Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making

of Modern Drama (review)

Ehren Fordyce
Modern Drama, Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2007, pp. 287-290 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2007.0039
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WORKS CITED
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
MATTHEW S. BUCKLEY. Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution
in the Making of Modern Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006. Pp. ix 191, illustrated. $49.95 (Hb).
Reviewed by Ehren Fordyce, Stanford University
The French Revolution poses a quandary for modern drama. While
formative for social modernity, the Revolution remained marked by
conservative dramatic forms, and subsequent innovations in melodrama
and dramatic romanticism pale by comparison to the experiments of
eighteenth-century authors such as Lessing, Diderot, and Beaumarchais.
To demonstrate that the period entails less a rupture than a hiatus (2),
Matthew S. Buckleys Tragedy Walks the Streets examines how the
Revolutions theatricalization of political and public culture in France
and Britain revealed underlying continuities in the development of new
modes of cultural representation, even as dramatists frequently sought
refuge in traditional genres, such as tragedy, that no longer adequately
conveyed the eras historical acceleration and anti-heroic modernity.
Buckleys work contributes to the history not only of modern drama
but of modern performance. It extends out from literary culture to
demonstrate how the power of the performative imagination became
ecstatically and frighteningly material in a radically theatrical context
of public action (4).
In an initial chapter, Theater of the Revolution, Buckley builds an
image of pre-revolutionary Frances public sphere, with its pleasure
gardens, growing fashion industry, round-the-clock entertainment in the
Palais Royal, and streets newly dotted with lampposts signifiers of the
kings watchful eye. For those without access to leisure and power,
surreptitious acts of performative violence became a way of expressing
resentment. Street urchins slashed aristocrats slippers; a gang of
goldsmiths and clockmakers accosted and raped women under the
(open) cover of a royal fireworks display. In the months leading up to
the storming of the Bastille, however, these acts turned more overt.
Louis XVIs politics of urban surveillance was turned against him, and
a politics of publicity emerged, accompanied by a new rhetoric of
unveiling and by acts of unmasking (33).
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For revolutionary orators, such unveiling created its own problems.
Buckleys second chapter, The Drama of the Revolution, traces the
manic attempt by Parisian politicians and the press to settle the
Revolution by fixing its genre. First, Mirabeau and others attempted
a comic reconciliation, with the king once more married to his people.
But after the kings failed flight to Varennes, the symbolic veil of kingly
authority was irreparably torn. The only reconciliation possible seemed
tragic. The kings execution, followed by that of the Feuillants and
Girondins, made Robespierre the last Brutus standing. But he himself
questioned his role, for, What does it matter that Brutus has killed the
tyrant? Tyranny still lives in the peoples hearts (62). Confronted with
rising opposition, Robespierre shot himself in the mouth and, unlike
Danton and others, was left unable to speak at his own trial. The Terror
ended, but the tragic confrontation toward which the Revolution was
aiming failed to transpire (64). In the subsequent rise of the mute
in melodrama, Buckley argues that the [character] testifies not only
to the failure of Revolutionary ideals but also to the historical condition
of post-Revolutionary modernity a condition in which speech has
ceased to exercise historical agency and in which all tragedy has become
modern (67).
In England, these events were followed eagerly, in part due to the rise
of one of the first international news systems, by rider and boat, from
Paris to London. The third chapter, Revolution and British Theatrical
Politics, shows how British political culture shifted from its habitual
native dignity (77) of subdued oratory, epitomized by Edmund
Burke, to a more spectacular and melodramatic politics, represented
by the triumph of Sheridans Pizarro (1799). Noting that Paine and
Wollstonecraft criticized Burkes hagiography of Marie-Antoinette as
a disingenuously theatrical form of sympathy, Buckley points out how
the anti-theatrical rhetoric of these latter critics was itself informed by
colourful metaphor and stereotypical characters, most notably in the
form of prisoners of misery, proto-melodramatic victims of the ancien
regime. Buckley grounds his analogies between political and theatrical
cultures in a variety of ways. Most vividly, he offers a subtle reading of
London newspaper design, in which political and theatrical items lay next
to each other in a code that evaded libel lawsuits but remained legible to
contemporary readers. Sheridans involvement in the Elocutionary
Movement offers further evidence of how the periods political and
dramatic rhetoric derived from similar cultural sources.
While the third chapter offers an overview of Britains mingled political
and theatrical cultures, the fourth focuses on a specific realization of that
phenomenon: Coleridge and Southeys The Fall of Robespierre. Buckley
begins his narrative with a description of how Robespierres fall was
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reported in England: suspense-laden gaps in the press (as the crisis
mounted and mail from France slowed) were followed by a subsequent
rush of news, leading to radically revised opinions of the event. Buckleys
research is elegant, providing a vividly thick description of how mediation
and modernity intersect to create impressions of accelerated experience,
historical self-fashioning, and systemic fatality. On a bet, Coleridge and
Southey adapted this news-stream into a play, as events came out, leading
to odd deviations in plot as expectations of genre went awry. Buckley
concludes that
[i]f Thermidor marked the end of that tragic illusion [of casting the Revolution
in Paris in Roman garb], as Marx asserted, it marked as well the establishment
of the modern political stage of the news press. The Fall of Robespierre captures
both facets of that conflict, opening in the imagined world of Jacobinisms
tragic vision and closing in chilling political modernity. (117)
A final chapter, Reviving the Revolution: Dantons Tod, explores
how Bu chner created a modern, democratic, anti-heroic version of
tragedy through a clinical autopsy of the Revolution. Modes of rhetoric
offer Bu chner one method for understanding the periods desire and
inability to contain the imaginative power of the Revolution: [i]n
Dantons speech, internal division is contained in hyperbole (138);
by contrast, Robespierres rhetoric relies on periphrastic negation
innuendo rather than confrontation, abstraction rather than explicitness
(141). Yet, beyond Bu chners sensitivity to these nuances of language use,
one of his most distinctive achievements was to reveal languages silence
and actions speaking. By avoiding a depiction of the hero Dantons
death scene and eliding it into Lucilles cry (Long live the King!),
Bu chners play announc[es] its departure from what Desmoulins . . .
describes as our guillotine Romanticism (14445). It signals the
realization that modern history is not tragedy but ineluctable violence
(148).
Some of the best recent works in theatre studies, in fields related
to Buckleys, have tended to be largely literary-critical and theoretical
(Pu chner, Stage Fright; Bennett, All Theater is Revolutionary Theater)
or largely socio-historical (Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics; Maslan,
Revolutionary Acts). Despite ongoing calls for multidisciplinarity, it
remains understandably difficult to approach the scope of earlier grand
narratives like those of Steiner, Auerbach, and Bentley. With its close
readings of the archive, cross-national breadth, theoretical perspective,
and attention to literary, cultural, and performance studies, Tragedy
Walks the Streets offers a modestly ambitious, and successful, attempt
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to demonstrate what an interdisciplinary, comparatist, historical theatre
studies might look like today.
S.E. GONTARSKI and ANTHONY UHLMANN, eds. Beckett after Beckett.
Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2006. Pp. 227. $59.95 (Hb).
Reviewed by David Pattie, University of Chester
2006, the centenary of Becketts birth, was a busy year. The regular
stream of conferences and publications devoted to his work has swelled
into a flood, and the amount of material generated will no doubt keep
publishers, academics, and students amply occupied for a while yet. This
outpouring, however, should take no one by surprise; Beckett has always
generated more than the usual amount of commentary and criticism, with
no sense that his work is in any way exhausted by it. In fact, Beckett
criticism is approaching an interesting developmental point: the Beckett
archive is being mined, his letters are beginning to appear, and, as S.E.
Gontarski notes in the introduction, all of this activity serves to create a
series of afterimages through which Becketts work is being reassessed.
The period after Beckett the turn toward biographically informed
criticism, the advent of new critical schools (eco-criticism and genetic
criticism are represented here), and the continuing use of Becketts texts
in contemporary French critical thought does not tend toward the
production of a final summary, either of the work itself or of the works
implications. Rather, the afterimages are multiplying, and the trace of
Beckett is spreading, through philosophy, through performance, through
literature, and through art.
In these circumstances, a collection concerned with the afterimages
produced by Becketts writing is welcome, and especially when the
collection is (by and large) as successful as this one. In Gontarskis and
Uhlmanns collection, we encounter a range of the traces that Beckett
has left: the first being Beckett himself, in a letter written to George
Duithuit a few days before the composition of the Three Dialogues. In it,
we encounter the argument laid out in the Dialogues about an art
devoid of relation presented with more hesitancy and self-deprecation;
the letter, in other words, retraces the Dialogues. And, as such, it is
a useful paradigm for a collection that attempts a number of such
retracings, both of Becketts work in general and of the fine details of
particular pieces of writing. Herbert Blau, for example, notes Becketts
traces in the history of American conceptual art; this trace moves across
the dividing lines between modernity and post-modernity and across
the lines imposed by distinct art forms a trace of mourning discernible
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