivimaa not only documented his impressions in the 1942 Finnish-language travelogue Eurooppalainen veljeskunta: Runoilijamatka halki Saksan (European brotherhood: A poet’s tour through Germany)31 ; his 1943 Valon ja pimeyden manner (The mainland of light and darkness) returned to this event, suggestively interweaving Weimar Classicism’s humanism with National Socialist biopolitics. In Weimar, in the garden of the Haus Elephant, Kivimaa remembers, in this very moment, I felt I possessed the spirit of the birthplace of European humanism more fully than ever before. “More light”: whatever Goethe may have meant with these words at the moment of his death, they surely express his being. Everything that we make part of the totality of the concept of Europeanness is a spiritual light—life-creating and lifemaintaining, warm and radiant. But it must also be tough and merciless: bacteria killing, deception destroying—the brightness of truth. The task of such light is to give fearlessness to men.32

Kivimaa will associate his postwar humanism not with death but with life. Here, though, the “brightness of truth” sustaining “European humanism” is a declaration of a racialized we invested in the cocreation of

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transnational Kultur, triangulating raced biology, life, and art as an instrument for ostracizing a Jewish pestilence so familiar, it seems, that it need not be named. In 1943, the lives of some were discursively and visibly at stake. As Hitler’s Mein Kampf charted it, “Jewish activities in the press, in art, in literature and in theatre” were nothing other than “a moral pestilence, with which the public was being infected”; “[o]ne ought to realize that for one Goethe, Nature may bring into existence ten thousand such scribblers [Jewish authors of ‘artistic products’] who act as the worst kind of germ-carriers in poisoning human souls.”33 This sense of a Jewish pestilence was not invisible but operative across the Third Reich in ways that realized Hitler’s metaphor in political and cultural enactment: individual couples caught in interracial relationships—in the Rassenschande (race disgrace) or the Blutschande (blood disgrace)—were shamed through public displays34 ; the Jewish population, branded by the Star of David and subject to en masse collections and deportations, was made to perform its “inferiority” on the streets. This enforced precarity, illuminated in the “brightness” of National Socialist “truth,” was rationalized in the public verbal discourse and social affectivity in which Kivimaa’s quotation participates, drawing on two antisemitic—epidemic—images, both demanding a radical treatment and cure: a medical metaphor, bacteria motivating the fear of infectious disease afflicting the transnational European body, and an antitheatrical metaphor casting the Jews as protean actors deceptively threatening that body’s racial integrity. Kivimaa’s “European humanism” is a contemporaneous performative. Kivimaa’s theatrical humanism performs more than a discursive alignment with the National Socialist appropriation of Weimar Classicism’s conception of dramatic theatre, as he ascribes a racialized ethical function to the elävä teatteri or living theatre. Even though he would maintain that his living theatre transcended history and politics, the “living word” and “living poetry,” repeated phrases informing Kivimaa’s theatre humanism, gather into themselves notions of racial (during WWII) and ethnic (after WWII) national purity, and instrumentalize that purity toward the formation of the relevant European community. Both in its emphasis on the living word and in its notion of a national exclusiveness, the living theatre’s “spiritual light—life-creating and life-maintaining, warm and radiant,” is not a means of (Jewish, Slavic, gay, etc.) inclusion but instead elevates the exclusive, “Nordic,” “new human type” emerging from the Third Reich.

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Contemporary German dramatic art regards as its most important task to make the living word [elävän sanan, das lebende Wort ] the living poetry [elävän runouden, die lebende Dichtung ], into the spiritual power of its hundreds of thousands of listeners. In this way, it fulfills an enormously responsible cultural-social task, whose importance during the war has increased rather than decreased. More urgent than any other form of the performing arts, the theatre has made the great national poetry the firm possession of the people. With this cultivating work, it continues the true tradition, and the foreigner can only be envious of its vitality, its capability to further life [elinvoimaisuus, Lebensfähigkeit ].35

Within the frame of “war,” of the Continuation War, mobilizing “vitality” to lend the theatre the power to perform a future-oriented responsibility toward life is neither an apolitical nor a dissenting move but an encouragement to identify with the desirable, even enviable “cultural-social task” pursued by the Third Reich. Recalling the accents of Schiller, by appealing to the racially privileged reader’s Rührung, this affecting rhetoric prompts a desire to “feel into,” to live into the vital concerted, transnational community this passage cocreates.36 Although disacknowledged in Finnish history and theatre studies, Kivimaa’s promotion of antisemitism was woven into his wartime “European humanism,” albeit rather silently. For his living theatre co-sculpts this looming European community by chiseling away its others, the Jewish and Russian theatre professionals, whose art cannot live up to the living force of “good”—“significant,” “valid,” “competent,” and “great”— plays. To Kivimaa, the play, the dramatic “word,” is what “humanizes the synthesis of the theatre, making it a living life,”37 a life endangered by modernist, implicitly degenerate forms of theatrical expression, which reciprocate the inferior nature of their makers. Living defines an autoempathetic circle of identification, inscribing an essentializing relation between the drama and the theatre artist. An actor might transcend or remake a problematic play through her/his spirit (as Cocéa did), but as an ideal rule, the essence of the drama guides the responsive living spirit of the actor, designer, director, or manager. Since the imprint of the nature of the artist, of the drama, and of the stage is self-enclosed, an artist’s experimentation with inappropriate or deviant styles reveals her/his strangeness to the living art, which is conceptualized as racially resonant only with the appropriate living community. Even though he would maintain that his timeless living theatre transcends history and politics, Kivimaa’s humanist censure of modernist

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works imports a racial quality into criticism through the ways in which style reveals the artist’s Jewish nature, an incompatibility with Kivimaa’s notion of nationalized, racially harmonized European, life. If the artist is too much a “genius” and therefore “too independent,” as Kivimaa wrote of (the Jewish) Max Reinhardt in 1937, “he does not want to be subjected to the play, but submits the play” to his own idiosyncratic impulses. Cast as the violator of the living word, Kivimaa’s Reinhardt is a protean director of “emotional forms,” made manifest in a stage of chaotic styles wild with “words, movement, and color.”38 The director’s modernist staging is the consequence of his native subjectivism: Reinhardt is predetermined—by nature/race—to do violence to “the play.” The antisemitic undercurrent here can be clarified against the backdrop of the 1941 Unbekanntes Theater: Ein Buch von der Regie (Unknown theatre: a book on directing), which Kivimaa owned in its 1943 second edition (his copy is preserved in the archives of the Helsinki Theatre Museum). Blanck and Haufe’s popular book reconstructs the history of German theatre to the rise of the National Socialist stage director, expunging directors and directorial approaches that do not accord with its raced dramatic telos. In their elaborate taxonomy, Blanck and Haufe approve of the Schauspielregisseur (the director of the play), the Dichterregisseur (the poetic director), and the Wortregisseur (the word director), while disapproving of the Überregisseur (the excessive, chameleon-like, spectacular director), exemplified for them by Reinhardt.39 The racial flavor of Kivimaa’s depiction of Reinhardt may not be immediately apparent, for Kivimaa acknowledges the director as a “Renaissance man,” in a “creative, positive view” and as “a cultural worker within the German language sphere.”40 This approbation, however, does not eliminate a qualifying National Socialist differentiation consistent with the regime’s ideological appropriation of aesthetic idealism, notably Schiller’s discrimination of the “man lacking in form” who “despises all grace of diction as corruption,” as lacking the “taste” to pay “heed only to form.”41 Kivimaa’s depiction of Reinhardt’s theatre might also seem to trace Schiller’s turn against artistic egoism, but again, the cultural idealism of the nineteenth century is overwritten by the antisemitic topoi of the “inflation of subjectivity” (Inflation der Subjektivität ), as Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser put it in his 1935 Das Volk und seine Bühne (The Volk and its stage)42 and of the “insatiable chameleon-like artists” (unersättlicher Verwandlungskünstler)43 Joseph Goebbels condemned in

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favor of those possessing “the German spirit, German feeling, and German thought,”44 attitudes echoed in Kivimaa’s exiling of Reinhardt from his living theatre. Kivimaa’s antisemitic discourse becomes more explicit when he turns closer to home, to Scandinavia. He uses the “Swedish-Jewish Isaac Grünewald” to instruct his Finnish readers on the relationality between art, race, and nation, on how to perceive modernist design as disclosing the proclivity of Jewishness to vitiate both the audience and “the heart of the theatre,” the actor-as-living-word. What will happen if a set designer will be allowed to freely materialize his own painter imagination in the theatre, can be best shown on the case of the Swedish-Jewish Isaac Grünewald: his decorative-fantastic stage images unroll on the auditorium splendid color masses and the wild, violent lines of the circles. As a result, the balance is broken, the actor is drowned in the stage image’s screaming, blatant fortissimo, and the word loses its dominant ascendancy.45

Aligning a modernist aesthetic with racial violence, Kivimaa imagines the superior word to be vulnerable to the power of the inferior image cunningly devised by the pointedly Swedish-Jewish artist. Grünewald’s imagistic stage design breaks the “balance” essential to the living theatre; its power transforms the stage into a “screaming, blatant fortissimo” that would drown “the actor” if its predestined objective—to strip the word of its priority, and so theatre of its living soul—were to be realized. The art of literature vs. art of the theatre, or the word (theatre as drama) vs. the image (theatre as stage), is a well-established antimodernist binary in early twentieth-century humanist criticism, reframing an Aristotelian tension between dramatic language and theatrical opsis.46 Yet “-Jewish” Grünewald is singled out less for his modernism than for the racial strain impelling it, a force violating the völkisch dramatic law of the “living theatre,” in part by transforming an essentially verbal medium into one that unnaturally privileges the visual. If theatrical performance is to be just, it must correlate to the law of the living word; if it is living, it is “truly full of life,” not “lebensfern” (far from life, lifeless), not “blutlos ” (bloodless), as Reichsdramaturg Schlösser stressed.47 Instead of highlighting the prestige of the national-European, Kivimaa’s hyphen, simultaneously additive and privative, participates in the interplay of race and form: it “is precisely the spirit that creates the form,”

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Schlösser continued, and “precisely because the spirits one admits are not easily removed, it is a question of asking which spirits are to be admitted” to the “internationalism” envisioned to sustain the Third Reich’s New Europe.48 As the Munich theatre professor Artur Kutscher put it in 1936, exemplifying the fusion of an anti-modernist with a National Socialist notion of Kultur, “if the stage is treated as a painter’s canvas, or as a space for sculpture, it has been arbitrarily subjected to the transfer of a foreign law,” a law that is “Kultur-foreign,” a “Volk-foreign hoax.”49 Kivimaa’s hyphenation, “Swedish-Jewish,” correlates with Kutscher’s “Kultur-foreign,” extending the Reich’s exterminatory linkage of race and nation to the sphere of culture, a linkage that echoes in Kivimaa’s postwar writings: “A living internationalism can be born only through national values,” he remarked in 1955.50 The racial origins of theatre makers’ have implications for their capacity to engage with living national culture, which continued to be racialized in Kivimaa’s postwar publications, reprinting and adapting some of his wartime essays. One of them, “Sodan-aaton teatterivaellus” (A theatrewandering on the eve of war), from his 1943 Valon ja pimeyden manner (The mainland of light and darkness), is included in his 1952 Näyttämön lumous (The enchanted stage). Even though the essay is silently cleansed of the overt hailing of Hitler’s military advances, such as the invasion of Danzig and Holland, along with any reference to the “Johtaja,” the Führer himself, its postwar version testifies to the ways Kivimaa’s revisionist effort remains true to his wartime antisemitism, as the “republication” collapses racialized into ethnicized national identity.51 Centering on France, the essay considers, and degrades, two prominent theatrical figures, Georges Pitoëff (1884–1939), the Russian-born director who pursued his career in France, and Philippe de Rothschild (1902–1988), the multitalented banking scion, Grand Prix driver, playwright, and theatre and film producer. In his portrait of Pitoëff, Kivimaa ignores the director’s 1927 founding membership in the cartel of Paris’s most significant, and text-oriented directors, the Cartel des Quatre—alongside Louis Jouvet (1887–1951), Charles Dullin (1885–1949), and Gaston Bâty (1885–1952)—preferring to suggest instead that as a Russian, Pitoëff could make no authentic theatrical contribution to the life of French people. Unsympathetic to Pitoëff’s plight, Kivimaa is committed to the racial trope of “the Asian-Slavic-Jewish slave type,” in 1943 as in 1952 omitting to note that Pitoëff (like Igor Stravinsky or Arthur Adamov) had fled the Russian Revolution.52 Kivimaa predicates Pitoëff’s

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achievement not on his organic bond with a natural audience, his individual agency, nor his ability as a director, but on the faintly suspicious fact that he “acquired for himself a position in one of the power countries of European civilization” and that the “corresponding moves” behind his success, moves which created “all the benefits of money,” will never be disclosed. Even though the 1952 “reprint” edits out the undermining claim that Pitoëff’s arrival in Paris was due to “certain Swiss friends,” it nonetheless retains the slight to Pitoëff’s artistic credibility and the suspicion that Pitoëff’s “Russian” origin compromises the vitality of his work in France. Framing Pitoëff’s success as “somewhat isolated” and as due to an unnamed sponsor, Kivimaa aims to evoke both gossipy curiosity and cultural suspicion, tapping into the Third Reich’s racial profiling of the Jewish-Bolshevik type.53 Kivimaa’s tactical acknowledgment and withdrawal of Pitoëff resonates with his account of Reinhardt, as it does with the concerns of the 1988 national UNESCO seminar (held four years after Kivimaa’s death), “Human Rights in Finland,” which concluded that racialized nationalism, operative in the 1950s educational material fashioning Finnish social and cultural identity, is still at play in statements privileging an “uncommon”—even “somehow isolated”—individual as transcending a stereotyped group, only to reinforce the power of the group stereotype itself.54 Kivimaa’s Pitoëff underlines this paradigm: the non-native artist transcends and so must be made to confirm the prejudices characterizing the type. Chastising the French people for the cosmopolitan openness that allows foreigners to succeed, Kivimaa’s 1943 Valon ja pimeyden manner takes Pitoëff and Rothschild to dramatize how, when exploited by foreign elements, the nation comes to witness its own victimization. The verbatim reprint of Kivimaa’s account of “Baron Rothschild’s” construction of the Parisian Théâtre Pigalle 55 in the 1952 Näyttämön lumous is also suggestive, as the essay does not seem to anticipate the Finnish public’s resistance to the antisemitism it shadows forth, nor does it anticipate that antisemitism would do reputational damage to Kivimaa as an “unyielding” humanist56 in the post-Nuremberg trials era. The stereotyping of Rothschild as motivated by greed, not by a disposition toward the ennobling values of art, is embodied by the extravagance of his state-of-the-art theatre, a self-reflecting “wonder,” a “cold-groomed splendor” predetermined to fail, as it is inherently incapable of making an essential appeal to French audiences. In a racialized gesture recalling Die

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Rothschilds (The Rothschilds ), one of three notorious films of National Socialist antisemitic propaganda, alongside Jud Süß (Jew Süß ) and Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew),57 Kivimaa ventriloquizes Rothschild to characterize the Pigalle as an instrument for seizing the French peoples’ money: the “Pigalle-theater … is what you get from us as a way to rid you of your money.” As with Pitoëff, Rothschild is alien to and so estranged from French nativity, racially conditioned as incapable of building a national cultural institution in which “the hopes and dreams of theatre people would be fully realized.”58 Rothschild’s portrait surely evokes Schiller’s concern that those who “know no other standard of value than the trouble of acquisition and the palpable profit” are incapable of “appreciating the quiet work of taste.”59 But it also aligns with the dominant features of the National Socialist stereotype: the excessive, money-hungry, and spectacle-obsessed Jew. See Mein Kampf. Kivimaa’s vision of Rothschild ramifies a cultural binary in the consequential distinction it draws between Rothschild’s glitzy Pigalle and Gaston Bâty’s “up-to-date Trocadéro-palace.” Bâty left the directorship of the Pigalle after only a brief period in Rothschild’s employ, the reader is told, because he “felt himself a stranger” to its environment, which lacked the “noble simple beauty” of the Trocadéro, a “Montparnassetheatre” in tune with the “downright” French audience’s innate “love” for a “living art” that money cannot buy. The antisemitism that Kivimaa’s living humanism extends to Rothschild is reciprocally underlined by his moderate, bookish, literary humanist antitype Bâty, in whom praxis and academic research, theatre experiment and theatre history, performance and literature, social and political responsibility creatively culminate: he is a “lover of the people.” As he took over Trocadéro, Bâty brilliantly demonstrated what a theatre-house responsive to the theatre spirit and its pursuit means for an active stage and how it needs to be protected, so that a favorable atmosphere for art would remain in this environment. The Montparnasse-theatre foyer’s collection of historical theatre images and writings, as well as its small bookstore tell of a man who as a theatre artist has been an experimentalist and literary scholar, a lover of the people, and in that way finally a social politician.60

In the liberating impulse of Kivimaa’s living theatre, the native stage doubling for the native people needs to be freed from interlopers like Rothschild and Pitoëff; indeed, it “needs to be protected” from them. In 1943,

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as well as in 1952, Rothschild, like Reinhardt, hardly needed to be labeled as Jewish; relying on the sociopolitical resonance of suggestive stereotyping, Kivimaa’s discourse enacts a strategy central to his theatre humanism, in which the prescriptive living theatre justifies a censure of modernist works, importing a racial quality into criticism of the ways style and design invariably reveal the artist’s nature: Jewish, Russian, authentically French, Finnish, European. Kivimaa’s racially self-enclosed notion of living art dramatizes a purchase on innate purity that must be secured within individual cultures, a cultural essentialism irreconcilable with Julian Huxley’s humanism, a difference particularly visible in relation to Huxley’s roughly contemporaneous writings, the coauthored 1935 We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems and his 1941 Uniqueness of Man. While the former is concerned with dissociating culture from a National Socialist racial genesis (Huxley was one of the most outspoken critics of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the biologized race lore sustaining them), the latter argues that racializing differentiation arose as a cultural effect of the colonial expansions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which “differences between human types” were assigned inappropriate value within the structure of a colonizing gaze, producing scientifically unjustified notions of human “racial” hierarchy that “impressed themselves upon general thought.”61 Of course, Huxley’s “scientific” social eugenics resonate with racism,62 and jibe, too, with Kivimaa’s understanding of the “fundamental biological principles of life.”63 In the era Huxley shared with Kivimaa, though, his evolutionary trans/humanism refused the Darwinian paradigm of “individual competition in nature” appropriated by National Socialism in favor of a model more in line with Fabian socialism and Henri Bergson’s creative evolution, combining biological with intellectual progress so that the relationality between different agents—different members of a species, a community, and a society—might contribute to a “self-defined evolution, guided by our own discoveries in science,” technology, and art.64 Rather than protecting the privileged European nations from Jewish pollution as Kivimaa had done, Huxley specifically saw the “reduction ad horrendum of racism by Nazi Germany,”65 “the Nazis’ belief in the superiority of socalled ‘Aryan’ science over ‘Jewish’ or ‘non-Aryan’ science” to lead “to a degeneration of science,” precisely because “so many of their leading thinkers and scientists were not ‘Aryans’ and were either suppressed or fled into exile.”66

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Arguing from a position that subordinates Finland’s alliance with the Third Reich to the necessities of its precarious location between two “evils,” the notion of nation-as-individual-victim is apparently reversible: Finnish academic scholarship has also understood Kivimaa’s wartime ideological alliances as an unavoidable consequence of national historical circumstance, as though Kivimaa’s humanism were the only possible response to the nation’s political jeopardy. And yet, some of Kivimaa’s Finnish contemporaries working on the international scene did deploy “humanism” differently, underlining the intentionality of Kivimaa’s racialized discourse in WWII, of its persistence, and of its adjustment in the Cold War. Lauri Viljanen’s (1900–1984) 1936 Taisteleva humanismi (A fighting humanism) employed humanism to debunk the National Socialist antisemitism he pointedly saw taking hold in Finland. Unlike Kivimaa’s, Viljanen’s humanism draws Jewish authors such as Jacob Wasserman into the defining center of European cultural heritage. Criticizing the convergence of racism and national identity, Viljanen explicitly calls attention to the antisemitic image of German propaganda—“the Jew” as both “a metropolitan, unscrupulous, tradition-destroying ‘intellectual’” and the epitome of the merchant class—that was, in the 1930s’ Finland, already defining “our one-sided views of Jewishness.”67 More to the point, Viljanen also figures in the 1943 war diaries of the Finnish writer and public intellectual Olavi Paavolainen. Once the guest of the Third Reich, upon his return to Finland, Paavolainen turned against the National Socialist regime. Identifying the influence of pro-German propaganda in Finland, he was particularly concerned by its effect on Finnish youth: they picked up Viljanen’s “fighting humanism” as a mocking label—“the fighting humanist”—to stigmatize those “moderately thinking teachers” who failed to hew closely enough to the ideological demands of the Third Reich.68 That Kivimaa’s contemporaries recognized a spectrum of Finnish humanisms in the 1930s and 1940s is documented by another 1936 text, an article introducing the literary landscape of Finland to Englishspeaking readers by the well-known Finnish writer Mika Valtari (sometimes Waltari). Valtari positioned Viljanen as the representative of “a purely humanistic culture” and Kivimaa in closer proximity to those Finnish poets “inspired by the White Idea and by its offspring, the Finnish Fascism.” A “refined and sensitive poet,” Kivimaa is featured as having

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“found relief from the mechanized life of the cities in the mighty countryside and landscapes of the interior province of Tavast.”69 Kivimaa embodies the poet whose flight from the industrial into the rural environment resonates with both Finnish White nationalism (the conservative Whites won the Finnish civil war against the Communist Reds in 1918) and with the Third Reich’s Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), an ideology used in German–Finnish bilateral relations during WWII to superimpose Finnishness on German racial discourse, and to authorize Finnish expansion into a Greater Finland to the east.70 Kivimaa figures in Valtari’s convenient ideological map of Finnish literature as closer to fascism than to humanism; in this context, a moment in Eurooppalainen veljeskunta (European brotherhood) is particularly suggestive in how it repositions the “neutrality” of Kivimaa’s authentic Finnishness in the early 1940s. His central chapter “Towards New Europe” is framed by a poem by the German soldier-poet Hans Baumann, Talonpojan rukous (The farmer’s prayer). Although the design of the book does not claim a syntax between the poem and the essay, the conjunction of the Blut und Boden thematics of the poem and Kivimaa’s rationale for a New Europe sustains his enthusiasm for the rural nature he sets in the service of a new future for Finland, a future in which humanism is inseparable from its racialization: “New Europe … Finland has struggled on its behalf without forsaking heavy casualties guaranteeing itself an eternal place within it. How spiritually close to each other are the countries fighting today to guarantee the future of Europe!”71 It was—as the examples of Viljanen, Paavolainen, and Valtari suggest—evidently possible to recognize and to oppose the National Socialist import of antisemitism within the cultural, political, and international contexts of the 1930s’ and 1940s’ Finland, offsetting Jokisipilä and Könönen’s claim to understand wartime antisemitism, including Kivimaa’s, as the “resigned indifference” of the “German-sympathizing Finns.”72 Given the liminality of the New Europe up to 1943, Kivimaa’s instrumentalization of the living theatre to identify and exclude his Jewish theatre contemporaries and Russian émigrés from their institutional positions directly undermines the assertion of an “anti-Jewishness” that doesn’t amount to antisemitism; and it sharply undermines the notion of systematic racial discrimination of the kind Kivimaa pursued in his writings as reducible to individual rather than to state and collective biases.

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Postwar Internationalizing The 1960s’ World Theatre Day is Kivimaa’s troubling, living, legacy, part of a “rehabilitative” strategy exemplified by his 1972 Teatterin humanismi, a book of tactical importance to Kivimaa’s national cleansing embraced by Finnish academia. Presented as the series of speeches given annually to the Finnish National Theatre staff from 1950 to 1971, assembled by Ritva Heikkilä but appearing under Kivimaa’s name, the collection hinges on a central group of 1961–1962 essays which coordinate with the inaugural World Theatre Day, recontextualize Kivimaa’s humanism, and provide a point of conceptual organization for the volume as a whole. The postwar necessity to confront, albeit indirectly, antisemitism sustains a striking moment in the 1961 essay entitled “Taiteilijan ja ihmisen tehtävä” (The task of the artist and the human), where Kivimaa inserts “the Hellenistic thinker Philo” to strengthen the illusion of his uncompromised humanism. For we, whose life is art, were given an instrument of the human soul’s mysterious means of expression, the word. Its possibilities are limitless, its dimensions borderless. More than two millennia ago, the Hellenistic thinker Philo said that the word, the Logos, is the bond between goodness and power, the reason of the Supreme Being, realized in the creation of the world. The word is, for the human, a bridge to divinity, the liaison to eternity. It is the highest criterion for humanity, and the poetry created through it is the most lasting measurement of the value of humanity. The abuse of the word occurs at all times. However, the irrelevant washes away into the sea of oblivion, while the creative word of the Alpine peaks remains. They glitter like the beacons on the difficult path of mankind.73

Philo Judaeus (c. 10 BCE–c. 50 CE), whose Jewishness—like the identifying “Judaeus”—is unmentioned, is a particularly engaging figure for Kivimaa to deploy to legitimize the “unyielding” spirit of his wartime humanism. Philo’s Platonic philosophy interpreted classical and Scriptural sources to join the Hellenic and Judaic traditions “through the mediation of the logos and the holy spirit,” as Jacques Derrida and Moshe Ron suggest.74 Philo figures the interaction of Judaic, Greek, and Christian culture, rather than asserting an intrinsically distinctive Jewishness, and as part of the Alexandrian diaspora he also registers a cosmopolitan Judaism, implying a contestation of the singularizing racial dynamics of Kivimaa’s

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wartime discourse. Positioning Philo as a Hellenistic thinker who understood the logos to emanate from the “Supreme Being” unifying the physical community in its power, Kivimaa lends his living theatre a redeeming alibi, recasting the logos of his wartime “European humanism” as standing apart from the blood of National Socialist race lore, to which this fragment indirectly but reciprocally alludes. For much as Philo marks a relation between Judaism and Hellenism, Kivimaa’s emphasis on Alpine revelation—the glittering beacons of illumination, the conjunction of goodness, power, and eternity—nonetheless preserves the overripe rhetoric triangulating Weimar Classicism, German Romanticism, and German Idealism with National Socialist Kultur; failing to render Philo as a Jew, Kivimaa perhaps not surprisingly fails to note Philo’s report of the historical persecution of the Jewish community in Alexandria in 38 CE in Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium. Positioning Philo as the re-spiritualizing axis of his living theatre and its cultural ensemble, Kivimaa stages the assimilative force of his theatre humanism by unwriting, and covertly reinscribing, the racializing accent of his wartime humanism. Kivimaa casts his postwar theatre humanism as Judaeo-Christian, universal, and apolitical, evidently forgetting his appreciation of Bâty as a “social politician” (my emphasis), and drawing a separation between culture and the political that, much as it does in Schiller’s aesthetic humanism, evidently performs what it denies. For this reason, “Culture does not possess the means of power politics, its acts cannot change the world,” for culture essentially represents “the assurance that the human spirit cannot be suppressed, and that the vitality [elinvoima] of great ideals will remain.”75 Like his ambiguous invocation of Philo, Kivimaa’s glancing opposition to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach—the “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”76 —signals Kivimaa’s spiritual vivification of Finnish arts and idealism by disclaiming that culture/art should be deployed as the means of state, and by extension cultural, politics. For Kivimaa, as for Schiller, culture provides a means of affective, aesthetic socialization, but only in ways that attune the audience to the spiritualizing elevation of the living arts, only when audiences can engage “art without asking its purpose.”77 Given the Soviet–Finnish “agreement,” Kivimaa’s critique of Communism—aligned here with Huxley’s rejection of Communism—cannot escape the political: the pronounced allusion to Marx asserts an operative humanist distantiation of culture doing politics.

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While his wartime writing codes theatre, nation, culture to racial expression, Kivimaa’s postwar work fashions national character to a synthesis of “omalaatuinen suomalaisuus ” (distinctive Finnishness)78 and “suomalainen ihmisyys ” (Finnish humanness),79 a synthesis recoding the National Socialist functionality of race as an organizational principle of international relations. Solidifying a Finnishness that bears a “consciousness of self-quality,” this self-enclosed ontology of national authenticity provides Kivimaa a postwar measure against which other peoples and their cultures—cultures his work as a theatre administrator internationalizes—are justified or judged. A mark of national exceptionalism, “Finnish humanness” is a mark of exclusion, a differentiating ontology based on finally mystifying humanist platitudes—“out of the spirit and for the spirit we live.”80 Kivimaa’s postwar “Finnish humanness” departs from Huxley’s sense of culture as the site of interrelated diversity, for Huxley’s national culture is always already an interpenetrated formation of ongoing exchange; cultures are recognizable and desirable as diverse and as irreducible to a pure interiority. Conceptualizing “all human groups” to be “of mixed origin,” Huxley’s 1957 New Bottles for New Wine saw diversity in ecological terms, as inevitable for sustaining the life of any species. Setting the “human” and “human culture”—sites of genetic interrelation—outside the notion of purity, Huxley’s global cultural diversity was crystallized in cultural specificity; that specificity, though, was conceivable only in relational terms, and depended on both internal and external cultural interaction to be realized, interaction that would inevitably change that temporalized identity. Similarly, Huxley’s notion of art emphasized relational more than national racial or ethnic health while seizing the rhetoric of life: when “a cleavage between art and life,” he argued, divides art from the interests of the community, the “vital reference to the needs of society,” it becomes isolated from the “living present,” from “something essential in the life of the community,” and like “a social organism,” it dies.81 It might be seized by a selfish, politically or economically greedy clique, but even such a community is unthinkable apart from its inherent cosmic and ecological interconnectedness and so its openness to the other cultures with which, in Huxley’s utopian vision, it is projected eventually to fuse.82 Huxley’s humanism is monistic. Kivimaa’s humanness is monocultural: sharing in humanness, Finnish identity is not shareable as humanness. As Kivimaa justified it in the 1958 quarterly review of the ITI published

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for the world congress in Helsinki (implicitly summoning the national methodology of Finland-as-victim by mentioning both WWII and the ensuing Soviet Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance as rationalizing contexts), “Finland has suffered a great deal from her geographical position and her liberty has been purchased at the price of exceptional sacrifices; but her culture, while never compatible with the Slav outlook, has developed along national lines, dominated by Protestantism and social humanism.”83 Kivimaa reaches for a ligature, “social humanism,” both recalling Huxley and leaning on Schiller’s “social character,” which, conferred by beauty, does not divide global society but “brings harmony into society, because it establishes harmony in the individual.”84 Significantly, though, Kivimaa’s “social humanism” is also evocative of the agglomeration of the kind of literary, national, and sociopolitical nexus of values he framed as an instance of living theatre to discredit Rothschild and his modernist Pigalle.85 Conditioning the international ITI community to understand Finland’s postwar geopolitical circumstances through a discourse of victimization and a racialized exceptionalism, Kivimaa’s postwar theatre humanism reciprocally reflects the limits of his engagement of UNESCO/ITI internationalism as a mode of applied humanism. His “Protestantism and social humanism” delineates the “Slav outlook”—recalling his 1942 invocation of Bruno Brehm’s “Asiatic-Slavic-Jewish slave type”—in direct tension with Huxley’s foundational humanism, which rejects identitarian scapegoating in favor of a self-reflective critique of ideology, of “belief.” As Huxley might have put it, Kivimaa holds to “the comfortable assurance of the old,” an “inner resistance to changing our primitive methods of resolving conflict” by projecting “our own inner aggression on to some external scapegoat or enemy, as was dramatically and horrifyingly illustrated by the history of Nazi Germany, and is now being exemplified by the mutual projection of scapegoatery from the United States to Communist Russia and vice versa.”86 Kivimaa’s ethnocentric inter/nationalism sits uncomfortably under the umbrella of UNESCO/ITI’s international cultural exchange,87 confirming Huxley’s concern that nationalism—Kivimaa’s “living patriotism,” “Finnish humanness”—is often “in a dangerous conflict with itself and internationalism.”88 Indeed, Kivimaa’s principle of national self-determination here works to cancel Huxley’s utopia of supranational unification, however instrumentalist it was. In the postwar era, Kivimaa’s racialized but ostensibly apolitical humanism shares with Huxley’s the necessity of an anti-Communist

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perspective, visible in the ways he employs the living theatre to combat specific—political, “leftist”—forms of theatrical expression, dramatic genres, and styles of acting. In 1942, Kivimaa’s Eurooppalainen veljeskunta (European brotherhood) staged a climactic scene in which he discussed the unsympathetic figure of a Jewish-Bolshevik in the Third Reich with an unnamed, antisemitic German interlocutor, whose comments (like those of his French friend on Cocteau) enable Kivimaa simultaneously to legitimize and notionally stand apart from antisemitic views.89 In the 1970s, his Teatterin humanismi reenacts this strategy, disparaging epic and documentary genres of contemporary theatre through a “sympathetic” conversation with a “young German” at a 1964 international seminar on literature. Here, using an interlocutor allows Kivimaa both to refuse Communism and its forms of theatre and to rehabilitate himself as ignorant of the National Socialist cultural politics his wartime theatre humanism and living theatre had purposely reproduced.90 The 1964 scene poses an “open question” from an unnamed, female, Swiss theatre teacher to the “seminar youth,” challenging their desire to eliminate “pathos” from the theatre in favor of a “dry new-matter-offactness.” One of the students takes her up, answering [t]heatre’s means of expression need to be renewed. Everything that is happening in the performing arts now is only the transformation of the same, which in modern poetry and the visual arts has already taken place. Frugal, clean, objectivity can express more than merely a vague emotional fuss. Intellect is the expression of discipline. The young speaker was German. I [Kivimaa] talked a long time with him at the end of the seminar day. I said, “in your theses there is a lot of truth. Some of them have been around for years, have been tried and implemented in the practical work of theatre. But don’t you think there is a danger when theatre becomes dehumanized, when emotionality is excommunicated and a scepter of righteousness is given only into the almighty hands of the intellect?” “That kind of risk does not exist, on the contrary,” replied the debate companion, “think about the fate of my country. It collapsed due to the vortex of uncontrolled emotionality. The blind sense of authenticity caught the individual and the masses. No one thought; there was man’s destruction. Intellectualization in the theatre precisely means the humanization of the theatre, even in a new way.”91

Kivimaa stages a deceptive anagnorisis, as he is instructed about the effects of the Third Reich Kultur he had once vividly asserted. Using the voice

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of the young German, a leftist figure of the postwar generation evocatively interested in the genres of epic and documentary theatre, serves to obfuscate Kivimaa’s support of National Socialism, as the speaker’s criticism of an ecstatic Volksgemeinschaft (the racialized people’s community) displaces the work of Kivimaa’s living theatre in separating Cocteau (self-love), Reinhardt, Grünewald, Rothschild (Jewish), and Pitoëff (Russian/Slavic opportunist) from the wartime genre of humanity. In the course of the rhetorical and political design of this passage, living theatre now nods toward a limited “diversity,” an inclusive range of styles that nonetheless excludes any style undermining the authority of the we through which Kivimaa’s humanism speaks. I asked if we could agree that dramatic art is at its best when under the bright, moderate, and intellectually controlled form can be felt the enormous forces of emotion. The young fellow approved my conception. Actually, even more than that: the most important fact that the theatre can never be declared to be dominated by only one single style. That bind is the death of art. The style of theatre is the performed play’s style.92

Kivimaa persistently forges his humanism, as well as national memory and sensibility, through a distinctive practice of forgetting, scapegoating, concealment, and revelation. Here, he first directs a rhetorical question to the “young speaker.” “I asked if we could agree”: taking a mock-Socratic, instructive attitude, Kivimaa poses a question inscribed in its own telos. After all, had the student answered in the negative, writing this scene would be meaningless. Moreover, the substance of Kivimaa’s question recontextualizes, depoliticizes, and finally empties the National Socialist inflection of humanism suffusing his wartime writing, by taking living theatre to be defined by the “enormous forces of emotion” feelingly operative, and yet regulated, moderated, and intellectually controlled by form. When the young German approves of Kivimaa’s “conception,” he is made to deny and ultimately refute his historicized understanding of the social consequences of theatrical emotionality, replacing it with, and so legitimizing, Kivimaa’s formalist account. Finally, the young German reinforces the dramatic humanism sustaining the authority of living theatre. Agreeing to the desirability of a democracy of style, that “the theatre can never be declared to be dominated by only one single style,” he reinforces Kivimaa’s position that a play’s performance should be governed by its literary spirit.

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The young German promotes an intellectual theatre, a theatre understood here as a totalizing instrument displacing all other forms and code for a Brechtian epic theatricality repugnant to the living theatre.93 Insofar as epic theatre dialectically engages, comments on the text in a formal counterpoint to it, epic theatre must be excluded from Kivimaa’s democratic ensemble, in which the diversity of dramatic writing should determine performance form: “theatrical style is the performed play’s style.” The liberal-humanist view of Brecht emerges with particular clarity here, for while applying the form of Brechtian epic theatre to a dramatic text might engage with Schiller’s sense that in “a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything,” Kivimaa takes epic theatre to be about the political content he ascribes to the form, and implicitly to Brecht’s Marxism, rather than seeing it as a dialectical appearance in its own right.94 The young German’s promotion of a “dry new-matter-of-factness” in the theatre, an intellectual, “[f]rugal, clean objectivity,” points to the prominence of epic theatre and of the emerging forms of documentary theatre after the war. Kivimaa’s 1952 Näyttämön lumous , like Teatterin humanismi, reuses the distinction separating “runous ” (poetry), a synonym for “runonäytelmä” (verse drama), from “reportaaši” (reportage) precisely to discredit these genres,95 a binary enforcing both liberal and racial humanist legacies. From a Schillerian perspective, the documentary gesture superimposes the external, the political, the critical on the inward, the aesthetic, the ecstatic function of theatre; in its investment in the consequences of history, the everyday, it falls outside the autonomous and idealist force of a living form. From the National Socialist perspective, the historicization of socioeconomic critique and technological experimentation (photo and film projection) seized by Brecht’s epic theatre via Erwin Piscator’s (1893–1966) is incompatible with the requisite idealism of the Schauspielregisseur (the director of the play), the Dichterregisseur (the poetic director), and the Wortregisseur (the word director), for whom theatrical expression is the consequence of racialized spirituality always already present in the language and, by extension, in the form of the play. The German interlocutor, expressing both a critique of National Socialism and support for Communist theatricality, provides a complex vehicle, effectively becoming a scapegoat, both a holy and an accursed vessel for Kivimaa’s—and by extension the Finnish people’s—postwar ethical transformation. Absorbing the National Socialist past and the Communist

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present, the German student takes on a hybrid—German–East German— identity, tracing the ideological border between the liberal FDR and the Communist DDR, and in so doing suggesting the moment in which Kivimaa’s national methodology and rehabilitation simultaneously interact with, and delineate the limits of, ITI’s humanist internationalism. Given a “speech hollowed out by itself, so to speak, working on the secret that works on it,”96 this figure and its views are the object of critique also inhabited by Kivimaa; defacing the German student, Kivimaa absorbs him into his own, Finland’s, and UNESCO’s structure of assertion. As it was in his wartime writings, the living theatre is for Kivimaa an inherently performative—dualist—instrument, enabling him to discriminate between kinds of people, kinds of drama, and modes of performing as well. Taking issue with epic and documentary drama, he also criticizes an analytical, cool style of acting. In the living theatre, the actor must dive to “the bottom of the disturbed, innermost human,” and in “a controlled and rich way, appreciating organic natural laws” become “the radiating image of his internal recognition,” by balancing the opposing forces of nature and culture, passion and intellect, fire and ice. Unlike the intellectualized or critical theatre (another dualism), living acting cannot be “realized out of an idea, out of a predetermined concept,” but “has to come about as if from the sub-surface of fire, as a glow under the ice.” Throughout history, Kivimaa contends, “the true artist has, of course, in all times achieved this balance,” transcending the play into a “living shape.”97 Kivimaa’s performer engages Schiller’s dynamic art of appearance, a performance driven as if by emotional fire but in fact regulated by its opposite, the ice of trained, reasoned perception. The politics of this balance arises from the sense that while the emotions, nature, must be harmonized to the intellect, to an aesthetic form appearing to be apolitical, neither nature nor intellect seeks “to take the place of reality” nor needs “to have its place taken by reality.” This perspective, urgently emptied of the political, nonetheless traces it: the living appearance of form registers “thought over physical satisfaction, dreams of immortality over experience.”98 Kivimaa’s comments on acting verge on Schiller’s critique of the “cold heart” of the “abstract thinker”99 but resonate politically in the Cold War context of the Soviet–Finnish agreement of friendship and cooperation. Turning against the “cool” acting practice prevalent in the UK, the move away from “emotion, the movement of feelings as the premise of actor’s work,” Kivimaa sees this “dangerous idea” to exercise “even more

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power” in the United States.100 His sense that the emotionally laden Method prominent in American acting 101 is “cool” is only seemingly paradoxical. Rather than an instance of Kivimaa’s lack of interest in the actual landscape of UK and American acting, this depiction precisely locates the ambiguous overdetermination of Kivimaa’s cultural discourse: as a Cold War liberal gesture placating the Soviet Union, it alludes to a present-tense disaffiliation from the genres of “formalist” performance, and from artforms arising as part of US cultural dissemination. The 1970s’ Teatterin humanismi casts Kivimaa’s postwar leadership of the Finnish National Theatre (FNT) in idealizing terms, at once extolling the institution as the embodiment of the Finnish people’s “radiant dreams” and “idealism,” “a living memory of its good powers,” a “living art institution,” of a “very special Finnish sense of values,” one cognate with “Finnish humanness,” while also conjoining its mission to a compassionate, critical, and cosmopolitan humanity resonating at once with Lessing’s Vermenschlichung and with Schiller’s aesthetic idealism. As Kivimaa puts it in the final essay, “I have spoken for many years about … humanism” as “a deeply democratic religion of life,” supporting all human beings’ “opportunity to evolve beyond their birth origin and beyond the confines of pragmatic conventions.”102 Even though semantically evocative of Huxley’s trans/humanism, and superficially witnessing its pragmatic instrumentalization in inter/national cultural politics, Kivimaa’s theatrical humanism, as I have shown throughout, nonetheless foregrounds the dark side of his living theatre, its implication in singularizing notions of race, ethnos, and nation in prewar, wartime, and postwar Europe. Kivimaa’s “Finnish humanness” provides the ethnicizing force for the “de-racialization” of his wartime living theatre through the platform of UNESCO’s internationalized humanism, while strategically instrumentalizing Nancy’s ideological “machine” for identifying the “meaning for man” with “the ‘we’ through which the community”—here, the institutional community of national and international European theatre in the postwar period—“speaks.”103 In this sense, even though it retains its racializing logic, Kivimaa’s living humanism opportunistically exempts itself from critique by its inseparability from the postwar collective right to self-determination (the right to determine the integrity of the nation, the people, and its culture) inherent to the work of the ITI and more broadly of UNESCO. The efficacy of Kivimaa’s theatre humanism lies precisely in this self-consciously performative design. For insofar as his humanism is

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applied through UNESCO/Huxley’s scientific trans/humanism and its proximity to universal human rights, it reflexively wards off its National Socialist past by warding off criticism as inhumane, as though to challenge that determination would be to cast oneself out of humanity, the charge that Kivimaa—or his famous friend—addressed to Cocteau. ∗ ∗ ∗ Arvi Kivimaa may seem far removed from the disciplinary self-fashioning of modern theatre and performance studies, particularly as the ITI has removed his name from the World Theatre Day website. Perhaps. And yet. In June 1967, the American Educational Theatre Association and the US State Department cosponsored a conference in Washington, DC, in the week following the ITI’s World Congress in New York, gathering influential figures in theatre practice, scholarship, and artistic administration to assess the state of Theatre Education and Development.104 Among the representatives drawn from twenty-four countries, panels were led by Bernard Beckerman of Columbia University (“Theatre and its Developing Audience”); Oscar G. Brockett, of Indiana University (“Theatre in the Education Process”), whose History of the Theatre would appear the following year; Richard Schechner, of New York University (“Improving Design for Theatrical Function”; his Environmental Theatre was on the 1973 horizon and The End of Humanism a bit farther off in 1982); and Brooks McNamara, of the University of Delaware (“Developing and Improving Artistic Leadership”). Among the international delegates, one on McNamara’s panel became particularly notable, Arvi Kivimaa. Kivimaa’s self-fashioning as an uncompromised humanist was not lost on McNamara, whose report on the panel’s discussion of leadership and of artistic and moral standards in the theatre notes: “Mr. Kivimaa declared that the theatre must be free to show all sides of Man,”105 except, as I have suggested here, those he preferred to persist unseen. And differently, as Humanism, Drama, and Performance has argued, those that literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms prefer to see unwritten.

Notes 1. Arvi Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi: Avajaispuheita 1950–1971 (Helsinki: Otava, 1972), 236–37. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Finnish and German are my own. 2. Arvi Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner: Eräiden vaellusten tilinpäätös (Helsinki: Otava, 1943), 59.

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3. The telegram is quoted in Louis Calte, “50 Nations Mark World Theatre Day,” New York Times, March 28, 1962. 4. UNESCO, “Theatre of Nations,” Irish Times, April 20, 1962. 5. Rosamond Gilder, “The Theatre and the International Theatre Institute,” Educational Theatre Journal 14, no. 2 (1962): 116; “World Theatre Day: About the World Theatre Day,” International Theatre Institute ITI—World Organization for the Performing Arts, accessed June 8, 2017, https://www.world-theatre-day.org/worldtheatreday.html. 6. Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 112. 7. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 66. 8. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 54. 9. Lucien Rebatet is quoted in Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 27 (my emphasis). 10. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 56. 11. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 58, 59. 12. Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 116. 13. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 65, 58, 12, 58–59; on the 1952 reprint of this essay on Cocteau, see Arvi Kivimaa, Näyttämön lumous (Helsinki: Otava, 1952), 129–34. 14. Spotts, The Shameful Peace, 237, 5, 45. 15. Cocteau’s cinematic imagery, like Kivimaa’s prose, was entangled with the National Socialist cultural politics. Supportive of the Third Reich’s celebrity sculptor Arno Breker, Cocteau also appropriated the inherently antisemitic “Nordic” aesthetics to enhance the appearance of the male bodies in his films. 16. Julian Huxley (1887–1975, the brother of Aldous Huxley, and the grandson of the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley) was an evolutionary biologist. Julian Huxley began his career as the cofounder of the biology department at today’s Rice University in the United States; after brief service in the British Army Intelligence Corps in Italy during WWI, he continued his transatlantic collaboration, popularizing life sciences; 1935–1942 he was the Director of the London Zoological Society. In 1931, he traveled to Moscow, and though his late 1940s Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949) unfolds the telos of Lysenkoism, an ideologically conditioned notion of environmentally acquired heredity, in the early 1930s, he saw the Soviet state-funding system supporting science and research as a progressive sociopolitical instrument. 1927–1930, he held the Fullerian Chair of Physiology at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. During WWII, he served in the British Ministry of Information and presented, especially in We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems,

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17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

coauthored with Alfred C. Haddon, A. M. Carr-Saunders, and Charles Singer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), a sharp critique of the National Socialist race lore legitimated in the Third Reich. From 1937 to 1944 Huxley served as the Vice-President and from 1959 to 1962 as the President of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley’s eugenics was both racializing and classist: a strategy of global social engineering conceived to sustain the well-being of humanity by regulating procreation, nutrition, and education; he envisioned a higher living standard to those “less well-endowed genetically” in the hope that an “equalized environment” would lower their rates of procreation to those of the white social (and presumably genetic) elite. Director-General of UNESCO, Huxley was also the cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund. Animating a 1950s, biologically derived concept of the Anthropocene, Huxley adapted Ernst Haeckel’s notion of ecology as an integrated system of interrelation and as a science studying the coordination between the interacting elements. This definition of ecology extends to the dynamics of human culture and its artifacts, including nations, belief systems, or art classifications. For Julian Huxley’s career, its points of contact with and departure from the evolutionary theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see R. S. Deese, We Are Amphibians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 36, 308, 309. Pirkko Koski, Kansan teatteri 2: Helsingin Kansanteatteri (Helsinki: Helsingin teatterisäätiö, 1987), 178–79. See the Final Statement of the Committee of Experts Convened by UNESCO, “Humanism of Tomorrow and the Diversity of Cultures,” in Interrelations of Cultures: Their Contribution to International Understanding (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 382. H. R., “Arvi Kivimaa, The European Humanist,” in Teatterin humanismi, 267–70 (my emphasis); see also 236–38. H. R. is likely Ritva Heikkilä (1920–2016), who collected the material for Teatterin humanismi and functioned as the dramaturg and secretary-general of the Finnish National Theatre 1952–1984. On Kivimaa’s contingent humanism, see Hana Worthen, “Towards New Europe: Arvi Kivimaa, Kultur, and the Fictions of Humanism,” in Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, ed. Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 95–127. Kivimaa’s wartime discursive racism, and its implication in UNESCO/ITI humanism, has been systematically avoided in Finnish literary, theatre, and cultural studies. On Kivimaa’s early modernist inclinations, internationalism, and Europeanism, see Hanna Korsberg, “Open the Windows on Europe! Arvi Kivimaa’s Work and Literary

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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Production in the 1920’s and Early 30’s,” in Comparative Approaches to Nordic and European Modernism, ed. Mats Jansson, Janna Kantola, Jakob Lothe, and H. K. Riikonen (Helsinki: Palmenia, 2008), 59–73. For the Finnish National Theatre’s international (European) showcasing of Chekhov in the 1950s, which omits any mention of Kivimaa’s compromised WWII discourse, see Hanna Korsberg, “Geographies of Theatre: The Finnish National Theatre in Stockholm in 1956,” Nordic Theatre Studies 28, no. 1 (2016): 27–38. For celebratory sporadic mentions of Kivimaa in the official version of the Finnish National Commission for UNESCO publication, see UNESCO 50 vuotta ja Suomi, ed. Katri Himma (Yliopistopaino, 1995). Cf. Elina Melgin, Propagandaa vai julkisuusdiplomatiaa? Taide ja kulttuuri Suoman maakuvan viestinnässä 1937 –52 (Helsinki: Unigrafia, 2014), especially Chapters 3 and 4. Markku Jokisipilä and Janne Könönen, Kolmannen valtakunnan vieraat: Suomi Hitlerin Saksan vaikutuspiirissä 1933–1944 (Helsinki: Otava, 2013), 540. Arvi Kivimaa, Helsinki, Parisi, Moskova: Teatterija, kirjoja ja kirjailijoita (Helsinki: Otava, 1929); Arvi Kivimaa, Teatterivaeltaja: Kirjoista, Kirjailijoista ja näyttämön taiteesta (Porvoo: WSOY, 1937); Arvi Kivimaa, Eurooppalainen veljeskunta: Runoilijamatka halki Saksan (Helsinki: Otava, 1942). Riikka Korppi-Tommola’s “Politics Promote Dance: Martha Graham in Finland, 1962,” Dance Chronicle 33 (2010): 82–112, gives a succinct contextualization of Finland’s “neutrality” in relation to cultural politics in the Cold War, especially in the early 1960s; her analysis of the reception of Graham’s work also exemplifies the circulation of humanist vocabulary in Finland, even though it does not identify the ideology as such. John Sundholm, “Stories of National and Transnational Memory: Renegotiating the Finnish Conception of Moral Witness and National Victimhood,” in Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, ed. Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 35, 36. Louis Clerc, “‘Gaining Recognition and Understanding on Her Own Terms’: The Bureaucracy of Finland’s Image Policy, 1948–88,” in Histories of Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries: Representing the Periphery, ed. Louis Clerc, Nikolas Glover, and Paul Jordan (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015), 152, 155, 156. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), 20; originally published as L’Oubli de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1986).

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29. Nancy, L’Oubli de la philosophie, 26, 35, quoted and translated in Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 21. 30. Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 1. 31. Arvi Kivimaa, Eurooppalainen veljeskunta: Runoilijamatka halki Saksan (Helsinki: Otava, 1942). One chapter from this publication, “Uutta Eurooppaa kohden” (Toward New Europe), appeared in German in 1942, two years before a full, adjusted, German translation of the volume was issued in 1944; see Arvi Kivimaa, “Finnische Betrachtung,” in Europäische Literatur 1, no. 2 (June 1942); Arvi Kivimaa, Europäische Dichterreise durch Deutschland: Reiseeindrücke eines finnischen Schriftstellers in Deutschland [trans. Reimar von Bonin] (Berlin, Wien, Leipzig: Karl H. Bischoff, 1944). 32. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 65 (my emphasis). 33. Adolf Hitler, My Struggle, Operation Sea Lion Edition (n.p.: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf. GMBH, 1940), 58. 34. Hitler arrogates the authority of Goethe to the Rassenschande, noting that “Goethe rose up in revolt against the failure legally to prohibit marriage between Christians and Jews. … through him there spoke the voice of the blood and the voice of reason”; My Struggle, 330. 35. Kivimaa, Eurooppalainen veljeskunta, 80 (my emphasis); Kivimaa, Europäische Dichterreise durch Deutschland, 103–4. 36. Schiller is a touchstone for Kivimaa in his wartime writings and elsewhere, where he depicts Schiller as the embodiment of “German fighting idealism” in his 1942 Eurooppalainen veljeskunta (European brotherhood) and operates with the phrase “fighting Westernness” (which he equates with Germanness) in his 1937 Teatterivaeltaja (The theatre wanderer); Eurooppalainen veljeskunta, 83; Teatterivaeltaja, 227. 37. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 233, 218, 197, 193, 128, 170, 96, 82, 70. Kivimaa’s living, in other words, provides a compacted term conveying a network of seemingly depoliticized values from his wartime to his postwar writings. 38. Kivimaa, Teatterivaeltaja, 170 (my emphasis), 171. 39. Karl Blanck and Heinz Haufe, Unbekanntes Theater: Ein Buch von der Regie (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1943). 40. Kivimaa, Teatterivaeltaja, 170. Kivimaa seems at first to counter two distinctive National Socialist (differently inflected in the nineteenth century) antisemitic binaries—Oriental vs. Occidental and the merely receptive vs. creative work—isolating the Jewish modernist artists; after including Reinhardt in “Western” culture, though, his accentuation of Reinhardt’s failure overwrites the alleged rhetorical objectivity of Kivimaa’s judgment. Kivimaa hardly needed to underline that Reinhardt was an

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Austrian Jew; moreover, when Teatterivaeltaja appeared in 1937, Reinhardt was already in exile. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola: Dover, 2004), Letter 10, 56–57. Rainer Schlösser, Das Volk und seine Bühne: Bemerkungen zum Aufbau des deutschen Theaters (Berlin: Theaterverlag Albert Langen, 1935), 7. Blanck and Haufe, Unbekanntes Theater, 23. Joseph Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen: 14 Jahre Nationalsozialismus (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933), 198–99. Kivimaa, Teatterivaeltaja, 115. Affiliating himself with the National Socialist attack on naturalism and modernism, Kivimaa sets his defamation of Grünewald into an argument aligning “aesthetic” propriety with social justice, or truth: “we do not have the right to say” that the theatre of naturalism or futurism “engender[s] the only truth.” Only by comparing these two opposite styles can the “fact” that neither naturalism (and realism) nor futurism is “true to life” be illustrated: while the former arises as a radically objective stylization, and the latter as a radically abstract or subjective stylization, neither finally possesses the “authenticity” of living theatre. Displacing naturalism, Kivimaa’s discourse takes naturalism, specifically naturalist design, as an “imitation of an alien world,” a “slavish imitation of the accidental external reality.” Rather than creating an intuitive environment of spiritual, here völkisch, reality, naturalistic scenography invests in the mere reproduction of “material and milieu,” less uniting with and raising the audience’s expectations of an elevating “truth” than producing a deadening effect upon “our imagination”; Blanck and Haufe, Unbekanntes Theater, 8, 9. If the dates that mark the individual essays in Kivimaa’s 1937 Teatterivaeltaja are correct, he wrote his “Lavastustaide” (The art of the stage design) denigrating Grünewald in 1933, during his 1932–1934 lectureship at the Greifswald University, and only a short time after the modernist painter had been appointed as a professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. Kivimaa’s effort to racialize Grünewald is telling, as according to Ludwig Qvarnström, the year of Grünewald’s appointment, 1932, marks a break with antisemitism within Swedish “nationalism,” which “gradually lost its importance for artists and critics in Sweden” in the late 1920s and 1930s; Ludwig Qvarnström, “The Jewish Modernist: Isaac Grünewald in Bertel Hintze’s Art History,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 15 (2016): 19. In Finland, in 1933 and again in 1937, Grünewald’s Jewishness evidently remains at stake for Kivimaa, who accentuates it, and so implies—and impels—his readers’ competence to recognize and interpret modernist artforms as suspect products of a foreign, “-Jewish” expression. Needless to say, the “Jewish” characteristics motivating Kivimaa’s

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46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

discourse on Grünewald trace the “Nation and Race,” also translated as “People and Race,” chapter in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. For one of the most succinct, modernist essays illustrating the attack on the literary stage that casts Goethe’s “battle of words against visions” as his “Thirty Years’ War” against a theatre seen as “the reflection of natural life in an amusing mirror,” see Edward Gordon Craig, “‘Literary’ Theatres,” in The Theatre—Advancing (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1919), 130–31. Schlösser, Das Volk und seine Bühne, 41. Schlösser, Das Volk und seine Bühne, 15. Artur Kutscher, Stilkunde des Theaters (Düsseldorf: Pflugschar Verlag, Klein Vater u. Sohn, 1936), 57, 60. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 58. Although Kivimaa notes that he made a number of changes to the reprinted texts, he does not mention the contextual requalification these adjustments perform. In Eurooppalainen veljeskunta, 59, and Europäische Dichterreise, 79, Kivimaa leans on Bruno Brehm to enhance the portrayal of the “Bolshevik Russia” governed by “the Asian-Slavic-Jewish slave type” as an antithesis of Europe; I have analyzed Brehm’s function in Kivimaa’s travelogue in “Towards New Europe: Arvi Kivimaa, Kultur, and the Fictions of Humanism,” 106–7. Kivimaa, Näyttämön lumous, 115, 116, 119; Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 38, 39, 43–44. On how the values of racialized nationalism were, in the 1980s, still operative in the production of Finnish national consciousness, and at odds with the discourse of human rights, see Karmela Liebkind, “Syrjinnän ja suvaitsevaisuuden sosiaalipsykologiaa,” in Suomi ja ihmisoikeudet (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 1990), 20–34. Sponsored by Henri de Rothschild (1882–1947) and under the direction of Philippe de Rothschild, Théâtre Pigalle ran from 1929 to 1948 (it was demolished in 1959) and was well known for staging avant-garde works. Planned by the architects Charles Siclis, Henri Just, and Pierre Blum, the theatre’s Art Deco interior design and exterior architecture was accompanied by state-of-art stage technology (Max Reinhardt staged Die Fledermaus here in 1933). Koski, Kansan teatteri 2, 178–79. Die Rothschilds, directed by Erich Waschneck (Theodor Herzl Studios, 1940). Cf. the patriotic portrayal of Nathan Rothschild in the 1934 Hollywood film, The House of Rothschild, directed by Alfred L. Werker (Twentieth Century Pictures), nominated for Outstanding Production at

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58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

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the Academy Awards in 1935. Jud Süß (Jew Süß ), directed by Veit Harlan (Terra Film, 1940); Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), directed by Fritz Hippler (Terra Film, 1940). Kivimaa, Näyttämön lumous, 121 (my emphasis); Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 45. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 10, 56. Kivimaa, Näyttämön lumous, 121; Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 46. Bâty’s portrait here sheds light on Kivimaa’s employment of living theatre to reject Cocteau, who unlike Bâty, “a lover of the people,” is “a kind” who does not “exist for people” and therefore does not deserve to be loved. Cocteau also collaborated with Pitoëff and wrote the introduction to the brochure celebrating the opening of the Pigalle; see Théâtre Pigalle: Ses éclairages, sa machinerie, with texts by Jean Cocteau and René Lara, photographs by Germaine Krull, cover design by Jean Carlu (Paris: Draeger, 1929). Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (1941; London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 121, 122. Sharply criticizing the pseudo-concept and the social implementation of the “Nordic race,” Huxley’s approach to difference does imply cultural and social temporalities, which would be inflected in the postwar practices of the UNESCO cultural and educational mission, especially in its language of “development.” For a critique of UNESCO’s program to defeat illiteracy and its assistance in the emancipation of postcolonial and colonial societies, see Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Search of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 104–17. For the full statement of his “Eugenics in Evolutionary Perspective,” see Evolutionary Humanism, 251–80. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 22. Deese, We Are Amphibians, 6–7. Huxley, Evolutionary Humanism, 252–53. Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 242. Lauri Viljanen, Taisteleva humanismi: Kulttuurikriitillisiä ääriviivoja Goethestä nykypäivään (Hämeenlinna: Arvi A. Karisto Osakeyhtiö, 1936), 295–309, 296 (my emphasis). Olavi Paavolainen, Synkkä yksinpuhelu: Päiväkirjan lehtiä vuosilta 1941– 1944, vol. 2 (Porvoo: WSOY, 1946), 552. Mika Valtari, “The Finnish Literature Today,” Books Abroad 10, no. 3 (1936): 269. Finland’s Tavast region has a prominent place in Finnish folklore as the center of authentic Finnish identity; on the National Socialist racialization of Finland’s Tavast region and its articulation in relation to Blood and Soil, see Hana Worthen, Playing “Nordic”: The Women of

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Print, 2007), 78–116. Kivimaa, Eurooppalainen veljeskunta, 67; Baumann’s poem can be found on [63]. Jokisipilä and Könönen, Kolmannen valtakunnan vieraat, 540. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 127–28. Jacques Derrida and Moshe Ron, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” New Literary History 22, no. 1 (1991): 49. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 207 (my emphasis). Karl Marx, “Concerning Feuerbach,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 423. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 26, 131. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 96. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 116. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 85, 126. Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, 1 C/6, UNESCO/C/6, 1946, 53, 54, 52, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/ 48223/pf0000068197. Huxley’s intrinsic cultural diversity is connected in UNESCO to the values of a capitalized liberalism, the “free flow” and exchange of commodified information, private property; the rights of the creative artist are founded on a global comparison between cultural groups, who are brought into alignment with the Western—humanist—discourse of theatre, registering the personhood of the “artists” as the legal right to an ownership of self. As Jean d’Ormesson puts it, regarding “all the complicated but necessary structures, ranging from copyright protection and the protection of cultural heritages to the free flow of cultural information: the key is the upsurge towards the universal, which at the same time respects the roots and diversity of cultures”; “Culture,” in In the Minds of Men: UNESCO 1946–1971 (Paris: UNESCO, 1972), 106. And as Rosamond Gilder restated it in 1961, as “the theatre arm of UNESCO,” ITI exemplifies how UNESCO’s main “projects are often of direct significance to the theatre. For instance, the long patient work resulting in the Universal Copyright Convention is of enormous basic importance to playwrights and, therefore, to the heart of drama”; “The Theatre and the International Theatre Institute,” Educational Theatre Journal 14, no. 2 (1962): 113. Neither the UNESCO nor the ITI discourse on copyright was free from colonial anthropology universalizing the Third World within a perspective of cultural and human rights dependent on the values of liberal capitalism. This aspect is well reflected in the views of the Chairman of ITI’s Provisional Executive Committee, J. B. Priestley, who in 1948 militated against the “ignorance, vague prejudice, and the fog of cross-purposes” interfering with international understanding, or who, in

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1962, was reported to understand theatre as “particularly important in the field of international understanding.” J. B. Priestley is quoted in C. Robert Kase, “The International Theatre Institute and UNESCO,” Educational Theatre Journal 1, no. 1 (1949): 4, and in Rosamond Gilder, “The Theatre as a Means of World Understanding,” Times of India, March 25, 1962. For Priestley, internationalism is not to be confused with egalitarian cultural dialogue. As he condescendingly notes in his answer to Julian Huxley’s inquiry about the function of the arts in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, any statement must be “simple enough for Eastern and colonial races to understand,” since what they must understand is that the “most important right of the artist is, in my view, not freedom of expression, for complete freedom is quite impossible, but the Right to secure, own and control copyright of his work.” The freedom of expression, according to Priestley, is an important right, but the right to secure, own, and control property is a fundamental, universal, and inalienable dimension of any human society. J. B. Priestley to Julian Huxley, April 15, 1947; UNESCO Archives, File 342.7 (100): 1 A 02 - Comité sur les Principes Philosophiques des Droits de l’Homme - Part I, https://atom.archives.unesco.org/comitesur-les-principes-philosophiques-des-droits-de-lhomme-part-i. 83. Arvi Kivimaa, “Editorial,” in “Theatre in Finland,” special issue, World Theatre, a quarterly review published by the ITI with the assistance of UNESCO (1958): 3. Kivimaa takes Protestantism as an unquestioned national, religious doctrine, bypassing it as a form of internationalism, as presented, for example, in Gustave Hervé’s L’Internationalisme (Paris, 1910), paraphrased in Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 24. “Social humanism” resonates with Kivimaa’s remarks on institutional leadership, that the “man of culture” (including himself) works for the benefit of the artists and their art (both in the service to the people), to raise wages, improve pensions, and guarantee appropriate artistic education. Along these lines, Kivimaa’s notion of “living art” arises as having a predominantly social meaning, “because it influences people and fashions their inner being”; Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 62, 96. Kivimaa’s “social humanism” might also figure as an alternative to “socialist humanism”; on “socialist humanism” as an anti-fascist and anti-National Socialist phenomenon, a phenomenon of cultural resistance practiced by exile organizations and bringing together Left and liberal bourgeoisie, see Andreas Agocs, Antifascist Humanism and the Politics of Cultural Renewal in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 23–36; as a postwar historical phenomenon, Erich Fromm, ed., Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), and

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84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

as an intellectual paradigm, David Alderson and Robert Spencer, For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2017). Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 27, 138. Kivimaa, Näyttämön lumous, 121; Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 46. Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 237–38. Kivimaa’s national/ist positioning of Finnish theatre was appreciatively recognized by Jonathan W. Curvin, who notes both that the “Finns keep a most intelligent balance between their intense national pride and their lively curiosity about the world outside” and that the origins of “Finland’s native dramatic literature,” rooted in “the aggressive nationalistic movement of the last century,” had “developed outside the main currents of world drama”; “The Finnish Theatre: An American Tribute,” in “Theatre in Finland,” special issue, World Theatre, a quarterly review published by the ITI with assistance of UNESCO (1958): 8, 13. Ilona Salomaa demonstrates how the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ traditions of folk religion and folk culture important in building national identity underwent a racializing—xenophobic and antisemitic—shift in the 1920s and 1930s through proximity to Germany; see “‘I Devote Myself to the Fatherland’: Finnish Folklore, Patriotic Nationalism, and Racial Ideology,” in Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, ed. Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 69– 94. Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, 40. I analyze this passage in “Towards New Europe: Arvi Kivimaa, Kultur, and the Fictions of Humanism,” 98–108. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 168. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 169 (my emphasis). Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 169–70 (my emphasis). Brecht is silently at issue here. Kivimaa’s disacknowledged dismissal of Brecht is not unique in the postwar literature produced by writers whose WWII discourse conceptualized theatre alongside the cultural politics of the Third Reich; it has a German counterpart, for instance, in Artur Kutscher’s 1960 biography Der Theaterprofessor: Ein Leben für die Wissenschaft vom Theater (München: Ehrenwirth, 1960). Brecht’s theatre professor—and nemesis—in the 1920s, Kutscher relies on a similar gesture, implicitly opposing a dialectical or political theatre by criticizing a 1931 Munich University student parody of Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny, Wallfahrt des Mannes Orge nach der Stadt Mahagonny, which was predetermined to fail, as it “followed a foreign, know-it-all, and finally lame idea” (198). As I pointed out earlier, Kutscher also used the term “foreign” during the Third Reich, signifying “a foreign law”

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to expel the “Kultur-foreign,” the “Volk-foreign hoax,” that had no place on German stage. Although the racial binaries signify differently after the war, the “foreign” still resonates with the National Socialist composite Bolshevist-Jewish-foreign; Stilkunde des Theaters, 57, 60. The aversion to Brecht is also shared among the Eastern European postwar dissidents, perhaps best exemplified by Václav Havel’s liberal humanism; see Anna Freimanová, ed., Václav Havel: O divadle (Prague: Knihovna Václava Havla, 2012), passim. Taking on the ITI notion of a theatrical internationalism, the Finnish National Theatre (FTN) under Kivimaa’s leadership presented a conceptually, politically, and stylistically diverse range of offerings, some of which clearly stand apart from the objectives of Kivimaa’s discursive humanism in Teatterin humanismi. While a political analysis of the FNT during the transition from the Continuation to the Cold War would have to take up each production during his leadership, and particularly consider the interaction of national and international affairs, it is nonetheless suggestive of what UNESCO humanism offered for European theatre makers, here particularly Kivimaa. In this environment, the repertoire was understood as an act of international political affiliation, used by different states in different ways, and as a way of reworking national forgetting as national memory. While the FNT mounted five of its own productions of Tennessee Williams’s sentimental memory plays and hosted a sixth, and mounted five productions of Arthur Miller’s liberal classics, in the period from 1950 to 1971, it joined other European capitals in hosting the Berliner Ensemble for Mother Courage and Galileo in 1959, but mounted only two of its own productions of Brecht (A Man’s a Man, 1963, and Good Person of Setzuan, 1967). See the appendix to Teatterin humanismi, which lists all productions in this period. 94. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Snell, Letter 22, 106. Of course, Kivimaa opposes Brecht on the Schillerian ground that “instructive (didactic) or improving (moral) art” has a “tendendious effect upon the character,” and so is at variance with the “concept of Beauty” (107). But my point here is that epic performance formally codes a unity between style and text, but one that cannot be known from the text alone and emerges only through the application of dialectical exploratory technique. 95. Kivimaa, Näyttämön lumous, 37. The National Socialists racialized and applied the binary and hierarchized dramatic categories of Schiller’s aesthetic humanism. In 1936, for instance, the Völkischer Beobachter panned the Berlin Deutsches Theatre production of Georg Büchner’s episodic Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) as nothing more than mere “historical reportage”; see Job Zimmermann, “Gilbrichts Corday—Drama bei

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96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104.

105.

Hilpert,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 15, 1936, quoted in Glen Gadberry, “The History Plays of the Third Reich,” in Theatre Under the Nazis, ed. John London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 117. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43, 51, 45. Kivimaa, Valon ja pimeyden manner, 59; Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 15, 76. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 26, 129. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 6, 42. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 9, 97, 176. Michael L. Quinn, “Self-Reliance and Ritual Renewal: Anti-theatrical Ideology in American Method Acting,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 10, no. 1 (1995): 5–20. Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 236–37. Nancy, L’Oubli de la philosophie, 26, 35, quoted and translated in Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 21. This conference was held June 14–18, 1967, in Washington, DC, following the June 4–10 conference of the ITI in New York. On the latter, see Charlotte M. Canning, “If ‘The World Was Ruled by Artists’: The 1967 International Theatre Institute World Congress and Cold War Leadership,” Theatre Research International 43, no. 2 (2018): 130–46. Brooks McNamara, “Group III Conference Report: Developing and Improving Artistic Leadership,” Educational Theatre Journal, Special Issue (August 1968): 294.

References Agocs, Andreas. Antifascist Humanism and the Politics of Cultural Renewal in Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Alderson, David, and Robert Spencer. For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics. London: Pluto Press, 2017. Blanck, Karl, and Heinz Haufe. Unbekanntes Theater: Ein Buch von der Regie. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1943. Calte, Louis. “50 Nations Mark World Theatre Day.” New York Times, March 28, 1962. Canning, Charlotte M. “If ‘The World Was Ruled by Artists’: The 1967 International Theatre Institute World Congress and Cold War Leadership.” Theatre Research International 43, no. 2 (2018): 130–46. Clerc, Louis. “‘Gaining Recognition and Understanding on Her Own Terms’: The Bureaucracy of Finland’s Image Policy, 1948–88. In Histories of Public

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Diplomacy and Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries: Representing the Periphery, edited by Louis Clerc, Nikolas Glover, Paul Jordan, 145–71. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015. Craig, Edward Gordon. “‘Literary’ Theatres.” In The Theatre—Advancing, 130– 31. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1919. Curvin, Jonathan W. “The Finnish Theatre: An American Tribute.” “Theatre in Finland,” World Theatre Special Issue (1958). Deese, R. S. We Are Amphibians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Der Ewige Jude. Directed by Fritz Hippler. Terra Film, 1940. Derrida, Jacques, and Moshe Ron. “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German.” New Literary History 22, no. 1 (1991): 39–95. Die Rothschilds. Directed by Erich Waschneck. Theodor Herzl Studios, 1940. Freimanová, Anna, ed. Václav Havel: O divadle. Prague: Knihovna Václava Havla, 2012. Fromm, Erich. ed. Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966. Gadberry, Glen. “The History Plays of the Third Reich.” In Theatre under the Nazis, edited by John London, 96–135. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Geroulanos, Stefanos. An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Gilder, Rosamond. “The Theatre and the International Theatre Institute.” Educational Theatre Journal 14, no. 2 (1962): 113–19. Gilder, Rosamond. “The Theatre as a Means of World Understanding.” The Times of India, March 25, 1962. Goebbels, Joseph. Revolution der Deutschen: 14 Jahre Nationalsozialismus. Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933. H. R. “Arvi Kivimaa, The European Humanist.” In Kivimaa, Teatterin humanismi, 267–70. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage, 1996. Hitler, Adolf. My Struggle. Operation Sea Lion Edition. N.p.: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf. GMBH, 1940. The House of Rothschild. Directed by Alfred L. Werker. Twentieth Century Pictures, 1934. “Humanism of Tomorrow and the Diversity of Cultures,” Final Statement of the Committee of Experts Convened by UNESCO. In Interrelations of Cultures: Their Contribution to International Understanding. Paris: UNESCO, 1953. Huxley, Julian. Evolutionary Humanism, with an introduction by H. James Birx. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992. Huxley, Julian. New Bottles for New Wine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.

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Huxley, Julian. Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949. Huxley, Julian. UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy. 1 C/6, UNESCO/C/6, 1946. Huxley, Julian. The Uniqueness of Man. 1941. London: Chatto & Windus, 1943. Huxley, Julian. We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems. Co-authored with Alfred C. Haddon, A. M. Carr-Saunders, and Charles Singer. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Iriye, Akira. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Jokisipilä, Markku, and Janne Könönen. Kolmannen valtakunnan vieraat: Suomi Hitlerin Saksan vaikutuspiirissä 1933–1944. Helsinki: Otava, 2013. Jud Süß. Directed by Veit Harlan. Terra Film, 1940. Kase, C. Robert. “The International Theatre Institute and UNESCO.” Educational Theatre Journal 1, no. 1 (1949): 2–4. Kivimaa, Arvi. “Editorial.” “Theatre in Finland.” World Theatre, Special Issue (1958). Kivimaa, Arvi. Europäische Dichterreise durch Deutschland: Reiseeindrücke eines finnischen Schriftstellers in Deutschland [Translated by Reimar von Bonin]. Berlin, Wien, Leipzig: Karl H. Bischoff, 1944. Kivimaa, Arvi. Eurooppalainen veljeskunta: Runoilijamatka halki Saksan. Helsinki: Otava, 1942. Kivimaa, Arvi. “Finnische Betrachtung.” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 2 (June 1942). Kivimaa, Arvi. Helsinki, Parisi, Moskova: Teatterija, kirjoja ja kirjailijoita. Helsinki: Otava, 1929. Kivimaa, Arvi. Näyttämön lumous. Helsinki: Otava, 1952. Kivimaa, Arvi. Teatterin humanismi: Avajaispuheita 1950–1971. Helsinki: Otava, 1972. Kivimaa, Arvi. Teatterivaeltaja: Kirjoista, Kirjailijoista ja näyttämön taiteesta. Porvoo: WSOY, 1937. Kivimaa, Arvi. Valon ja pimeyden manner: Eräiden vaellusten tilinpäätös. Helsinki: Otava, 1943. Korppi-Tommola, Riikka. “Politics Promote Dance: Martha Graham in Finland, 1962.” Dance Chronicle 33 (2010): 82–112. Korsberg, Hanna. “Geographies of Theatre: The Finnish National Theatre in Stockholm in 1956.” Nordic Theatre Studies 28, no. 1 (2016): 27–38. Korsberg, Hanna. “Open the Windows on Europe! Arvi Kivimaa’s Work and Literary Production in the 1920’s and Early 30’s.” In Comparative Approaches to Nordic and European Modernism, edited by Mats Jansson, Janna Kantola, Jakob Lothe, and H. K. Riikonen, 59–73. Helsinki: Palmenia, 2008.

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Schlösser, Rainer. Das Volk und seine Bühne: Bemerkungen zum Aufbau des deutschen Theaters. Berlin: Theaterverlag Albert Langen, 1935. Sedgwick, Ewe. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123–151. Durham: Durham University Press, 2009. Sluga, Glenda. Internationalism in the Search of Nationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Spotts, Frederic. The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Sundholm, John. “Stories of National and Transnational Memory: Renegotiating the Finnish Conception of Moral Witness and National Victimhood.” In Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, edited by Simo Muir and Hana Worthen, 31–45. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Théâtre Pigalle: Ses éclairages, sa machinerie. With texts by Jean Cocteau and René Lara, photographs by Germaine Krull, cover design by Jean Carlu. [Paris]: Draeger, 1929. UNESCO. “Theatre of Nations,” The Irish Times, April 20, 1962. UNESCO 50 vuotta ja Suomi. Edited by Katri Himma. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 1995. Valtari, Mika. “The Finnish Literature Today.” Books Abroad 10, no. 3 (1936): 268–69. Viljanen, Lauri. Taisteleva humanismi: Kulttuurikriitillisiä ääriviivoja Goethestä nykypäivään. Hämeenlinna: Arvi A. Karisto Osakeyhtiö, 1936. “World Theatre Day: About the World Theatre Day.” International Theatre Institute ITI—World Organization for the Performing Arts. https://www.worldtheatre-day.org/worldtheatreday.html. Accessed June 8, 2017. Worthen, Hana. Playing “Nordic”: The Women of Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Print, 2007. Worthen, Hana. “Towards New Europe: Arvi Kivimaa, Kultur, and the Fictions of Humanism.” In Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, edited by Simo Muir and Hana Worthen, 95–127. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

CHAPTER 7

Disassembling Performance

Throughout Humanism, Drama, and Performance, I have attended to the distinctive historical engagements between humanism and theatre: the literary separation from, and privileging of, written drama over theatrical performance; the dramatic subordination of theatre as a means to execute the coherent dramatic work; the theatrical interchange of liberal values between dramatic performance and its audience. To conclude, I turn to three performative constellations that stage the challenge posed by theatre to the humanist imagination at a moment when humanism is undergoing radical revaluation in performance’s posthuman/ist critique: Anne Carson’s engagement with Sophocles’ Antigone (2012, 2015); Thomas Ostermeier’s with Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2012); and the Smeds Ensemble’s with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (2011). These productions address the inscription of readers and spectators into the regime of literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms by variously engaging canonical dramatic translations and destabilizing their nationalizing territorializations, which I consider with recourse to the ways Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblage undoes the dualistic and hierarchical—humanist—structuring of the components of the theatre. Triangulating readerly, spectatorial, and civic performance, I explore how these performative expressions negotiate theatre at the intersection of humanist determinations and posthumanist becomings, with specific consideration of “translation” and “performance.” Each of these constellations engages with translation, a product and a practice particularly revealing of the ideological constraints of theatrical © The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4_7

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humanism, its reliance on a mutually stabilizing notion of the literary, the textual, the speakable, the audible, and the performable. To use Lawrence Venuti’s provocations, translating drama amounts to a doubly domesticating act: accommodating the text to the power structure of the target language-culture, as well as to the implicit power-logic of its conventional theatre practice. To the extent that the translator renders the translated play to the criteria of speakability in the target rhetoric of theatre practice, the translation also confirms the domesticating function of that theatre’s performability (dramatic humanism). In his account of foreignizing translation, then, Venuti provides an instrument to challenge dramatic humanism, the transparent assimilation of drama to performance, by dislocating speakability, audibility, and performability from the mimetic theatre of cultural reproducibility. Calling for an “ethics of foreignization,” Venuti’s performative translation enacts the textual other as jarring, as only intermittently legible, as unsettling to the “reigning domestic values” of the target culture, to the “narcissistic experience of recognizing” one’s own culture in a “cultural other.”1 Much as it does for the literary/dramatic translator, theatrical performance has the capacity to complicate this relationship, opacifying the transparency between language, media, and cultures, producing a convergent work in a medium that may simultaneously domesticate and foreignize it in different registers. Performance, in this sense can resist the “imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy” that naturalize the play to the theatre as a means to domesticate an acculturated ensemble.2 Within the orbit of a critical posthumanist theatre, the performative assemblage specifically refuses to translate the text, if what translation means is to reduce a literary object to the domestic, identitarian regimes of singularizing performance.

Carson’s Antigonicks As an act of unwriting, the texts of Anne Carson’s translational ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone become from the particularities and relationalities forged among them as well as from their asymmetrical encounters with one another. At the same time, their meanings multiply from the ways this constellation deterritorializes the Antigones it thematically animates, to address their philosophical and cultural territorializations. An open-ended becoming, this assemblage enacts verbal and performative de-singularizations of the humanist conventions

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of “the book” as the signifying container of “the work” and of “the character” as the living variable of the ordained center of Being, “the human.” Moving beyond the performance of “the cultural book,” ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone performs a rhizomatic dramaturgy.3 ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick disassembles the cultural and commercial connections structuring the desire to identify the book with the work, the work with the author, the original with the translation, and the text with the performance, directly intervening in the ontologies and epistemologies of literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms. Unwriting the book, as a printed artifact, in part by placing an orthographically different title on the cover and on the title page, ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK appeared in 2012 as a hardcover, and ANTIGO NICK – antigonick in 2015 as a paperback, each referring to itself as a translation of Sophokles’ Antigone, “Translated by Anne Carson” (hardback) and “translated by anne carson” (paperback). Despite the rationalization offered by the Library of Congress cataloging information, both the title pages and the copyright pages register the particularities of these publications. Is the reader encountering a work entitled “Antigonick / Sophokles; translated by Anne Carson and illustrated by Bianca Stone” written by “Sophocles” (hardback, 2012) or “Antigonick / Sophokles; translated by Anne Carson” by “Sophocles, author” (paperback, 2015)? Given the formal difference in the orthography of the title, in the capitalization of the translator-poet’s name, and in the cover design as well, the hardback and the paperback perform with and against one another, in an interplay beyond a clean, positive, and negative binary; each iteration presents itself as an almost but not quite identical rendition of the other, as more than an “edition.” In 2015, another volume appeared, and one more dimension entered the assemblage, when Carson published a “new translation” of Sophokles’ Antigone commissioned for a commercial touring stage production directed by Ivo van Hove and starring Juliette Binoche.4 Impelled to translate Antigone by van Hove’s refusal to stage her “Antigonick version,” Carson resolved to “make a version otherwise … attempting to outwit myself as it were”5 ; first performed in Luxemburg and London, this “version otherwise” could be bought and its theatrical treatment experienced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then elsewhere in the United States in 2015. The hardback is entitled ANTIGO NICK on the cover, and ANTIGONICK on the title page, the double title—the cover inserting a space

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between ANTIGO and NICK, orthography not followed on the title page—appearing in one Roman font, all uppercase. The title page of the paperback stages another alteration, in Roman lowercase: antigonick. And Sophokles’ identity multiplies as well; foreignized in its evocation of Greek spelling, the name is given in parenthetical uppercase on both the hardback and the paperback covers, in uppercase on the hardback title page, and in parenthetical lowercase on the paperback title page. This loosening of the title’s orthography and the author’s parenthetical location prompts an affective disorientation, as the book—and so the reader—is ambivalently caught between subject and object, somewhat like Anne Carson and anne carson, identified as the translator despite her creative, critical, and theoretical production of the text, positioned beyond the (author) whose name is simultaneously and variously inscribed into the title. This multiplying? dimension of the assemblage also points to the limitations of the singularizing requirements of citational style, as its slippages and multiplications of citational objects—title, author, translator—cannot be captured within those rubrics (think of The Chicago Manual of Style, used here). Enigmatically, the titles furthermore unwrite the separation between the fictitious and the real, as they appear to be marked by Carson’s life in their embodiment of the name of her deceased brother, Nick, whose doing underpins the “translation’s” final stage direction: “[exeunt omnes except Nick who continues measuring].”6 An act of public and private mourning, Nick’s performance performs the ending of Carson’s “translation” and his beginning into the world otherwise, his becoming in and through her “translation’s” performance.

Cover Title page

Hardback 2012

Paperback 2015

ANTIGO NICK (SOPHOKLES) ANTIGONICK SOPHOKLES Translated by Anne Carson Illustrated by Bianca Stone Design by Robert Currie

ANTIGO NICK (SOPHOKLES) antigonick (sophokles) translated by anne carson

What is the work here? What is it called? Who is its author? Triangulating an interaction between text-as-meaning, writing-as-style, and meaning-as-image, and allowing for an open-ended interaction between the volume’s co-creators, the 2012 hardback announces itself as a “new

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translation by Anne Carson, with text blocks hand-inked on the page; on separate translucent vellum pages, Bianca Stone has created drawings to overlay the text” (copyright page). Creating a mutual material interdependence in which the text, translation, and poem underlie and are seen through Stone’s image and vice versa, the hardback also materializes an historical echo, as both the hand-lettering and vellum remediate an earlier, pre-industrial era of handmade book production through the elegant design of a contemporary art book. Indeed, though his name does not appear on the cover, “Designed by Robert Currie” appears on the title page, and Currie holds individual copyright side by side with Carson and Stone. Professionally designed, and fashioned to unusual trim size, and unpaginated, the hardback announces its status as an art book. This thing, though, is more than that. Infiltrating the humanist readerly subject by multiplying its channels of discourse, its layered imbrication of words and/as images, it asks to be encountered in multiple ways through a process of nonlinear, tactile, relating. I cannot read, or only read, the hardback, but I can make myself available to its material and contextual communication with me. Embodying an interdependent—inanimate and animate—engagement of perception and meaning, and collaboration across the artistic and graphic disciplines of book production, the hardback presents itself as a posthumanist ecology. The paperback is different, foregrounding the labor and value of the “translator’s” work as significant to the experience of reading the poem between its covers, prioritizing translation’s value by emphasizing Carson’s “translated by” in tension with the parenthetical author, (sophokles). As the hardback overcomes the ascription of the work to the single agent of its verbal composition, the “author,” the paperback affirms the status of the translator unbracketed by the author, folding into that appellation the unstated, but undeniable, activities of theorist and poet materialized through the framing theoretical verse essay “the task of the translator of antigone,” and also through the original material Carson generates and inserts into (sophokles’) Antigone. Formatted to the size of Carson’s other books of poems, and paginated—no designer is named, though the cover photo is credited to Currie—the paperback more visibly, though not exclusively, performs the page as a scene of “authorial” colonialization of the book, and its evasion in the rhizomatic interaction between (author), translator, [essayist], and [poet]. And Nick. Evolutionary cultural history, to say nothing of the genetic model of bibliography, regards an earlier authorized edition as more authoritative

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than its subsequent reissue. Irreducible to “its” (hardback) avatar, the paperback escapes this logic. A discrete and a relational thing, while the paperback “lacks” the hardback’s illustrations and the “text blocks handinked on the page,” it “adds” Carson’s theoretical essay, “the task of the translator of antigone.” Even as the titles—their different orthographies refusing to align into one identity—materialize a dissonant vibration, these two not-quite-editions also swarm: enacting inter- and transmedial relationality, each thing casts itself through its internal relationalities and in relation to the other. Rather than constituting a progressive, reproductive, mimetic series, these things actualize, and through their vibrational materiality argue for, connectivity-in-difference. As assemblage, not reduced to the ideal of a singularized identity, ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone performs an undoing of the exclusively human/ist ethos of the book, a surpassing of the conception of the author, the work, the translation, the character, of the instrument mediating the individuating and internalizing selffashioning of the writer and the reader. It does not reenact the serial objectification of the historical emergence and materialization of the author’s “intentions” in a set of more or less (in)adequate printform representations: first editions, final authorial editions, popular editions, and scholarly editions. Rather, each not-quite-edition and its elements—translation, title, textuality, Antigone, etc.—perform as what Jane Bennett calls “power things” and “vibrant materials,” producing through a “certain vital force.” As each’s particular materiality enters into “a coalition and yet preserves something” of its own “agential impetus,”7 ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone moves beyond the human performance of the book; freighted by what it dis/assembles, it takes on a posthumanist “coming collectivity.”8 ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone also reverberates with posthumanist repositionings of theatre. At the time the hardback was published, a stage reading performance, of which a recording is available on YouTube, took place at the 2012 Louisiana International Literature Festival, featuring Carson herself as the Chorus.9 Located within an inter- and transmedial multiplication of interdependent—bodies, performers (readers, spectators, viewers, and users), texts (dramas, scripts, and translations), and media (sound amplification and video projection)—materialities, the staged reading itself also multiplies genres of performance as a capacious public modality, not reducible to a singularizing performativity.

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Staged: motivating his performative persona as an actor, Nielsen’s performance as Kreon tends toward a more fully embodied, psychologized, characterizing approach to the text-as-a-role, toward acting; rather than re-citing the text in the mode of reading aloud, his performance articulates a theatrical push to personation, embodying the interpretative power of words-in-character. Reading: Carson’s performance as the Chorus enacts differently, shaped by and shaping the convention of poetry reading. The poet works to cast the words, attributing to them an intrinsic weight, performatively re-citing that weight, so to speak, in the grain of the (authorial) voice. Carson’s recitation summons the poet’s bodily voice as its signifying material, in part by refusing to locate language in acting, emphasizing the performance instead as a presentation of the word to an audience of listeners. Staged/ reading /performance: undermining the exigency of the border between poetic reading and theatrical acting, the performance also resists a unified—acting or reading, monolingual and monoaccentual—performance style, as the performers-readers (also) speak themselves in a range of embodied accents. As a multi-accentual landscape of international and American Englishes, the stage sonority dramatizes and moves beyond the logocentric affordances of the cultural standardization of “democratized” theatre speech (think, for example, about the work of “RP,” received pronunciation, in the UK, or the various controversies about “Black English” or a “white voice” in the United States). The poetry reading performance refocuses the inscriptive power of the humanist text in the form of a question: is the body merely the vessel channeling the word’s action into the world, or does it make the word into action, its action? In his meditation on the performance of the poetry reading, Charles Bernstein suggests that its purpose is to emphasize “the material presence of the poem, and of the performer,” a presence and presentation that he distinguishes from an “actor’s rendition”: whereas “poetic” reading enacts a literary humanism by asserting the transparency of the performance to the poem, “‘acting’ takes precedence over letting the words speak for themselves,” even when it, as a mode of dramatic humanism, merely recodes the writing in a conventional theatrical discourse.10 In this staged reading, Nielsen’s “theatrical” and Carson’s “poetic” performance at once measure and overcome a persistent anxiety to preserve the poem’s/drama’s authority in performance, registering the challenge that

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“acting” poses to Bernstein’s poetics. In literary humanism, the performance is superfluous. In dramatic humanism, the performance is transparent to the drama; the drama contains the performance. ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone strikes an alliance with assemblage-like productions refusing to treat performance as a means to singularization. It resonates, rhizomatically, with Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s 2002–2004 Tragedia Endogonidia, a “production” transpiring in multiple temporalities and localities through episodes staged in many European cities (Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London, and Marseille) and across different media platforms, each thing—live performance/s, “video-memory,” a book, YouTube clips—both interconnected and irreducible to any other.11 Like Tragedia Endogonidia, ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick– Antigone also performs across a range of materializations and performative genres, enacting a desire to resist “performance’s” digestion to “the translatable.” Given its valuation of performance’s multiplicity, ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone reverberates with Barbara Cassin’s 1998 sense of “translation” as conditioned by the “untranslatable,” by what “is left untranslated as it is transferred from language to language … or that is typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation.”12 Recharging humanism’s perennial escape from the theatre and the singularizing performance it depends on, ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone deploys translation to suspend (Cassin) or to release or to emancipate (Rancière) Antigone as the un/translatable, as the “ability” of untranslatability (Benjamin),13 as the potential to sound from the site of irreducible difference.14 In relation to “ancient Greek,” ANTIGO NICK – ANTIGONICK – antigonick – Antigone performs different modes of translation and theories of translation, refusing to immure a translated, translatable Antigone. Casting Antigone as “a strange new kind of inbetween thing,”15 the effect of what has been “left untranslated” as she was “transferred” from one appearance into another, the assemblage summons Antigones—of Sophokles, Brecht, Hegel, Lacan, Judith Butler, George Eliot, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Anouilh, and Ingeborg Bachmann—to sound Antigone’s undoing. Irreducible to George Eliot’s “exemplar for masculine intellect and moral sense,”16 this swarm resists any singularizing reduction, her “classic double bind” figuring “Woman” as “the eternal irony of the community” to Hegel, as the “occasion for a new field of the human” to

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Butler, as “a good impression on the Nazi / high command / and simultaneously on the leaders of the French Resistance” to Anouilh.17 Carson’s Antigone is already multiple; she neither reiterates Sophokles’ nor succeed his successors’, merely adding to the lineage of her unwriting. Nor can this Antigone be captured dialectically, in negation, disclosed as the opposite of the mask: tied to his logos, his body, animated through the politics of the Greek theatron. Instead, she keeps “faith / with a deeply other organization that lies just beneath what we see / or what we say,” bound to her “name in Greek,” which “means something like ‘against birth’ or ‘in- / stead of being born.’”18 For then and there, she cannot but speak her appointment to the tomb/womb; her “next word” cannot be anything other than “death.”19 “We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us ”: appropriating Beckett’s words while “paraphrasing Hegel”20 (or not), Carson’s Antigone is not an “autonomous ” thing; instead, like John Cage’s 4’33”, she is composed “gradually out of many small pieces of silence,” to allow us “to listen to the sound of what happens / when everything normal/musical/careful/conventional or pious / is taken away.”21 We were always already anxious about you perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins “I lose my screams” dear Antigone, I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams22

Antigone’s screams sound from that “other organization”; a “mobile and mutant” sound, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, her screams wander “across the grid” of her orchestrated representation.23 Addressing herself to Antigone, and charging herself with the responsibility to Antigone’s embodied voice, Carson and her Chorus turn to Brecht: “maybe he got you best,” Carson writes, “to carry one’s own door will make a person / clumsy, tired and strange.”24 Chorus:

Antigone:

you’re clumsy it’s true clumsy as your father remember how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back oh I don’t want to talk about him or him25

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Antigone may not want “to talk about him,” but let us probe into the “deeply other organization that lies just beneath” these words, by speaking about her, Helene Weigel, the actress who, in the 1948 production of Brecht’s and Caspar Neher’s Antigone, had a Brett, a rectangular board, resembling a door but not quite a door, strapped to her back. Originally conceived by Neher as a yoke, this wooden prop, this thing evolved into an abstract plank, less an attribute of character than a way to ensure a material responsiveness from the actress’s body, from her body’s weight and height and movement, a means to produce both physical fatigue in the actress’s production of Antigone and a kinaesthetic force, to lend them—Weigel and Antigone—gravity and intensity (Fig. 7.1). A “door can have diverse meanings”26 : the door is a powerful symbol, but Weigel’s Brett is a powerful tool and an agentic thing. The “Brettschleppen,” board-hauling, freights the actress’s work, its momentum propels her, it bows her down, and it also provides backing, straightens her up. As Brecht explained, [i]mplementing her reactions and actions with great physicality, the boardhauling makes Antigone into a center of restlessness. On the one hand, when she transgresses against the Elders … and against Creon … she has to haul the board, and on the other, the momentum of the board also hauls her. During the struggle, the board appears to be lighter.27

Marking Antigone as a “strange new kind of inbetween thing” (Carson), occupying the “in-between, the border or line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari),28 this conjunction of agentic-thing and actress-thing reminds us of the labor das Brett engages, as the board played an interactive part with Weigel’s performance: in moments of transgression, the board becomes heavier, “she has to haul the board,” while “[d]uring the struggle, the board appears to be lighter.” Carson’s “door” points to the logic and imagery of the poem’s narrative, providing an opening for restoring das Brett, and the actress with whom it performed, to the logic of the untranslatable.29 The slippage from (unnamed) Weigel’s board to Antigone’s door provides an opportunity to write with Carson’s translation. Carson’s door powerfully realizes Antigone’s capacity to “go to places that don’t have an obvious way in, like normality / or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind.”30 It captures an interpretive dimension of this liminal

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Fig. 7.1 Helene Weigel and the Brett, which functions both as a handcuff restraint on Antigone’s wrists and as an instrument of and for Weigel’s acting. In Neher’s original design, it resembled an animal yoke across Antigone’s neck, heightening and psychologizing a suffering Antigone, a function displaced by the anti-realist and dialectically constellated Weigel-Brett-Antigone (Credit Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Brecht-Archiv, Brecht-Fotoarchiv 47/117 © by Ruth Berlau/Hoffmann)

thing, the verbal imagery of the play, the language of passages, the gate to the city, the opening of the tomb. Acculturating the theatrical prop to the door also inscribes the actress’s performative doing in the design of the

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drama, recalling the Althusserian paradigm, inserting the embodied miseen-scène into the deep structuration of the authorial work, the “deeply other organization that lies just beneath.” Let us, then, unwrite the board into the translational assemblage, alongside Antigone’s screams, to bear the weight of the actress to the mise-en-page through an opening that is and is not a door.

Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind When audiences enter the auditorium for Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Ein Volksfeind, they encounter a passage from The Invisible Committee’s political manifesto The Coming Insurrection—a remediatized page and a symbolic door into the performance—projected on a screen across the stage. In its Brechtian inflection, inviting the audience to read through The Coming Insurrection, Ein Volksfeind at once invokes and distanciates the conventional relations of modern proscenium realism, and the interiorization promoted by the privileged instrument of humanism, the book. Thematically, this digital mise-en-page ironizes a liberal, “essentially just society,” in which “no one is disadvantaged or exploited by dependence on others,” in which no individual is “expected to sacrifice her interest to those of others in order to gain the satisfaction of social intercourse.”31 “I AM WHAT I AM”: not simply a lie, not a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry, directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation against everything that makes us exist and ensures that the whole world doesn’t have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new development: pure boredom, passionless and well-ordered empty, frozen space, where nothing circulates but registered bodies, automobile molecules, and ideal commodities.32

“I AM WHAT I AM,” a tautological war cry, a self-referentiality defying analysis, “I = I”33 : this phrase locates the ethos of neoliberal individualism inhabited by Ein Volksfeind at the intersection of theatre as a glocal commodity. Composing itself through “decomposition,” as a consequence of “the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity,” this I comes into being by undoing “everything that exists between

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beings … everything that invisibly links them,”34 by denying what Judith Butler casts as interdependencies and Jean-Luc Nancy as “the measure of the ‘with.’”35 At once homo economicus and homo aestheticus, subject to and object of neoliberal capitalism and its “aesthetic lifestyle with which advertising strategies have linked the article,”36 this I is unencumbered in the enactment of the rationality sustaining its entrepreneurial nature. The critical stance of The Coming Insurrection is echoed, and perhaps undermined, by two additional dimensions of Ein Volksfeind I will engage in this section: a moment midway through the performance, when “the play” is paused and this text is used to frame a discussion forum between the cast and the audience, and by the material style of the mise-en-scène, which asserts the global appetite for an urbane modernism to sustain the commodified ubiquity of the relations of realism.37 Centering on the 2013 performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), I argue that the political work of Ein Volksfeind emerges against the backdrop of a specific performative history, the network of contradictory performances prompted by The Coming Insurrection in the United States, which dramatizes strategies for the containment of the political—the right to appear—indexed in the production itself.38 In the five years prior to Ein Volksfeind’s Brooklyn appearance, The Coming Insurrection had been instrumentalized both to resist and to support the impact of neoliberalism. The first performance was a publicity flash-mob organized by the independent publisher Semiotext(e) to mark the appearance of the volume’s English translation; this event was absorbed into the majoritarian discourses of the New York Times and of Fox News, reperformances closely anticipating the liberal-humanist dynamics of Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review of Ein Volksfeind at BAM. Regardless of the political vector of the platform (the New York Times, Fox News, BAM), the reception of The Coming Insurrection speaks to the contemporary suppression of the right to appear as a critically, politically, and intersectionally motivated public assembly. In the forum scene, Ein Volksfeind appears to suspend a neo/liberal-humanist exclusion of the political from the aesthetic, but the tactics with which a neo/liberal media captures and nullifies the practice of assembly do not stand entirely apart from the gestus of Ein Volksfeind; the production also appears to open a moment of collective political expression that becomes conceptually foreclosed within its own globalizing perspective, a perspective groomed to the commodity relations represented through the production’s scenic design.

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According to the New York Times, the “contributors” of the 2007 L’insurrection qui vient, “who [significantly claim] are not its authors,” came to be known to the wider French public when the book was introduced into the 2008 trial of the “Tarnac Nine,” charged with a “terrorist enterprise,” the sabotage of the French national high-speed rail lines “by draping horseshoe-shaped iron bars over 25,000-volt power lines on four separate tracks, disabling 160 trains.” Characterizing the defendants as “‘ultra-leftists’ who share a ‘total rejection of any democratic expression of political opinion, and an extremely violent tone,’” as the New York Times reported, French Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie labeled the manifesto a “manual of terrorism,” intrinsically opposed to the democratic culture of France and, by extension, of Europe.39 What is striking about the Times ’s reporting is the palpable connection it maintains between the destabilizing force of the de-authorized dissemination of L’insurrection qui vient and a terrorist rejection of democratic principles, a conjunction that plays an ongoing role in the reception of the manifesto. Upon its initial appearance on the internet, L’insurrection qui vient began to multiply in anonymous translations. Text as virus, as terror: invisible contributors, writing without an author, discourse free from copyright, unframed from the protection of property, a radical icon of what Chantal Mouffe calls the unreasonable, inadmissible to economized liberal production and identity.40 In the summer of 2009, Semiotext(e) released its English-language translation, The Coming Insurrection; to mark the occasion, a flash performance was covertly organized in New York, as a “mysterious message made its way across the Internet.” Please join us for the official book launch, including discussion of the text as well as content-appropriate activities, on Sunday, June 14 at 5pm on the fourth floor of Union Square Barnes and Noble.41

As the New York Times reported, a “crowd” of about one hundred assembled at the bookstore, gathering around its small stage used for readings and concerts. When a Barnes & Noble employee announced that “there was no reading scheduled for that night, a man jumped onto a stage and began loudly reciting the opening words of the book’s introduction: ‘Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.’” At that point, a

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security guard tried to halt the unsanctioned reading, but the man continued for about five minutes, until the police arrived. The crowd, mostly people in their 20s and 30s, including some graduate students, then adjourned, clapping and yelling, to East 17th Street. There they formed a rebellious spectacle, crowding into shops and loudly shouting bits of political theory, to the amusement of some onlookers and store employees and the irritation of others.42

As Noam Chomsky suggests, in the American “terminology of modern progressive thought, the population may be ‘spectators,’ but not ‘participants,’”43 in fact a vision of proper spectating consistent with the fourthwall proscenium theatricality of industrial modernity. While the Barnes & Noble event might be understood as savvy social-media marketing coorganized by Semiotext(e), its performative replay in the New York Times dramatizes the difficulty of intervening in the economized public sphere— Union Square or the Times —through unscripted civic performance, particularly when its public is prefigured as an ensemble at the intersection of “clapping and yelling” citizen-spectators and citizen-consumers. For as Times reporter Colin Moynihan documents, the effort to publicize and debate The Coming Insurrection by constituting a spontaneous public assembly in the sphere of economic daily life was inevitably met only with “the amusement of some onlookers and store employees and the irritation of others.” Even though Moynihan does quote “one man” following the performance in the Barnes & Noble who remarks, “‘[t]he book is important because it speaks to the total bankruptcy of pretty much everything’ … ‘[w]e’re living in a high-end aesthetic with zero content,’” this critique is marked as oddball, as lacking moderation, as distinct from the licensed reactions of disengaged annoyance or amusement. Following the demonstrators into a nearby Starbucks, Moynihan summarizes his encounter with “Emile Olea, 28, a customer at the coffee shop who was visiting from San Diego,” and who “closed his laptop computer and gazed at the crowd. ‘I have no idea what’s going on,’ he said. ‘But I like the excitement.’”44 Ignoring the underlying issues raised by the flash performance, dismissing the performance’s civic dimension by highlighting it as a “rebellious spectacle” (my emphasis), an amusing yet alarming irrelevance to the urban economic life it disrupts (also signaled by the condescending title “Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes”), the article highlights two points. First, presenting the Coming Insurrection flash performance as an ineffectual waste of time, it trains the reader’s skeptical eye on

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what it takes to be an anti-consumerist protest; in this sense, the discourse shares in the suppression of the unrehearsed and undetermined possibilities of a public gathering. Second, in singling out “graduate students” as the iconic emblem of intellectual and economic inconsequentiality, the article’s rhetorical affectivity relies on an anti-intellectual “class” division undermining what the Times apparently stands for, a commitment to unbiased reporting sustaining an undivided democracy, a commitment echoed in its liberal-humanist discourse on the democratic function of the arts as well. Rather than analyzing the background and the causes of this flash-mob, or taking its economic concerns seriously, the members of the public are simply ridiculed behind the screen of the Times ’s impartiality. At the same time, the Times ’s ridicule also suggests that the “graduate students” pose a kind of threat: they appear to know what they are doing when they occupy the space of public performance. The Times provides little context or investigation into the object of reporting, spectacularizing the event through an anti-intellectual and anti-civic anxiety masked as supercilious irony toward the performers and the onlookers of their actions. The recontainment of the flash-mob felicitously resonated at the other end of the political spectrum. On July 1, 2009, right-wing Fox News television host Glenn Beck took up the event, in part to promote his new book, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine.45 Reiterating the charge of “terrorism” against The Invisible Committee in “France, of all places,” Beck took the performance to undermine the economic institutions sustaining American life and charged his audience with the obligation to commence defensive surveillance of such “enemies within.” A group had organized and translated this book and they were reading unauthorized portions of this book at a New York City bookstore. Well, the bookstore threw them out because they weren’t supposed to be doing that, and then they went to Starbucks and then they went into some other, some other place, and I read about this in the paper and I was struck by the line of one of the Americans in there, where they’re reading parts of this, they are calling for terrorist activity, and they’re calling for the end of Western civilization, the end of our economy and one of the ladies actually said, “I did not know what was going on, but it sure was exciting.” And I thought we are doomed. This isn’t about excitement, this is more than a curiosity.46

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In a typically apocalyptic register, Beck sees the “group[’s]” violation of American/Western civilization to arise from the unauthorized use of intellectual property (unauthorized translation and reading of The Coming Insurrection) and the unauthorized use of real property (the Barnes & Noble store and its stage). Taking his information from the Times article and representing its condescension in a different key, Beck misgenders Emile Olea as “one of the ladies,” his sexism sustaining the corrosive critique of the “excitement” she shares with the preposterous yet ominous public performativity disrupting the flow of the economy. Tellingly, perhaps, while Beck inveighs against the flash-mob’s obstruction of economic activity, The Coming Insurrection benefited from his performance: the day after Beck’s Fox broadcast, The Coming Insurrection rose to number 54 on Amazon’s bestseller list and in July the book briefly advanced to number 1.47 Despite the polarized tonalities of their responses, Moynihan (Times ) and Beck (Fox) reperform The Coming Insurrection assembly as at once threatening and irrelevant in the social, economic, and political registers. In accents dramatizing an underlying anxiety regarding the limits of civic public performance, both the Times and Fox undermine what Butler calls the right to appear, forms of appearance actualized in The Coming Insurrection flash-mob. These gestures effectively work to limit public space as the space for civic togetherness, a pressure extending to the reception of Ein Volksfeind, which staged (like the Times and Fox) “the fear that the theatre,” as Martin Puchner might suggest, “would actually provide a forum in which the constitution of public opinion might take place.”48 The accent of media accounts of The Coming Insurrection performances is audible against the now-familiar background of what one might call neoliberal humanism: “that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade,” freedoms that the globalized state “is to create and preserve” as an “institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”49 Performing The Coming Insurrection in the action of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People—Ibsen’s English-language title recalls the rallying campaign of one of Beck’s subchapters, “Enemies Within: Tread Carefully”—Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind mounts a complex negotiation with neoliberal imperatives in contemporary civic life and with the neoliberal

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logic permeating the discourse of public media, particularly with the consensualized global citizen as an economized protagonist in the drama of the free market rather than as a politically motivated co-performer. One aspect of the problematic global touring of Ein Volksfeind is its disinterest in the relation between local performance histories and the staging of The Coming Insurrection on which its theatrical performance— and the performative transformation of spectators into an aestheticized civic assembly—depends. At the opening of Ein Volksfeind, the audience is invited to interpret the performance through the screen on which a passage from The Coming Insurrection was projected; this passage re-enters the performance as the script for Dr. Stockmann’s incensed address to the townspeople later in Act Four, intersecting Ibsen’s conflict between political and economic liberalism setting with the contemporary shift from liberal to neoliberal politics. At the moment Stockmann’s speech is to be delivered, a coup de théâtre repositions the theatrical audience in the dramaturgy of civic assembly: the deep, realist perspective of the stage room, looking out on the countryside is foreshortened as the stage is whitewashed and notionally transformed into a public hall. Calling for the house lights, Stockmann begins to speak to us from The Coming Insurrection, locating the relatively privileged, relatively neo/liberal BAM audience as both cause and effect of the crises he presents: “[i]ndividualization of all conditions—life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia”; “[t]he quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap … whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an ‘I.’” Declaring that the “self is not some thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us,” Stockmann maps the undoing of the liberal-humanist individual by the prostheses of the neoliberal market to the undoing of civic resistance by the repetition of crises: “[t]hirty years of ‘crisis,’ mass unemployment and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy.” If “the economy is not ‘in’ crisis, the economy is itself the crisis,” then the conventional instruments of resistance to “growth” are no solution but an impasse, a continuation of business by other means (as Brecht, appropriating Clausewitz, noted of warfare in Mother Courage), depending on the optimization of the democratic subject as neoliberal consumer in a world where “nothing circulates but … ideal commodities.”50 Radicalized by a post-truth sensibility displacing scientific knowledge, Stockmann slips toward the apocalyptic accent of Glenn Beck—anyone

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who “refuses to see that what we’re faced with is not the crisis of a society but the extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation”—and then toward a more explicitly National Socialist register, indexing humanism’s inherent complicity with (pseudo)scientific genocide, summoning a “wish to exterminate” the city leaders “like vermin.” At this moment in the performance, the newspaper owner Aslaksen intervenes, asking for a show of hands from those who side with Stockmann’s point of view. The shift in Stockmann’s rhetoric is dramaturgically designed to alienate spectatorial empathy for him, as his lines recall the Nazis’ ostracizing of the Jews as “vermin” as part of the “final solution.” However, the spectators do not accept their circumscription within this historical discourse to override the present circumstances through which they relate to Stockmann’s speech and its values. The majority of spectators raise their hands, siding with Stockmann’s, and The Coming Insurrection’s, call for ecological—as well as political, economic, and social— responsibility. Disrupting the neo/liberal-humanist polarizing of the political and the aesthetic, for the next fifteen minutes or so the spectators debate the issues raised by the play, the compromising alliance between the political and media players, the destruction of the environment for economic, political, and social gain, the devaluation of collective rights. The actors do not entirely suspend their fictional roles, remaining close to or in character; the spectators bring contemporary local politics into the performance, the “Gowanus Canal,” “global warming,” “Burning Man,” the politics of “Monsanto.” As one spectator put it, transcending the aestheticized notion of the ensemble, “we, we all of us, sitting in this audience, in this country, we all are the problem. We go about our business, we don’t stand up, we don’t protest, and we don’t stop it. I mean that the corporations and their money rule us. I mean they don’t have to. We need to stand up and fight. Every single month, every single day.” Audience applause. The discussion ends when Stockmann (Stefan Stern) resumes his lecture, posing and answering a rhetorical question: “[t]he majority of society, who is it? Are they the smart or the stupid ones? … The stupid are in the majority. They have the power, but I have the right. I am right, the right is on the side of the individual. You let the city go under so that you don’t have to acknowledge the truth.”51 At this point, Hovstad and Billing attack Stockmann, pelting him with paintballs that further taint his image, treating him like a canvas on which post-truth institutional power executes its force.

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Understanding The Coming Insurrection as “reductive,” Ostermeier and dramaturg Florian Borchmeyer had been startled at the “early try outs and the Avignon premiere.” For rather than turning against him as Ibsen’s townspeople do, audiences created “quite a problem within our original dramaturgic conceit” by expressing a “one-sided sympathy pro Stockmann.”52 This kind of reception was reiterated in the dozen performances I attended in Berlin, London, and Brooklyn, where audiences tended to compose themselves more as recalcitrant theatrical assemblies, in which speaking up and speaking out structured their interaction with one another, with the actors, and with the play’s thematics.53 Ostermeier and Borchmeyer’s anticipation that the spectators would exert a neoliberal moderation against Stockmann’s radical rhetoric is in tension with Eva Meckbach’s (Katharina Stockmann) comments about the BAM audiences. Although the BAM spectators supported Stockmann and voiced ecological and political concerns, she “was a bit shocked and frightened” by the New York response, noting, “[y]ou could really physically feel neoliberalism, even though it’s such a cool city.” Given the layout of BAM’s Harvey Theatre, where spectators in the rear had difficulty calling for the microphone, perhaps Meckbach simply failed to hear unanticipated questions and comments like those above. Others in the cast note, as Moritz Gottwald (Billing) did, a “very cool, reflected, unemotional debate”; for him, “a few people really made some very intelligent remarks.” Both Gottwald and Christoph Gawenda (Hovstad) rightly take issue with Meckbach’s sense that at BAM “[n]o one spoke up for Stockmann, everyone supported Aslaksen and the politicians.” Yet, even though speaking up for Stockmann or reiterating liberal attitudes within the framing structure of the commodified individualism of neoliberalism does not, as indeed Stockmann’s speech suggests, provide active resistance, it does dramatize a spectatorial willingness to appear as participants in an evolving theatrical assembly, dissolving the separation between aesthetics and politics.54 Nonetheless, Charles Isherwood’s review for the New York Times, “An Ibsen Who Rages Over Ritalin and Economic Austerity Plans,” is sustained by the propriety of an apolitical theatrical ensemble unified through the legitimate aestheticizing experience of the drama.55 Isherwood is deeply suspicious of any compromise to the spectator’s inward-turned subjectivity—defined as a freedom to interpret for oneself (rather than

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think otherwise, with others), an act of intimate independence, of private citizenship—as a freedom from politics in the aesthetic sphere of art, a freedom realized as the power or privilege to remain silent, in one’s seat, in the dark. Recalling Trump’s requirement for theatre (see Introduction), Isherwood’s theatre must remain a muted, safe space, and protecting art rather than life. Reminding his readers of the audience’s proper function, Isherwood summons the division between the left (cast as a kind of self-indulgent evil) and the right (assumed as the pragmatic necessity of democracy sustained by the free-market economy) to discredit the “director’s decision to use Ibsen’s drama as an occasion for the audience to indulge its own political views.” Playing “precisely the wrong role,” the audience is led to depart from its normative passivity and to engage in a “public referendum,” an activity that “most of us prefer” to undertake “at the polls, not the theater.”56 Though Isherwood distinguishes between the political purpose of the polls and the aesthetic purpose of the stage, the voting booth provides precisely the image of the ensemble of atomized unity informing his sense of theatrical propriety: like the citizens casting their votes, the spectators must be free to exert the independent, private, internal judgment that defines theatrical relations. Echoing the Times ’s ridicule of the Coming Insurrection flash-mob, Isherwood understands the spectators’ playing of their civic part as inappropriate to the theatre; and, like Schiller, he sees political theatricality as a potentially dangerous undemocratic expression: “Bring on the tumbrels!” Throughout Ein Volksfeind’s run at BAM, the spectators decisively voiced themselves as Mouffe’s “participants in political community,” undertaking an active “view of citizenship” at the intersection of theatrical performance, the politics of liberalism, and the effects of neoliberalism.57 Yet, despite the diversified field of the spectators’ performances, Isherwood (again like Trump) understands a differentiating agonistic performance as inappropriate: the audience should behave as an ensemble, regardless of its actual doing: “Need I point out that the patrons of German-language versions of Ibsen plays tend to be are [sic] a liberalminded bunch?” Isherwood reiterates the ideological closure practiced by Moynihan and Beck in terms of theatrical performance. Ein Volksfeind pressures the theatre by distorting the idealized image of the audience, an ensemble of individuals stabilized by the drama, inviting instead a dissonant public to experience its distributed political agencies as resonating with an assembly. Indeed, what finally saves Ein Volksfeind for Isherwood

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is the realist theatrical propriety taking place on the stage, not in the house: the production sells “an engrossing and superbly acted night at the theater,” with stylish costumes and sets and “terrific” performances by the actors. The economized aesthetic pleasure of the commodity must absorb Ein Volksfeind’s tangential promotion of an alternative, politicized, theatrical experience. Ein Volksfeind encourages the spectators to assert their right to appear as a politically engaged collectivity, a potential occasionally realized when, in some localities, the spectator-citizens refused to accept their position beyond the fourth wall. In Moscow, the discussion scene drew “maybe 200 spectators” to the stage. In São Paolo, a spectator jumped onstage and assaulted David Ruland (playing Aslaksen). In Buenos Aires, the actors describe “25 minutes of class struggle live, and proper riot in the house.” These moments—when audiences treat the stage as the polls, so to speak—point to the limits of the production’s organizing conceit, traced by the conflict-driven construction of action and character. For as the actors point out, when “various groups in the auditorium” were “all shouting at each other,” the production could not adapt Ein Volksfeind’s architecture as a civic event beyond the determinations of realist theatricality, and so could not intersect theatrical with the social dramaturgy it seemed to summon: the actors “had absolutely no control anymore.” In this location, dependent on an antagonist/protagonist structure of us and them, the production could not provide an intersectional activity that would potentially mediate a provisional togetherness with a capacity reciprocally to alter Ein Volksfeind’ s present-future performativity through its interaction with the local public and vice versa. The antagonistic underpinnings of realism extend to a form of cultural colonialism in Ein Volksfeind’ s packaging as a global commodity. As Thomas Bading (Morten Kiil) remarked of performing in Delhi, “I also felt in an odd way alien and totally out of place, and began to ask myself some ethical questions: should we be here at all, and play our theatre, in India, in this totally different culture, and very different everyday life?”58 While Bading’s comments explicitly address the production’s disinterest in “our theatre” being open to the local cultures where it is produced, Ruland’s comment reveals an evolutionary colonial rationality, pointing out that “the poorer a country is, the more politically minded people are.” On their way to a richer democratic future, by virtue of their not-yet-democratic condition they produce liberatory political theatre that will, when democracy is established, become—as Isherwood’s review suggests—obsolete. Aesthetics replaces politics.

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Stage realism—the most ubiquitous stylistic practice associated with modern Western theatre, and distinctively associated with Ibsen—continues to provide a global currency against which Ein Volksfeind’ s closure to the local takes place. The politics of the realistic mise-en-scène is troped by its formal design: the actors remain “in character,” use practical props and furniture, are focused within the dramatic space behind the fourth wall, and behave within the “given circumstances” asserted by the drama, the logos of performance. Theatrical realism also dramatizes the liberal-humanist linkage between visual perspective and the implication of a viewing subject: the perception of depth, the fourth wall, and the darkened auditorium sustain the claim of mimetic illusion to transcend to the truth of verisimilitude. The emerging scenic technology of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe—receding wings and painted backcloth—attempted to reproduce a perspectival structure of vision in the theatre, and its means of encoding a viewing subject were, as Stephen Orgel has pointed out, reflexive of the theatre’s expression of an empowered monarchial subject, whose eye/I completed the perspective.59 Hans-Thies Lehmann suggests that the theatrical perspective “involves more than organizing visual space; it also means guiding visual understanding,” to the extent that “placed in front of the pictorial space of the stage,” the audience becomes a public of “contemplating spectators.”60 The closure of the represented subject and the viewing subject through an implicitly perspective gaze is crucially enabled by the electrification of the nineteenth-century house: the ability to cast the audience into apparent darkness (the spectatorial performance of the covert individual consumption of consciousness replacing the overt social performance transpiring in the illuminated house) is reciprocated by the picture frame stage and eventually by the rise of fourth-wall realist performance. Corollary with the rise of print and the expansion of literacy and literary experience, nineteenth-century stage realism increasingly claims an experience of individuated privacy for the readerly spectator. As Said remarks, “the reader is a central feature of all humanism—with essentially private, inward, meditative experiences of a rarified spiritual nature not readily available to public scrutiny. Along with the very notion of privacy itself.”61 Realist theatre uses its specific technological apparatus to assign a cognate, “private, inward, meditative” even “spiritual” role to the spectator, a “privacy” asserted through public means produced within a visible structure of representation. As in perspective painting, the realist spectator is an absent, yet constitutive agent, generated by and generating the

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illusion, whose agency in the theatre is conceptually conceived as reflective rather than active, consuming her or his cognitive encounter with the scripted performance. Enforcing “upon us a sense of the unalterable solidity of world,” as Mary Eagleton suggests,62 stage realism nonetheless prioritizes a drama of consciousness, in which critique works at the level of individual motive, while the constitutive systems framing the social narrative (social structure, the government, the media, and theatrical technology) remain offstage, figured by their individual agents, the broker, the judge, the loan shark, or in this case the doctor, the newspaperman, the factory owner, the mayor. A theatrical set designs at once a rhetorical space and a represented room: augmenting the alienating effect of the opening projection screen (“I AM WHAT I AM”), this room is a signifying space to be read, interpreted as a potential critique of realist scenography, and to be beheld, insisting on the metonymic relation between the stage, its materiality, and the spectatorial positionality it contains. Jan Pappelbaum’s set represents a generic domestic space that is anywhere and everywhere, “somewhere between Germany and the rest of the world”63 : an open floor plan, the living room area (audience left) features a black leather sofa and a chair recalling Knoll, Le Corbusier, or Mies van der Rohe; the dining room area (audience right) with a long dining table, part of a contemporary vogue for mid-twentieth-century modern décor. Furnished, as Ostermeier notes, according to the desire of “many Germans today,” in “today’s entirely trivial general style,” the lineaments of the apartment evoke the Design Within Reach urban class,64 what The Coming Insurrection calls the “frozen space” of the contemporary circulation of “ideal commodities.”65 The furniture materializes a globalized performative, in which a widely disseminated genre of representation (stage realism) and the props it requires is locally performed, co-generating local structures of affective meaning. The furniture’s significance as part of a commodified domesticity precisely locates the apartment in a material, economic, and political geography, in what Saskia Sassen has characterized as the “global city”: a hipster lair as readily found in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as in Berlin’s Prenzlauerberg.66 Modernist interior design merges ontology and epistemology: the “properties” of the set embody ethical principles, a proposal of the characters’ relation to the world. The Helmers have their piano and deluxe editions in the bookcase; the Stockmanns have their Eames, fulfilling the

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Zolaesque principle in which environment reveals and determines character. In a self-reflexive gesture of ideological disclosure, though, the walls are chalkboards covered with hand-drawn furniture and diagrams, with perspective lines marking floor and ceiling, angling inward toward an upstage chalkboard wall where the perspective converges on a central window—also drawn in chalk—through which the audience sees (again in chalk) what appears to be a distant mountainous countryside and the dismal factories poisoning the town baths. Some drawings on the chalkboard walls are of scenic elements—furniture and lamps. Others are diagrammatic, representing the intertwining of social, economic, and media systems, such as a circular arrangement of arrows gathering a set of topics and products into a self-reflexive network: Apple Store, advertisement, MacBook, Hollywood, promotion, community, gadget, iPod. As Katharina Ziemke, the scenic artist on the production, notes, the walls were traced by the status symbols of globalized modern design—“an iPhone and a Nespresso machine, and certain status symbols, like the Le Corbusier lounger or a designer floorlamp”—as a sign of Stockmann’s “contradictory personality,” which at once “rejects the whole capitalist consumer society” and retains its materiality “as an aspiration.”67 Framed by its chalk-outlined furniture, Pappelbaum’s and Ziemke’s set, perhaps, reveals the articulation of realism with the captured line of Deleuze and Guattari, the line that assigns coordinates, determining a punctual system of localizable connections, and so organizes a specific “didactic” system of “molar” “mnemotechnics.”68 Challenging the apparent neutrality of realist representation, Pappelbaum appropriates one hallmark of verisimilitude arising at the conjunction of the Enlightenment and emerging technologies and practices of stage and theatre design: the stage room is manifestly the space for the ideological production of an image of socioeconomic reality, a point materialized by the distant mountain horizon, which was actually “a stock-market graph of share prices.”69 The force of perspective tricks the eye, so to speak, concealing the economic as a natural vista. Framing its material objects in the blueprint of the mise-en-scène, the furniture of a globalized modernism inscribes a vision of the human encoded—much as the liberal rights of man were originally extended only to white, European, property owning men— within the vanishing point of ideology, in which the “natural” horizon is the market itself.

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The quoted space of the mise-en-scène gestures toward deconstructing perspectival realism as the global structure of social and economic representation within which Ein Volksfeind circulates. Its chalkboard walls and perspective lines at once evoke domestic space and delineate a spatial impossibility: the factory drawn on the upstage blackboard wall is only relatively to scale, visibly asserting the transformation of stage space into an environmental depth. At the same time, though, the slogans and diagrams drawn on the walls do not subvert the delimiting dimensions of stage realism: the mise-en-scène is at once a bounded space, a thing in itself, a represented room, and a processual space, a rhetorical space that signals, without overcoming, its structure of relations. Opening with a revolutionary diatribe against the neoliberal hybrid homo economicus-aestheticus, “I AM WHAT I AM,” Ein Volksfeind’s realist scenography renders tangible the structure of the line connecting the points of auditorium and stage, spectator and character, observer and observed, a transparency literalized in the discussion scene, in which the perspective is whitewashed away. And yet that perspective, like realist rationality itself, is reasserted after the discussion, as the actors clean the walls, and restore the proper relations of the stage. In this sense, the scenic design nearly allegorizes the ways Moynihan and Beck reproduce The Coming Insurrection, noting a space of civic reorientation within a structure of aesthetic and political domestication that barely renders its radicality possible. As the performative history of The Coming Insurrection in the US suggests, one strategy for recontaining the spectator-citizen’s performativity is to foreground its alterity as impropriety, a strategy reinvoked in relation to the spectatorial assembly in Isherwood’s review of Ein Volksfeind. Similarly, Ein Volksfeind enacts an ambivalent commitment to the work of theatrical assembly, unable to leave behind the binary categories it indexes: stage/auditorium, actor/character, and aesthetics/politics. Having invited its audiences to rehearse politically (and aesthetically) motivated speech, to invest in the production of themselves as citizens, it nonetheless operates within the realist compact, the reciprocity between the interiority of dramatic character and the internalized exteriority of the theatrical ensemble, an ensemble addressed as readers by the remediatized page at the opening of the event, a symbolic door into the performance. Addressed by it, the audience is positioned at the intersection of dramatic and liberal humanism, reinforced in its private freedom to interpret, a freedom framed in terms of individualism’s liberal independence, and

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also thematized at the intersection of aestheticized and monetized citizenship, as enacting a freedom from the interdependence briefly expressed in the theatre where their assembly might have made a difference. “To be rhizomorphous,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses.”70 Ein Volksfeind sells a globalized commodity, an aesthetic form inviting political assent, inviting audiences to alert themselves to their condition within a theatricalized structure—a realistic perspective naturalized by the economics-chart “mountains”—of power, trading in dramatic and local conflict as the source of the production’s cultural profit. Simultaneously distributing and, in turn, reinforcing oppositional dynamics, the gesture of global solidarity cast in the intermittent, repeated assembly, then, takes part in Ein Volksfeind’s discursive and material practices of delineation, the very instruments of neoliberal globalization, of cultural colonialism, of permawar against the performativity of assembly by other, aesthetic, means.

Smeds Ensemble’s Vysˇ niu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten In 2011, the Smeds Ensemble staged Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten as its contribution to that summer’s Wiener Festwochen. The production was shaped by a layered dramaturgy of crossings, unwriting the theatre’s identitarian aesthetics, exploiting urban ethnographic differentiation by sociopolitical and cultural geography through a distinctive performative experience, deconstructing the effects of singularizing “performance.” To heighten a tangible interrelationality between immigrants, refugees, and the Festwochen spectators, the Smeds Ensemble organized a processual outdoor and indoor event in Vienna’s peripheral district of Simmering on May 28 and again on May 29.71 Then on May 30, the Festwochen event extended to the center of Vienna, to the Schauspielhaus Wien, here making palpable how liberal theatricality’s politics of translation and representation reaffirm an ethos of disaffiliation with the “missing people” of Simmering, as its multi-spatiotemporal and transmedial embodiment translated a pluralizing theatre out of its humanist coordinates. Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten housed itself in a “peripheral” space where the nationalized “human” is challenged by the mobility of identities, languages, and positionalities. Searching for a performance environment materializing the repetitive ethno-spatial ordering inherent in the

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EU (values as inscribed in the Wiener Festwochen as they were in the Theatre of Nations), engaging performativity committed to relationality, the Smeds Ensemble turned to “Macondo,” as the settlement was named by asylum seekers fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s, after the town in Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once, perhaps, a promising refuge for the victims of state violence, in 2011, Macondo remained a ghettoized locality, both permanent housing and temporary transit space, dominated by a modern apartment building, surrounded by a green lawn without the usual signs of everyday life (toys, bicycles), chain-link fenced from the rest of the area, visibly “protected” by surveillance cameras. As I learned from the residents, people were confined to this holding center before their state-enforced deportation. Like García Marquez’s town and Chekhov’s cherry orchard, Macondo is an apt emblem for the illusion of permanence, as it is for the precarious circumstances of its inhabitants and the inconsequential “stationary time in which nothing resembling history can yet happen,” an “empty” spatiotemporality72 ; through Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten, Macondo becomes otherwise. “It’s nothing personal, it’s just art”73 : irony was a constitutive gesture of the Smeds Ensemble, voiced in the company’s title announcing what it worked against, the authorial and true ensemble’s structures of power. Deconstructing modernity’s segregation of the aesthetic from the political, the Smeds Ensemble’s working methods reject the oppositional and singularizing assertions sustaining “the constitution of ‘majority’ as redundancy,” and so the separative distinctions between applied and artistic theatre, amateur and professional, immaturity and maturity, and animality and humanity. In everyday exchange with the Macondo community, the company socialized, ate, and rehearsed with its members, and finally performed on the grounds, in the garden of one of the residents, Ramon Villalobos-Arenas, who brought local concerns into the lived performance of the Festwochen audiences. And as the Macondo residents were included in the processes of “just art,” so were the dependents of the professional performers working with the Smeds Ensemble: Adomas, a child, and Lokis, a dog (part of the company, not a locally sourced prop like the German Shepherd cast in Ein Volksfeind). Resistant to the humanizing structure of the internationalized festival theatre, Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten neither excluded nor subordinated difference but engaged differences as constitutive, lived materialities. Villalobos-Arenas’s

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immigrant experience, Adomas’s spontaneous laughter, and Lokis’s enjoyment and frustration were lived in and through the performances, coshaping their interactive doings. Immigrant-performer, child-performer, dog-performer, professional-performer: Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten layers existential, sociopolitical, and aesthetic geographies in rhizomatic ligatures. Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten: the bilingual title frames the Bixnvy cads (Cherry Orchards) it announces as untranslatables. The ligature’s two poles—the two almost but not quite Cherry Orchards—are incommensurable, each resisting translation into the other. At the same time, they appear as complementary, as cultural and linguistic landscapes brought into contact by what at once relates and equates, and gathers and distributes, difference: the hyphen. Because Vyšniu˛ sodas does not possess the linguistic familiarity of German, the Festival administration intentionally added “ - Der Kirschgarten” to the title, in a pertinent way marking the Lithuanian title as in need of an intelligible semantic supplement. This imposition became a layer in the Smeds Ensemble’s critical exploration of the production’s “minoritarian” orientation, a spur to engage and enlarge its performative intersectionalities. While the German addition of - Der Kirschgarten may well have overdetermined the hyphen and summoned spectators who would not have bought tickets for Vyšniu˛ sodas, or for a performance happening in Simmering/Macondo, a nationalistically targeted and commonly avoided locality, retaining Vyšniu˛ sodas marks the production’s “minoritarian” perspective, as the bilingual title un/writes national hierarchies. Like Carson’s translational constellation, the multiplication of the title cancels the singularity of the performance. Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten’s dramaturgy of crossings, signaled through the title, continues to unfold when the Festwochen spectators gather and are transported from the meeting point in the center of Vienna to be deposited in Simmering’s generic low-end supermarket parking lot, where a seven-foot-high yellow metal fence protects and separates the commercial zone from disenfranchised Macondo (Fig. 7.2). A cut in the wall: leaving “Vienna,” we, the Festival audience, pass through the opening, this “power thing,” into the lived heart of the production. This passage is and is not a “door.” It is a threshold that cannot be closed, a nonbinary opening in a binarizing wall; it provides neither closure nor safety, merely marking the boundary between two zones of (imposed) identification; it marks by its absence. Yet, like a door, it frames a passage between political, social, and symbolic meanings; it provides a

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Fig. 7.2 View from the supermarket parking lot into Macondo: the yellow fence, erected between the commercial parking lot of a supermarket and the immigrant settlement. The immigrant and refugee residents had long asked that the narrow passageway through the fence be widened, but it was only enlarged— to Kristian Smeds’s dismay—for the convenience of the Festwochen patrons (Credit Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten, 2011. Courtesy of Smeds Ensemble. Photograph by Ville Hyvönen)

locus of transformation; it operates as a site of power, highlighting inclusion and exclusion, a change in status. As a moment of change, it recalls Carson’s Antigone, that “inbetween thing.” And it shapes how I, passing into Macondo, orient myself in the landscape of politically, socially, and culturally imposed identification. A translational threshold: the hybrid graffiti scrawled on the right side of the opening—Chechen, a combined Roman-Cyrillic orthography of Qeqen, Chechnya—heightens our transit into the scene beyond, as we pass into a spirited soccer match. Behind the fence, an adult team in white shirts (the actors) plays against an ethnically diverse group of youngsters (the refugees and immigrants), cheered on by the home audience across the field. Bused outside the yellow wall, passing through it, entering the already unfolding soccer game, facing and being faced by the Macondo

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public, us and them, across the field: crossings locate translatable identities. A drone scenario: rendering us otherwise, a drone descends to within a few feet of individual spectators. Whoever, what ever we now are, we are at the border, are the border. Inasmuch as the encounter with the aerial vehicle is unnerving, it also creates an opportunity to shift the looking at into a perceiving with, to experience an interrelation, a bonding, for the power of the drone’s eye is equally inaccessible across the soccer field. As Étienne Balibar’s Politics and the Other Scene suggests, across contemporary European social, political, and economic life, “borders are vacillating”; “no longer at the border,” they are “both multiplied and reduced in their localization,” simultaneously suspended and re-made as they are here, “things within the space of the political itself,” focused on and through the bodies they configure. Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten develops and complicates this opening gambit, staging and multiplying borders as sites of qualification and subjection; it leads us to feel and to transgress this power embodying us, doing us in the landscape of the Festival, the city, the nation, and the theatre, as well. Another repositioning: after about twenty minutes, the Festival audience is led deeper into Macondo, around an allotment area to one of the gardens there, belonging to the Villalobos-Arenas family. On the freshly planted lawn, many rows of assorted chairs face a large screen, and to the right, as in many such “colony” gardens throughout central Europe, is a small cottage—perhaps 20 by 40 feet. When we have been seated, Lopachin-Jonas Vaitkus, a Russian edition of Chekhov’s play in hand, welcomes us, his audience, in English, “here, on my land.” The other performers speak in a bundle of languages—Lithuanian, German, French, English, Spanish, and Russian—and, recalling the Chechen epigraph, mix them as they introduce themselves and the role each co-creates; Lokis is asked to announce himself as well; he chooses to forgo this invitation. De-singularizing Chekhov’s play and its characters as linguistically “bounded systems linked with bounded communities” and cultural territories,74 framing the necessity to speak otherwise and so to hear otherwise, this multilingual, multiaccentual, multigenerational, and interspecies introduction hybridizes the nationalized economy of theatrical audibility, a consequence of dramatic translatability.

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For Michael Cronin, “open-ended interdependency is a more credible candidate than essentialist autonomy for thinking about forms of living and interconnectedness.” If cultural audibility speaks from the “vital connection between translation, identity and power,”75 its theatrical counterpart, then, speaks from the lived voice harnessed to the empowered, living, pragmatism of translatability: the politics of theatrical aurality are closely entwined with the borders of translation. Domesticating dramatic translation is valued for its faithfulness, “to read and sound as if it were an original work” in the target language; it privileges a standardized stage audibility (also coding rhythm and breathability), displacing forms of sonority it inherently degrades as “other than cultural,” even “other than human.” If a dramatic translation is jarring, it is inharmonious. If it is inharmonious, it is dissentient. If it is dissentient, it is at variance with what is performable, defining what does not belong, what cannot belong; it threatens the authority of standardized performability and the aesthetic ensemble it holds in place.76 Inasmuch as, Cronin suggests, the “identity politics” of liberal multiculturalism derive a naturalizing force from the equalized “plurality” of “predetermined and mutually exclusive cultural frameworks,” then the refugees and immigrants and asylum seekers who find themselves outside their “culture of origin” and so doubly outside sanctioned audibility, cannot but translate into “mistranslation.”77 Speaking less through the reductive and redundant fluidity of a nationalized humanity, Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten speaks out in multiple languages—including Lokis’s—and translations and accents, referencing the sonorous, inter-relational, ecological fullness of life. Challenging the frame of individual, linguistic, and cultural identity as rendered by the linkage of audibility and performability to an essentialized humanity, it orchestrates both physical and aural crossings through which the emergence of those who have been made unperformable—the peripheral and the transitory subjects of audibility—can appear, take voice. A line-up: after the performers’ introduction, Lopachin proposes a kind of self-selection. Turning to us, he invites (only) Lithuanian spectators to move into the cottage where the live performance takes place. Since Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten transpires mostly in spoken Lithuanian and Russian, dividing the audience turns out to be necessary, as those who do not understand these languages are seated outside, before the garden screen where the cottage performance is livestreamed and supertitled in German. Anything but merely pragmatic, though, Lopachin’s

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announcement orchestrates embodied encounters with what—an I that— differently inhabits us, a national, cultural, and linguistically sanctioned identity. The ironies are made visible. Most of the Festival spectators line up as “Lithuanian,” are stopped at the cottage border and returned to their seats in front of the screen, kept shivering outside, in the cold. The Eastern “outsiders”—from Lithuania, the border of the European Union—move into the warmth of the cottage, into the live audition of the performance. For us, with us and through us, this act both dramatizes and makes tangible, perceivable, the exchangeability of identity, a transaction withdrawn from the residents of Macondo. The politics and ethics of positionality gain yet another civic resonance when Lopachin purchases the cherry orchard, and the performers move outdoors into the garden (the “orchard”), where most of the spectators have been gazing at the screen. In Chekhov, Lopachin is a figure for the rising merchant class transforming the material and sentimental economy of the Russian aristocracy. In Macondo, when Lopachin celebrates the orchard purchase, he throws us off his property: we have no standing here. At the play’s opening, he held a Russian Cherry Orchard edition in hand; now Lopachin holds a German translation, which he tosses after the Festival spectators as we move off his “land.” “Here is The Cherry Orchard if you want to keep it,” he says in English. Disposing the German “Cherry Orchard,” Lopachin marks an inter- and transmedial gesture, between texts, among translations, between realist and more interactive, immersive performative expressions. Disposing translation as Deleuze and Guattari’s “apparatus of capture,” he casts the book as mediating language not for communication but for maintaining the separation between people and communities, enforcing their “self-sufficiency, autarchy, independence” from one another, as a barrier to intersectional co-existence in becoming.78 Blackout. In the dark, a recitation, possibly in Lithuanian: no one spontaneously translates. Divided along our language communities, we are lost to the translatability of national identity. Lights up. Ramon VillalobosArenas steps forward, explaining the history of this garden. Like the other allotment gardens, it was once worthless. In the 1970s, Macondo was a dump, the reason why the city housed the refugees here in the first place. Making their lives more livable, over decades the immigrants have reclaimed, subdivided, and planted this soil, their communal ground—a troubling effect of the affordance of the circumscribing yellow wall. Now, though, it has become a valuable property, and the Viennese government,

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resembling Lopachin as Villalobos-Arenas notes, is imposing rent on the gardens in a profit-driven move to develop this real estate, and criminalizing those who cannot afford to pay or who refuse to do so on principle. Having sketched the criminalizing treatment of immigrants, VillalobosArenas asks us to ally with the Macondo community and resist the city’s appropriation of this place, and to perform our commitment by crossing back into his (no longer Lopachin’s) garden. Encouraging us to socialize, he remarks, “Mensch wir sind, und Menschen sollen wir bleiben.” Like the performers’ languages and accents, Villalobos-Arenas’s speaking grafts the universalizing gesture of humanism to the lived, foreignizing, materiality of his syntax, dissolving the binary between multicultural rationality and an audibility bound to national, cultural, and political identity. This speaking, this taking voice, resists the politics of nativity tellingly captured in 2017 by French Minister for Education Jean-Michel Blanquer’s phrase: one language, one grammar, and one Republic.79 At the moment of enactment, Villalobos-Arenas’s taking voice renders the unhearable, theatrical, stageable. Most of the spectators cross the fence, and while this crossing may later become symbolic, in the moment of its enactment it registers as a performative act, a saying that is also a doing. Inviting us back inside, it engages a present act of futureoriented solidarity, a commitment that is also a promise in both Carson’s and J. L. Austin’s sense, which, if not upheld, will void the claim to solidarity as an uncommitted infelicity. Giving space to Villalobos-Arenas to speak and to be heard outside the formal boundary of the nationalized speakability, Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten invites an embodied experience with the “missing people” (Braidotti) traditionally excluded from the liberal-humanist, multicultural polity, an embodied investment in the precarity of the Macondo community. Inter-mission. Schauspielhaus Wien: a day (or two) after the Macondo Festival performances, the “finale” of Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten was staged at the Schauspielhaus Wien, its dramaturgical design requiring reciprocal, differentiating, crossings from the peripheral immigrant settlement to the center of the city. In the theatre, a video installation by Ville Hyvönen and Lennar Laberenz of the initial 2009 Lithuanian iteration of the piece plays while a staged reading of the play in Russian and Lithuanian begins, heightening a sense of the theatre as the legitimating site of the literary, of what is legible, readable, theatrically speakable and audible. All the while, an improvisation occupies the stage, challenging the text’s— and the theatre’s—authority to signify a meaningful experiential closure,

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the requirement of singularizing performance. While the reading audibly territorializes theatrical space as textualized, the improvisation’s visual field interrupts the “translation” of scenic description to designed theatrical space. In place of Chekhov’s axed orchard, cleared as waste, the bare Schauspielhaus stage is littered with plastic bottles overflowing Simmering supermarket carts, rendering the play’s symbolic orchard as trash, as the detritus of an interconnected commercial and financial system. Neoliberal globalization depends on and produces waste: indestructible plastic trash, the collateral damage of displaced—here unwritten—human lives. Indeed, in contrast to the events in Macondo, the performance in the Schauspielhaus asserts itself as refuse, assigned meaning, and value largely according to its place in the system of cultural consumption. Precisely by not staging what has been made missing, the non-finale binds its audience to an act of sensing through the scene, seeing and hearing—perceiving—what is implicated as unperformable, invisible and inaudible, here: the inhabitants standing still in Macondo, their exilic home. To move into the theatre, back into the play, is to reoccupy the scene of theatrical humanism, one predicated, Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten argues, on the dispossession of the missing. Staging a performance structured for a global market, Ein Volksfeind’ s opening to the local—the homeless in Berlin, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn—depends on the audiences’ analogous alignment with the commodified social relations represented onstage, and materialized through an internationally commodified discourse of interior design. Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten’ s dramaturgy of crossings differently locates the theatre-festival spectators between and within the peripheral and the local, on the hyphen— as the hyphen, the means of relation—between and within Vienna and Macondo, between the Schauspielhaus and the immigrant garden, between central and marginalized positionalities, between the purchase of professionalized and of applied theatre practice, and between theatre as the aestheticized pleasure of the literary and theatre as a socially lived, experiential performance of the political. Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten materializes theatre as an opening— a door that is more than a door—into an already brokered landscape, rendering the theatre, civic space, national, and EU territory as the contested ground for the significant experience of theatrical dis/assembling. Instead of assuming the convergent ubiquity of an identification with cultural products and social relations, the investment in theatre as a singularized global commodity inherent to Ein Volksfeind, Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der

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Kirschgarten multiplies the embodied effects of translational processes; its multi-lingual, multi-spatiotemporal, and interspecies performance locates its participants on the hyphen between languages, aural landscapes, phonetic identities, and the aesthetic and socio-political positionalities they constellate. The performance is a site where an ecological goes beyond an economic logic, framing the interaction of interdependent agencies, precarious actors “always in some sense in the hands of the other.”80 Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten opens a space of the lived to theatre, crossing beyond a binary economy of antagonistic relations, of dramatic conflict so to speak, a socio-theatrical economy that would separate Festival theatre goers from immigrants and refugees, theatre observers from theatre makers, the aesthetic from the political, the ensemble from the assembly. In Macondo, there is no way for me not to be the Wiener Festwochen spectator, not to be cast in and not to perform that role, if not for myself then for the others and for the performance itself, and so to be confronted with my privileges, privileges cognate with the theatre. Like the border, performance transpires among the bodies it signifies and renders significant. Having a passport from a part of Europe that in 2011 belongs to the EU guarantees me inclusion in a territorialized humanity, the humanity of the theatre. It facilitates the enactment of other privileges, too, the privilege of having a well-paid job, of holding a grant allowing me to be a part of both Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten’s performance and its preparation process, the privilege of being able to visit and to leave Macondo. And yet. Night. Parking lot: returning from a late-night “rehearsal” of Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten, standing in a deserted parking lot inside Macondo’s yellow wall, I call a taxi service. When the taxi arrives, the driver inquires, indirectly, about the “dark setting” where he picks me up. Given circumstances: Macondo, a too-late hour in the evening, or, in fact, a tooearly hour in the morning, to be here, “a girl like you,” speaking an audibly Czech-accented German. Translated in/as a liminal position on the border of national time and space, the scene casts me as a “translatable”: Eastern European “girl.” Born in Czechoslovakia, coming of age in Austria, educated in Finland, working in the United States, and a client (as I learned) of a driver “from Slovenia,” riding in a cab wending from Macondo to Vienna: like the performance, the border transpires among the bodies it signifies and renders significant. Configured by the border performative, the conjunction of

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my accent, my not belonging, my sex, and my dis/location translate into what I am, into a “character” like me: the scene plays out its un/written script. ∗ ∗ ∗ The three performative constellations I have considered here do not escape, cannot escape, or simply leave behind the humanist determination of a subordinate, ideologically confined, or redundant theatre. The humanist theatre tracks these events, looming behind Carson’s and her Antigone’s “door,” behind Ein Volksfeind’s fourth-wall containment of the political by a perspective groomed to the commodity relations of realism, behind the Smeds Ensemble’s deconstruction of Macondo’s peripheral location and its symbolic centrality to contemporary social and political living. It haunts them even as they resituate the canonical impulses of literary, dramatic, and theatrical humanisms: taking up the material instruments of performance (the book, the modernist stage set, the “found” site of the colony garden house), inviting an altered embodiment of the spectators’ participation in the spectacle, traversing the sociocultural, aesthetic, and political relationalities where theatre takes place, all to perform the place that theatre might take. These performances open toward a reimagining of theatre as a creative, cultural process, toward a future where the humanist dualities captivating drama and performance are un/written, multiplying the pleasures of performance across an interconnected, post/human, in/animate ecology of life.

Notes 1. Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), 13, 12. Venuti’s work has been criticized for essentializing linguistic borders, and so reproducing the other; see Mohammed Albakry, “Between the Human and the Foreign: Translating Arabic Drama for the Stage,” in Educational Theory 64, no. 5 (2014): 505–9. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 40. 3. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25, 6, 8, 25. 4. For the hardback, see Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Anne Carson, illus. Bianca Stone, design Robert Currie (New York: New Directions, 2012);

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

for the paperback, see Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Anne Carson (New York: New Directions, 2015); and for the translation used in Ivo van Hove’s production, see Sophokles, Antigone, trans. Anne Carson (London: Oberon Books, 2015). These different manifestations do not exclusively align with the accumulation of merchandised products—collectibles, recordings for sale, toys, T-shirts—manufactured for “profit derived from the whole package,” in which each of these objects is less important as long as the “whole is profitable.” Think, for instance, of Broadway musicals’ dependence on merchandized collectibles sponsoring, economically enabling, the run of the production; Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 27. Carson’s January 1, 2015 email appears in Will Aitken, Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance (Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2018), 5. Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 44, 9. Unless otherwise noted, I cite from the 2015 paperback, which is paginated. Nick here resonates with his prominent role in Carson’s earlier volume Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), now part of the assemblage. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 35. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85. “Anne Carson: Performing Antigonick,” YouTube video, 45:27, from a performance recorded at the Louisiana Literature Festival on August 25, 2012, posted by the Louisiana Channel (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art) on February 3, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= BEfJKjOg3ZU. Other readings are now available via YouTube, as are full theatrical productions on college campuses; Antigonick / Sophokles was, for example, produced by Barnard and Columbia College students, directed by Talley Murphy, March 8, 2017. Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 9, 11. “An actor’s rendition, like a type designer’s ‘original’ setting of a classic, will not have the same kind of authority as a poet’s own reading or the first printing of the work. But the performance of the poet, just as the visualization of the poem in its initial printings, forever marks the poem’s entry into the world; and not only its meaning, its existence” (8–9). The purpose of the poetry reading is to “foreground the audible acoustic text of the poem” (12). Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti, video memory of Tragedia Endogonidia by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, directed by Romeo Castellucci (RaroVideo/eccentriche visioni, 2002–2006), DVD (includes booklet of photographs).

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12. Introduction to Cassin’s translation of On Nature (Parménide: Sur la nature ou sur l’étant; La langue de l’être? [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998]) quoted in Emily Apter, preface to Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. and ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), vii. Originally published as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004). The Dictionary of Untranslatables encompasses about 400 literary, philosophical, and political terms or concepts that defy easy translation from one language—or one culture—to another. More than 150 academic collaborators examine these terms in their cross-cultural as well as cross-linguistic complexities, while keeping attuned to the “conceptual differences carried by the differences between languages”; Peter Osborne’s introduction to Vocabulary in Radical Philosophy 138 (2006): 9, quoted in Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 585. The authors of the entries—such as to translate, actor, media/medium, logos, praxis, mimesis, Mitmensch, neighbor, stranger, animal —and the translators of the English version inevitably, too, aim to unfold “how a term ‘is’ in its native tongue, and it ‘is’ or ‘is not’ when relocated or translated in another language.” Apter notes that the entry—to translate—is still performatively linked to übersetzen, to Schleiermacher’s distinction between a loftier rendering of thought, übersetzen, and a non-lofty, functional interpreting or dolmetchen. From “this perspective, Übersetzung is the name of a disavowed Germanocentrism that clings to the history the word ‘translation.’” Accordingly, the contradictions the English translation encountered in the French Dictionnaire’s cartography, especially in the entries devoted to national languages themselves—Portuguese, German, Italian—still pertain to national performativity. The Dictionary of Untranslatables is concerned with a non-centric comparatism, treating national languages as effects “caught up in history and culture,” and as “internally transnational,” heterodox units or micro-worlds; Apter, preface to Dictionary of Untranslatables, ix, xiv, xiii. See also Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 587. 13. On -barkeit of Übersetzbarkeit, see Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s —Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). According to Weber, for Benjamin “translation unfolds the ways of meaning by moving words away from the meanings habitually attached to them, and which are generally construed as points of arrival rather than of departure” (92). 14. Cassin, introduction to Dictionary of Untranslatables, xvii. 15. Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 30. 16. Anne Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” in Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 4. George Eliot, “The Antigone and Its Morals,”

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

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in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 243–46. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 4. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 5, 3. Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 29, 31. Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 9. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 6. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 346. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 3, 4. Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 30. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 3. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe of Bertolt Brecht, vol. 25, Schriften 5: Theatermodelle “Katzgraben” - Notate 1953, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 104; “Das Brettschleppen macht Antigone zu einem Unruhezentrum, da es ihre Reaktionen und Aktionen physisch groß umsetzt. Bei ihren Vorstößen gegen die Alten … und gegen Kreon … hat sie einerseits das Brett zu schleppen, anderseits treibt das Momentum des Bretts sie. Im Kampf scheint das Brett leichter zu sein.” Antigonick / Sophokles, trans. Carson, 30; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 342. Erika Fischer-Lichte notes that the “acting style was to a great extent determined by objects,” suggesting that the range of techniques—movement, masks, the board—used in Brecht’s production enabled the spectator to “delight in their professional application.” At the same time, though, in suggesting that the acting was “determined” by these objects, objects understood entirely as part of Brecht and Neher’s design for the production, this account scants Weigel’s agency in making the production, that she used the board rather than merely being determined by it. In the passage cited here, which Fischer-Lichte also cites, it’s Antigone who is described as bearing the board, which is—as it is in Carson— absorbed into the character’s scene rather than into the actress’s work. See Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), e-book. Carson, “The Task of the Translator of Antigone,” 4. David Gauthier, “The Liberal Individual,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, ed. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 159, 160. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 32–33. The text ironically alludes to Exod. 3:14, “I am that I am.”

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33. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 29. 34. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 30, 44 (my emphasis). 35. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 68; Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 71. 36. For a popular response to neoliberalism and its impact on social and moral character at the time of Ein Volksfeind’s touring, see Paul Verhaeghe, “Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us,” Guardian, September 29, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/ 29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic. On homo aestheticus, see Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage, 1997), 81. 37. Pat Donnelly, “There’s an Enemy of the People in Every City Around the World; Update of Ibsen’s Classic Should Resonate Here as Charbonneau Inquiry Continues,” Gazette [Montreal, Quebec], May 11, 2013. Ein Volksfeind opened at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2012. In September of the same year, the production moved to Ostermeier’s home base, Berlin’s Schaubühne. In 2013–2014 An Enemy of People was seen in Athens (Athens Festival, July 2013), Venice (Biennale di Venezia, August 2013), São Paulo (Teatro Paulo Autran, September 2013), Buenos Aires (Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, October 2013), New York (Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, November 2013), Moscow (New European Theatre Festival, November 2013), Reims (Comédie de Reims, December 2013), Paris (Théâtre de la Ville, January/February 2014), Rennes (Théâtre National de Bretagne, March 2014), Siegen (Apollo Theater, May 2014), Istanbul (Istanbul Theatre Festival, May 2014). As of this writing, the Schaubühne website lists additional performances in Oslo (September 2014), London (September 2014), Moscow (October 2014), Belfast (October 2014), Cluj-Napoca (November 2014), Lausanne (February 2015), Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai (February 2015), Naples (June 2015), Pilsen (September 2015), Tbilissi (October 2015), Minsk (October 2015), Bogotá (March 2016), Torún (May 2016), Seoul (May 2016), Copenhagen (June 2016), Santiago de Chile (January 2017), Shizuoka (April 2018), Singapur (May 2018), Göteborg (August 2018), Beijing (September 2018), and Nanjing (September 2018). See the series of interviews with actors in Peter M. Boenisch and Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier (London: Routledge, 2016), 100–21. 38. These performances and their reception also provide the opportunity to revisit arguments I have previously made concerning Ein Volksfeind’s reception at BAM; see Hana Worthen, “Toward a Skeptical Dramaturgy,” Theatre Topics, 24, no. 3 (2014).

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39. Celestine Bohlen, “Use of French Terrorism Law on Railroad Saboteurs Draws Criticism,” New York Times, November 4, 2008. 40. Chantal Mouffe, “Politics and the Limits of Liberalism (1993),” in Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, ed. James Martin (London: Routledge, 2013), passim. 41. jay babcock, June 15, 2009, “Report on ‘The Coming Insurrection’ book launch at NYC Barnes and Noble, Sephora, Starbucks,” Arthur, accessed May 27, 2014, http://arthurmag.com/2009/06/15/report-on-thecoming-insurrection-book-launch-at-nyc-barnes-and-nobles-sephorastarbucks/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog. 42. Colin Moynihan, “Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes,” New York Times, June 16, 2009. 43. Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 44. 44. Moynihan, “Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes.” 45. One of Beck’s subchapters, “Enemies Within: Tread Carefully,” recalls the English-language title of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Glenn Beck, with Joseph Kerry, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-ofControl Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York: Mercury Radio Arts / Threshold Editions, 2009). 46. “FOX NEWS reviews ‘The Coming Insurrection,’” YouTube video, 6:55, from Glenn Beck’s program televised by Fox News on July 1, 2009, posted by “doingbeing,” July 1, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ZKyi2qNskJc. My transcription of the broadcast. Beck notably refers to the (male) Olea as “one of the ladies.” 47. Noam Cohen, “A Book Attacking Capitalism Gets Sales Help from a Fox Host,” New York Times, March 15, 2010. For the mutual implication of “terrorism,” “our way of life,” “business,” and neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Classical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37–59. Brown specifically discusses how Presidential Envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer understood his mission as a merging of democracy with global market rationality (48). In 2003, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi described the implementation of “free-market fundamentalism” enacted in the United States’ “wholesale sell-off of state owned enterprises” in Iraq; see Thomas Crampton, “Iraqi Official Urges Caution On Imposing Free Market,” New York Times, October 14, 2003. 48. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 11. A summary view of attitudes toward theatrical audiences is provided in Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), especially 38–76.

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49. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 50. I take these excerpts from The Coming Insurrection at https:// archive.org/stream/TheComingInsurrectionByTheInvisibleCommittee/ first13pages#page/n1/mode/2up. 51. Although this role was created by Stefan Stern, whose performance I discuss here, it was subsequently transferred to Christoph Gawenda, who had previously played Hovstad. In New York, the play was performed in German with English supertitles, but the discussion was conducted entirely in English; Stockmann (Stern) somewhat reluctantly signaled the end of this phase of the performance by noting that the actors would be returning to German, pointing up to the supertitle screen. 52. Florian Borchmeyer in Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 81, 82. 53. For actors’ comments on the audiences at São Paolo and Moscow, see Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 108–9, 116–17. For Schaubühne travel videos documenting the theatre team’s experiences, the spectators’ discussions, and their reactions to the production, see “»Ein Volksfeind« on Tour//Torun,” YouTube video, 13:18, posted by Schaubühne Berlin on October 17, 2016, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Yhqp4_nl8gs; “»Ein Volksfeind« on Tour // Seoul,” YouTube video, 16:29, posted by Schaubühne Berlin on October 18, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD0DrWiCHQ; “»Ein Volksfeind« on Tour // Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai,” YouTube video, 52:27, posted by Schaubühne Berlin on March 25, 2017, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=k9v_3_gPM2w. All accessed July 17, 2017. 54. Eva Meckbach, Moritz Gottwald, and Christoph Gawenda, in Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 111. For Ingo Hülsmann (Peter Stockmann), it “is a very satisfying moment in this acting profession when the boundaries get blurred, and the theatre begins to listen in to the real world”; Ingo Hülsmann in Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 94. 55. Charles Isherwood, “An Ibsen Who Rages Over Ritalin and Economic Austerity Plans,” review of Ein Volksfeind, by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Florian Borchmeyer, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, BAM Harvey Theater, Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn, New York Times, November 7, 2013. 56. For Isherwood, “the audience was playing precisely the wrong role” on opening night; the second-night audience, perhaps forewarned by Isherwood’s review appearing that day, performed differently. Many more of the November 7 spectators walked out during the show, especially during the discussion scene. I found this phenomenon surprising at the time, precisely because—having been engaged by the pre-show conversation between Ostermeier and Simon Critchley, “On Truth (and Lies)

286

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

H. WORTHEN

in Democracy,” that evening—the audience’s commentary and discussion seemed as lively as on the previous night, but also more focused on the issues; a more sustained dialogue ensued between individual spectators, as well as between spectators and the performers onstage and circulating through the house. Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, 104. Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 116, 108, 109, 110, 120. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (London: Routledge, 2016), 221, 211. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43. Mary Eagleton quoted in Erhard Reckwitz, “Humanism and the Literary Imagination,” in Humanism in Intercultural Perspective: Experiences and Expectations, ed. Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 180. Ostermeier, quoted in Donnelly, “There’s an Enemy of the People,” E 11. As Ostermeier implies in remarking that the “biggest desire for many Germans today is to be able to make ends meet financially. For them, the utopia is being a couple who earn well, who live in a decent flat, furnished in today’s entirely trivial general style, with the kids attending the best possible schools, ideally an international school, learning the violin and playing classical music, going with them to the theatre, and training them from as early on as possible how to survive in globalised capitalism. Culture, and a big part of it is the classical bourgeois canon of works, is their ultimate attempt to be able to survive in global capitalism, to acquire certain weapons and a certain shell which helps you to stay sane”; Ostermeier, “The Politics of Contemporary Theatre,” 235. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 32–33. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). The sleek, contemporary design of the Schaubühne’s Ibsen productions has met with a specific critique on South American tours: that the furniture and fittings depicted onstage would not be affordable to the local middle and professional classes. This observation was discussed at the European Theatre Research Network Conference, “Thomas Ostermeier—Reinventing Directors’ Theatre at the Schaubühne Berlin,” Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, September 26, 2014.

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67. Katharina Ziemke, in Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 124. 68. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 343. 69. Katharina Ziemke, in Boenisch and Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier, 125. 70. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 15. 71. Like other postwar European theatre festivals, the Wiener Festwochen, founded in 1951, is designed to bring “innovative event[s] based on international cooperation” to the “undisputed cultural metropolis” of Vienna; “About Us,” Wiener Festwochen, accessed April 23, 2014, http:// www.festwochen.at/en/about-us/festwochen-zentrum. On the living situation in Wien-Simmering, beyond the tourist images of Vienna, see Thomas Öhlböck, “Achteinhalb Hektar, die die Welt bedeuten: Über das Leben in der Flüchtlingssiedlung Macondo; Besuchsfeldforschung in Wien-Simmering” (master’s thesis, Universität Wien, 2011), http:// othes.univie.ac.at/17029/1/2011-11-14_0206173.pdf. 72. Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 100. 73. The Smeds Ensemble was the collective constitution of three interdependent artists: Kristian Smeds, the director; Eeva Bergroth, the translator and producer; and Ville Hyvönen, the media designer. What the Smeds Ensemble precisely lacks, in a sense, is the ensemble. While the Smeds Ensemble stopped working in this constitution, an iteration of Vyšniu˛ sodas was produced in the Jaunimo teatre in Vilnius in 2019. 74. Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton, “Language and Superdiversity,” Diversities 13, no. 2 (2011): 4. 75. Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity (London: Routledge, 2006), 50, 93. 76. This policy of Modern International Drama journal edited by George Wellwarth is quoted in Phyllis Zaitlin, “Observations on Theatrical Translation,” Translation Review 46, no. 1 (1994): 14. 77. Cronin, Translation and Identity, 48. In liberal multiculturalism, an ideal of equality between cultures slips into cultural essentialism, in which “identity politics” are identified with “a plurality of predetermined and mutually exclusive cultural frameworks.” As a result, in some essentializing linguistic and cultural/political formations, “immigrants properly belong to their culture of origin and all translation in the form of migration is mistranslation” (48). 78. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 500. 79. Jean-Michel Blanquer’s Twitter post reads, “Il y a une seule langue française, une seule grammaire, une seule République”; @jmblanquer, Twitter, 15 November 2017.

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80. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 25.

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Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften 5: Theatermodelle “Katzgraben” - Notate 1953. Edited by Werner Hecht, with Marianne Conrad. Vol. 25 of Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Brecht, [Bertolt], and [Caspar] Neher. Antigonemodell 1948. Ruth Berlau: Modellbücher des Berliner Ensemble 1. Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1955. Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” In Edgework: Classical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 37–59. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Carloni, Cristiano, and Stefano Franceschetti. Tragedia Endogonidia. By Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, directed by Romeo Castellucci. DVD. RaroVideo/eccentriche visioni, 2002–2006. Carson, Anne, trans. Antigonick / Sophokles. Illustrated by Bianca Stone, design by Robert Currie. New York: New Directions, 2012. Carson, Anne, trans. Antigonick / Sophokles. New York: New Directions, 2015. Carson, Anne. Nox. New York: New Directions, 2010. Carson, Anne, trans. Sophokles, Antigone. London: Oberon Books, 2015. Carson, Anne. “The Task of the Translator of Antigone.” In Antigonick / Sophokles, translated by Anne Carson, 3–6. New York: New Directions, 2015. Cassin, Barbara, ed. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004. Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Cohen, Noam. “A Book Attacking Capitalism Gets Sales Help from a Fox Host.” New York Times, March 15, 2010. Crampton, Thomas. “Iraqi Official Urges Caution On Imposing Free Market.” New York Times, October 14, 2003. Cronin, Michael. Translation and Identity. London: Routledge, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Donnelly, Pat. “There’s an Enemy of the People in Every City Around the World; Update of Ibsen’s Classic Should Resonate Here as Charbonneau Inquiry Continues.” Gazette [Montreal, Quebec], May 11, 2013.

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Eliot, George. “The Antigone and Its Morals.” In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 243–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. European Theatre Research Network Conference. “Thomas Ostermeier—Reinventing Directors’ Theatre at the Schaubühne Berlin.” Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, September 26, 2014. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. E-book. Fox News. “FOX NEWS reviews ‘The Coming Insurrection.’” YouTube, July 1, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyi2qNskJc. Freshwater, Helen. Theatre & Audience. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gauthier, David. “The Liberal Individual.” In Communitarianism and Individualism, edited by Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit, 151–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Isherwood, Charles. “An Ibsen Who Rages Over Ritalin and Economic Austerity Plan.” New York Times, November 7, 2013. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Routledge, 2016. Louisiana Literature Festival. “Anne Carson: Performing Antigonick.” YouTube, August 25, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEfJKjOg3ZU. Mouffe, Chantal. “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community.” In Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, edited by James Martin, 103–14. London: Routledge, 2013. Mouffe, Chantal. “Politics and the Limits of Liberalism (1993).” In Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, edited by James Martin, 115–31. London: Routledge, 2013. Moynihan, Colin. “Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes.” New York Times, June 16, 2009. Öhlböck, Thomas. “Achteinhalb Hektar, die die Welt bedeuten: Über das Leben in der Flüchtlingssiedlung Macondo; Besuchsfeldforschung in WienSimmering.” M. A. Thesis, Universität Wien, 2011. http://othes.univie.ac. at/17029/1/2011-11-14_0206173.pdf. Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

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Reckwitz, Erhard. “Humanism and the Literary Imagination.” In Humanism in Intercultural Perspective: Experiences and Expectations, edited by Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass, 177–88. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Schaubühne Berlin. “»Ein Volksfeind « on Tour // Torun.” YouTube, October 17, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhqp4_nl8gs. Schaubühne Berlin. “»Ein Volksfeind « on Tour // Seoul.” YouTube, October 18, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItD0DrWiCHQ. Schaubühne Berlin. “»Ein Volksfeind « on Tour // Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai.” YouTube, March 25, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9v_ 3_gPM2w. Smithson, Robert. “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites.” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, 364. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Internet Archive. Accessed January 15, 2020. https://archive.org/stream/TheComingInsurrection ByTheInvisibleCommittee/first13pages#page/n1/mode/2up. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998. Weber, Samuel. Benjamin’s—Abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Wiener Festwochen. “About Us.” Accessed April 23, 2014. http://www. festwochen.at/en/about-us/festwochen-zentrum. Worthen, Hana. “Toward a Skeptical Dramaturgy.” Theatre Topics, 24, no. 3 (2014): 175–86.

Index

A Ackerman, Alan, 52 Adamov, Arthur, 211 Adomas, 270, 271 Adorno, Theodor W., 48, 155 Agocs, Andreas, 235 Aitken, Will, 280 Albakry, Mohammed, 279 Alderson, David, 236 Alleyn, Edward, 116, 117, 128, 129 Alliot-Marie, Michèle, 256 Althusser, Louis, 4, 31, 38, 41, 53, 167, 183, 185, 186, 254 Alypius, 103–106, 109, 110, 124 Anouilh, Jean, 250 Apter, Emily, 281 Arden, John, 127 Arendt, Hannah, 136 Aristotle, 5, 9, 11, 13, 26, 34, 38, 39, 65, 68, 112, 113, 137, 142–144, 210 Poetics , 5, 7–9, 141–143 Artaud, Antonin, 29 Auerbach, Erich, 126 Auguet, Roland, 69–71

Augustine, 5, 40, 41, 110, 112, 113, 116, 120, 121, 125, 135, 140, 143, 149, 150 Confessions , 40, 99–101, 119 The City of God, 99, 122 Auslander, Philip, 25, 51, 280 Austin, J. L., 34, 101, 106, 125, 276 B Bachmann, Ingeborg, 250, 251 Bading, Thomas, 264 Baldyga, Natalya, 138, 158 Balibar, Étienne, 166, 187, 189, 273 Balme, Christopher B., 43 A Cultural History of Theatre, 21–24, 31, 41, 74, 77, 78, 144 Balogh, J., 126 Bank, Rosemarie K., 50 Theatre/Performance Historiography, 23 Barish, Jonas, 27, 34, 38, 109, 111, 112, 125, 127 The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 5, 6, 13, 26, 28, 30, 31 Barnett, David, 189

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 H. Worthen, Humanism, Drama, and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44066-4

293

294

INDEX

Bartsch, Shadi, 88 Bataille, Georges, 52 Bâty, Gaston, 211, 213, 218, 233 Baumann, Hans, 216 Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 44 Bayly, Simon, 34, 35, 53 Beacham, Richard C., 91 Beard, Mary, 175 Beckerman, Bernard, 226 Beckett, Samual, 29, 251 Beck, Glenn, 258–260, 284 Behn, Aphra, 22 Behrndt, Synne K., 47 Belsey, Catherine, 21, 26, 49, 51, 52 Benjamin, Walter, 27, 52, 250 Bennett, Jane, 248 Bergson, Henri, 214 Berlau, Ruth, 182 Bernstein, Charles, 249, 250 Bertolazzi, Carlo, 183–186 Bibliography, 247 Binoche, Juliette, 245 #BlackGirlsMatter, 166 #BlackLivesMatter, 166 Blanck, Karl and Haufe, Heinz Unbekanntes Theater: Ein Buch von der Regie, 209 Blanquer, Jean-Michel, 276 Blommaert, Jan, 287 Blum, Pierre, 232 Boenisch, Peter M., 193 Bohlen, Celestine, 284 Bok, Sissela, 90 Bolter, Jay David, 123 Bond, Edward, 127 Borchmeyer, Florian, 262 Bouchard, Elsa, 7, 45, 157 Braidotti, Rosi, 49, 276 Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 29, 52, 103, 127, 153, 165, 166, 168–170, 175, 176, 179, 182–184, 186–188,

192, 223, 236, 237, 250–252, 254, 260 Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), 166, 170, 171 Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken), 166 Galileo, 170, 237 Mann ist Mann (A Man’s a Man), 170, 171, 176 Modellbücher (modelbooks), 41, 182 Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), 166, 168, 170–172, 174, 177, 179, 237 Brehm, Bruno, 220 Breker, Arno, 227 Brockett, Oscar G., 18, 34, 49, 79, 82, 90, 91, 108, 226 D˘ejiny divadla, 47 History of the Theatre, 5, 6, 13–24, 26, 31, 74, 76, 77, 79–82, 226 Brown, Wendy, 54, 284 Bruno, Giordano The Heroic Frenzies , 115 Bryant-Bertail, Sarah, 190 Burbage, Richard, 120 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 128 Butcher, S. H., 156 Butler, Judith, 6, 33–35, 37, 38, 106, 108, 125, 178, 250, 255, 259, 283, 288 Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 53 C Cage, John 4’33” , 251 Calderini, Domizio, 72 Calte, Louis, 227 Camp, Pannill, 50

INDEX

Canning, Charlotte M., 238 Carloni, Cristiano, 280 Carlson, Marvin, 46, 48, 82 Theories of the Theatre, 9 Carson, Anne, 42, 243, 247, 249, 251, 271, 272, 276, 279 “the task of the translator of antigone,” 247, 248 Cartwright, Kent, 21, 49, 128 Cary, Phillip, 109, 125, 126 Cassin, Barbara, 250 Castellucci, Romeo, 280 Castiglione, Baldassare Book of the Courtier, 114 Cerasano, S. P., 129 Charalabopoulos, Nikos G., 45 Chaudhuri, Una, 44, 50 Chekhov, Anton, 275, 277 The Cherry Orchard, 42, 243, 270, 271 Chomsky, Noam, 257, 284 Chytraeus, David, 72 Cicero, 72, 102 Clerc, Louis, 205 Cocéa, Alice, 199 Cocteau, Jean, 197–199, 221, 222, 227, 233 La Machine à écrire (The Typewriter), 198 Les Parents terrible (1938), 198 Coleman, K. M., 64, 68, 71, 86, 91 Craig, Edward Gordon, 232 Crampton, Thomas, 284 Critchley, Simon, 285 Cronin, Michael, 274 Csapo, Eric, 45 Cull, Laura, 24, 50 Currie, Robert, 247 Curtius, Michael Conrad, 141–143 Cyprian, 122

295

D Dabbs, Thomas, 129 Dacier, André, 141, 142 Dalberg, Wolfgang Heribert von, 159 Davies, Tony, 114, 121, 123 Humanism, 100, 113 Davis, Jim, 160 Davis, Tracy C., 43 Debord, Guy, 32 Deese, R. S., 228 De Hooch, Pieter, 119 Delaney, Shelagh, 127 Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 243, 251, 252, 267, 269, 275 De Rothschild, Henri, 232 De Rothschild, Philippe, 211–214, 220, 222, 232 Derrida, Jacques, 34, 123, 217 Diamond, Elin, 175, 190 Diderot, Denis, 71, 118, 130 The Paradox of the Actor (Le Paradoxe sur le comédien), 118 Diebold, Bernhard, 176 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 174, 190 Dixon, Brandon Victor, 36 Dodd, William, 129 Donnelly, Pat, 283 d’Ormesson, Jean, 234 Dou, Gerrit, 119 Dox, Donnalee, 122 Dullin, Charles, 211

E Eagleton, Mary, 266 Ehrman, R. K., 87 Eliot, George, 250 Enelow, Shonni, 44 Erne, Lukas, 129 Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris , 7 Medea, 8

296

INDEX

F Falk, Norbert, 176 Felski, Rita, 44 Fergusson, Francis, 82 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 49, 119, 130, 154, 282 Florio, John Second Fruits , 115 Foley, Michael P., 125–127 Foucault, Michel, 20–22, 52, 65, 78, 87, 144, 150, 151 Foucault, Sigmund, 31 Franceschetti, Stefano, 280 Freedley, George, 90 Freeman, Lisa A., 22, 23 Freimanová, Anna, 237 Freud, Sigmund, 30 Fried, Michael, 130 Futrell, Alison, 90

G Gadberry, Glen, 238 Gainor, Ellen J., 89 The Norton Anthology of Drama, 75 Gans, Andrew, 189 Garner, Stanton B., 89 Garrick, David, 22, 71 Gauthier, David, 282 Gawenda, Christoph, 262, 285 Gebauer, Gunter, 153 Geisenheyner, Max, 176 Gilder, Rosamond, 227, 234 Goebbels, Joseph, 209 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17, 18, 34, 48, 108, 127, 137, 145, 147, 152, 230, 232 Iphigenia in Tauris (1787), 18 Goffman, Erving, 30, 52 Goldsmith, Oliver, 127 Gorky, Maxim, 127 Gottwald, Moritz, 262

Goulston, Theodore, 144 Greater Finland, 214 Greenblatt, Stephen, 128 Greville, Fulke, 127 Grotowski, Jerzy, 29 Grünewald, Isaac, 210 Grusin, Richard, 123 Guattari, Félix, 243, 251, 252, 267, 269, 275

H Haeckel, Ernst, 228 Haekel, Ralf, 47 Hall, Edith, 8 Halliwell, Martin, 44 Halliwell, Stephen, 9, 44, 46, 156 Hall, Stuart, 206 Hamilton, 6, 35–38, 54 Hardison, O.B., Jr., 193 Harlan, Veit Jud Süß (Jew Süß), 213, 233 Havelock, Eric A., 45 Healy, Patrick, 54 Heath, Malcolm, 156 Hecht, Werner, 190 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26, 165, 250, 251 Heikkilä, Ritva, 217, 228 Heinrich, Anselm, 31, 53 Heller, Agnes, 136 Herbrechter, Stefan, 28 Hildy, Franklin J., 18, 90, 91 Hippler, Fritz Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), 213, 233 Hitler, Adolf, 211, 230 Mein Kampf , 207, 213, 232 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 114 Horace, 10, 13, 72, 146 Ars Poetica, 9–12, 46, 47 Horkheimer, Max, 48, 155

INDEX

Housman, A. E., 88 Hove, Ivo van, 245, 280 Hughes, Holly, 44 Hülsmann, Ingo, 285 Hunter, Lynette, 166, 189 Huxley, Aldous, 227 Huxley, Julian, 42, 200, 202, 203, 205, 214, 218–220, 226, 228, 235 New Bottles for New Wine, 219 Uniqueness of Man (1941), 214 We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems , 214 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 227 Hyvönen, Ville, 276, 287

I Ibsen, Henrik, 263 An Enemy of the People, 42, 243, 259 Innes, Christopher, 49 The Invisible Committee The Coming Insurrection, 254–257, 259, 261, 262, 266, 268 Iriye, Akira, 235 Isherwood, Charles, 170–174, 255, 262, 263, 285 Izaac, H. J., 68

J Jacobs, Monty, 176 Johnson, William A., 46, 124 Jokisipilä, Markku, 202, 216, 229 Jones, Richard, 116 Jonson, Ben, 127 Josephus, 87 Jouvet, Louis, 211 Jürs-Munby, Karen, 145, 157, 158 Just, Henri, 232 Juvenal, 67

297

K Kennedy, John F., 197 Kivimaa, Arvi, 42, 197–202, 204–208, 210, 213, 215–218, 220–226, 230, 233, 237 Eurooppalainen veljeskunta: Runoilijamatka halki Saksan, 203, 206, 216, 221 Europäische SchriftstellerVereinigung , 198, 204 Näyttämön lumous , 203, 211, 212, 223 Teatterin humanismi, 197, 202, 203, 217, 221, 223, 225, 237 Teatterivaeltaja, 203 Valon ja pimeyden manner, 197–200, 203, 206, 211, 212 Kobialka, Michal, 50 Theatre/Performance Historiography, 23 Könönen, Janne, 202, 216, 229 Korppi-Tommola, Riikka, 229 Korsberg, Hanna, 228, 229 Koski, Pirkko, 228 Kotzé, Annemaré, 124 Kotzebue, August von, 16 Kowsar, Mohammad, 189 Kuijper, D., 68 Kulick, Brian, 166, 177, 179 Kutscher, Artur, 211, 236 Kyle, Donald G., 90

L Laberenz, Lennar, 276 Laird, Andrew, 46 Lamb, Charles, and Lamb, Mary Tales from Shakespeare, 117 Lara, René, 233 Lederman, Josh, 54 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 25, 45, 265, 286

298

INDEX

Postdramatic Theatre, 24, 50, 86 Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 45 Lennox, Sara, 175 Leon, Mechele, 22 Lepage, Louise, 25 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 47, 103, 137, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 152, 166, 189 Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 136, 138, 154 Selbstdenken, 136 Vermenschlichung , 40, 135–137, 152, 225 Lewis, Kecia, 169, 172–174 Lim, Richard, 122, 124 Lloyd, Christopher, 171 Lokis, 270, 271, 273, 274 Löwen, Johann Friedrich, 146 Löwen, Madame, 160 Lukács, Georg, 165, 188

M Machiavelli, Niccolo, 128 Mantz, Jeffrey W., 192 Markus, A., 122 Marlowe, Christopher, 118–121, 127 Doctor Faustus , 115, 128 Tamburlaine, 114, 115 Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude, 270 Martial, 72, 78, 79, 85, 87, 99, 121 damnatio ad bestias , 39, 41, 64, 77, 79, 82, 85, 86, 100, 135, 144 dramatic spectacle, 39, 41, 64–67, 79, 82, 85, 86, 100, 135, 144 Liber Spectaculorum, 39, 64–66, 68, 70, 73, 74, 79, 100, 104 Martialis, Marcus Valerius. See Martial Martin, Benjamin G., 199, 227 Marx, Groucho, 171 Marx, Karl, 165, 169, 218, 234

Marx, Peter W., 53 Mattfeld, Monica, 44 McConachie, Bruce, 89, 125 McNamara, Brooks, 226 Meckbach, Eva, 262 Meech, Anthony, 48 Mele, Christopher, 54 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 266 Mill, John Stuart, 32 Mouffe, Chantal, 36, 54, 256, 263, 284 Mousley, Andy, 4, 43, 44 Moynihan, Colin, 257, 259, 268 Mücke, Dorothea von, 139 Murphy, Talley, 280

N Nagourney, Adam, 53 Nagy, Piroska, 126 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 31, 205, 225, 229, 255 Being Singular Plural , 32, 53 The Inoperative Community, 53 Neher, Caspar, 182, 192, 252 Neuber, Caroline, 48 Noah, Mordecai, 174, 190 Nussbaum, Martha C., 45

O O’Connell, Robert J., 124 O’Donnell, James J., 111, 123, 125 Orgel, Stephen, 265, 286 Orozco, Lourdes, 50 Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices , 24 Osborne, Peter, 281 Ostermeier, Thomas, 42, 193, 243, 259, 262, 266, 283, 285, 286 Ein Volksfeind, 254, 255, 264, 277, 279

INDEX

P Paavolainen, Olavi, 215, 216 Pappelbaum, Jan, 266, 267 Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, 44, 50 Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices , 24 Patterson, Michael, 49 Paul (apostle), 102 Payne, Deborah C., 22 Peletier, Jacques, 72 Pence, Mike, 6, 35–37 Perotti, Niccoló, 72 Peters, Julie Stone, 130 Petrarch, 72 Phelan, Peggy, 25, 51, 110 Phillips, Anne, 53 Philo, 217, 218 Philo Judaeus. See Philo Pinkins, Tonya, 41, 165, 167–170, 172–174, 177, 179, 181, 184, 186, 187 Piscator, Erwin, 223 Pitoëff, Georges, 211–213, 222 Plato, 7, 11, 81, 110 Laws , 27 Republic, 2, 26 Plautus, 102 Pliny the Younger Epistles , 46 Plotinus, 102 Pope, Hugh, 130 Popper, Karl, 27 Price, Jason, 48 Price, Leah, 117 Priestley, J. B., 234 Puchner, Martin, 47, 52, 89, 259

Q Quinn, Michael L., 238

299

R Raber, Karen, 44 Rader, Matthäus, 73, 88, 89, 121 Ramirez de Prado, Lorenzo, 73 Rampton, Ben, 287 Rancière, Jacques, 2, 33–35, 43, 53, 250 The Emancipated Spectator, 34 Rebatet, Lucien, 198, 199 Reeves, John A., 90 Reinhardt, Max, 209, 212, 214, 222, 230, 232 Rembrandt, 119 Remshardt, Ralf, 25 Revermann, Martin, 77–80, 144 Roach, Joseph, 13, 47 Roberts, Dorothy, 192 Robinson, Douglas, 169 Römmelt, Stefan W., 73, 89 Ron, Moshe, 217 Rose, Alleyn, 120 Roselli, David Kawalko, 46 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30 Ruland, David, 264 S Said, Edward W., 34, 43, 80, 265, 286 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 1, 3 Orientalism, 3, 4 Salomaa, Ilona, 236 Saltz, David Z., 44 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 30, 52 Sassen, Saskia, 266 Saul, Nicholas, 158 Saunders, Trevor J., 51 Scanlon, Larry, 123 Schechner, Richard, 36, 54, 87 The End of Humanism, 226 Schiller, Friedrich von, 17, 19, 32, 51, 108, 127, 136, 137, 149–152,

300

INDEX

165, 208, 209, 213, 218, 220, 223, 224, 230, 263 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 77 Schlösser, Rainer, 209, 211 Schneider, Helmut J., 130, 154 Seneca, 72, 80 Sennett, Richard, 154 Shakespeare, William, 117, 119, 120, 127, 174, 179 As You Like It , 72 Hamlet , 114 Sheik, Duncan, 171 American Psycho, 171 Siclis, Charles, 232 Siddons, Sarah, 22 Sloterdijk, Peter, 63, 85, 121 Sluga, Glenda, 233 Smeds Ensemble, 42, 243, 269–271, 279, 287 Vyšniu˛ sodas - Der Kirschgarten, 269–271, 273, 274, 276–278 Smith, William, 154 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Tragedia Endogonidia, 250 Solga, Kim, 175, 190 Sontag, Susan, 28, 52 Soper, Kate, 188 Sophocles, 246, 250, 251 Antigone, 42, 243, 245, 252 Oedipus Tyrannus , 7 Tereus , 7 Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher, 89 Southerne, Thomas, 22 Speer, Albert, 200 Spencer, Robert, 236 Spender, Stephen, 28 Spengler, Oswald, 80, 92 Spotts, Frederic, 227 Stern, Stefan, 261 Stern, Tiffany, 128, 129 Stock, Brian, 101, 102, 105, 113, 125, 130

Stone, Bianca, 247 Stranitzky, Joseph Anton, 15 Stravinsky, Igor, 211 Strehler, Giorgio, 183–186, 193 Styan, J. L., 129 Suetonius, 67 Sullivan, J. P., 72 Sundholm, John, 204

T Taubman, Howard, 193 Taussig, Michael, 238 Taylor, Gary, 129 Terence, 72 Tertullian, 82, 85, 99, 122 De Spectaculis , 82 Therborn, Göran, 151 Todorov, Tzvetan, 145, 157 Tortelli, Giovanni, 72 Trump, Donald J., 6, 36–38, 54, 263 Turner, Cathy, 47 Turner, Victor, 130 Twining, Thomas, 155 Tynan, Kenneth, 176

V Vaitkus, Jonas, 273 Valla, Lorenzo, 72 Valtari, Mika, 215, 216 Venuti, Lawrence, 244 Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 86 Vergil, 102 Verhaeghe, Paul, 283 Vermeer, Johannes, 119 Vessey, Mark, 122, 125, 127 Viagas, Robert, 189 Victorinus, Marius, 102, 103, 106–108, 125 Viljanen, Lauri, 215, 216 Taisteleva humanismi, 215

INDEX

Villalobos-Arenas, Ramon, 270, 275, 276 Virgil, 72 Voegelin, Salomé, 189 Voltaire, 127 W Waschneck, Erich, 232 Die Rothschilds , 213 Wasserman, Jacob, 215 Weber, Samuel, 81, 281 Wedekind, Frank Spring Awakening , 171 Weigel, Helene, 167, 175, 176, 191, 252 Weismann, Werner, 123 Welch, Wolfgang, 152 Werker, Alfred L. The House of Rothschild, 232 Wertz, William F., 158 Wesker, Arnold, 127 West, William N., 135 Wiedemann, Thomas, 67

301

Wilde, Oscar, 127 Wiles, David, 90 Williams, Gary Jay, 89, 125 Wilson, Robert, 29 Worthen, Hana, 228, 233, 283 Worthen, W. B., 89, 129, 130 The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 75 Wright, Matthew, 45 Wulf, Christoph, 153 Y Yacoub, Joseph, 54 Yeats, William Butler, 127 Z Zaitlin, Phyllis, 287 Zarrilli, Phillip B., 76, 89, 125 Ziemke, Katharina, 267 Zimmermann, Job, 237 Žižek, Slavoj, 250 Zumsteeg, Johann Rudolf, 159