The Play within the Play

The Performance of
Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection
 Internationale Forschungen zur
112 Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich

Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität
Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität
Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki

Anschrift der Redaktion:

Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
 The Play within the Play
The Performance of
Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection

Edited by
Gerhard Fischer
Bernhard Greiner

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover image: Les Farceurs de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne, by Abraham Bosse (c.1633,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris).
By placing Gaultier-Garguille’s eye-glasses in the very centre of his image, Bosse
indicates that eyes and looking are the key to this play within a play: observed
by an internal on-stage audience (a Frenchman and a Spaniard), Turlupin robs
Gaultier-Garguille, who is watching Gros-Guillaume make love to a woman,
while we, their audience, watch them all. (John Golder)

Cover design:
Pier Post

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de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence”.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO
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for permanence”.

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Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi,
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Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag,
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From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen

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ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2257-7
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner
The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives xi
I. The Play within the Play and the Performance
of Self-Reflection
Bernhard Greiner
The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit
of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm 3
Yifen Beus
Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre
Manifestation 15
Klaus R. Scherpe
‘Backstage Discourse’: Staging the Other in Ethnographic and
Colonial Literature 27
David Roberts
The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation 37
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones
Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet’s The Balcony and The
Blacks 47
II. The Play within the Play and Meta-Theatre
1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference
Christian Sinn
The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob
Bidermann’s Cenodoxus (1602) 61
John Golder
Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and
Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-1635/36 77
Manfred Jurgensen
Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play 101
Barnard Turner
Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real
Thing (1982): New Frames and Old 113
Ulrike Landfester
The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss’s Postmodern Metadrama and
the History of Theatrical Reality 129
vi

2. The Theatre and its Audience

Shimon Levy
Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin’s Political, Aesthetic and
Ethical Metatheatricality 145
Gad Kaynar
The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious
Play in Israeli Stage-Drama 167
Zahava Caspi
A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflective Theatre: The Case of
Israeli Drama 189
III. Perspectives on the World: Comedy, Melancholy,
theatrum mundi
Frank Zipfel
‘Very Tragical Mirth’: The Play within the Play as a Strategy for
Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy 203
Herbert Herzmann
Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister
Ludi 221
Helmut J. Schneider
Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical
Drama from Lessing to Büchner 237
Gerhard Fischer
Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and
German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller) 249
Birgit Haas
Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz’s Festung and Albert
Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie 267
IV. The Play within the Play as Agency of Socio-Cultural
Reflection and Intercultural Appropriation
Lada Cale Feldman
The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre
Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique 285
Maurice Blackman
Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête 297
Kyriaki Frantzi
Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth:
Another Night: Medea 307
 vii

V. The Play within the Play as Agency of

Intermedial Transformation
1. The Play within the Play and Opera
Yvonne Noble
John Gay and the Frame Play 321
Donald Bewley
Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude 335
Theresia Birkenhauer 
Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic
Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the
Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera Ariadne auf Naxos 347
2. The Play within the Play and Film
Erika Greber
Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play. The
Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in Eugene
Onegin 361
Alessandro Abbate
The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen:
Multi-Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet
and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet 377
Ken Woodgate
‘Gotta Dance’ (in the Dark): Lars von Trier’s Critique of the
Musical Genre 393
3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction
Tim Mehigan
The Game of the Narrative: Kleist’s Fiction from a Game-
Theoretical Perspective 405
Alexander Honold
French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and Symbolic
Acting in Gottfried Keller’s Prose Fiction 421
Ulrike Garde
Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’
and Barrie Kosky’s Interpretation for the Melbourne International
Arts Festival 431
Notes on Contributors 447
Index of Names 455
Acknowledgements
The essays in the present collection constitute a selection of papers delivered
at the 2004 Sydney German Studies Symposium, which was devoted to the
topic of The Play within the Play. The chapters have been thoroughly revised
and edited for publication. The Symposium, convened by the editors, was
designed to explore the wide range of aesthetic, literary-theoretical and philo-
sophical issues associated with the rhetorical device of the play within the
play, not only in terms of its original theatrical setting ranging from the baro-
que idea of the theatrum mundi onward to contemporary examples of a post-
modern self-referential dramaturgy, but also with regard to a number of dif-
ferent generic and theoretical applications, in narrative fiction and anthro-
pological writing, in musical theatre and film.
As editors, our thanks go, first and foremost, to the individual authors
who have made this volume possible; we appreciate their contributions as
much as their co-operation and patience during the preparation of this work.
We also wish to thank Marieke Schilling of Rodopi and Ernst Grabovszki
and the members of the editorial board of IFAVL for their enthusiastic adop-
tion of the project. A vote of thanks is due to the Sydney Goethe Institute,
notably Roland Goll and Rainer Manke, for providing once again their beau-
tiful venue with its cheerful ambiance that had so much to do with making
the Sydney German Studies Symposia a successful series of events over near-
ly three decades, as well as to the German Consulate-General in Sydney and
the German Research Council (DFG) for their essential support. We also like
to acknowledge the contribution of the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of UNSW (Prof. Annet-
te Hamilton, Dean) who made the visit of Prof. Bernhard Greiner possible.
We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Dr. Nita Schechet (Jerusalem)
and, in particular, to Dr. John Golder (Sydney) who helped with the arduous
task of proof-reading and copy-editing a complex and diverse manuscript. A
final ‘thank you’ goes to Maria Oujo (Sydney) who completed the electronic
layout of the book.
Lastly, it is our sad duty to report the death of our colleague Theresia Bir-
kenhauer who passed away on 6 November 2006.

Gerhard Fischer (Sydney) and Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen)

Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner

The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives

The curtain opens. The stage represents a theatre.

Ludwig Tieck, Die verkehrte Welt

The Play within the Play, Spiel im Spiel in German dramatic theory, or le thé-
âtre dans le théâtre in French, is a theatrical device or convention, or a kind
of sub-genre within dramatic literature and theatrical practice. Dramaturgical-
ly speaking it describes a strategy for constructing play texts that contain,
within the perimeter of their fictional reality, a second or internal theatrical
performance, in which actors appear as actors who play an additional role.
This duplication of the theatrical reality is often reinforced by the presence
onstage of an ‘internal audience’ which acts as a double to the actual audi-
ence. Like similar terms employed in theories of narrativity, e.g. mise en
abyme, Rahmenerzählung (‘frame story’), Binnenerzählung (‘inner story’, or
story within a story), dramaturgical terms such as ‘frame play’ or ‘outer play’
(Rahmenstück, pièce-cadre) and ‘interior’ or ‘internal play’ (Binnenstück,
pièce intérieure) are commonly used in order to identify the two characteris-
tic components of the play within the play. Its most salient feature is that it
doubles an aesthetic experience which already presents a dual reality: the
actor, who appears on stage both in his/her own physical presence and in the
part he/she portrays, assumes and plays yet another role, thus adding a third
identity which itself is constructed in the context of a third level of time,
space, characterisation and action.
The play within a play boasts a long and notable tradition in European
theatre and dramatic literature: it is a dramaturgical strategy that playwrights
from Aristophanes to Heiner Müller have put to a wide range of purposes.
However, scholarly perspectives on the play within the play do not need to be
limited to European theatre. Indeed, the anthropological ubiquitousness of
both play and performance as social action as well as aesthetic experience
testify to the international and multicultural dimensions of the play within the
play and its function as a motif in dramatic literatures around the world. Fur-
thermore, the play within the play also presents an ideal agency for shifting
xii Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner

between different media, as well as for expressing notions and experiences

involving cultural exchange or cultural conflict.
The play within the play was the focus and the exclusive topic of investi-
gation of an International Symposium held from 22 – 25 July 2004 at the
Goethe Institut in Sydney, Australia, under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales. The main aim of
the conference, convened by the editors of the present volume, was to present
a comprehensive account of the peculiar structural and thematic features of
the play within the play, to analyse its theoretical dimensions, and to provide
a comparative basis for discussion of this literary/theatrical phenomenon on
an international scale. The participants, some fifty academics from Europe,
Asia, the United States, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, repre-
sented a number of disciplines and research areas; they included scholars in
literature and cultural studies, anthropologists, theatre historians and practi-
tioners, musicologists, and specialists in performance studies. The present
volume presents a selection of the papers that were read and discussed at the
Sydney Symposium, edited and brought up to date for the express purpose of
providing a critical study at once wide-ranging and comparative.
The play within the play is manifest in a multitude of forms and constel-
lations, and it fulfils an equally diverse variety of tasks and functions within
the performing arts. Systematically, these can be grouped in four distinct cat-
egories. One can consider the play within the play primarily (1) as an artistic
agency of self-reference and self-reflection, i.e. as imaginative play that re-
fers back to itself. It thus appears as a meta-theatrical mode of aesthetic ex-
pression, in terms of its own specific nature as play and representation as well
as with regard to the function of the stage-audience relationship and in view
of the self-reflection of its acting protagonists. It may also be thought of (2)
as a special mode of perception that allows for different ways of presenting
perspectives of appropriating and placing itself in relation to the world at
large.
Likewise, it is (3) a particularly suitable aesthetic agency for the explora-
tion of fields of social and historical interaction or exchange, with a special
dimension in the area of intercultural and/or intracultural contact or conflict.
Lastly, the play within the play can be seen (4) as an artistic agency of media-
tion between conventional genres, or of generic transformation, permitting
shifts from one genre to another. The play within the play is thus by no
means limited to theatre, whether it be dramatic text or performance; it en-
joys a wide popularity also in film, opera and musical theatre, and it frequen-
tly appears as a device in narrative fiction as well.
 The Play within the Play xiii

As a specific form of organizing a process of theatrical reflexivity, the

play within the play needs to be distinguished according to the different con-
stituents of its respective realisations on stage. It features most prominently
as a meta-theatrical strategy of self-reflection, especially in the modern con-
text of the establishment and foundation of a concept of the self, that is to say
in the affirmation of a self-conscious subject (‘the actor’) that transcends the
masks of social roles. Hamlet, as play and as character, thus presents the
succinct model of a social-historical and aesthetic-philosophical paradigm of
modernity. Similarly, the play within the play constitutes a special agency for
the self-legitimation of an evolving bourgeois subject within the parameters
of a philosophy of idealism; here, the constellations of the play within the
play favoured by the Romantics of the Kunstperiode offer the relevant para-
digm. On another level, as part of a system of thinking set within a specific
order of ‘representation’ (in the sense of Foucault’s meaning of the term), the
play within the play also appears as a preferred field of self-reflexivity, which
is why the meta-theatrical dialectic of play and representation achieved such
particular prominence in the period of the Baroque. Of course, it could also
be said that a postmodern art in which a reflection upon itself appears to be
an essential element (not only in the theatre, of course) is very much a feature
of our own era. Indeed, the play within the play would seem to be a particu-
larly apt device for the expression of the playful self-referentiality of the
post-modern condition.
Other forms of the play within the play offer themselves, and have been
employed, to provide a structure for self-reflection concerning the theatre au-
dience, or the recipient reader of a literary work, respectively. Here, the play
within the play functions as a ‘romantic’ site which encompasses all constitu-
ent elements of art (in the sense of borders being suspended or transcended),
or equally as the site of a didactic theatre, e.g. during the early Enlight-
enment period or, with similar but not identical intentions, in the Lehrstück-
concept of Brecht towards the end of the Weimar Republic. One could add
that, generally, the play within the play tends to be a prominent feature of the
practice of political and anti-illusionistic theatre.
Apart from these forms of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity, the play
within the play also offers an important organisational structure that high-
lights certain ways of approaching or dealing with the world. Perhaps the
most significant example of this is comedy. Indeed, it could be said that the
play within the play is a constituent and intrinsic component of the comedic
genre. Typical features of comedy, e.g. the use of parabasis (as in the plays of
Aristophanes), falling out of character, improvisations, or comic intrigues
generally, are all structured on the play-within-the-play principle. Other ways
xiv Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner

of approaching the world, in which the play-within-the-play constellations

can be seen, are melancholy and humour. In the former the world that con-
fronts us, our own world of social practice and process, is merely regarded as
play, however, when seen from the perspective of a protagonist who refuses
to join in. The humorist, on the other hand, accepts his or her role as a per-
former in the ‘play of the world’; even though he recognizes the play as idle
and transitory, he nevertheless accepts that he is an actor and that he has a
role to play. Thus, the time-honoured topos of ‘world theatre’ proclaims that
the world itself and all of its inherent processes and interactions is merely
theatrical play, performed in front of and judged by a higher authority. The
Baroque period in particular featured very powerfully staged presentations of
the topos of theatrum mundi at the core of many of its extravagant spectacles.
In another way, social or socio-historical interactions are often consciously
imbued with the aura of the theatrical, as shown in the example of the protag-
onists of the French Revolution who loved to see themselves and reflect upon
their historical roles by taking on the personae of the protagonists of the Ro-
man Republic of classical antiquity.
The play within the play has also found a very useful and productive
usage as a form of action and reflection within a wide variety of cultural and
intercultural exchanges. An example of this might be the appropriation of
classical culture, e.g. Greek or Roman, by later European cultures. It can thus
serve as an organisational agency to assist structuring encounters of different
European cultures of distinct epochs, as in the role model of Shakespeare
within German-language theatre, or the return to different forms of comme-
dia dell’arte at various stages within the development of European comedy.
Similarly, the play within the play has been an important factor as a structure
of mediation between European and non-European theatrical traditions; it has
enabled and facilitated the meeting of European and non-European cultures,
just as much as it has been used to question the validity of such forms of cul-
tural appropriations in the context of colonial encounters as well as in a criti-
cal postcolonialist discourse. As examples one could cite the case of Israeli
theatre which connects the European culture with a genuine Jewish theatrical
tradition, or the appropriation and transformation of certain aspects of Euro-
pean theatre to theatrical forms of the Islamic World. The staging of plays
belonging to a specific culture by directors or theatre practitioners whose cul-
tural background might be very different has opened up a special field in an
area which might simply be called ‘cultural contact’ in an affirmative sense.
But cultural encounters could also provide unforeseen and undesirable
outcomes. Attempts at intercultural mixing or interaction could result in mis-
understandings and misappropriations; they could result in opposition and
 The Play within the Play xv

distanciation, cultural exchanges could fail. This leads to yet another promi-
nent usage of the play within the play, namely as an agency of action and
reflection in the context of cultural conflict. One could distinguish here be-
tween intracultural and intercultural conflicts. An example of the former
would be the conflict between high and popular culture, e.g. the proliferation
of the play within the play in the Volkstheater movement (a specific tradition
within German-language theatre), where it was used to ironically or comical-
ly subvert the idea of theatre as the property and domain of the ruling classes.
Here, the Viennese Volkstheater of Nestroy offers the most obvious para-
digm. Intercultural conflicts on the other hand might involve differences and
opposition between cultures or groups of more or less equal prestige and
standing, or between a majority culture (i.e. the ruling or leisured class) and a
minority culture; the latter variant occurs for example in the play-within-the-
play constellations that are being used in the context of postcolonialist en-
counters. Alternatively, some of the paradigms current in postmodern and
postcolonial studies (hybridity, syncretism) are well suited to explore the
topic in question, e.g. in relation to the notion of ‘intercultural framing’ as
part of the process of reception and appropriation of European theatrical
works by non-European playwrights and theatre practitioners.
Finally, the play within the play has played a significant role as a structur-
al principle to facilitate a process of mediation between media, or a move-
ment of ‘shifting’ between different media. Thus, a kind of intermedial strate-
gy can be observed in the change of medium or genre from theatre and other
forms of artistic and imaginative expression. The play within the play appears
here as the essential link, or as a kind of go-between.
In recent film versions of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, new forms of
the play within the play were widely discussed as prominent features. In mu-
sical theatre, similar shiftings also make use of the device. The transforma-
tion of plays into opera in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries attests
to the versatility of a structural principle that allows librettists like Hof-
mannsthal and composers like Strauss to appropriate and to transform suit-
able dramatic models as well as pieces from the classical theatrical repertoire
into their own modernist operas. More recently, practitioners of modern
dance theatres have also found it useful and productive to explore the poten-
tial of the play within the play in order to contribute to the development of
original works that originated in other genres or media.
Alternatively, the play within the play facilitates and enables the dramati-
sation of certain prose narratives – as, for example, in some of Heiner Mül-
ler’s later works – or, in a more conventional mode, it can be found as a fairly
standard literary motif in a number of novels or other works of narrative
xvi Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner

fiction. One prominent example concerns the integration of theatre and of

theatrical practice in narrative texts, by way of specific constellations of the
forms of the play within the play that can be found in narratives by Goethe,
Keller or Pushkin, among many others.
 I

The Play within the Play and the

Performance of Self-Reflection
Bernhard Greiner

The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the
Play: The Hamlet Paradigm

When the play within the play starts its career in early modernity, it revolves about the modern
subject as director, examiner, and judge of the play. Moreover, and vice versa, it produces this
position: the ego as the centre of the world. Referring to Hamlet and its multiplied plays within
the play, the chapter shows that this emergence of the modern subject takes place in a circle. The
play within the play requires a position beyond the play from which the play can be initiated,
directed, performed, examined, and judged. But, to achieve such a position (of a ‘true interior’,
an ego beyond all masks and all show), it is necessary to gain knowledge and certainty about the
interior, which can only be achieved by exteriorization of the interior, in other words, by playing
(by acting in masks, in the world of show). Thus the effect of the play within the play is its pre-
condition and vice versa. This chapter considers this circle in Hamlet as paradigm with refer-
ence, not only to an historical argument (the specific conditions on which the concept of the play
within the play is constituted in early modernity), but also a systematic argument (the position of
the ego, constituted as endless reflection, as the reference point and precondition of the play
within the play). The other meaning of the circle, in which the emergence of the modern subject
and the concept of the play within the play are connected, is the unification of producer (the ego
bringing forth plays within plays as acts of self-reassurance) and product (the ego brought forth
by plays within plays), and thus a purely immanent self-creation of the modern subject: it pro-
ceeds from the ‘spirit’ of the play within the play and no longer needs reassurance from a posi-
tion of transcendence.

‘It is a peculiarity of Shakespearean triumphalism,’ Harold Bloom remarks,

‘that the most original literary work in Western literature, perhaps in the
world’s literature, has now become so familiar that we seem to have read it
before, even when we encounter it for the first time. Hamlet [...] remains both
as familiar, and as original, as his play. [...] We hardly can think about our-
selves without thinking about Hamlet, whether or not we are aware that we
are recalling him.’ 1
If, in our awakenings to self-awareness, we have always been Hamlet, it
is because we equate the subject in its ideal boundlessness and respective
uniqueness with unending reflection, introversion, and an element of play-

1
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1998),
pp. 404-05.
4 Bernhard Greiner

acting that is hard to pin down, in the sense that one can only be a person by
playing one. The play-within-a-play patterns developed with virtuosity in the
Hamlet drama bring these three constituents of the subject (self-reflection, in-
troversion and play-acting) together. Hamlet becomes, as a paradigm for the
play within the play, a paradigm of the subject.
The figure of Hamlet introduces itself with an ontological claim to an es-
sence independent of both role models and behavioural models. This claim is
conspicuously linked with the theme of grief that is raised at critical junctures
in the plot; that is to say, at critical junctures in the play’s redrawing of the
self. The theme is presented without delay in the exposition of the conflict
between Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet over proper and false ways of
mourning Hamlet’s father. Likewise, the evocation of grief or signs of grief
becomes the subject of a debate that follows the Player’s monologue on the
grief of Hecuba, occasioning the play within the play in the narrower sense,
which triggers certain crucial incidents in the plot: Gertrude urgently de-
mands an interview with Hamlet, at which he kills Polonius; Claudius
removes Hamlet from court with the intention of having him killed in Eng-
land). Lastly, the final catastrophe, when all the protagonists except Fortin-
bras and Horatio meet their deaths, begins with the conflict between Laertes
and Hamlet as to whose grief over Ophelia is the more authentic. In grief the
subject is manifested as having experienced a fundamental loss that at the
same time implies a loss of self.2 The subject in mourning does not, in a
sense, maintain possession of itself. It is therefore all the more astonishing
that it is Hamlet’s grief that moves him to lay claim to a self beyond and be-
neath the forms of appearance. The outward signs of mourning, Hamlet ex-
plains to his mother in their first scene – clothing, gestures, modes of behav-
iour – are mannerisms that could just as well be faked (‘actions that a man
might play’; I.ii.84)3, whereas he himself is unacquainted with appearances:
‘I know not “seems”’ (I.ii.76). He has rather ‘that within which passeth
show’ (I.ii.85). Hamlet negatively introduces the ontological claim to a sub-
jectivity beyond appearance. Obviously, such a subject cannot otherwise be
delineated. Insofar as it is missing something, it experiences itself: this
indeed constitutes the grief of the ego through the concrete content of the
deficiency, in this case the death of the father.
The courtly ideal of ‘civility’, of cultivated behaviour, as proposed by
Baldassarre Castiglione in The Courtier (published 1508-16) and given a

2
Sigmund Freud, ‘Trauer und Melancholie’, in Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, ed. by Alex-
ander Mitscherlich and others (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1974), III, pp. 193-212.
3
Quotations are taken from G.R. Hibbard’s edition of the play (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987).
 The Hamlet Paradigm 5

political concretisation by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince (1513), in-

cludes significant doses of ‘play’, ‘show’, and ‘seeming’; that is, the art of
concealing oneself, permitting no-one to see behind the mask, suppressing
the emotions, controlling the body and its expressions, moulding oneself like
a sculpture, all made to appear effortless, unforced, as ‘natural grace’ under
competitive pressure. No-one is expected to say what his ‘own’ thoughts and
feelings are, and each person expects similar treatment from his peers. 4 The
reference point for this ubiquitous seeming is not, however, the construction
of a personal identity, but rather that of a persona, that is of a mask.5 The goal
is social advancement, making the right moves in the game played conscious-
ly by all, without any claim being made to a self beyond or beneath the mask.
Hamlet is the figure that refuses to play the game, lays claim to an ego be-
hind the mask, and makes reference to truth rather than to functionality in
social intercourse. The refusal of the subject to play along in a world of
seeming stands thus in a reciprocal relationship to grief, through which the
subject has established itself as incorporating a fundamental lack. With all
this, Hamlet is in the position of the melancholic as developed in the figure of
Jacques in As You Like It, written immediately before Hamlet. The melancholic
recognizes that life is a play – ‘All the world’s a stage’, he says – but has no
desire to act in it himself. In As You Like It, the conditions of possibility of this
position are not discussed. We find ourselves in the Forest of Arden, that is,
outside the social world, and Jacques, after the Duke’s restoration to power,
will not return to court with the other exiled lords. In Hamlet, the question of
the conditions of possibility for the position of the melancholic is asked ex-
plicitly as a question of the possibility of maintaining the existence of a sub-
ject, a being beyond the social masks and roles assigned to each of us. This
ego-essence is connected significantly with the notion of the particular, that
is, of the entirely unique, that which is connected with the notion of the
authentic, and never allows itself to become an instance of a general rule. Ger-
trude questions the occasion of Hamlet’s grief and the grief itself as being
‘particular’ (‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’; I.ii.75). It is in response
to this that Hamlet lays claim to an essence beyond all seeming (‘I know not
“seems”’). But what is the basis of such an ego, and how can it be sure of
itself?
The scenes with the ghost of Hamlet’s father give the subject’s claim to
transcend ‘show’ a justification, although in a doubtful manner – a justifica-

4
Cf. Klaus Reichert, ‘Hamlets Falle. Das Paradox der Kultiviertheit’, in his Der fremde
Shakespeare (München, Wien: Hanser, 1998), pp. 57-86.
5
Cf. Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
6 Bernhard Greiner

tion by what is, after all, a ghost. The subject is called upon to restore the dis-
turbed natural order (‘Revenge his [i.e. the father’s] foul and most unnatural
murder’; I.v.25). On the other hand, he is not allowed to link his actions to a
pre-existing natural order which, ideally, would have a secure metaphysical
foundation. The subject is made rather to justify its actions through itself and
its own moral responsibility. This occurs with the second command that has
to be fulfilled in the restoration of order: ‘Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul
contrive/ Against thy mother aught’ (I.v.85-86). The subject is offered an elu-
cidation of the occurrences at court that permits it to see beyond appear-
ances, that is, beyond the show put on by the others. This fuels the subject’s
claim, based on a deficiency (that is, on grief), to an essence beyond all
seeming. Since, however, the subject does not wish to dirty its hands in per-
forming the actions the insight prescribes, it must initiate an investigation
before carrying out its revenge. But this means that Hamlet must achieve cer-
tainty about the nature of the Ghost – first, as to whether it is a ‘goblin
damn’d’ that hopes to destroy him;6 then, whether it is telling him the truth
when it claims that Claudius is his father’s murderer and has had an adulter-
ous relationship with Gertrude; and thirdly, whether he himself is capable of
correctly understanding the behaviour and speech, the signs, that the others
produce. On this last point he provides questionable proof. As his own words
he cites, ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’, which the Ghost had said to him
(I.v.112). Is he here metonymically replacing the speaker with its audience?
Or, if the words Hamlet writes are truly his own, must we accept the Ghost’s
speech and perhaps even the Ghost itself as mere delusion? Hamlet maintains
that he swore ‘Remember me’, but until this point in the plot he has sworn
nothing. Instead it is his companions who must take an oath, not to ‘remem-
ber me’, but rather not to betray Hamlet or his investigative techniques.
Hamlet, who has claimed to know no seeming, to have that within, a subject-
tive essence, which is beyond all show, announces to his comrades that he
will ‘put an antic disposition on’ (I.v.179). This, however, means operating
behind a mask, play-acting. Self-contradiction is inevitable. From this contra-
diction arises, with and through the tragedy of Hamlet, the configuration of
the play within the play.
The subject, with its claim to transcend seeming, can only experience and
be aware of its subjectivity when it becomes apparent, that is, manifests itself
in the world of seeming. The ego must simultaneously play-act and judge its
own performance from the sidelines. This is precisely what Polonius suggests

6
Cf. Greenblatt, ‘Hamlet im Fegefeuer’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur frühen Neuzeit, 2
(1998), pp. 5-36.
 The Hamlet Paradigm 7

to Reynaldo in Act II, scene 1, following the Ghost scene, as a method of

acquiring relevant information about Laertes’ conduct in Paris. The method
employs the negation of negation. Reynaldo should express negative opinions
of Laertes, and from the ways in which these are contradicted it will be possi-
ble to deduce the truth. Nor does Hamlet have any other method, but his
goals are more far-reaching. He has to prove the ego-essence that is beyond
all seeming, beyond all produced signs and masks, while simultaneously
proving his interpretation of the events surrounding his father’s death, an in-
terpretation which along with his grief has occasioned his departure from
operating behind masks in accordance with the rules of courtly role-playing.
Hamlet’s method similarly employs the figure of the negation of negation. He
stages, on the foundation of an ‘antic disposition’, performances of negation
that the others must then negate. Correspondingly, the ego whose foundations
and apperception are thus based proves itself negated; that is, it proves that it
in itself is fragmented. The subject can gain itself as ‘particular’, that is,
unique and indivisible, only by dividing into two subjects, one that acts in
self-staged productions and another offstage that judges the performances. It
refracts others’ masquerades through its own, then reflecting the consequent
figures of refraction as its legal instance. Thus, the putative ego-essence, be-
yond all show, manifests itself as a process of reflection within the medium
of the theatrical. Harold Bloom may have felt as much when he cited Richard
Lanham’s assessment that Hamlet’s self-consciousness ‘cannot be distin-
guished from the prince’s theatricality’.7 The subject, as manifested in the
tragedy of Hamlet, is embedded in masquerades. It is so deeply nested in
them that, Hamlet, for example, who has proclaimed that he will play at
‘madness’, is able in the fifth act to call upon his ‘madness’ as a defense
when asking for Laertes’ pardon. At the same time, the subject takes up a po-
sition beyond the play-acted representations, observing its own and others’
acting in reality. But such duplication is the essence of theatre. It is therefore
hardly surprising that Goethe, in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, de-
veloped the conception of representative acting that gave shape to his drama-
turgic and theatrical activities in Weimar with direct reference to Hamlet.8
The actor, Goethe writes, must be always absorbed in his role, yet at the same
time he must know and observe himself in the reality of acting.9

7
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 411.
8
Cf. my ‘Puppenspiel und Hamlet-Nachfolge: Wilhelm Meisters “Aufgabe” der theathra-
lischen Sendung’, in Bernhard Greiner, Eine Art Wahnsinn: Dichtung im Horizont Kants.
Studien zu Goethe und Kleist (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1994), pp. 29-41.
9
See, for instance, Goethe’s rules for actors in his Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und
Gespräche. Vierzig Bände, ed. by Hendrik Birus and others (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher
8 Bernhard Greiner

A subject based on such a foundation is not ‘particular’, e.g. not unique, a

whole that behaves in response to the various masquerades in which it is em-
bedded. It is split, ‘dismembered’ and also in need of remembering, one
might say, with apologies to the ghost of Hamlet’s father. With this kind of
fragmentary self-justification and apperception, the subject is in a circuitous
movement that cannot end. In the collisions of its masquerades with those of
others, it becomes fragmented. To convey the semantic content of these re-
fractions, it must undertake new proofs that it simultaneously observes and
through which new fractures arise, again demanding new acts of judgment,
and so on. Embedded in an unending chain of references, the ego flees ever
deeper, itself becoming ghostly. Thus, the Ghost scene substantiates the sub-
ject, which had laid claim to a being beyond appearances, as an internally
refracted processual unit of reflexivity without any possible end, a reflection
taking place within the medium of theatre. The combination of its fragmented
nature and its inconclusive reflexivity give the subject the ontological status
of a ‘dismembered ghost’ that would have equally solid grounds for demand-
ing – the question is only of whom – ‘Remember me.’
After Hamlet, as a reaction to the Ghost’s revelations, has announced his
intention of assuming an ‘antic disposition’ and sworn his companions not to
reveal that his actions may be concealing something beyond what they seem,
it is impossible to decide whether or when Hamlet is play-acting both in the
represented world in the events and speeches that follow and in the reality of
the discourse (that is, for viewers and readers). From now on Hamlet defies
definition. To gain insight into such a subject, one needs to apply Hamlet’s
own method of apperception: The viewer, or reader, must confront Hamlet’s
semantic masquerades with his own – his reading strategies; at the same time,
he must step outside the semantic masquerades in which he nonetheless re-
mains involved, and pass judgment on the resulting figures of refraction from
a position offstage, in the wings. Thus he creates himself as a Hamlet-like
subject. It is this persistence in establishing subjectivity on the other side of
appearances, in the reality of discourse, that makes the ego-conception of
Hamlet so utterly compelling.
The method of establishing and qualifying a subject that transcends all ap-
pearances through the staging of masquerades (generated by the subject on
the basis of an ‘antic disposition’ and simultaneously performed and judged)
is already in place and visible with initial effects before the professional ac-
tors appear in the Hamlet drama. Polonius, Claudius, and Gertrude attempt in

Klassiker Verlag, 1987-), XVIII: Ästhetische Schriften 1771-1805, ed. by Friedmar Apel
(1998), pp. 857-83.
 The Hamlet Paradigm 9

vain to arrive at a cogent interpretation of Hamlet’s behaviour toward

Ophelia. Hamlet is incomprehensible, precisely because as a subject beyond
all show he can conceal himself, rather than revealing himself, in the mas-
querade. Why is a further exponentiation of play-acting (through the perfor-
mance put on by the travelling players at Hamlet’s request) necessary? With
regard to the grounding of the ego as a process of inconclusive reflexivity in
the medium of the theatrical, and with respect to the attempt to bring out the
truth about the death of Hamlet’s father within this structure, nothing new
can be gained by the Players’ performance. The chain of staged action and
reaction, already well under way, can only become more complex. So the
question necessarily arises whether the play-within-the-play thematic forced
by the Players’ performance is yet another way of grounding and making sure
of the subject, while at the same time suggesting a different way of dealing
with the unexplained events that surround the death of Hamlet’s father.
What impresses Hamlet so much about the First Player’s presentation that
he engages the troupe for a performance before the King and Queen? The
answer seems clear. The actor, in his speech about Hecuba’s mourning for
Priam, puts himself so entirely into character – spanning two internal refrac-
tions, as he represents a narrator reporting how Dido reported the scene to
Aeneas – that he manages to evoke in himself that grief of which he is speak-
ing, even manifesting his feelings with an abundance of physical symptoms.
Apparently, the Players are engaged because they are effective in this man-
ner. They invite the expectation that their acting will elicit signs of Claudius’
guilt or innocence. This way of reading the text is suggestive, but it ignores
grave contradictions. The actor produced his emotional effect in himself, not
in Hamlet, his audience, who had every reason to empathize with grief over a
murdered king, and whose fixation on this very theme had led him to demand
this text from the actor. If Hamlet has shown no affect, how can he expect
Claudius, who has good reason to control his expressions of emotion, to be
moved by the play to the uncontrolled production of signs that would betray
him? The actor’s self-deluding performance has, however, produced a result
in Hamlet; reflection on himself, and renewed resolve, stemming from his
comparison of the actors’ text and performance with his own situation. Ham-
let offers a commentary immediately after the player’s speech: ‘O, what a
rogue and peasant slave am I’ (II.ii.538). That seems to be the effect he hopes
the play within the play will achieve: not the production of signs whose con-
tent can only be conveyed in further semantic performances in a ‘progressus
ad infinitum’, but rather the evocation, if not the creation, of a subject that
possesses an essence beyond the performances on display and behaves as
Hamlet has previously depicted. If one reads carefully, Hamlet describes
10 Bernhard Greiner

exactly this as the hoped-for effect of the Players’ performance: ‘guilty crea-
tures’ will be compelled to ‘proclaim their malefactions’ (II.ii.578, 581),
which presupposes a moral subject: ‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch
the conscience of the King’ (II.ii.593-94). Hamlet is aiming for a subject that
does more than function in masquerades, for a moral ego that reflects on it-
self when confronted with represented performances. Hamlet has postulated
such an ego with reference to himself (‘I have that within which passeth
show’). The attempt to make sure of this subjectivity has shunted him on to
the track of inconclusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical on which
he himself threatens to become a ‘dismembered ghost’, while at the same
time threatening never to achieve any certainty with regard to the actions of
others. Thus, one can name two functions and attainments of the plays within
the play, as developed in Hamlet. On the one hand, they serve to reassure the
originator, actor, and observer of the play of the existence of his ego – postu-
lated as given – beyond and beneath all appearances. On the other, raised ex-
ponentially to plays within plays within plays, they should evoke, or even
create, this ego in their audience.
The Players’ play within the play seems, by virtue of its complex teleolo-
gy, to be entirely dedicated to the former function, yet it fulfills only the
latter. The scene presents so many levels of play-acting and corresponding in-
terpretative contexts that the formation of meaningful signs ‘betraying’
Claudius can no more be mastered than can their possible readings. Suffice it
to name a few of these levels. The play within the play duplicates and predi-
cates itself with a pantomime, the dumb show. Claudius does not react to the
dumb show, which reprises the entire plot, a king’s murder and his widow’s
marriage to the murderer. However, he does react to the spoken play, in
which it is not the King, but the Queen, that takes the leading role. In addi-
tion, Hamlet announces that he has inserted a speech of his own, though the
particular passage cannot be readily identified. It is everywhere and nowhere.
Hamlet proceeds to offer nonstop commentary, not only on the play itself, but
also on the Players’ acting skills and the meaning of the performance (refer-
ring to it, for example, as The Mousetrap). The performance immediately fol-
lowing the dumb show is largely taken up by the complexity of ‘the Queen’s
fidelity’, featuring, among other things, the Player Queen’s scandalous state-
ment that, by giving herself to her second husband, she will kill the first.10
The regicide is mentioned only briefly, yet it is not the Queen’s reactions to

10
‘A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed’ (III.ii.172-
73). The double meaning of these words is stressed by Anselm Haverkamp, Hamlet: Hypo-
thek der Macht (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004), p. 49.
 The Hamlet Paradigm 11

the play, but those of Claudius that are supposed to be put to the test. Lastly,
the piece does not reflect the murder as described by the Ghost. The murderer
in the play within the play is not the brother, but the nephew of the King.
Thus, the play appears to refer not only to the death of Hamlet’s father, but
also to a possible future murder of Claudius by Hamlet. Hamlet has commis-
sioned the performance. Through his addition to the text, it becomes his own.
In the frame play’s presentation of a play for the King and Queen, he plays
along, yet maintains at all times the perspective of an outsider observing the
play and its audience. As end-effect of the piece and its performance, Hamlet
seems to have achieved the desired certainty about Claudius. But such cer-
tainty should be followed by an act of revenge that becomes conspicuous by
its absence. At first it fails because Hamlet misinterprets Claudius’s posture
as a token of deep prayerfulness, but he later fails repeatedly to carry it out;
as, for example, when Claudius questions him about Polonius’s whereabouts
and sends him to England, acting clearly not as a repentant sinner, but as a
conspirator with evil intentions. Meanwhile, the play within the play does not
have the hoped-for effect of eliciting unambiguous signs. Claudius’s reaction
on leaving the performance is ambiguous: it may be a confession of guilt, or
possibly a reaction to a clear threat of murder. At the same time, it is the only
appropriate reaction to a play generating meaning that has spiraled out of
control.
In addition to creating a diversity of signs that cannot be unambiguously
determined, the play within the play also fulfills the second function. That is,
it evokes in Claudius as its audience (and likewise in Gertrude, although I
will not discuss her case further here) an ego beyond all masquerade. This
subject announces its presence when Claudius leaves the performance instead
of interacting with the Hamlet-generated piece viewed by Hamlet and Hora-
tio that could be entitled Performing a Play about Regicide for a Regicide
Audience. This subject is evidenced by Claudius’s monologue as he prepares
himself for prayer. This evoked ego behind the mask can only be perceived
by the signs it emits, as was true for the ego-being claimed by Hamlet from
the beginning. These, however, can never be conclusively determined, as
Hamlet’s misinterpretation of the seemingly praying Claudius shows. Read-
ing such signs demands new semantic performances in which the interpreting
ego, as presented, would experience itself as being further alienated from it-
self and embedded in an endless self-reflexive process. So both achievements
of the play within the play (self-knowledge in its founder, actor, and observ-
er, and the evocation of an ego in the audience) remain under the spell of this
structure. Each launch of a play within the play necessitates further plays.
12 Bernhard Greiner

But is it also possible to escape the influence of the infinitely partheno-

genetic plays within plays? The fifth act of the play puts this question centre
stage. The answer it gives is that it is possible to break the spell of the plays
within plays, if both achievements can be combined in a single figure. That is
demonstrated by Hamlet in Act V. The new quality that Hamlet gains re-
solves the great hermeneutic riddle of the piece, how the Hamlet of the fifth
act can be linked with the Hamlet of Acts I-IV, where he appears as the
modern subject in whom the world is centred, where he is expected to ‘set
right’ [the time] that is ‘out of joint’ (I.v.197, 196).11
The juxtaposition of the two attainments of the play within the play con-
tinues to proceed from the theme of grief, now in the conflict between Laer-
tes and Hamlet as to who can display the deeper grief over the dead Ophelia.
Hamlet has pursued the semantic performances that serve to assure him of his
subjectivity by assuming an ‘antic disposition’ on the very field where dissi-
mulation is least expected, that of love. His play-acting has destroyed, among
others, Ophelia. He was an actor in, as well as observer of, this play, and
Laertes’ grief over Ophelia confronts him once more with the signs that his
performance has evoked. When he rejects Laertes’ grief in favour of his own,
his argument is weak, purely quantitative. His ‘quantity of love’ exceeds that
of ‘forty thousand brothers’ (V.i.260, 259). Hamlet lends substance to his
grief with an emphatic first-person declaration, and this immediately after
Laertes has marked him as the guilty party:

What is he whose grief

Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane (V.i.244-48)

Thus, the play within the play that Hamlet once played with his and
Ophelia’s love has not only put him on track to apperception of his putative
subjectivity, but has also evoked in him – when Laertes puts him in the posi-
tion of the audience at his own play – a subject that confesses its guilt. This is
what Hamlet once expected from the performance by the Players, but he
could not be sure of its effect on others, that is, on Claudius as its intended

11
For two totally different interpretations of this, see Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, ‘Shake-
speares Hamlet: Apologie der “Innerlichkeit”’, in her Skeptische Phantasie: Eine andere
Geschichte der frühneuzeitlichen Literatur (München: Fink, 1999), pp. 102-26, and Aleida
Assmann, ‘“Let it be”: Kontingenz und Ordnung in Schicksalsvorstellungen bei Chaucer,
Boethius und Shakespeare’, in Kontingenz, ed. by Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Mar-
quard (München: Fink, 1998), pp. 225-44.
 The Hamlet Paradigm 13

audience. The subjective essence claimed by Hamlet beyond and beneath all
appearances is present both as a creative force (bringing forth plays within
plays as acts of self-reassurance) and as a created product (brought forth by
the plays within plays). Such a unification of producer and product is an act
of self-creation of a subject whose character is purely immanent – it proceeds
from the ‘spirit’ of the play within the play – and no longer needs reassurance
from a position of transcendence. An ego that has brought itself forth in this
manner and has reassured itself of its self-generated semantic performances –
as unending reflection in the medium of the theatrical – can allow all trans-
cendence to rest on it alone. It has no need to involve itself in questions of
providence; it does not need to play at destiny. Hamlet’s speech ‘Let be’
(V.ii.170) and his apparent recognition and transfer of loyalty to a world of
providence is the utterance of an ego that has created itself and bears no trace
of transcendence. So the subject purifies, through its speech, transcendence
of all immanence,12 proving in the process that transcendence is the absolute
Other of the purely immanent self-creation of the subject out of the spirit of
the play within the play. This feeds the expectation that the self-negation of
this ego – insofar as Hamlet anticipates his probable death – creates ex nega-
tivo an opening into the transcendent world as a metamorphosis that takes its
evidence from the perfect immanence of this ego’s self-creation.
The two attainments of the play within the play through which the subject
creates itself are brought together in the realisation of the dramatic discourse
– that is, not primarily in the represented world, but rather in the reality of the
here and now of each performance or reading of the piece. For it is the order
of the drama that links the producer and product aspects of the Hamlet-
subject: it confronts Hamlet, who is the subject of plays within plays, a sub-
ject that must first make sure of itself, thrusting itself into a course of incon-
clusive reflexivity. The drama confronts this Hamlet with the Hamlet as au-
dience at his own performances that call forth in him a subjective essence
beyond all appearances, an emphatic first-person declaration of the recogni-
tion of guilt. The drama Hamlet achieves, in its discursive reality here and
now, the self-creation of the ego – the Hamlet-subject as a process of incon-
clusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical that we all are. It lends this
act, as the absolute Other of transcendence, its aura ex negativo. This makes
the ‘birth’ of the modern subject in Hamlet so compelling that we feel we

12
This argument is stressed in Walter Benjamin’s remarks on baroque allegory; see his
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by R.
Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), I, p. 246.
14 Bernhard Greiner

have always known it: the self-creation of the subject out of the spirit and
matter of the play within the play.
Yifen Beus

Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre

Manifestation

The play within the play is often used as a form of irony and can be disguised as a simple perfor-
mance within the play itself, a character masquerading as another character, a character pretend-
ing to be out of his mind, or a complex fusion of theatrical realities. All these forms of the play
within the play carry a paradoxical significance in theory and practice and rely on a self-cons-
cious writing process on the playwright’s part and the self-reflexive aspect of the performance
itself. This paper concerns the theoretical development of self-reflexivity in the play within the
play and focuses its examination on early discussions that greatly influenced the poetics of
‘modern’ drama, namely German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept and definition of Ro-
mantic irony. It will also discuss the cross-genre application of the play within the play that func-
tions similarly in painting, drama and cinema by drawing examples from Diego Velázquez,
Ludwig Tieck and Terry Gilliam.

The play within the play is often used by playwrights to reveal the workings
of dramatic irony and the very nature of drama. It may come in a variety of
guises: (i) a simple performance within the play itself, as in Ludwig Tieck’
Der gestiefelte Kater or Puss in Boots; 1 (ii) a character masquerading
him/herself as another character, as in Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio;2 (iii)
a character pretending to be ‘beside’ his/her usual self, as in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet; or (iv) a complex fusion of theatrical realities, as in Luigi Pirandel-
lo’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.3 All these forms of the play
within the play carry a paradoxical significance in theory and practice and
rely on a self-conscious writing process on the playwright’s part and the self-
reflexive aspect of the performance itself. Thus, it is meta-drama, so to speak.
This is by no means a new concept. In fact, self-reflexivity can be regarded as
a marking of modernity in art and literature. This chapter examines the theo-
retical development of self-reflexivity in the play within the play, focusing on
early debates that greatly influenced the poetics of ‘modern’ drama, namely

1
In Schriften, 12 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985).
2
In Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
3
In Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello (New York: Meridian Books, 1952).
16 Yifen Beus

German writer/philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony.4

By drawing examples from the work of Diego Velázquez, Ludwig Tieck and
Terry Gilliam, as well as that of Schlegel, it will also discuss the cross-genre
application of the play within the play as it functions in drama, cinema and
painting, in order to illustrate the working or reflexivity in various forms of
the play within the play.
First elaborated by Schlegel as part of his definition of the modern, Ro-
mantic irony later becomes a defining characteristic of all Romantic art.
Schlegel is the first to use the term ‘Romantic’ to describe modern literature.
In his Critical Fragments (Kritische Fragmente or Lyceum Fragmente),5 pub-
lished in 1797, in the periodical Lyceum der schöne Künste, Schlegel rede-
fines the concept of irony, in literature as well as in philosophy. He uses the
term Poesie (roughly translated as ‘poetry’) in its broadest sense, to mean
literature in general, and thus his theory of irony and poetry actually concerns
all literary genres. The two major aspects of Romantic irony are: (i) the har-
monious mixture of the comic and the serious, and (ii) self-reflexivity, i.e.
literature that reflects back on itself, that reflects on its own existence. In his
Athenäum Fragment 116, Schlegel defines Romantic poetry as ‘eine progres-
sive Universalpoesie’ (a progressive universal poetry):

Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen
und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will und soll
auch die Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen,
bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Gesellschaft
poetisch machen, den Witz poetisieren und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegenem Bildungs-
stoff jeder Art anfüllen und sättigen und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen.
(Its mission is not merely to reunite all separate genres of poetry and to put poetry in touch
with philosophy and rhetoric. It will and should also mingle poetry and prose, genius and
criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, render poetry living and social, and life
and society poetic, poetize wit, fill and saturate the forms of art with solid cultural material
of every kind, and inspire them with vibrations of humour.)6

4
For a more detailed analysis of Schlegelian irony, and of its working in Tieck’s drama, see
my Towards a Paradoxical Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), chaps 2 & 3. The pre-
sent essay derives the analysis of the play within the play from the re-definition of Romantic
irony advocated by Schlegel.
5
Schlegel’s key writings on irony and the Romantic poetics appear in two sets of fragments,
the Critical, or Lyceum Fragments and the Athenäum Fragments (1800), both published in
Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Hans Eichner, 35 vols (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967).
6
Athenäum Fragments quotations are taken from volume 2 of Schlegel’s Kritische Ausgabe
and, unless otherwise noted, translations are by Ernst Behler and Norman Struc in German
Romantic Criticism, ed. by A. Leslie Willson, German Library, 21 (New York: Continuum
International, 1982).
 Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 17

This is a very ambitious – and obviously serious – definition of literature.

Few people have taken literature and the attempt to define it more seriously
than Friedrich Schlegel, yet he concludes his central definition by arguing
that literature should inspire laughter in the reader.
For Schlegel, the comic is a key ingredient in serious literature. He de-
rives this comic, ironic paradox from a number of literary sources, including
Hamlet, King Lear, and Tristram Shandy. In Hamlet, the comic play within
the play reveals the central, hidden truth that Claudius has murdered Ham-
let’s father. Fiction, here, becomes the perfect vehicle for truth. In King Lear,
the Fool’s jests show Lear the true nature of his daughters. The Fool’s jokes
both conceal and, at the same time, reveal the truth – and thus might arguably
be seen as another form of play within a play. In Tristram Shandy, Tristram,
the narrator, assumes the role of jester, informing his readers that he will
‘sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it’. At the same time, he re-
quests that his readers ‘courteously give [him] credit for a little more wisdom
than appears upon [his] outside’.7
In these examples, the line between folly and wisdom, the comic and the
serious, appearance and truth, becomes blurred. This instability – this comic
irony – forces the spectator (or reader) to view realities on different levels –
realities both within and outside the work. This ironic sentiment reflects a
quizzical attitude towards the traditional, classical views of reality or truth.
By mixing the serious and the comic in this way, the new Romantic poetics
challenges the old Classical definitions, and the very strict boundaries of a
play (in its broadest sense). Thus, this fusion of tones is essential to the play
within the play as a device of deception, intrigue and masquerade and an ulti-
mate truth-telling power about the nature of play/drama. Structurally, the play
within the play also takes on the (con)fusion of various levels of reality,
blending the theatrical reality as well as illusion while maintaining a reflexive
posture through this very design, for within the larger play’s illusion, there
are both reality of the spectator and illusion. It calls for the breakdown of the
spectator’s suspension of disbelief and draws his attention to the purpose of
this mise-en-abîme structure.
Schlegel does not simply advocate the fusion of comic and serious ele-
ments in a literary work. He argues for a universal poetry, a kind of literature
that embraces everything, an all-inclusive literature. The new freedom advo-
cated in Schlegel’s definition of Romantic poetry emancipates the poet’s im-
agination with regard not only to form, admitting every possible genre, but

7
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1967), I, vi.
18 Yifen Beus

also to content, admitting all imaginable subject matter. In order to exemplify

his new ideals, Schlegel writes Lucinde, which he subtitles ‘a novel’. Far
from what we think of as a typical novel, Lucinde is a combination of short
narratives, essays, and dialogues. Besides containing a mixture of traditional-
ly separate ‘genres’, in line with the principle of universal poetry Lucinde
also attempts to challenge the concept of the novel as a single, complete work
consisting of a lengthy narrative with logical sequence or discernible chrono-
logy and providing a sense of closure after a climatic incident. Not only does
aforementioned irregularity and variety exist in individual sections of the
book, but the entire second part of Lucinde is never written! This ‘novel’ is
thus complete (in its structural intention) and yet incomplete. However, in the
midst of seemingly formless imperfection and a mixture of different genres,
Schlegel carefully arranges the novel’s content in a fashion that displays wit
and craft while Classical drama insists on a strict separation of the different
genres – tragedy, epic, and comedy – Romantic drama insists on mixing these
genres.
Of all the genres of literature in the Romantic period, drama pushes
Schlegel’s ideals the farthest in practice, although to Schlegel the novel (der
Roman) is the ideal genre. In the absence of Classical restraint, Romantic
playwrights are given so much freedom that their plays often exceed the
physical capabilities of the nineteenth-century stage. For instance, a sudden
change of location or the staging of multiple simultaneous scenes were not
easily achieved in the first part of the nineteenth century, until the advent of
devices such as the elevator stage and the revolving stage. The former is first
installed in 1884 in the new Budapest Opera House, and the latter in 1896 by
Karl Lautenschläger in Munich’s Residentztheater. Faced with the limitations
of the stage, Romantic dramatists such as Byron, Shelley and Musset write
closet dramas. Not intended for physical performance, these permit the poet’s
imagination to soar beyond theatrical boundaries. A play within the play also
allows the playwright freedom to incorporate elements, situations, characters,
and even dialogue that are inconsistent in tone and structure with the main
drama and would otherwise have not been included. This device literally
breaks the conventions that are contained within a drama and clears the space
for itself to exist separately and yet, at the same time, as part of the main play.
The physical stage is thus no longer an obstacle in terms of scene and loca-
tion change or even identity disguise for characters; such changes could easi-
ly be performed and staged in the context of a play within a play that justifies
any manipulation or inconsistency in technicality or illusion. These changes
might even be highlighted in the play within the play in order to hint at truth
and display the playful nature of the theatre.
 Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 19

The second major feature of Romantic irony is its self-reflexivity. Poetry

should always be meta-poetry, and drama meta-drama. The play within the
play is the most common device for this self-reflexivity. In Athenäum Frag-
ment 238, Schlegel says:

[...] so sollte wohl auch jene Poesie die in modernen Dichtern nicht seltern transcendentalen
Materialien und Vorübungen zu einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtunsvermögens mit der
künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung […] in jeder ihrer Darstellungen
sich selbst mit darstellen, und überall zugleich Poesie und Poesie der Poesie sein.
(That poetry not infrequently encountered in modern poets should combine those transcen-
dental materials and preliminary exercises for a poetic theory of the creative power with the
artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring […] thus this poetry should portray itself with
each of its portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poetry of
poetry.)

The paradoxical self-creative and self-critical powers combine raw material

with theory and allow the work to present itself as meta-poetry (Poesie der
Poesie) that describes itself as well as the author’s mind at work. Schlegel
frequently refers to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is full of digressions and
digressions from digressions, as the most quoted example of such a narrative
device that makes the author’s act of writing the novel evident. Besides
Sterne’s opening remarks warning the reader that he would occasionally act
as a jester to provide comic effect as mentioned previously, his voice
(through Tristram) is constantly heard, talking to his reader and asking how
he might continue the story, telling the reader to re-read a passage which she
has carelessly read, calling on the critic to render assistance in writing a diffi-
cult part of the narrative etc. Sterne’s narratology challenges Schlegel in his
reading experience to constantly think about both his own process of reading
and the novel’s own self-critical stance, while Schlegel commends Sterne’s
witty craft of a novelist who skillfully captures his reader’s interest and atten-
tion, giving them immense pleasure of confusing the reading and writing ex-
perience. Humour is but a disguise for criticizing the form of a novel and the
rules of reading a work the reader is accustomed to. Similarly, the play within
the play device serves as a digression in the main play from the development
of the plot, while at the same time it extends the implications of the inner
play into the main play. Thus, this disguised digression continues to develop
the story, supplies plot information and reveals the very process of writing
(both plays). In addition, the framing of the inner play exposes the existence
of the author from within and, in so doing, gestures towards the actual author
(of the outer play) at work.
In his own writing, Schlegel employs similar authorial intrusions, al-
though not as daringly digressive as Sterne’s or Denis Diderot’s narrative
20 Yifen Beus

patterns, by confounding the authorship and the narration of each section of

Lucinde. Its very title-page sets up a frame for the reader to enter the world of
fictionality: ‘Lucinde, a novel, by Friedrich Schlegel’; but the authorship of
each section of the novel is deliberately ambiguous. After a prologue in
which the author, employing the German first-person ‘mein’, confesses his
inability to write verse like that of great poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, and
states his overall view of poetry, love, and romance, another subtitle-like
page insert appears: ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’ (Confessions of a
Maladroit), suggesting an ambiguity regarding the author of the confessions:
Is it Schlegel himself? Or Julius? Within the confessions, the main body of
the novel, the point of view shifts back and forth between that of the main
character Julius (using first-person narration) and that of an omniscient nar-
rator. ‘Sehnsucht und Ruhe’ (Longing and Silence), one of the shortest sec-
tions of the novel, even contains pure dramatic dialogue. Although autobio-
graphical parallels in Lucinde often confuse the narrative voice (of the author,
the narrator, or the character Julius) addressing the reader, Schlegel, through
such a deliberately ambiguous narration, is able to present his philosophy and
opinions from an ‘objective’ position, critiquing his work through his charac-
ters and their self-expression within this novel. Hans Eichner sees this inter-
posed narration as the novel’s main strength, illustrating the ‘fusion of
enthusiasm, caprice, self-criticism, and deliberate structuring’ demanded by
Schlegel’s theory:

Most strikingly, the novel exploits the technique of the interposed narrator in such a way as
to display the fusion of enthusiasm, caprice, self-criticism, and deliberate structuring de-
manded by Schlegel’s theory; Lucinde is an obvious illustration of the ‘witty’ or ‘arabesque’
form that Schlegel had singled out as a distinguishing feature of Romantic poetry.8

To Schlegel the self-reflexive (Selbstbespiegelung) and thus ‘objective’

presentation of an action in Romantic poetry also refers to portraying itself as
a whole with each of its portrayals. This reflexivity, which occurs every-
where, will thus be at the same time ‘Poesie’ and ‘Poesie der Poesie’ (Athe-
näum Fragment 238). As the author depicts his object, he constantly stands
above to look at his creative process and his creation and critiques it as he
moves along, and the work he produces in turn reflects all these individual
activities, forming a whole with a series of creative and critical components.
This self-mirroring power merges poetry/drama with theory and allows the
work to present itself as an organic self-revealing and self-critiquing entity
that describes its very nature and the writer’s writing process. Just as a play

8
Friedrich Schlegel, Twayne World Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 89.
 Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 21

within the play is a complete, self-contained work, it is also a part of the

larger play that contains it. Thus, it is both a fragment and a whole in the
post-modern sense. The very existence of the play within the play displays
the ironic structure of such a literary device and exposes the nature of play-
writing – it is a play (toying) with illusion and reality between the characters
and the spectator/reader.
As Schlegel points out in his Fragments, numerous pre-modern literary
works, as well as art works, already display this reflexive sensibility and for
him serve as forerunners of ‘modern’ literature.9 The seventeenth-century
Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, demonstrates such modernity in his cele-
brated Las Meninas, a painting about painting that questions the nature and
representation of perception and thus invokes the effects of the play within
the play. 10 Acknowledged as the chief forerunner of nineteenth-century
French Impressionism, Velázquez presents a striking ironic fusion of Clas-
sical order and objectivity, of naturalistic details and obscure reflections, and
of the duality of creative and destructive powers in the very creation of the
work. Las Meninas is a great example of self-reflexive art, in which the
painter toys with various forms of disguise – through the motifs of reflections
in the glass/mirror, door frame, the very canvas itself, and the contextual real-
ity of the subject – much like that of a play within a play, while at the same
time, displaying a playful reality of the act of painting and artistic expression.
On the left-hand side of the canvas is a painter, ostensibly Velázquez himself,
painting the scene that we see inside the painting. As with the various reali-
ties superimposed through Romantic irony, this painting reveals to us layers
of existence and perspectives within and outside itself: ourselves (the specta-
tors), the painter, the King and Queen (reflections in the mirror), the José
Nieto (the figure standing in the doorway), and the infanta Margarita with her
ladies-in-waiting and the dwarf. The painter here creates a painting within the
painting. The figure of Velázquez looks out of the painting, at the spectator,
forcing the spectator to contemplate the whole question of artistic representa-
tion.
The playwright Ludwig Tieck, a contemporary of Schlegel’s, is the prime
exemplar of Romantic irony in literature. In his plays, Tieck’s self-reflexivity
systematically destroys the dramatic illusion of reality, just as does Veláz-
quez’s painting by revealing all the different levels of its representations, and

9
Besides Shakespeare and Sterne, previously mentioned, Cervantes, Milton and Diderot all
inspired Schlegel to rethink and define modern literature.
10
See Foucault’s detailed analysis of the painting in Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard,
1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Book Editions, 1994).
22 Yifen Beus

disrupts the ‘reality’ it appears at first to depict. In Tieck’s best-known play,

Der gestiefelte Kater, the characters go to see the play Puss in Boots. The
plot develops around the characters’ responses to and interaction with the
playwright, the actors and audience of the play within the play. The structure
of the play reflects itself as drama and meta-drama at the same time. Some
techniques Tieck uses include: this framing of the play within the play, the
double role of many characters in the play, and the constant interaction be-
tween the characters and the audience. All these elements are presented on at
least two, if not more, levels – the play itself, and the play within the play,
which both creates and critiques the ‘real’ play at the same time. The play it-
self is a process of writing and staging a play. Tieck manipulates the illusion
of reality in his plays, alternately increasing and decreasing the distance be-
tween the play and the audience.
By using the play-within-the-play structure, Tieck conveniently critiques
the clichés of his contemporary sentimental drama by ridiculing the author-
audience relationship within the play. It displays in essence more of a retro-
spective attitude of the author than a direct attack on a specific form/subgenre
or author and serves as a device to examine the nature of the genre. The
poet/playwright in Kater, for instance, defends his profession and role by re-
minding his audience at the end of the epilogue that he has done well to
transport them back to the remote feelings of their childhood years – a naïve
and innocent state closer to nature than adulthood.11 Although the audience
rewards the poet with ‘rotten pears and apple and wads of paper’, the latter
walks off the stage commenting that the audience is in fact better than he is at
creating a ‘eine neuerfundene Dichtungsart’ (a new kind of poetry), a farce
indeed. This farce, created by the audience within the play, leaves the real
spectator/reader to contemplate the nature of the dramatic genre, the mission
of the poet, and the entire viewing experience – a quite serious intent – after
the laughs and farcical caricature are produced during the play.
This sort of self-conscious reflection, this playing with the boundaries
between fiction and reality, remains quite common in more recent theatre and
film. The Verfremdungseffekt (device for making the familiar strange)
through laying bare the play’s structure in Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre does
this, for example, as does the ‘anti-play’ of the Theatre of the Absurd. These
twentieth-century dramas continue what Schlegel advocates in the Fragments

11
Wordsworth expresses a similar sentiment in his poem, ‘The Rainbow’. This call to return to
childlike innocence, in order to be closer and eventually united with nature, becomes one of
the defining characteristics of most Romantic lyric poetry. Tieck’s desire to transport his au-
dience back to childhood feelings is no doubt serious, and he does it by using fantastic ele-
ments rooted in the past and far removed from jest and imagination.
 Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 23

and set the stage for the cinematic use of similar kinds of ‘play within play’.
For instance, the subject of Federico Fellini’s film, 81/2 is the film itself.
Woody Allen’s characters jump in and out of the screen in The Purple Rose
of Cairo. Terry Gilliam’s films often blur the boundaries between fiction and
reality; his Adventures of Baron Munchausen even uses the stage as its very
backdrop and introduces the audience to a play within a play within a film.
This cross-genre application of the self-reflexive device illustrates how Ro-
mantic irony functions in the film’s content and form at different levels of
authorial control.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is based on a set of stories about
the preposterous eighteenth-century Baron Karl Friedrich von Munchausen,
who goes on all sorts of remarkable adventures, including sailing to the moon.
Gilliam uses these obviously impossible adventures to call into question the
nature of reality and explore the truth-telling power of fiction. The film opens
in an unnamed European city that is under attack from the army of the Grand
Turk. In a large theatre, a troupe of actors is trying to perform a dramatic ver-
sion of Baron Munchausen’s tales. As the play within the film begins, a man
claiming to be the real Baron Munchausen enters the theatre and disrupts the
performance. The first exchange between the ‘real Baron’, the actors portray-
ing the Baron’s story and a prominent member of the audience (Horatio Jack-
son) sets up the initial playful complexity of theatrical illusion and reality.
The Baron often comments on both the play and events in the ‘real world’
outside the play. In an interview with Eric Idle (who played Berthold, a mem-
ber of Munchausen’s gang), the actor marvels at the interplay of fantasy and
reality this film presents in the form of the play within the play:

They’ve cleverly interwoven them, so you don’t feel it’s several stories. It’s just drawn on
the sources. So he [Munchausen] goes into the whale, and he goes to Vulcan, and you do
feel it’s going somewhere because of the context in which Terry’s set the whole thing,
which is the conflict with the Turks and this little troupe of actors playing this awful version
of the Munchausen story. When you first see Munchausen, he’s played by this very awful
actor with a silly nose, and you think, ‘Oh no, it’s not going to be this’ – and it isn’t! The
Baron comes up out of the audience, and goes, ‘No, it’s not like this at all.’ And takes you
off into fantasy. So it’s good the way the fantasy and the reality keep [overlapping], so
you’re never quite sure whether the Baron – in one scene, for example, we’ve finally beaten
the Turks, and we win, and then he’s shot dead. And we’re going to a funeral and everything
for him, and we cut back to the stage and the Baron says, ‘That was just one of the many oc-
casions on which I’ve met my death!’ It’s a nice joke. Very strange.12

12
David Morgan, ‘Interview with Eric Idle’, available at <http://members.aol.com/morgands1/
closeup/text/idle.htm> (accessed 25 January 2005).
24 Yifen Beus

When the Baron, backstage at the beginning of the film, says to Horatio
Jackson, ‘Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I’m delighted to say that I
have no grasp of it whatsoever’, we realize immediately that he is addressing
both the theatre audience within the film and us, the cinema audience outside
the film. A few moments later, the real Baron ushers the actors offstage and
begins to narrate the apparently ‘real story’ of his adventures. As he tells his
tale, the stage setting dissolves into the palace of the Grand Turk. The film
then follows the Baron through his adventures until, finally, he defeats the ar-
mies of the Grand Turk. As the city celebrates its deliverance, Horatio Jack-
son reappears and shoots Munchausen. The audience then picks up the story
at the Baron’s funeral – one of the many deaths Munchausen encounters dur-
ing the course of the play within the play. Gilliam’s strategy is to set up and
then dismantle a linear story-line. By the end, the spectator has no way of dif-
ferentiating between real events and the story Munchausen tells. When the
film cuts back to the Baron’s narrative, after his apparent death, the audience
does not know whether he is dead or alive, whether he has simply been tell-
ing crazy tales, or whether all the characters have been part of a great adven-
ture. Gilliam gives equal weight to each of these possibilities. His manipula-
tion of artistic illusion through the play within the play can be traced back to
Schlegel’s concept of irony; that is, the notion that a work of art should re-
veal the creator’s creative process, the mind at work, rather than simply pre-
sent an imitation of reality in the classical sense.
Since the Romantics coaxed irony out of its Classical shell as a rhetorical
trope, it has been an intrinsic attribute of modern literature and art, redefining
the relationship between the author, the work, and the reader through its
mode of expression and representation. Jonathan Culler describes Romantic
irony as ‘the posture of a work which contains within itself an awareness of
the fact that, while pretending to give a true account of reality, it is, in fact,
fiction and that one must view with an ironic smile the act of writing a novel
in the first place.’13 In a word, Romantic irony is self-referentiality, constant-
ly reminding the reader of the very act of writing and reading the text. The
modern concept of irony has generally evolved around Schlegel’s definition.
It remains a topic of constant interest and investigation in contemporary liter-
ary studies as well. From Shakespeare to the Romantics, and from the Ro-
mantics to the modernists and contemporary writers and theorists, Romantic
irony continues to play an important role.

13
Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).
 Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 25

In Les Mots et les choses Foucault comments on the crisis of representa-

tion initiated by Romantic irony and the transparency of language as a sign-
system whereby representations represent nothing more than themselves:

La littérature, c’est la constestation de la philologie […] De la révolte romantique contre un

discours immobilisé dans sa cérémonie, jusqu’à la découverte mallarméenne du mot en son
pouvoir impuissant, on voit bien quelle fut, au xixe siècle, la fonction de la littérature par
rapport au mode d’être moderne du langage […] la littérature se distingue de plus en plus du
discours d’idées, et s’enferme dans une intransitivité radicale; elle se détache de toutes les
valeurs qui pouvaient à l’âge classique la faire circuler (le goût, le plaisir, le naturel, le vrai),
et elle fait naître dans son propre espace tout ce qui peut en assurer la dénégation ludique […]
elle rompt avec toute définition de «genres» comme formes ajustées à un ordre de représen-
tations, et devient pure et simple manifestation d’un langage qui n’a pour loi que d’affirmer
– contre tous les autres discours – son existence escarpée; elle n’a plus alors qu’à se recour-
ber dans un perpétuel retour sur soi […].14
(Literature is the contestation of philology […] From the Romantic revolt against a dis-
course frozen in its ritual pomp, to the Mallarméan discovery of the word in its impotent
power, it becomes clear what the function of literature was, in the nineteenth century, in re-
lation to the modern mode of being of language […] literature becomes progressively more
differentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity;
it becomes detached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation dur-
ing the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own space
everything that will ensure a lucid denial of them..[…] it breaks with the whole definition of
genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation
of a language which has no other law than that of affirming – in opposition to all other forms
of discourse – its own precipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve
back in a perpetual return upon itself […].)

This description of language and literature of the nineteenth century as self-

reflecting manifestation largely coincides with Schlegel’s central assertion
about Romantic poetry – that poetry ‘should portray itself with each of its
portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poe-
try of poetry’. Lyceum Fragment 37 also describes this self-referentiality in-
herent in the paradox of irony – ‘Das Höchste: [...] Selbstschöpfung und
Selbstvernichtung’ (The highest goal: [...] self-creation and self-destruc-
tion).15 In Foucault’s words, literature creates within itself a space that en-
sures a ‘lucid denial’, it curves back in a perpetual return upon itself. But to
Schlegel, poetry is more than an independent form such as Foucault describes
it, which exists wholly in reference to the pure art of writing; it is also a re-
presentation of the author’s creativity, and it should also undertake a critical
approach that portrays its relationship not only to the creator but also to his

14
Foucault, p. 313.
15
Kritische Ausgabe, II, 151.
26 Yifen Beus

surroundings. It is a paradox that transcends its intrinsic being as a ‘pure art

of writing’.
Romantic irony creates multiple layers of existence and meaning in works
of art. It also creates a resistance to fixed interpretations, permitting texts to
remain in a state of perpetual becoming. It makes the work of art a self-con-
suming artifact that protects itself from attempts to finalize its meaning. Ro-
mantic irony also reveals criticism as creatively destructive in the way it dis-
mantles the preconceptions and received opinions (of the author, the text it-
self, or the audience/reader). As we look at the myriads of the form of the
play within the play in its broadest sense, it is indeed this self-reflexivity that
underlines the working of dramatic irony generated by meta-drama. Play
within the play is its best representation and, at the same time, the best criti-
cism of itself.
Klaus R. Scherpe

‘Backstage Discourse’: Staging the Other in Ethnographic and

Colonial Literature

‘Backstage discourse’ is constituted by gestures, words and tales, which cannot be performed in
the face of power. Exploring the ‘hidden transcripts’ in ethnographic and colonial literature we
can follow a line of resistance from 18th century drama (Schiller’s The Robbers) to Jean Genet’s
Les Nègres, which – as play within the play – mimicks the front stage of domination and vio-
lence. Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ demonstrates the ape’s mimetic faculty as a means of
survival. Jean Rouch’s film Les Maîtres Fous gives evidence of resistance by incorporating the
colonial regime into the tribal ritual. The replay of the ceremony shows its real character. Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ exemplify the perver-
sion of power indicating the failure of the colonial enterprise

The term ‘backstage discourse’ is taken from a fabulous book by James C.

Scott, an expert in South East Asian Studies at Yale. Its title, Domination and
the Arts of Resistance, refers to encounters of and confrontations between the
powerless and the powerful, the colonizers and the colonized. The process of
domination generates hegemonic public discourses (of morals, conduct, val-
ues and language) as well as a backstage discourse that consists of what can-
not be said in the face of power. Backstage discourse is to be found in gossip,
folktales, jokes, songs and all kinds of performances in which the vengeful
tone of mocking and mimicry display resistance to official onstage practices
and rituals of denigration, insults and assaults of the body. Making use of ca-
mouflage, disguised speech, and hence exploring the immanent possibilities
of acting against domination, these ‘hidden transcripts’ – another term for the
same issue – are part of a power play within the accepted framework of dia-
logue, participation and understanding. In its anonymity and ambiguity, back-
stage discourse harbors a permanent threat to those in power, who fear vio-
lence.1 Thus it is inherent in the colonial mode of production of reality. Mi-
mesis occurs, as Michael Taussig argues, ‘by a colonial mirroring of other-

1
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1990), p. 2.
28 Klaus R. Scherpe

ness that reflects back onto the colonist the barbarity of their own social
action.2
Like social scientist James Scott, cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig,
Clifford Geertz in his ‘thick description’3 of the Balinese cockfight, or new
historicist Stephen Greenblatt in his Marvelous Possessions,4 I take the liber-
ty to present some striking literary examples of theatrical quality within the
context of ethnography: a re-reading of well-known texts by Franz Kafka, an
ethnographer in heart and mind; a story by George Orwell, the colonial offi-
cer in 1920s’ Burma; Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness of course; some
cinematographic material and, at the end of this essay, Jean Genet’s clown-
ery, Les Nègres. Backstage discourse, I suggest, functions as a play within
the play, taking into account the ‘mimetic faculty’ that Walter Benjamin has
explored in his short essays on language,5 drawing attention to the sensuous
and tactile qualities of communication lost in the script.
I should like to begin by going back to the première of Friedrich Schil-
ler’s drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) at the Mannheim National Theatre on
January 13, 1782. Surrounded by his wild bunch of comrades, Karl Moor, the
prodigal son and heir to the principality, receives the forged and fatal letter,
written by his vicious brother Franz, which informs him of his father’s deci-
sion to dispossess him of home and country, and to set him free to go wher-
ever his ‘despicable deeds’ may take him, without hope of forgiveness. While
Karl is reading the letter on the front stage, Moritz Spiegelberg, who embod-
ies the utmost of criminal energies among the robbers, performs a pantomime
backstage that silently demonstrates Karl’s transgression from good to evil.
The dialogue between the three robbers that accompanies and comments on
Spiegelberg’s strange performance backstage runs as follows:

What’s Spiegelberg up to?

The man’s gone mad. He’s gone St. Vitus’s dance.
His mind must have gone. Or he’s writing poetry.
Spiegelberg! Hey, Spiegelberg! The brute can’t hear me!

2
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and
Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 134.
3
Clifford Geertz, Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture, in The In-
terpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays, ed. by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books,
1973), pp. 3-30.
4
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
5
Walter Benjamin, Über das mimetische Vermögen, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II.3, ed.
by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1877), pp. 210-214.
 ‘Backstage Discourse’ 29

(Shaking him) Are you dreaming, man? Or what?

Spiegelberg (Who has meanwhile been miming a mountebank’s pitch in the corner of the
room [die Pantomime eines Projektemachers]
jumps up wildly) La bourse ou la vie!6

Evil Spiegelberg mimes good-natured Karl’s criminal imagination. Spiegel-

berg is obsessed with crime and insanity, dancing the epileptic Vitus’s dance
backstage; he is the brute, the beast; and he is in Schiller’s play (often ne-
glected by scholars of German literature, with the exception of Hans Mayer 7)
the Jew. Moritz Spiegelberg is the Jew in the play, who desires to bring the
kingdom of Judea back by force as he bursts into his dance. ‘I took you for
your better,’ Hamlet says ironically to Polonius. ‘I take you for your worst’ is
the sardonic message in Spiegelberg’s pantomime. The name Spiegelberg
means ‘mirror mountain’, rocher de miroir. He re-plays, or rather pre-plays,
the robber’s violent action in the Bohemian Forest. But in this backstage mir-
roring of a front-stage morality play – Karl’s soul will be saved at the end –
there is, against expectation, no referential evidence in the doubling of the
theatrical reality, nothing of the fascination with transgression, liminality,
hybridity, no real drama between fact and fiction to entertain and educate the
audience. The pantomime does not illustrate the dramatic action; it does not
substitute and illuminate the dialogue as in Hamlet’s staging of the play
within the play. Why? Because there is nothing to negotiate. And that means
that the only evidence on the backstage is casual and not causal: violence.
Spiegelberg demonstrates pure violence.
The villain’s mimetic acting shows the audience how terrifying resem-
blance can be. Why? Because Spiegelberg’s spectacle, that is, the extremist
other (as murderer, beast, maniac, and Jew) demonstrates that pure violence
has no metaphor, no symbol, and no meaning. Real violence is nothing but
the desire to kill, Jean Genet said in an interview with Hubert Fichte about
the murder of Pasolini on the beach of Ostia: ‘People say it’s for a dollar or a
coat. In reality it’s for the violence itself.’ 8 No picturing, nothing but this
mute mimicry. Schiller’s ‘hidden transcript’ on the backstage operates me-
tonymically: Spiegelberg insults and murders by numbers, making his vic-
tims into objects, thus making himself the outcast, the thief, the rapist, the

6
Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. by Robert David MacDonald (London: Oberon
Books, 1995), p. 33.
7
Hans Mayer, ‘Der Weise Nathan und der Räuber Spiegelberg. Antinomien der jüdischen
Emanzipation in Deutschland’, in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 17 (1973),
253-272.
8
‘Jean Genet talks to Hubert Fichte’, trans. from the French by Patrick McCarthy, in The New
Review Vol. 4 (1977), 9-21 (p. 17).
30 Klaus R. Scherpe

murderer, the opposite of Karl Moor on the dark side of reason. In his Vitus’s
dance Spiegelberg is outraged, beyond himself. Basically violence has no
face, as Jean-Luc Nancy states: ‘Violence represents itself as Gestalt without
Gestalt; it is monstration and performance of what remains without Gestalt.’9
In his pantomime of a criminal, Spiegelberg, the monster, is constructed as
pure monstration. The backstage discourse of the fierce and ultimate ‘other’
is – to return to my main point – the realm of non-representation (one that is
not/cannot be represented). Nonetheless, when we wish to see or visualize
horror, the uncanny, catastrophe, our vision of the end of the world (the apoc-
alypse) in writing and reading, we seek relief from violence. How? By engag-
ing l’écriture, the distancing code of the alphabet against the original mimetic
process of the backstage, which according to Benjamin was originally consti-
tuted as a magical correspondence. Friedrich Schille’s The Robbers, staged in
Mannheim in 1782, is a morality play that expects the audience to take an in-
terest not in violence, of course, but in the functioning, the instrumentality,
the moral katharsis of violence. But whose violence? Whose morality is it, or
will it be?
When we take backstage discourse not only as an educating construction
of good and evil, but as a scene of hidden violence within the construction of
domination and resistance – the terrifying scene of difference and resem-
blance – we are then confronted, sans phrase, with the core of the problem:
in ethnographic and colonial efforts of writing and re-writing ‘the other’. The
staging of the other (the monster, beast, brute, the Hun, the Black, and the
Jew) takes place in the presence of the other’s other: the white man, the white
audience, which Jean Genet demanded for his black play.10
In Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ we find the inversion of this scene.
Rotpeter, the ape imported from the dark continent (the brute, the monster,
the slave, the Jew), has made his way to the front stage of the academy; con-
vincingly he gives evidence of his learning to become a human being by imi-
tating human beings, ‘almost but not quite’, as Homi Bhabha would say.11
Mimicry was Rotpeter’s only chance to survive (his Ausweg, the only way
out, the last exit). One can read this as alluding to the forceful assimilation of
the ‘Jew of Prague’, that is, of Kafka’s own play within the play. The ape’s
progress is, by means of this mimetic production, meant to wipe out his exist-

9
“Die Gewalt stellt sich als Gestalt ohne Gestalt aus, sie ist Zur-Schau-Stellung (“mon-
stration“) und Darbietung dessen, was ohne Gestalt bleibt.’ Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Bild und
Gewalt’, in Lettre International 49 (2000), 86-99 (p. 89).
10
Gene A. Plunka, ‘Victor Turner and Jean Genet – Rites of Passages in Les Nègres’, in Thea-
tre Annual 46 (1993), 65-88 (p. 69).
11
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 91.
 ‘Backstage Discourse’ 31

ence as an ape, his difference, extinguishing his original barbarity (Caliban

on the island before the arrival of Prospero). But not quite! What we see in
Kafka’s text, again, is the experience of terrifying resemblance. The brutal
act of subjection, well accomplished in the eyes of the observers, officers and
officials, hides the wound, the red scar on the ape’s bottom, the reason why
the name Rotpeter was inflicted on him. Not always! When excited and en-
thusiastic about his mimetic achievements toward becoming a human being,
Rotpeter cannot always avoid dropping his pants in public and demonstrating
(monstrare) where he was shot, exposing the spot, the signifier of violence
and pain. And, back home, behind the stage, he has his beloved, his female
ape, dull and blind, to relax and feel pleasure, as Kafka writes. Kafka’s art of
resistance, as we know, only exists as a ‘hidden transcript’ in the self-destruc-
tive act of assimilation and submission.
And this, of course, takes us directly to the colonial enterprise, on stage,
to the West Coast of Africa, for instance, or to the San Blas Islands off the
shore of Panama. How is the white man’s presence being performed? How
can the powerless, the subaltern, speak behind or in the face of colonial pow-
er and violence? How is resistance performed in the white man’s presence,
backstage?
‘In some way or another one can protect oneself from the spirits by
portraying them.’ Michael Taussig makes this statement in his book Mimesis
and Alterity, referring to the ritual practices of the Cuna Indians who inhabit-
ed the San Blas Islands.12 In 1927, the Swedish baron Erland Nordenskjold
made his observations of the Cuna shamans who use carved wooden figur-
ines in a curing ritual. These figurines are emblems of power. Everything vi-
sible (people, animals, plants, stones) has its invisible counterparts. The Cuna
Indians believe in the magical power of replication. In the wooden figurines
the evil spirits can be convinced and pacified by portraying them. And when
copied, the power of the original is transferred to the copy. In other words:
The representation takes its power from the represented. But the really stun-
ning discovery of the white traveler was to observe that the Cuna in one
particular village carved fifty larger than life-sized figurines, all of which re-
presented (through their clothes and military outfits) European types of main-
ly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them a colossal, seven-
foot figure of General Douglas MacArthur. Obviously, the mimetic transfer,
this curious affair of embodiment, the appearance of the colonial other in
local shamanism, is a re-play in the strict sense, a strategic maneuver to resist

12
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, Lon-
don: Routledge, 1993), p. 10.
32 Klaus R. Scherpe

power in the face of power. Consequently, thanks to the Cuna’s mimetic

faculty of visualization, backstage discourse could be performed on stage. In
this case, however, the mimetic process does not reveal any act of violence: it
is not ‘emergent’, exploding in an act of disobedience and disorder. On the
contrary, the Cuna’s technologies of mimesis make use of all tactile qualities
(carving and painting) to establish a logical and strategic matrix of mimesis.
By comparison, mimetic performances of violence as such, emergent vio-
lence, could be observed in another context of colonial affairs, in Western
Africa, Niger, nowadays Ghana. Cultural anthropologists have researched the
Hauka movement in the 1920s und 1930s, when the natives were resisting
French colonial rule. Jean Rouch’s famous ethnographic film Les Maîtres
Fous gives evidence of the Hauka’s spiritual practice. In their ritual dance it
could happen that the Hauka became possessed by the spirits of their colonial
administrators. This mimetic production signified to the Europeans, of
course, the native’s downright savagery and awesome otherness. Mocking
the white man was a daily practice among the Hauka, but making the colonial
authorities the object of ritual violence called the French colonial regime to
the scene. Much later, in 1954, Rouch’s film showed that such actions were
banned in France. The insult to the French, as Rouch explains, ‘was because
the film, e.g., shows an egg being broken over the head of an image repre-
senting the Governor-General, an imitation of the real Governor General’s
plumes cascading over the ceremonial helmet.’ 13 The mimetic machinery, in-
tensified through film’s ability to explore the optical unconscious, is greased
with dirt, blood and excrement to soil the symbols of power and oppression.
The Hauka’s re-play of colonial domination, first performed on the backstage
of the possession rituals in local villages, went beyond earlier limits of repre-
sentation. Tribal violence as mimesis of colonial domination developed a
variety of mimetic techniques for dishonoring and delegitimizing the white
man’s mental and physical power. Incidentally, one of the last targets of
those militant Hauka spirits in Ghana was a French general who later became
a commander in the Indochina war that preceded the U.S. war in Vietnam.
How terrifying resemblance can be! Quite different from what Victor
Turner aimed for in his well-known book From Ritual to Theatre, Western
theatre that is, which takes mimesis as a universal potential for understanding
and humanizing the other.14 The mimetic matrix of violence tells a different
story of colonial power and resistance. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

13
Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 242.
14
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Per-
forming Arts Journal Publications, 1982).
 ‘Backstage Discourse’ 33

stages colonialism as a narration within narration: Marlow, the narrator, re-

tired on the banks of the river Thames, tells the adventures of Major Kurtz,
who crossed the borders of civilization to become the chieftain of native bar-
barians. Marlow’s mission as Kurtz’ potential double (the Doppelgänger) is
to reverse Kurtz’ excess of violence in the dark hinterland of domination by
bringing home (to the colonial office) Kurtz’ eccentric writings on colonial
matters and his own re-writing of Kurtz’ experience of ‘horror’. Marlow’s re-
telling of the story is, one could say, a painful hermeneutic endeavour to
represent to the Western reader what cannot be represented: the horror, the
violence of Kurtz’ experience of the heart of darkness. In this reading, the
‘white lie’ is not only the softened version of Kurtz’ death which Marlow
gives to his fiancé in the British countryside; Marlow finds himself confront-
ed with the empire’s ‘white lies’ of colonizing “’he others’ in the name of
Christian brotherhood, of human rights and other benefits of the Western
world. ‘He [Major Kurtz] would have been a splendid leader of an extreme
party,’ Marlow quotes one of the visitors. ‘What party?’ he is asked, and the
fatal answer is: ‘Any party.’ 15 This is the moment when Marlowe’s narrative
of Kurtz’ adventures comes to the point, the point of no return as far as the
hermeneutic effort of re-writing of colonialism is concerned. On the back-
stage of the jungle outback there is nothing but a diffuse execution of vio-
lence; divine power, as Walter Benjamin says in his essay ‘Critique of Vio-
lence’,16 ‘ecstasy of heroism’, as Max Weber termed it,17 violence without
Gestalt, shape and contour as Nancy formulates. Major Kurtz is Marlow’s
Spiegelberg. And a Spiegelberg (the perversion of a human being, the brute,
the beast, the founder of a barbarian kingdom of his own will) can by no
means be brought back to the front stage of civilisation. Major Kurtz’ imper-
ative (‘exterminate the brutes’), as Malinowski’s secret diary of his field
studies also shows, cannot be reported back to the academy.
If Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is ultimately a book about the ‘final solu-
tion’ and a narrative of rescue in terms of the ‘white lie’, then George Or-
well’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a short story to end the ‘white lies’ of colo-
nialism. Orwell’s report about his colonial experience as a sub-inspector of
police in 1920s colonial Burma gains insight into the permanent threat of
backstage discourse, its hidden transcript of power that, on the front stage,

15
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 115.
16
Walter Benjamin ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II.1, ed. by Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1877), pp.
179-202.
17
Max Weber ‘Charismatische Herrschaft’, in: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J.C.B.
Mohr, 1985), p. 140.
34 Klaus R. Scherpe

deprives the dominant discourse of its meaning and legitimacy. Worse, back-
stage discourse even makes dominant discourse ridiculous in the eyes of the
so-called natives. In this first person narrative Orwell has been summoned to
deal with an elephant that has broken its tether and now ravages the bazaar
and kills a man. Later, the elephant peacefully grazes in the paddy fields; his
heat has passed. For the villagers and the officers the logical assumption
would have been to return to work. But there is another logic Orwell has to
perform on the front stage of colonial rule. The public scene demands the ex-
ercise of power to preserve power. Two thousand colonial subjects follow the
scene and watch the police officer. Orwell writes:

And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expect-
ed it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their thousand wills pressing me forward, irre-
sistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first
grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s domination in the East. Here was I,
the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the
leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the
will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns
tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy
[…]. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘na-
tives’, and so in every crisis he has to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask
and his face grows to fit it.18

Orwell’s use of theatrical metaphors is pervasive, as James Scott observes.19

He speaks of himself as ‘a leading actor of the piece’, of hollow dummies,
puppets, masks, appearances, and an audience that would ridicule him if he
did not follow the established script of colonial power. Obviously, there is a
disparity between the public discourse of domination, the open exercise of
power, and the backstage discourse safely expressed only offstage. If subor-
dination requires a credible performance of obedience and humility, so domi-
nation requires an authoritarian performance of haughtiness and mastery.
Any disorientation of this hierarchy as experienced and reflected by Orwell is
threatening. As a result of the failure of this power play – the breakdown of
the hegemonic discourse of the colonial power under the observing eyes of
the powerless – Orwell feels the ‘hollow posing’ of his own performance: the
sudden recognition that his acting is nothing but the shallow imitation of an
action, which had to be carried out. The personal consequence for Orwell

18
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1950), pp. 3-12, (p. 8).
19
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990), p. 10-11.
 ‘Backstage Discourse’ 35

after this experience was quitting the colonial service. If Major Kurtz mirrors
Spiegelberg, who mimics pure violence on the backstage, in the woods, in the
jungle, then Orwell, the colonial officer, makes his last appearance as Karl
Moor did on the front stage, staging shame and honesty, the very last hero of
a morality play, Western style.
However, as Jean Genet observed when commenting on the theatrical
production of Les Nègres, colonization does not end when the colonizer has
gone. In an all-black performance, Genet writes, one white man at least must
be in the audience, the spotlight focused on this symbolic white; or white
masks have to be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theatre;
and if the blacks refuse the masks, ‘then let a dummy [of a white man] be
used.’ 20 Even better: a dummy! The black audience does not share George
Orwell’s sophistication of guilt and the shame of being ridiculed by ‘the
other’. Les Nègres is a play without morals, absolutely indifferent to the
‘white man’s burden’ and also deeply mistrustful of the better morals of the
subordinates. Genet’s support of the Black Panther movement did not alter
this view. The play within the play in Les Nègres is a ‘clown show’, impro-
vised not only to execute the inversion of white to black domination, but even
more to demonstrate that the code of power and violence is circulating, end-
lessly shifting without a reliable notion of one’s own identity and that of the
other. For this reason, the blacks imitate their own imitation of the whites.
‘Who can say what exactly is “black”?’ Genet asks. At this point the ontolog-
ical order of the play within the play – what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fiction’? –
becomes ineffective. There are no limits of representation in this play and,
therefore, no substantial meanings of identity, hybridity, transgression, etc.
The coffin with the body of the murdered white woman onstage and – back-
stage and offstage – the trial and execution of a renegade Negro, are happen-
ings that are accumulated and associated data of violence, nothing more: kill-
ing by numbers in a never-ending play. ‘What party’, extreme and powerful?
Major Kurtz’ ghost would have answered: ‘Any party’. Here it is again: The
power play within the play, without Gestalt, no condition, no reference, the
definition and vision of violence.
And the theatre as an institution? If the play can no longer be a moral play
in Friedrich Schiller’s sense, maybe the theatre can be a moral institution;
differently, to be sure, in Genet’s practice. ‘There is only one place in the
world,’ Genet claims in his interview with Hubert Fichte, ‘where theatricality
does not hide power and that is the theatre.’ 21 In political and social affairs

20
Gene A. Plunka, p. 69.
21
Jean Gene talks to Hubert Fichte, p. 14.
36 Klaus R. Scherpe

power is hidden by theatricality, violence is justified, legalized, etc. Not so in

Genet’s theatre. In staging violence the theatre does not hide violence; in its
ritual action it has the ability to incorporate violence. Pure violence in abso-
lute presence: this would be the sensation of Genet’s theatre of excess. And
the audience? They, of course, are fictional in their need and desire for iden-
tity, with the illusion of gaining insight and learning from the play. ‘Why
does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and
Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet?’ Jorge Luis Borges writes: ‘These inver-
sions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators,
then we, their readers and spectators, can be fictions.’ 22 Western readers and
spectators, one must add! The real horror, the utmost threat to one’s own fic-
tional identity is, as we know, the loss of the opposite, the black, the brute,
the Jew, ‘the other’ to define oneself against. Most terrifying: the absence of
evil Moritz. The absence of Spiegelberg as a mirror of good-natured Karl
Moor would signify the loss of certainty and security. But identity needs a
mirror, at least a shadow. We cannot do without our Caliban.
And here I come to the end of the chapter, with Kafka again. Franz Kafka
in Prague with his friend Max Brod, after a visit to a cinema maybe where a
Western movie was shown – Kafka, in this very short story about an Indian,
reports the terrifying experience of the failure of mimetic production, in this
case the mimetic desire to be an Indian:

Oh to be a red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one’s galloping mount, leaning into the
wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the
spurs, for there were no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there were no reins, and could
barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that horse’s neck and
horse’s head were gone.23

22
Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-52, trans. by Ruth Sims (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1964), p. 46. See also Pyllis Gofrain, ‘Play and the Problem of Knowing in
Hamlet: An Excursion into Interpretative Anthropology’, in The Anthropology of Experi-
ence, ed. by Victor Turner and Edward Bruner (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1986), p. 217.
23
‘Longing to be a Red Indian’, in Franz Kafka. The Transformation and other stories, ed. and
trans. by Malcolm Pasley, (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 31.
 37

David Roberts

The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation

The limits of representation in the theatre can be made manifest only through the staging of the
representation of representation. The two basic types of metadrama, the inset play, the self-
implicating play in the play, and framed play, the self-explicating World Theatre, are the pro-
ducts respectively of the Renaissance (Shakespeare) and of the Counter-Reformation (Calderón).
The second part of the article analyses the critical intention of Dürrenmatt’s combination of these
two forms of metadrama in The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame).

1.
In Derrida’s essay on Artaud 1 the theatre of cruelty is characterized as the
total antithesis to Western theatre. Artaud’s impossible idea of a theatre with-
out representation serves to bring into focus the limits of representation, that
is to say, the closure of representation which defines the invariant structure of
Western theatre across its whole history and all its dramaturgic revolutions.
This invariant structure, integral to Western culture, whether it be in the
field of religion, philosophy or politics, is metaphysical or theological in
kind. By theological Derrida means the dominance of the word, the primacy
of a founding logos, which endows the scene with the following elements: an
author-creator, absent, distant, armed with a text, who supervises and controls
the meaning of the representation. The originating logos is represented by
directors and actors, who represent characters, who represent directly or indi-
rectly the ideas and intentions of the author-creator. In other words, actors
enact the will of an invisible master before an audience of spectators, con-
sumers, voyeurs.
The theatre of cruelty, more exactly, the idea of a theatre without repre-
sentation, signifies the impossible attempt to banish God from the scene by
destroying this structure of reduplication and repetition. Artaud’s paradoxical
dream of an originary representation of pure self-identical presence cannot
escape the closed circle of representation. All Artaud can do is lay bare what
this circle contains: ‘Closure is the circular limit within which the repetition
of difference repeats itself indefinitely. That is to say, the space of play (jeu).

1
Jacques Derrida, ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation’, in L’écriture et
la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 341-368.
38 David Roberts

This movement is the movement of the world as play.’ 2 Every play, we may
say, opens a space of play and represents the world as play. From the per-
spective of the limit, the space of play refers to the form of the play and the
world as play refers to the content (meaning) of the play. Since every form
has a content and every content a form, neither the space of play nor the
world as play is perceived as such. The limit of representation remains unre-
presented, just as the scene’s secret relationship to its other – the originary
force of a theatre without representation – remains occluded. The hidden
‘presence’ of this other can manifest itself only negatively as a consciousness
of the limit of representation. For this to happen, however, representation
must be represented: that is to say, presented, re-presented, represented. In-
herent in this second order reduplication are two possibilities: on the one
hand reduplication can produce a self-critique of representation; on the other
hand, it can produce a self-affirmation of representation.
These two possibilities are familiar as the two basic types of metadrama:
the inset drama, the play within a play, and the framed drama, the theatrum
mundi or World Theatre. The play within the play first appears in the Renais-
sance, its classic embodiment is Hamlet. World Theatre as generic form
comes to full flowering in the Baroque. Calderón’s The Great Theatre of the
World is its classic embodiment. The theological dimensions of both plays
are evident. Calderón’s affirmation of the world as play requires a personal
appearance by the author of authors, whereas Shakespeare’s exploration of
the space of play is shot through with theological doubts. But in each case the
meaning of representation, for both actors and audience, is at stake, the
meaning, that is, of playing the game.
The self-referential character of both types (e.g. the self-critique and self-
affirmation of representation) indicates that they both operate within the cir-
cular closure of representation. Each reconfirms through reduplication this
closure at the same time as each uses reduplication to ‘master’ closure by
raising representation to a higher power. In structural terms the two types
constitute complementary (but asymmetrical) opposites: the play within the
play is the introversion of the framing ‘play of the play’ in World Theatre,
just as the latter operates through the extroversion of the inset play. To put it
differently: the one uses reduplication to internalise the origin and causality
of the scene, the other to externalise origin and causality. In each case redu-
plication has the purpose of making the invisible closure of representation
visible in relation either to the form or the content (meaning) of representa-
tion. As indicated, the representation of representation raises the theological

2
Derrida, p. 367.
 The Closure of Representation 39

stakes – in more obvious fashion in the case of World Theatre, where instead
of chasing God from the stage he is made the visible source of all action, the
God in the World Machine; in less obvious fashion in the case of the play
within the play, where God has withdrawn to become the ghost in the ma-
chine. Theologically and historically the two types point in opposite direc-
tions: the play within the play anticipates through introversion the modern
recession of origin, that is, the paradox of self-implication; World Theatre
looks backwards to reaffirm through extroversion the medieval closure of
meaning whose outcome is the allegory of self-explication.
The distinguishing feature of the play within the play is that it makes the
space of play visible by redoubling it in order to stage the form of representa-
tion. I am using the term ‘form’ here in the sense that Spencer Brown uses it
in his Laws of Form.3 Spencer Brown defines form as the unity of difference,
such that every form possesses two sides: the marked, visible and the un-
marked, invisible. The form of representation involves a visible scene and an
invisible audience but also the in/visible distinction between actor and role.
To make this closure of representation visible, it is necessary to repeat the
form – in Spencer Brown’s terminology, to re-enter the form in the form (the
concisest definition of mise en abyme.4 This is of course what the play within
the play, the representation of the form of representation, does. Its mise en
abyme appears to bracket the theological question of the author-creator. In
Hamlet an agnostic or atheistic standpoint is adopted, whose consequence is
the paradoxicalization of representation. Although Hamlet expounds an Aris-
totelian aesthetic of imitation (e.g. holding a mirror up to nature), he is com-
pelled to register that in a world of mirrors everyone is an actor, that one can
smile and yet be a damned villain, and that madness is the safest refuge of
sanity. In Hamlet we observe the stage becoming the world through staging
itself. The play announces what we could call the vanishing perspective of
modernity – the infinite recession of meaning, set in motion by re-entry, that
is, by the self-implication of form, which folds the play in on itself. The rep-
resentation of representation responds to the break in symmetry, which is the
effect/consequence of the closure of representation. The play in the play is
thus both less and more than the play. It is less, in that the part is less than the
whole; it is more, in that the part is more than the whole. Hence the paradox,
that the part contained in the whole contains and frames the whole at the
same time.

3
G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, 2nd edn (New York: Julian, 1977). See also David Ro-
berts, ‘Die Paradoxie der Form in der Literatur’, in Probleme der Form, ed. by Dirk Baecker
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 22-44.
4
See Lucien Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Oxford: Polity, 1989), p. 37.
40 David Roberts

World Theatre by contrast proposes the self-explication of its content by

unfolding the allegory of representation. If the play within the play absorbs
the world into the space of play, World Theatre absorbs the stage into the
world as play. In the first case the macrocosm becomes visible through the
microcosm (the inset play), in accordance with the paradoxical logic inherent
in the figure of re-entry (that the part is greater than the whole, because in
order to see itself the whole must divide itself into a seeing and a seen part).
The opposite applies with World Theatre: here the macrocosm, the world as
play, gives meaning to the microcosm, the stage play. This is only possible if
the spectators can be raised to the awareness of their participation in the
‘great theatre of the world,’ that is, if the spectators can grasp the meaning of
the rules of the game revealed through the authorization of representation.
The visible presence of God on stage has the function of ‘representing’ the
restoration of the symmetry broken by re-entry. The world of re-entry is a
world without God (a world of infinite recession). It makes us all, like Ham-
let, self-observing observers who have a problem with acting (in both senses
of the word). This vanishing perspective is replaced in World Theatre by God
as the vanishing point of all perspectives, through which the unity of all dif-
ferences can be reaffirmed. We are transformed from self-observing observ-
ers into authorized participants, called to represent in a worthy fashion the
role allotted to us in the world theatre. The authorization, the deparadoxical-
ization of representation cancels its negativities and culminates in the mys-
tery of ‘real presence.’ Calderón’s autos sacramentales, written for perfor-
mance on the feast of Corpus Christi, all conclude with the allegory of allego-
ries, the miracle of the Eucharist. The play within the play and the World
Theatre are thus the structurally complementary but asymmetrical representa-
tions of the closure of representation which emerge in the context of Renais-
sance/Reformation and Counterreformation.

2.
In the second part of this chapter I want to examine an inversion of the model
of World Theatre, which turns its defining idea of judgment against it: the
form this takes involves the presentation of World Theatre as the inset play of
a morality play that operates through the staged contrast between appearance
and reality, in which both actors and stage audience are being judged. The
play in question is Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (Der Besuch der alten
Dame, 1955), which I want to set in relation to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
reworking of Calderón’s Great Theatre of the World for the Salzburg Festival
after the First World War.
 The Closure of Representation 41

The Salzburg Festival, inaugurated in 1919, was Hofmannsthal’s response

to the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The heartland
of Central Europe, Austria and Vienna, had suddenly been relegated to the
periphery of the German ‘nation,’ divided since the Reformation between the
Protestant North and the Catholic South. The Festival aimed at more, how-
ever, than a continuation of the Baroque legacy of the Habsburgs. Hofmanns-
thal intended a cultural politics, whose stake was the divided soul of the
German nation, a cultural politics in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation,
that is to say, directed against the Protestant definition of the German nation.
Hofmannsthal’s Salzburg signifies in this sense the counterpart to Wagner’s
Bayreuth. Each festival was dedicated to the cultural-political goal of the
spiritual regeneration of the German nation through art. Each moreover iden-
tifies the split between Protestant drama and Catholic opera as the cultural
symptom of the divided German soul, which Wagner’s music drama and
Hofmannsthal’s ‘German national programme’ for the Festival were to heal.
As his own long productive collaboration with Richard Strauss indicates,
Hofmannsthal saw himself as the inheritor of a great theatrical tradition,
which did not separate opera and drama.5 Just as great operas – Gluck,
Mozart, Beethoven – are above all dramatic works, so great dramas –
Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s fantasy plays, Schiller’s romantic dramas –
presuppose music. At the centre of this great tradition stand Mozart’s operas
and Goethe’s Faust; they form what Hofmannsthal calls ‘the German nation-
al programmme of 1800,’ which included as well as the ancients the modern
– English, Spanish and French – drama. On what grounds, however, can
Hofmannsthal reclaim Goethe and Schiller and Weimar classicism from the
Protestant North and its concepts of Bildung and Kultur for his programme?
On what grounds can Salzburg displace Weimar and Bayreuth as the site that
truly corresponds to the nation, even more claims to be ‘the heart of the heart
of Europe’?6
Hofmannsthal’s ‘national’ programme of 1800 looks back to a prerevolu-
tionary Europe and to the universalism of the Catholic Church. It turns its
back on the political and cultural nationalisms of the nineteenth century,
which led Europe into the catastrophe of 1914 and tore the supranational
Austro-Hungarian Empire apart. Just as the ‘people’ must reconcile class di-
visions, so the lost tradition of popular theatre must reconcile the modern
splitting of the public into the elite and the masses. Thus against Bayreuth,

5
‘Deutsche Festspiele zu Salzburg (1919)’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke.
Prosa III (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1952), pp. 441-443.
6
‘Die Salzburger Festspiele’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Prosa IV
(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1955), pp. 88-94 (p. 92).
42 David Roberts

dedicated to one great artist and a German nation in the image of Weimar,
Hofmannsthal sets the whole classical heritage of the nation, which extends
from the Middle Ages up to Mozart and Goethe in an unbroken theatrical
tradition, whose organic development is rooted in the popular culture of the
South, that is, the Austrian-Bavarian lands. Hofmannsthal is at pains to un-
derline what he calls the southern German theatrical forms present in Goe-
the’s world theatre: Faust incorporates mystery and morality play, puppet
theatre, courtly opera with chorus and stage machinery. The centre of Aus-
tria/Bavaria is Salzburg, not Vienna. The modern cosmopolitan metropolis
cannot play this reintegrating national role. Salzburg thus stands for the ro-
mantic redefinition of society as community, as ‘aesthetic totality.’ 7
To create this totality through the moral and magic powers of a re-
totalized theatre, the collaboration of Max Reinhardt was essential. In 1917
Reinhardt submitted a memorandum to the Austrian Ministry of Culture pro-
posing the building of a theatre in Hellbronn, dedicated to the original and
final form of the theatre, the festival play, as it had been realized by the
Greeks and in the medieval mysteries and Passion plays of the Church. Rein-
hardt had already achieved some of his greatest prewar successes through
arena spectacles for a mass audience. Perhaps the best known was his 1911
production of the pantomime, The Miracle by Karl Vollmüller with music by
Humperdinck, performed by 2000 actors before an audience of 30 000 at the
Olympic Hall in London, transformed for the occasion into the interior of a
Gothic cathedral. In the following years this production was performed in
Vienna, various German cities, New York and the Salzburg Festival in 1924.
In 1910 Reinhardt directed Oedipus Rex in Hofmannsthal’s adaptation at the
Circus Schumann in Berlin, and in 1911 Hofmannsthal’s version of the me-
dieval English morality Everyman at the same venue. If Oedipus figures as a
production of major importance in the history of twentieth century theatre,
Everyman failed to impress Berlin critics. Before a more congenial audience
in Salzburg in 1920, however, staged in front of the cathedral, it made a pro-
found impact and remained central to the Festival up to 1937, forming with
Don Giovanni and Faust a trinity of Catholic morality plays.
The success of Everyman fulfilled Hofmannsthal’s idea of the festival
play and confirmed the ideological goal of the Salzburg Festival: the trans-
formation of the theatre public into the ‘people.’ As Hofmannsthal put it, the
public is capricious and moody whereas the people is old and wise and recog-
nizes the food that it needs. To this end the modern playwright must have
recourse to the great and simple dramatic forms that were truly the products

7
See ‘Die Salzburger Festspiele’, pp. 88-89.
 The Closure of Representation 43

of the people.8 In 1920 the difference between public and people was identi-
fied with the difference between Berlin or Vienna and Salzburg. In 1911, in
relation to the Berlin production of Everyman, Hofmannsthal had tried to per-
suade himself that concealed within the metropolitan masses the people still
exists, ready to respond to the revival of ‘this eternally great fairytale.’ Built
around the one great opposition between the profane and the sacred, earthly
life and salvation, Everyman, he declared, is still illuminated by a divine
light.9
The Salzburg reception of the medieval morality encouraged Hofmanns-
thal to rework Calderón’s most famous contribution to the genre of the auto
sacramental, The Great Theatre of the World. The dramatic metaphor of the
theatrum mundi, in which man plays the role allotted by God in the game of
life, provided the perfect model of and for a re-totalized theatre. Hofmanns-
thal’s Salzburg Great World Theatre sought to refunction this sacred form for
contemporary purposes by expanding the role of the beggar in revolt against
God’s world order into an allegorical demonstration of the overcoming of the
destructive forces of revolution by divine grace. Here the suggestive power of
Reinhardt’s staging in the University Church in Salzburg (by the Baroque
master Fischer von Erlach) came to the rescue of Hofmannsthal’s undramatic
allegory. Here too, as in Everyman, the figure of Death the drummer, leading
the players, King, Rich Man, Beauty, Wisdom, Peasant in a dance of death,
had the desired effect on the audience. Hofmannsthal speaks of this dance of
death as one of the strongest scenes of any of Reinhardt’s productions, hold-
ing the audience spellbound as death fetched each figure in turn in a panto-
mime in which the figures follow like puppets the beat of the drum.
Dürrenmatt’s The Visit is also set in the heart of Europe in the other Al-
pine republic, the other South German-Swiss region with its own tradition of
popular theatre going back to the Reformation and celebrated by Gottfried
Keller in his novel Der grüne Heinrich. Dürrenmatt’s Güllen is the counter-
part to Salzburg. On the one hand it presents itself as an old European Kul-
turstadt, proud of its medieval cathedral and its connections with Goethe and
Brahms. On the other hand, like Salzburg after the First World War, it is a
ruined provincial town, which European reconstruction after the Second
World War has passed by (international trains no longer stop in Güllen). The
Visit can be seen as a bitter satire on Hofmannsthal’s self-deluding ideology
of a theatre for the ‘people’ and on the revival of the Salzburg Festival after

8
‘Das Spiel vor der Menge (1911)’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Prosa
III, pp. 60-65 (p. 63).
9
P. 64.
44 David Roberts

1945 to promote the economic benefits of cultural tourism. On a second

level, however, The Visit needs to be grasped as a searching re-vision of the
idea of World Theatre, in which the theatre of the individual and internalized
guilt is pitted against the theatre of the collective and the externalization of
guilt.
The Visit explicitly invites comparison with the model of World Theatre.
In Act I we learn that the West Door of the Gothic cathedral (Münsterportal)
portrays the Last Judgment, in Act II posters at the railway station advertise
the Oberammergau Passion play. The author and director of the stage action,
the old lady, the billionaire Claire Zachanassian, who is present throughout
on stage, observing events from her hotel balcony, is repeatedly compared
with one of the Greek fates. With the exception of Claire’s former lover Ill,
the townspeople appear solely in their function as teacher, doctor, policeman,
etc., to be judged according to the duties of their calling. We are thus invited
to be spectators of a Last Judgment but also of a Passion play, in which the
last words of the sacrificial victim, ‘My God’, leave us to ask whether like
Jesus on the cross God has abandoned Ill in his agony. Ill is condemned to
death by the townspeople to redeem the sins of the community, that is to say,
to ransom the town from the guilt, which goes back to 1910 when Claire, dis-
honoured and betrayed by Ill, was forced to leave the town and to become a
prostitute. Claire has now returned 45 years later, after two world wars, to
demand justice from Güllen, which had sanctioned and approved Ill’s guilt.
Dürrenmatt’s morality play thus encompasses World Theatre and Passion
play: the judgment of Everyman and the judgment of Everyman’s proxy, the
sacrificed redeemer.
Dürrenmatt turns to the theatre of judgment after World War Two for the
same reason as Hofmannsthal after World War One. His play ratifies Hof-
mannsthal’s diagnosis of the disintegration of values, the self-destruction of
European civilization. He ratifies Hofmannsthal’s judgment at the same time
as he judges Hofmannsthal’s ideological programme. Salzburg serves Güllen
as the prototype of European reconstruction after a second world war, a re-
construction that represents for Dürrenmatt a final betrayal of European
values, in that it substitutes cultural restoration – the celebration of the ‘festi-
val as cultural event’ still in its infancy in the 1950s – for moral purification.
Dürrenmatt turns Hofmannsthal’s remedy against him by re-presenting the
old popular form of theatre as play in the play, performed for the assembled
media (film, TV, radio, and press) that follow Claire’s celebrity trail. Unlike
Hofmannsthal’s Everyman, the Güllen Passion play is not performed before
the cathedral but in the assembly room of the Golden Apostle, the hotel in
which Goethe once stayed. The men of the town have assembled here be-
 The Closure of Representation 45

neath a Theaterportal, as opposed to the Münsterportal with its Last Judg-

ment. The proscenium arch, designed to separate play and audience, is
decorated with Schiller’s famous adage, ‘Life is serious, art is serene,’ in
order to underline the evacuation of moral intention from the ‘representation’
of the old communal ritual before the cameras and microphones of a world
publicity.
However, as we know, the play in the play creates two audiences, the
audience on stage (the media and the townswomen) and the audience in the
auditorium. It is we, the real audience, who must observe and judge the dif-
ference between reality and appearance. And since the play within the play
frames the whole of which it is part, The Visit can both present and re-present
the idea of the festival play from Greek tragedy to Oberammergau – not for-
getting the town’s bankrupt ‘Wagner-Werke’! – for the judgment of the audi-
ence. The Visit realizes the idea of world theatre at the same time as it
demonstrates its reduction to advertisement for Güllen’s supposedly intact
civic tradition. Moreover, it does so through the enactment before the media
of the return to the archaic origins of the theatre in the ritual of communal
purification from pollution. It was Artaud who compared the living theatre,
the theatre of cruelty, to the plague. Güllen is infected by the plague. Its once
flourishing economy lies in ruins. Deliverance suddenly arrives from outside
in the person of Claire Zachanassian, Armenian Oil, who has secretly bought
and closed the town’s businesses. In return for economic rescue she demands
justice, that is, the death of Ill, the man who has brought the plague on the
town. Claire thus sets in motion the archaic ritual of the scapegoat, the exter-
nalization of collective guilt. That the destruction of Europe’s economy in
two world wars was the consequence of moral disintegration can thus be de-
nied or rather converted into its opposite: Güllen’s economic recovery is de-
picted before the media as the consequence of the still intact moral integrity
of the town, which renders unto Claire the justice that she demands. Ill is
murdered on stage once the cameras have gone. The blindness of Oedipus is
visited on the whole town. By assenting before the cameras to Claire’s gift to
her native town, Ill (the one individual in the town) assents to his murder as a
just retribution for his guilt, thereby demanding of the town that it recognize
the guilt that it is incurring. The Visit can thus re-present with total dramatic
irony the empty shell of the tradition of World Theatre, in which judgment by
a higher external causality is exemplified by the visible presence of the god-
author of the play and negated in Ill’s internalization of guilt.
This god is Mammon, comparable in the modern world to one of the an-
cient fates; Claire, like the tradition she represents, is herself an empty shell,
a creature of artificial limbs and plastic surgery, alive but not living. The
46 David Roberts

fateful archaic-modern reversal of Christian judgment takes the form of the

original constituting act of the polis – the traditional meeting of the towns-
people in solemn deliberation is enacted now for a world public in the ap-
propriately mediated form of a repetition of repetition, the very figure of re-
entry. The decision whereby Ill is collectively sentenced to death (masked as
the town’s decision to accept Claire’s gift) has to be repeated because of a
technical fault with the TV cameras. This simulation of a simulation, which
presents itself as moral self-approbation, is the public face of the collective
reversion to archaic barbarism. The theatre of the individual and the interna-
lization of guilt accuses the communal theatre and its myth of the authentic
community. The transformation of the townspeople into the one collective
body is aptly symbolized by the yellow shoes which they have all bought on
credit, the credit drawn on Ill’s life.
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet’s The Balcony and The
Blacks

The play within the play is discussed in relation to Genet’s The Balcony and The Blacks. By
staging the play within the play, Genet makes the central issue of his theatre not simply social or
political concerns but the question of the spectacle. Through the embedded play, actors take on
multiple roles, including that of spectator. Objectivity is brought into question and the spectator
is neither simply outside theatre nor within it. Indeed the borders of the representation are diffi-
cult to define. The notion of the work is examined and reference is also made to some of Derri-
da’s texts. The metaphor of the ‘house of illusions’ in The Balcony, for example, does not simply
relate to the bordello, but is clearly central to the idea of theatre, as is the title of the play. The
play within the play in Genet’s texts renders problematic the difference between reality and illu-
sion, outside and inside.

For theatre, as for culture, the question remains to name and to direct shadows: and the thea-
tre, which is not fixed in language and forms, destroys false shadows by this fact, but pre-
pares the way for another birth of shadows around which the true spectacle of life assembles.
(Artaud, The Theatre and its Double)

‘But is he still acting or is he speaking in his name?’

(Genet, The Blacks)

The Play within the Play

The play within the play is an integral part of Jean Genet’s theatre. Charac-
ters step into the roles of others, or represent themselves, in front of an au-
dience played by other characters. What is paramount about the play within
the play is that it brings into focus the question of theatre. It highlights above
all the acts of watching and acting, which are not as straightforward as they
may seem. The term suggests that one might designate an inner play which is
part of an outer play, yet it is precisely the boundary between the two which
Genet brings into question. When the frontier between the acting in the play
within the play and the so-called reality beyond this inner play is unclear,
then it is apparent that what belongs to the representation is not well-defined
and the very notion of the work needs to be rethought. In his writing on the
parergon in a different context, Derrida has problematized the conception of
48 Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

the work and its boundaries, for the parergon is neither internal nor external.1
Indeed, in analysing Genet’s use of the play within the play, I will discuss the
limit of representation and the problem of distinguishing between playing and
so-called reality. It can be shown that in The Balcony and The Blacks the in-
teractions of an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ play disrupt the conventional notion of
theatre as spectacle. Before examining these plays in detail, I will make some
brief, general remarks about Genet and theatre.
The play within the play has appeared in different forms in the works of
many playwrights including Shakespeare, Corneille and Molière, for exam-
ple, or Pirandello and Sartre.2 Drama has, of course, changed radically over
the ages, especially when considered in relation to the function which Aris-
totle ascribed to tragedy in the Poetics, namely catharsis or the purgation of
the emotions of pity and terror. However, it is the relationship between per-
former and spectator, the fundamental component of traditional theatre,
which has been rethought by playwrights such as Genet. Modern drama has
re-evaluated the aesthetics prevailing in Western thought, in which art is con-
ceived of as predominantly the imitation of nature.3 The play within the play
is an important means by which the interaction between art and life is re-
examined. The possibility for the spectator to be completely detached from
the play is brought into question. As Genet writes: ‘Without being able to say
precisely what theatre is, I know what I will not let it be: the description of
everyday gestures seen from the outside’.4 When the figure of the spectator is
placed on stage, the border between the spectator and the actor is displaced
and objectivity is undermined. As the distinction between the inner play and
the outer play is transgressed before the spectator’s eyes, so too is the limit
between the play and so-called reality and thus what constitutes playing
needs to be redefined.
Genet’s writings include poetry, novels, autobiography as well as plays,
namely The Maids (1947; revised 1954), Deathwatch (1949), The Balcony
(1956; revised 1960), The Blacks (1958) and The Screens (1961). Death,
ritual and crime return again and again in his work, frequently centred on out-

1
Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). See also Derrida, Glas
(Paris: Galilée, 1974), p. 277; ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, La Carte postale: De Socrate à
Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 439-524.
2
For an overview, Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of his
Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).
3
For a detailed analysis of various forms of mimesis, see in particular, Sylviane Agacinski,
Jacques Derrida and others, Mimesis des articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975);
Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4
‘Comment jouer Les Bonnes’, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), IV, 269. All
translations in this chapter are my own.
 Playing and not Playing in Genet 49

casts in society. 5 Prominent thinkers such as Sartre, Bataille, Lacan and

Derrida have turned their attention to aspects of Genet’s writing.6 Much has
been written on his plays from different points of view, in particular on the
issue of gender,7 although there has been little focus on the play within the
play. Martin Esslin has described The Balcony and The Blacks in particular as
belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd.8 On the other hand, Robert Brustein
believes that Genet is not an absurdist, and in a chapter of The Theatre of
Revolt prefers to associate him with Artaud,9 despite differences such as Ge-
net’s obvious reliance on written language.10 Genet, Brustein writes, ‘goes
well beyond the limited boundaries of the avant-garde to create an alchemi-
cal, primitive, messianic theatre, embodying many of Artaud’s precepts: an
Oriental theatre of metaphysical tendency, the modern equivalent of the mys-
tery religions’.11 Through rituals and ceremonies in Genet’s theatre, in which
characters lose themselves, the boundaries between the inner and outer plays
are repeatedly crossed. Genet strenuously rejected realism and his drama
makes use of many different visual and sound effects, as well as an often de-
liberately exaggerated use of masks, make-up, costumes, stilts and gestures.
Bernard Dort insists on the fundamental notion of the game, as well as dis-
guise in Genet’s theatre and states: ‘to be, it is necessary to appear’.12 Indeed,

5
Various political texts and interviews, including on Genet’s support for the Black Panther
Party, are to be found in Jean Genet, ‘L’ennemi déclaré’ Œuvres complètes, VI: ed. by Al-
bert Dichy (1991). See also Simon Critchley, ‘Writing the Revolution: The Politics of Truth
in Genet’s Prisoner of Love’, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 30-50.
6
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Saint Genet, comédien et martyr’, Œuvres complètes de Jean Genet, I
(1952); Georges Bataille, ‘Genet’, La Littérature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 197-
244; Jacques Lacan, ‘Sur Le Balcon de Genet’, Le Magazine littéraire, No. 313 (September
1993), 51-57; Derrida, Glas.
7
See, for example, Kristin Ross, ‘Schoolteachers, Maids, and Other Paranoid Histories’, in
Genet: In the Language of the Enemy (Yale French Studies, No. 91), ed. by Scott Durham
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 7-27; James Creech, ‘Outing Jean Genet’, in
Genet: In the Language of the Enemy, pp. 117-40.
8
The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. updated edn (New York: Overlook Press, 1973), pp. 166-97.
9
‘Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet’, The Theatre of Revolt (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 361-
411. See also Carol Rosen, ‘The Structure of Illusion in Genet’s The Balcony’, Modern
Drama, 35 (December 1992), 513-19.
10
Discussing a new role of language in theatre, Antonin Artaud writes about ‘Incantation’, Le
Théâtre et son double (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), p. 67. Theatre is a performance
which cannot simply depend upon dialogue, p. 66; see also p. 53.
11
Theatre of Revolt, p. 377.
12
‘Le théâtre: une féerie sans réplique’, Le Magazine littéraire, 313 (September 1993), 46.
50 Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

in his use of the play within the play, Genet exposes the limits of a dangerous
game entangling art and life, one which affords no safe haven.13

Dance with Death

For Genet, theatre is inextricably tied to death.14 In one of his letters to the
director Roger Blin, he wrote about The Screens: ‘Really, it is necessary that,
at the exit, the spectators take away in their mouths that famous taste of ash
and a smell of rottenness’.15 Truly tasting ash is part of the fundamental spec-
tacle which Genet presents and one is not free to remain aloof from the action.
Through the play within the play, the spectator is put right into the midst of a
conflict with death. Being at the knife-edge is exemplified by the tightrope
walker whom Genet describes in a short text. This character risks death,
chasing his image with which he tries to identify on the rope: we come to see
‘a solitary lover in pursuit of his image, saving himself and fainting on a
wire’.16 Between the tightrope walker and the image pursued is the risk of a
fatal fall. It is this extreme limit which fascinates Genet, one at which the
spectacle itself risks ruin, or at least transformation. Like the tightrope walker
in a dance with death, the actors and the spectators in Genet’s plays are in-
volved in the perilous making and unmaking of the spectacle.
Death and treacherous make-believe are central in The Maids. However,
unlike in The Balcony and The Blacks, which it preceded, the play within the
play does not show the spectator’s role explicitly. Yet to a certain extent what
is already questioned is the difference between role-play and life; that living
might somehow be free of acting.17 Claire says: ‘What remains for us is to
continue this life, take up the game again’, to which Solange replies: ‘The
game is dangerous’.18 In the changing of places, roles become confused.
When Claire drinks the poisoned tea as Madame, who does not drink it, is she
really still acting as Madame? To what extent she is pretending is uncertain.
Claire and Solange also interject in their ‘real’ identities. Yet it is as if they

13
This is contrary to Christiane Vymétal Jacquemont’s view: ‘The locus of the game provides
a reassuring cosmos while, in the outside world with its unpredictable daily profane life, a
threatening chaos reigns’, ‘The Essence of the Game and its Locus in Jean Genet’s Le Bal-
con’, French Review, 54 (December 1980), 285.
14
See the startling text, ‘L’étrange mot d’…’, Œuvres complètes, IV, 7-18, and, in particular,
Samuel Weber, ‘Double Take: Acting and Writing in Gene’s “L’étrange mot de…”’, in Ge-
net: In the Language of the Enemy, pp. 28-48.
15
‘Lettres à Roger Blin, Œuvres complètes, IV, 224.
16
‘Le Funambule’, Œuvres complètes, V (1979), 19.
17
Sartre, Œuvres complètes de Jean Genet, I, 567, states that the reader will recognize Claire
and Solange as the Papin sisters.
18
Les Bonnes, Œuvres complètes, IV, 154.
 Playing and not Playing in Genet 51

were somehow suspended between themselves and the roles which they as-
sume, like the tightrope walker chasing his image.19 Indeed, in the swapping
of roles, it is the line between play and reality which becomes impossible to
distinguish. Roles overlap; one is substituted incessantly for another. One fig-
ure lives on as another. It is as if the play were almost a game with multiple
possibilities in which actions are at once mimed and realized, neither played
nor accomplished once and for all.

Focusing on the Spectacle

Genet’s use of the play within the play in The Balcony and The Blacks draws
the spectator into the play, so that he is even more compellingly confronted
with a role which is neither simply imagined nor real. The notion of objective
observation is cast in doubt, as is the possibility of a well-defined frame
which would separate the actor in the play from the spectator in reality. Thus,
distinguishing where the play begins and where it might end, indeed defining
the work, becomes problematic. In particular, through the transgression of the
space between the inner and outer plays, the spectator’s role is shown to be
inextricably bound to that of the actor. The outer play is no more contained
than the inner play, but opens out into a much wider space, in which the shift-
ing limits between actor and spectator, play and reality, are at stake.
The Balcony begins in Madame Irma’s brothel, ‘The Grand Balcony’,
where clients are dressed up to act out their fantasies of various figures, in-
cluding a Bishop, a Judge and a General. Madame Irma observes the activi-
ties in all of her rooms with a viewing apparatus. She is also seen dressing
with the assistance of her confidante Carmen. Meanwhile, all around, a revolt
is taking place. Chantal, a prostitute who left the brothel to become involved,
meets with her lover Roger, a leader in the uprising. Chantal dies and be-
comes a symbol of the struggle. Madame Irma is persuaded to appear on the
balcony in the role of the Queen, along with the clients who pass themselves
off as Bishop, Judge and General, key figures in the society, and the Hero or
Chief of Police. The revolt is then quelled. The Chief of Police’s longstand-
ing dream to become part of the nomenclature of the brothel is finally real-
ized when Roger asks to act out his role. In the designated room, a mausole-
um, Roger castrates himself. The Chief of Police finally disappears into the
mausoleum and Madame Irma closes her house for the night.
The play within the play occurs in many scenes: in particular, in the
clients’ theatrical performances observed by Madame Irma, a surrogate audi-

19
In ‘Comment jouer Les Bonnes’, Œuvres complètes, IV, 267, Genet describes the Maids’
gestures, and even their voices, as suspended or broken, adding: ‘Each gesture will leave the
actresses suspended’.
52 Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

ence in her brothel; in the appearance of the key figures of society on the
balcony of the brothel and in Roger’s role-playing in the mausoleum, as he is
spied upon by other characters. What is apparent is that there is no clear-cut
distinction between the play within the play taking place in the form of role-
playing and the so-called reality outside this make-believe. When figures
playing roles become part of the political scene and calm the revolt, the line
between play and reality, theatre and affairs of state, is obviously blurred. In
fact, this is also the case in the brothel, also known as a ‘house of illusions’,
where the clients require that there be a certain truth and at the same time a
lack of reality, as Madame Irma explains to Carmen:

Irma: They all want everything to be as true as possible… Less something undefinable,
which makes it not true. (With a change in tone.) Carmen, I am the one who decided to
name my establishment a house of illusions, but I am only the director of it, and each person,
when he rings, enters and brings his perfectly worked out script. All that is left for me is to
rent the hall, provide the props, the actors and actresses.20

Illusion is not separated from reality by the walls of this house of illusions,
where, according to Carmen, the scenarios are all reducible to the theme of
death (Balcony, p. 126). When Arthur, an employee of the brothel, is hit by a
bullet which penetrated the house from the outside, he still plays a cadaver,
but for real. To distinguish between acting and not acting poses difficulties;
as Madame Irma says: ‘He didn’t believe that he would be able to play his
role of cadaver so well tonight’ (Balcony, p. 98).
In the fantasies played out in the house, characters move between roles
and so-called reality, or else between the inner play and the outer one. The
extent of the make-believe is difficult to determine, as in The Maids, and
characters slip into and out of the game like the judge with the girl playing a
thief (Balcony, pp. 48-49). The spectator in the auditorium sees the bounda-
ries between the inner and outer play becoming unclear and is compelled to
reassess his own position. In the play within the play, in which Roger takes
on the role of the Chief of Police, there are a few spectators who watch clan-
destinely in the outer play, namely Madame Irma as the Queen, the palace
Envoy and the Chief of Police, along with the Bishop, the Judge and the Gen-
eral. When the Chief of Police interjects, the Envoy tells him that he should
let the roles be played right to the end. However, what sort of play does this
entail? Might the Chief of Police see himself in Roger, and to what extent
does Roger act this spectator? In seeing his role performed, the Chief of

20
Le Balcon, Œuvres complètes, IV, 73. The page numbers to The Balcony will be given in the
text after the quotations.
 Playing and not Playing in Genet 53

Police witnesses the grandeur of his image. He sees Carmen explaining to

Roger towards the end of play that the Slave has left their role-play in the
mausoleum in order to disseminate the ‘truth’ to the outside world: ‘The
truth: that you are dead, or rather that you don’t stop dying and that your
image, like your name, reverberates to infinity’ (Balcony, p. 131). The inter-
jections of the Chief of Police to the Queen show his satisfaction with the
‘truth’ of his death, or, more precisely, that he never ceases to die, living on
in his name and his ever-present image.
If this show of truth is the culmination of the action for the Chief of Po-
lice, if after such a role-play nothing remains for him but to disappear into the
mausoleum for two thousand years, this is not the case for Roger, who em-
bodies his role in the inner play beyond all limits: ‘greater than great, stron-
ger than strong, more dead than dead’, in the words of the Chief of Police
(Balcony, p. 133). He carries on despite Carmen’s insistence that the ‘session
is over’ (Balcony, p. 131). Indeed, Roger does not just represent the Chief of
Police in the role-play, taking on the policeman’s chosen appearance as a
giant phallus, but he merges ‘his destiny with his own’ (Balcony, p. 132).
Roger castrates himself, as if to destroy the Chief of Police. It is evident that
the boundaries of the inner play are unclear, as Roger leaves the stage and is
replaced by the Chief of Police, who was a spectator. Taking over the role-
play, he acts himself on centre stage. To the photographers, who take his
photo, he says: ‘You, look at me live and die. For posterity: fire!’ (Balcony,
p. 133). Through his participation in the nomenclature of the brothel, through
his image passed on to posterity, the Chief of Police is never simply dead
once and for all. Thus, when he takes the place of the figure who personifies
him in the inner play, it becomes all the more apparent that his role is in fact
neither simply real nor represented, neither offstage nor onstage; that he is
not just a spectator or an actor, but both at once, appearing on a much wider
stage. Focusing on the spectacle is without a doubt a most problematic task.

A People of Shadows
In The Blacks, through the play within the play, Genet shows the fluidity of
the roles of actors and spectators involved, at once in ‘make-believe’ and
‘truth’. The play is about a group of Blacks who stage the ritual killing of a
White. This takes place in front of the spectators of the Court, Blacks masked
as Whites, and consisting of the Queen, her Valet, the Governor, the Judge
and the Missionary, some of the characters who also appear in The Balcony.
This action serves to hide the ‘real’ action offstage, where a Black is judged
by Blacks and executed. Ville de Saint-Nazaire makes several appearances
during the play to inform the actors, indeed all of us as spectators, about the
54 Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

progress of these events. The members of the Court take off their masks, re-
vealing black faces, and listen intently. They then put their white masks on
again and are finally killed in succession.
The play culminates in the murder of the spectators of the Court, as if
they were meant to be the true victims of the murder re-enactment. To a cer-
tain extent, there is a reversal at work, because the spectators from the outer
play are murdered on centre-stage in front of the actors from the inner play,
who have become spectators. Moreover, the interweaving of the roles of
spectator and actor is further complicated when the action offstage is reported
to everyone onstage and the actors are realigned with the spectators to form
an audience. In these ‘ceremonies’ involving death, as in The Balcony, the
boundaries of the inner and outer plays become blurred. This dramatic stag-
ing of a murder in front of others has parallels with the fundamentally thea-
trical representation of crime within the court system in society. Significant-
ly, for Genet, spectators are not removed from the action, but are implicated
in this theatre and thus must share the responsibility for crime. Indeed, it is
the queens, valets, governors, judges and missionaries in society who witness
to a certain extent their own deaths. However, what is apparent above all in
this play, in which murders are repeatedly staged, is that death is extremely
elusive.
While death is at the centre of this play, even literally, in the form of the
catafalque covered in a white cloth onstage, this spectacle of death is without
a doubt most difficult to grasp. Even the staging of the murder in the inner
play is surrounded by a certain unreality, because the enacted events do not
tally with Village’s account at the beginning of the outer play, in which he
speaks of his attack on an old tramp on the embankment. It is apparent
through the juxtaposition of these differing representations that there is no
simple reality. However, it is through theatre, more especially the play within
the play, that the spectator can get a glimpse of his mortality, or perhaps im-
mortality; as Bataille affirms, the spectacle or representation is, in fact, the
only way of ‘knowing’ death.21 About theatre, Archibald says to Village:
‘We’ll play at being reflected in it, and we’ll see ourselves – big black narcis-
sists – slowly disappearing into its waters’, adding finally: ‘You’re becoming
a spectre before their very eyes and you’re going to haunt them’. 22 Through
the play within the play, the spectators in the Court and the auditorium are

21
See Bataille, ‘Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice’, Deucalion, 5 (1955), 21-43.
22
Genet, Les Nègres: Clownerie, Œuvres complètes, V, 101. The page numbers to The Blacks
will be given in the text after the quotations.
 Playing and not Playing in Genet 55

made to witness to a degree their own death and to see themselves as

spectres.
Through a certain unreality of death, both the Whites and the Blacks are
caught in a twilight zone. While the Governor imagines ridding the earth of
the ‘shadows’ of the Blacks (Blacks, p. 150), the Queen asks whether in kill-
ing the Court, the Blacks will boast about killing ‘a people of shadows’
(Blacks, p. 149). After complaining about this dangerous ritual conducted
each night and each second, the Queen, undeniably a spectre, states that in
fact she is always ‘sculpting herself’ in the ‘form of an eternal ruin’; she is an
animated ‘cadaver’ (Blacks, p. 141). Indeed, the killing of the Court is some-
what unreal. When the Governor is shot, for example, Archibald gives him
directions to get up and move to centre-stage: ‘No. Come and die here’
(Blacks, p. 150). Seeing oneself die or seeing another die, as if in one’s place,
is a fundamental aspect of Genet’s use of the play within the play. The spec-
tator occupies a position which is neither simply in the play nor outside it,
and he can come to terms with an image of himself as neither dead nor alive,
moving between make-believe and reality. What is apparent is that both ac-
tors and spectators alike must confront an intangible death, mortal yet con-
tinuing to live on in a state of suspended animation.

The Frame in Play

The play within the play is a means of tackling the issue of the limits of thea-
tre by providing a glimpse of the viewing of the spectacle at the heart of the
play. By displacing the borders of theatre, it effectively highlights the condi-
tion of the spectator, indeed, of the human being, as actor. Most significantly,
it undercuts the spectator’s sense of reality by showing that he is also a shad-
ow in the ever-changing scenes. Both The Blacks and The Balcony contain a
play within a play in which the boundaries of performance are challenged and
the external status of the spectator is brought into question. In a different way,
Artaud’s replacement of the stage and the auditorium with a sole area without
partitions or barriers recasts the traditional roles of spectator and actor.23
In ‘How to perform The Blacks’, Genet explains that, during one of Vil-
lage’s speeches, both the stage lights and those in the auditorium are to be
turned on. The spectators must be in the spotlight. Genet writes that his play
is written for Whites by a White and that there must be at least one White in
the audience. Seated at the front, he will receive attention and the light will
be on him throughout the spectacle. If there is no White, and Blacks refuse

23
Le Théâtre et son double, pp. 146-48. See also Derrida, ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture
de la représentation’, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 341-68.
56 Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

masks, then a mannequin is to be used. Thus, the play opens out to include
the spectator, a White spectator, although even colour is changed in the play,
especially through the use of white masks, sometimes worn, sometimes
removed. As Genet writes: ‘But what exactly is a Black? And first of all,
what’s his colour?’ (Blacks, p. 79).
In The Blacks, the spectator is necessarily forced to recognize his own
part in the endless theatrical repetition of a play which finishes, only to begin
again with the same sounds of Mozart. At the start, the Blacks salute not only
the Court, but also the audience, as does Archibald when introducing the
actors. The Blacks are thus overstepping the boundaries of the inner play to
acknowledge at once the presence of both audiences. At the beginning of The
Blacks, the Governor in the Court says: ‘And we know that we have come to
attend our own funerals’ (Blacks, p. 86). This is the case for all the spectators.
Yet death is neither onstage, nor offstage; neither make-believe nor real.
After the members of the Court die, they lift their heads to listen, they talk,
get up, lie down again and move off to Hell. Along with the Blacks, the
members of the Court come back at the end, this time without their masks,
and stand once again around the catafalque draped in white.
Life, death and role-playing are also incessantly linked through the circu-
larity of The Balcony. In ‘How to perform The Balcony’, Genet rejects the
use of a turntable onstage and insists that the scenes follow each other from
left to right, as if one fitted into the other in front of the spectator (Balcony, p.
274). Thus, what Genet describes is not independent vignettes, but one scene
almost endlessly metamorphosing into another and witnessed by the specta-
tor, as if he were part of an ongoing movement. The first four scenes of the
play occur in different rooms of the brothel and are, of course, shown in se-
quence to the spectator. At the same time, the play within the play displaces
the boundaries of this sequential movement by showing Madame Irma look-
ing through her viewing apparatus at the salons simultaneously. The play
within the play disrupts the borders of the play, because it assembles together
within a frame role-playing which the spectator in the auditorium perceives
not simultaneously but sequentially. However, it is evident that in trying to
step back to take in everything within one frame, Madame Irma is no less
caught up in the endless succession of scenes. Indeed, a spectator of the sa-
lons, Madame Irma also assumes a role-play in the outer play and where the
role-playing begins and ends is certainly difficult to determine. It is evident
that the spectator in the theatre can no more simply step back than can Mad-
ame Irma. On the wall of the stage in the first three scenes is a mirror reflect-
ing an unmade bed and, if properly arranged, as Genet writes in his stage
directions, the bed would be in the first seats of the auditorium (Balcony, p.
 Playing and not Playing in Genet 57

39). This bed, shown on stage in the fifth scene, is set in Madame Irma’s bed-
room. Thus, it is as if Madame Irma’s bedroom were also in the auditorium.
It is as if the spectator were occupying Madame Irma’s place, in effect within
the frame of the play and at the same time beyond it, indeed neither inside
nor outside.
It is evident that in this theatre, in this ‘maison d’illusions’, clients along
with partners act out roles to the limit. If this role-playing involves dying,
death remains somewhat unreal. When the figures appear ‘in reality’ on the
balcony and help to quell the revolt, they play out their fantasies beyond im-
agination. As the Bishop says: ‘[T]here will never be a movement powerful
enough to destroy our imagery’ (Balcony, p. 124). The differences between
those figures and the people whom they represent are blurred. It is as if Mad-
ame Irma were no more real, nor unreal, than the Queen whose part she as-
sumes and whose function she successfully fulfils. There is already some
confusion about whether the Queen is alive or dead and, as the palace Envoy
states: ‘The Queen is embroidering and she is not embroidering…’ (Balcony,
p. 123).
At the very end of the play, Madame Irma slips from her role as Queen
into her role in the brothel. She frees the various figures, telling them to go
out into the alleyway, and turns off the lights, pre-empting what will soon
take place in the auditorium. Alone, she then speaks of her salons, which can
all fit together and combine, and of the endless role-playing: ‘Soon, it will be
necessary to begin again… to light everything up again… to get dressed […]
To redistribute the roles… to get into mine’ (Balcony, p. 135). What is appar-
ent is that no one, not even Madame Irma, is free from playing a role; no one,
not even the Chief of Police, initially excluded from the nomenclature, can
simply remain outside. Everyone plays a part,24 including the spectators in
this house, the term ‘balcon’ meaning also ‘dress circle’. Finally, Madame
Irma turns to the spectators and tells them also to prepare their roles, as jud-
ges, generals, bishops, chamberlains and insurgents. She tells them, just as
she said to the figures in the play, to go home and there ‘everything, don’t
doubt it, will be even more false than here’ (Balcony, p. 135). Playing the
same roles, they are just as much actors in the theatre as the players. They are
also told to leave via the alleyway. The entrances and exits in this scene are
not confined to the stage. As the spectators watch, join, Madame Irma’s
‘house of illusions’, she too is a spectator of the theatre of which they are all
a part.

24
For Lacan, ‘Sur Le Balcon de Genet’, pp. 56-57, however, everything pivots around the
Chief of Police.
58 Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

In ‘The Tightrope Walker’, the performer is suspended, endlessly chasing

his image on a rope. Balanced between reality and an image, this figure is
neither one nor the other. As a tightrope walker, he is at once fragile and still
part of an enduring tradition. In Genet’s plays, the characters are all involved
in a similar dance fraught with danger. They see themselves incessantly in
different roles. The Maids act to the limit, where play and reality, acting and
not acting, cannot clearly be distinguished. What is important about the play
within the play in The Balcony and The Blacks is that it demonstrates most
powerfully the way in which make-believe and reality are necessarily part of
the same scene. When spectators and actors onstage cross the borders be-
tween the inner and outer play, what is apparent is that the boundaries be-
tween actor and spectator are brought into question. There is no possibility
for the spectator in the auditorium to remain aloof. If in The Blacks murder is
staged, indeed ultimately that of all of the members of the Court who were
spectators, the spectator is compelled to a certain extent to confront his mor-
tality. Dying, he necessarily also lives on in another role or image. Death re-
mains somewhat abstract for the spectator, as it does for the actor playing a
part, which is symbolized above all by the empty catafalque.
In this theatre, the borders of the stage, like the ‘house of illusions’, are
certainly difficult to determine. What the play within the play shows above
all is not a well-defined drama within another, but rather the transgression of
the boundary between make-believe and reality; it redrafts the limits of the
scene, drawing attention to the fragility of the separation between the stage
and the auditorium. Both actor and spectator are part of a theatre in which the
very possibility of representation is at stake. For this theatre is not about a
work with a clear beginning or end, showing the ‘real’ world. It consists of
the endless comings and goings, both on the stage and in the auditorium, of
those who are at once actors and spectators. Changing roles, perhaps dying
and reliving in another performance, is part of this ungraspable game. Like
the tightrope walker one risks falling, unmaking a scene. However, roles are
also transformed as people, a ‘people of shadows’, come and go: Queens,
Judges, Bishops or Missionaries such as those who act in The Balcony or who
return, with a different profile, in The Blacks. What is in play are appearances
and disappearances on the world stage. Figures repeatedly take the place of
others in a performance which goes on. It is not possible simply to be a spec-
tator and to step back from the stage to see everything within one frame, for
one is precisely a part of the scene, at once both a spectator and an actor in
the infinite spectacle.
 II

The Play within the Play and

Meta-Theatre
1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference
Christian Sinn

The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob

Bidermann’s Cenodoxus (1602)

Bidermann creates in his Cenodoxus a metatextual metaphor derived from the literary sense of
‘text’ as ‘textum’, i.e. carpet, which fulfills the function of the Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’ by
providing the spectator with the figure of an implicit author who in the course of the drama inter-
weaves the strands of Greek and Latin tradition with those of normative Jesuitical Christianity
and, more important, keeps this process of weaving visible for the audience, so that the audience
by being made conscious of this process. To emphasize this figure in the carpet Bidermann
employs a combination of several media (the stage set, periochen (summaries) for the non-Latin
spectators, music, dancing, allegorical figures, etc.) in what today is called a Gesamtkunstwerk in
order to initiate the audience into an art of imagination.

On 3 July 1602, a new neo-Latin Jesuit drama was offered to the citizens of
Augsburg in a production staged by its author, Jacob Bidermann. Many other
stagings followed: Ingolstadt (1617), Paris (1636), Vienna (1637). Perhaps
the most remarkable performance was that given on the Munich court stage
in 1609: legend 1 has it that, in response to the horrific impressions left by the
play, the distinguished audience, consisting mainly of important Bavarian
court nobles and the foremost citizens of Munich, was moved to convert to
Catholicism.2 A strange, simple title, Cenodoxus, suggested the theme of
cenodoxia, i.e. vain glory, the mother of all sins. Opening with comic scenes,
the drama then built up to a mercilessly shocking finish. Its tone was exacting
in form and harrowing in content, threatening with hell on earth anyone in the
audience who might not repent his sins. Later audiences, especially in the era
of Enlightenment, were not amused by the tone and ideological fanaticism of
the play, and the most famous neo-Latin drama of its epoch seemed long for-
gotten until Hugo von Hofmannsthal, fascinated by the Baroque theatrum

1
Günter Hess, ‘Spectator – Lector – Actor. Zum Publikum von Jakob Bidermanns Cenodox-
us. Mit Materialien zum literarischen und sozialgeschichtlichen Kontext der Handschriften
von Ursula Hess’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur
(1976), 1, 30-106.
2
See Cenodoxus, ed. and trans. by Denis G. Dyer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1975), Introduction, pp. 1-25. All quotations are from this edition.
62 Christian Sinn

mundi theme, revived the history of Cenodoxus’ reception by developing

plans to write a play entitled ‘Xenodoxus’ [!]. Today Bidermann’s play is
performed in the classical schools in Germany (Ettal, St Blasien, Augsburg)
and at the University of Passau. At the University of Heidelberg, a new pro-
duction was staged in 2005.
What little we know of the life of Jacob Bidermann is quickly told. He
was born in 1578 in Ehingen, a village southwest of Ulm, and educated at the
Jesuit college in Augsburg, where he remained a pupil until 1594. In the
course of his studies he became personally acquainted with the famous classi-
cist and grammarian, Jacob Pontanus. In 1594 Bidermann entered the Society
of Jesus at Dillingen. For three years he studied at the college in Ingolstadt
and then started teaching Jesuit pupils in Augsburg. In 1606, after three more
years pursuing theological studies in Ingolstadt, he moved to Munich to teach
at the Jesuit college. In 1616 he first became professor of philosophy and
then professor of theology at the Jesuit-controlled university of Dillingen. Six
years later he was called to Rome to act as the official theologian of the
Society and censor of books. He died in Rome on 20 August 1639.
Bidermann’s oeuvre reaches far beyond the prescribed genres and didac-
tic interests of Jesuit tradition. Nine dramatic texts are known, including
Cosmarchia (1617), which not only preaches a spiritual reality, but is also a
readable and highly comical satire of politics, and Joannes Calybita, which
was staged with extraordinary success in 1638. There are epics in verse like
Herodias (1622), which was very popular and even translated from Latin into
German during his lifetime. Utopia (published 1640), an entertaining and
aesthetically complex cycle of satirical novels modelled on Boccaccio’s De-
camerone, went through nine editions and was also translated into German in
1677. There are epigrammatical writings – published in 14 editions – episto-
lary poems, such as the Epistolae Heroidum (1638), which tries for a Chris-
tian reworking of the Ovidian elegies, and there are hymns and stylized liter-
ary biograpies of the saints, Ignatius (1612), Elisabeth von Reute (1626),
Graf Anton Maria von Urbino (1631) and Alosius von Gonzaga (1640). In
short, Bidermann was an extremely productive author who experimented joy-
fully with nearly all the established contemporary genres.
Today Bidermann is valued as one of the seventeenth century’s great Ger-
man playwrights, along with Gryphius and Lohenstein. The reason his first
and most popular play, Cenodoxus, has met for so long with such a biased
reception is – always excepting the now unfamiliar Latin – that it has
consistently been seen as a mere illustration of Jesuit dogma. But the fact that
Cenodoxus was almost translated in 1635 in Munich by his pupil Joachim
Meichel and was then adapted for a German performance in 1742 emphasizes
 The Figure in the Carpet 63

that it was seen to differ quite significantly from other plays of its time, es-
pecially from traditional Jesuit drama. Still more importantly, the Society of
Jesus itself honoured Bidermann after his death with an exceedingly costly
and well-printed edition of his Ludi theatrales (1666) – including Cenodoxus
– for having innovated traditional Jesuit poetics in a way that gave his Ludi
the value of classical texts.3 This is all the more extraordinary as Jesuit dra-
mas were usually only staged for single performances, instruments of an ex-
cellent and highly progressive concept of education based on the ancient
theory of rhetoric practised in the form of a play. This play offered the pupils
different models of acting, and more often than not the play was discarded
once it had served its educational purpose.
Thus printed, Bidermann’s Ludi, unlike those of most of his contempora-
ry teachers, were read, quoted and performed until well into the eighteenth
century. Literary merits aside, they were considered theoretically highly in-
teresting.4 That it was called a comico-tragoedia already hints at this and
implies an understanding of Cenodoxus as a metadrama in our contemporary
sense of a ‘drama about drama’, and thus about the possibilities of drama it-
self.5 However, the play does not in itself represent a ‘pure’ dramatic genre,
but employs a mixture of tragedy and comedy in which the comic aspects, in
contrast to other forms of tragicomedy, function to deepen the tragic situa-
tion. Thus the concept of comico-tragoedia inverted the old Plautine idea of
tragico-comoedia, in which comedy was used to create a non-tragic ending
for a tragic situation. It is, however, not only this inversion which rendered
Bidermann’s comico-tragoedia highly innovative, but also the coexistence of
high and low characters in the same play, which was an offence against the
Baroque rule that tragedy should deal exclusively with the high-born and
comedy with the low.
Bidermann’s Jesuit respondents, however, found three arguments for ap-
plauding this offence. To start with, it furthered the ends of Jesuit popular
education, demonstrating that low-status persons could be shown to confront
ethical questions just like high-status persons. Consequently, the techniques
used to appeal to the audience covered a variety of ‘multi-media’ stimuli –
the stage set, periochen (i.e. summaries in the vernacular for non-Latin-

3
See Fidel Rädle, ‘Die Praemonitio ad Lectorem zu Jacob Bidermanns Ludi theatrales (1666)
deutsch’, in Der Buchstab töd – der Geist macht Lebendig, ed. by James Hardin and Jörg
Jungmayer, 2 vols (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), II, pp. 1131-71.
4
Hans Pörnbacher, ‘Cenodoxus, Der Doctor von Pariß’, in Dramen vom Barock bis zur Auf-
klärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), p. 9.
5
Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press
1986), p. 31.
64 Christian Sinn

speaking spectators), music, dancing, allegorical figures, etc. – in what Wag-

ner might have called a Gesamtkunstwerk, aimed at awing the audience into
humility and, at the same time, creating a heightened awareness of both the
performance’s theatricality and human existence on earth. The effects added
to Jesuit theatre after Bidermann – ballet scenes, operatic elements and, not
least, the scenic stage with its deep perspective and infinite vanishing-point,
where the boundaries between play and life seem to dissolve – served to in-
tensify this awareness still more, continuing the process which had started
before Bidermann with the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in England:
‘[P]rologues and epilogues, asides, direct addresses, and the play-within-a-
play [...] remind the audience that it is watching a play, which, while pretend-
ing to reality, [it] is not.’6 This is precisely why the prologue of Cenodoxus
informs us about the difference between history and fiction, implying, how-
ever, that history is formed by fictions. Seen against the backdrop of literary
history, Bidermann thus represents an important part of the hidden and com-
plex history of aesthetics before the term itself actually existed. First theology
and then politics become metaphors for art – in the sense of the ‘fiction’ in-
troduced by the prologue – so that Bidermann’s concept of the comico-
tragoedia is an interesting contribution to the notion of theatrum mundi in the
Shakespearean sense, especially on its self-referential level, ‘where the world
may become a stage, history a plot, kings dramatists, courtiers actors, com-
moners audiences, and speech itself the dialogue or script that gives breath to
all the rest.’ 7
Secondly, the comico-tragoedia was a typological argument in a theoreti-
cal discussion. It was J.C. Scaliger (1561) who first defined and established
the genre of tragicomedy, even if he himself criticised it for its heathen ori-
gins in the works of Euripides. Nevertheless, this led to a debate over the le-
gitimacy of ‘mixing’ genres, to which G.B. Guarini, Donatus and Lope de
Vega contributed with their respective theories of tragico-comoedia. From
the first years of the seventeenth century Bidermann’s work, with its inver-
sion towards a comico-tragoedia, anticipates this debate and argues for new
formal possibilities that might be derived from genre-mixing. However, the
later Classical poetics of Opitz and Gottsched strictly advocated preserving
the purity of the genres for their own sake, and the art of mixing them did not

6
June Schlueter, Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1979), p. 2.
7
James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 5. But the Shakesperean view is already found-
ed in older metaphors of play since Plato’s Nomoi, see Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische
Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 8th edn (Bern: Francke, 1984), pp. 148-54.
 The Figure in the Carpet 65

become acceptable until the German Romantics began to debate the theory
and put it into practice on onstage.
The third argument combines aspects of the first two: Biderman with his
‘Mischspiel’ (‘mixed-genre play’) strove to establish an art of imagination
which served the interests of the rhetoric and poetics of Jesuits as well as that
of Protestants.8 Traditional poetics, and with it traditional genre distinctions,
had to be rejected if they did not serve to instill Christian sense in the public.
By the same logic, mixing was legitimate, even compulsory, if it achieved its
didactic goal.9 Therefore, Bidermann not only wrote a comico-tragoedia but
also adopted the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence, introducing allegor-
ical characters who usually also combined antique and Christian aspects. This
coexistence of heterogeneous traditions linked metatheatrality, i.e. the topos
of the theatrum mundi, to a universal theological dogma: human beings do
not act by themselves, but are puppets operated by God and unable to control
their own existence. This dogma is most clearly illustrated by the fourth act
of Cenodoxus: Cenodoxus cannot make his own decisions regarding eternal
salvation, but must abide by a decision made for him. But herein lies a funda-
mental contradiction, one that reflects a deep division in Catholic ideology: in
radical opposition to that of the Dominicans, Jesuit dogma insists on the free-
dom of the human will – freedom, for instance, to decide for or against ac-
tions which lead to redemption. In light of this, Cenodoxus causes one to ask
why Bidermann should have adopted the Dominican-like, almost Lutheran,
position of proclaiming that man is no more than a plaything in the struggle
between God and Satan. The answer can only be found at the level of the
play’s poetics: as the comico-tragoedia informs the audience about what de-
termines man’s actions in the boundaries of the play within the play, it invites
its audience to reflect on those determinants and to act accordingly at the le-
vel of and with regard to its – the audience’s – own worldly existence.
The writing of this drama, however, presented a seemingly insoluble
problem for its author: as the drama displays an impressive amount of knowl-
edge derived from Greek and Latin sources, revealing its origins in quota-
tions and allusions, it shows exactly that form of learned superbia for which
Cenodoxus finds himself consigned to damnation. To resolve this theological
difficulty of how to attack and surpass the pride of the Humanist scholars

8
See also the analysis by Georg Braungart, ‘Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus. Zeitdiagnose, su-
perbia-Kritik, komisch-tragische Entlarvung und theatralische Bekehrungsstrategie’, Daph-
nis (1989), 18, 581-640.
9
This is documented by the Praemonitio itself (see Fidel Rädle, note 4 above) and the repre-
sentation of James A. Parente, Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian The-
ater in Germany and in the Netherlands, 1500-1680 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987).
66 Christian Sinn

without inviting the accusation of being proud himself, Bidermann employs

three variations of the play within the play.
First, the design of the persona Cenodoxus represents the construction of
Jesuit virtue, dependent on prudentia, prudence. Cenodoxus’ application of
prudentia operates within the idea of the theatrum mundi, the idea that every-
thing that is perceptible to a human being is part of a play ultimately devised
and staged by God Himself. In Cenodoxus’ case this idea does not confirm
any virtues as God-given but rather deconstructs them as arbitrary elements
of playacting, to be made use of wherever they seem to further the actors’s
interests.
Second, Bidermann applies prudentia himself against the false prudentia
of Cenodoxus. He contrasts and comments upon Cenodoxus’ superbia by
combining the antique tradition with Christian elements like the Last Judg-
ment, those elements again clearly shown to represent a theatrical structure.
So the guardian angel presents Cenodoxus with the latter’s book of sins, a
gesture taken from Everyman,10 yet he talks to Cenodoxus using an antique-
pagan vocabulary; and the devils, instead of being simply ‘Christian’ devils,
descend from the antique Acheron. But this creates a new problem: As soon
as religious – i.e. Christian – issues are put onstage, especially in this particu-
lar form, they lose their ‘own’ reality. They are no longer things but signs,
i.e. something standing for something else, thus gaining the precarious ‘reali-
ty’ of stage performance and becoming an integral part of the play’s basically
self-referential structure.
And third: this structure finds its most explicit metaphor in a metatextual
sign brought up in the so-called ‘carpet scene’ (II.8), a metaphor derived
from the literary sense of ‘text’ as ‘textum’, ‘carpet’, and as such an early
precedent of the Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’. It provides the spectator/
reader with an implicit author who in the course of the drama interweaves the
strands of Greek and Latin traditions with those of normative Jesuit Christi-
anity and, more importantly, keeps this process of weaving visible so that the
audience, by being made conscious of it, may ideally be led to the right form
of prudentia.
In terms of poetics, the carpet motif focuses on what by now has become
far more than the story of a man involved in sin and damnation. As play after
play is introduced into the framing Cenodoxus-plot, it becomes clear that the
plot’s end, Christ’s condemnation of the sinner, cannot even begin to exhaust

10
See also Barbara Könneker, ‘Das andere Sterben: Jakob Bidermanns Cenodoxus und die
Tradition der Jedermannspiele’, in Der fremdgewordene Text, ed. by Silvia Bovenschen
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 285-97.
 The Figure in the Carpet 67

the kaleidoscopic multitude of moral and other elements of reflection added

to the frame by its meandering subplots. Seen from this angle, Cenodoxus’
story seems little more than an axis around which the main interest of the
play evolves. Indeed, in the opening scene of the comico-tragoedia Cenodox-
us himself is not even present. He becomes even more absent, as it were, as
his servant Dama misleads the parasite Mariscus,11 who is searching for Da-
ma’s master: Dama lies to Mariscus about Cenodoxus awaiting him in the
suburban gardens, and on top of that shows him the wrong way to these gar-
dens.12

DAMA Walk past the tower, the one right here, and then
You’ll see an arcade on your left – walk in it,
Not to the right, though; bear then to the left,
Around a corner; take the next turn right,
Go left soon after, then turn right again.
Before your eyes ...
MARISCUS I’ll see the suburb gardens?
DAMA No, no, just wait. You’ll see a man who’s called
Hoplitodromus Megaloperiphronesterus,
Come all the way from Pyrgopolitoxia. (l.108-15)13

Mariscus will then have to ask Hoplitodromus Megaloperiphronesterus for

further information on how to meet Cenodoxus. This opening warns specta-
tors/readers that if, like Mariscus, they fixate on Cenodoxus as the play’s cen-
tral part, they too will be permanently misled by grossly fictional signals like
the preposterous names given by Dama. For the same reason the audience is
not allowed to see Cenodoxus himself, neither in the opening scene nor in
those that follow. The audience only hears the comments made by other char-
acters about him and, when he does finally appear, he himself quotes more
such comments. Even in his monologues he does not so much speak in his
own voice, as act as a medium through which the Philautia, self-love, and the

11
‘Mariscus’ may be derived from ‘marisca’, a bad figure, or perhaps from ‘Mariscus’, a kind
of rush, in the sense that Mariscus is not worth a rush. ‘Dama’ refers to the Latin term for
several animals, such as roe, deer, chamois, even antelope.
12
This misleading is constitutive for Bidermann’s plays (cf. Philemon I, 9) and an intertextual
allusion to Syrus as another form of the play within the play.
13
In his Miles Gloriosus Plautus, one of the most quoted sources in Bidermann, invents similar
names, which hint at the nonsense of what is proposed and which are not to be understood
etymologically.
68 Christian Sinn

Hypocrisis speak.14 The perioche of the performance in Munich 1609 there-

fore shows the Philautia as a shadow on stage, mirroring the fact that Ceno-
doxus, speaking the Philautia’s words, himself becomes a shadow of her
peformance.15
Instead of simply telling the story of a haughty bookworm who meets his
deserved, if ghastly, end, Bidermann uses these irritating devices to elicit the
spectator/reader’s awareness that the convoluted process of the play’s devel-
opment is itself at the centre of the play. A further clue to this is given by the
last words of the opening scene. They are spoken by Dama, who announces
himself to be a Cretan who tells lies, thus alluding to the ancient proverb that
all Cretans are lying, even when they say they are. If these words are taken
seriously, then there can be no distinguishing at all between what is true and
what isn’t. Furthermore, this distinction must be supposed to be of secondary
importance – if any at all – to the realisation that all characters, without ex-
ception, regardless of differences in their techniques and motivations, are
practising the art of deceit. This is certainly true for the play as play, but dis-
turbing as to the diagnosis of reality the play purports to aim at. If, for exam-
ple, the dramatis persona Dama reflects on the actions he took to dupe
Marisco as in a play, which finally leads to Mariscus being put into a lunatic
asylum, the question is raised whether two wrongs ever make a right, whether
it is ever justifiable to take immoral action against an immoral person such as
Mariscus. This question is put to the spectator/reader in terms that leave no
possibility of answering it outside the sphere of play, thus in fact multiplying
the problem instead of resolving it. This is further complicated because the
play makes it quite clear that Dama, on the surface the over-zealous and na-
ive but faithful servant of Cenodoxus, is in fact a complicated character who
professes to condemn wholeheartedly what he himself does most efficiently
and even with clear insight into the moral depravation he thereby invites.
Most notably, Bidermann further misleads the spectator by presenting
several interesting cases of memory loss. His play might even be said to
constitute an exercise in training the memory of his spectators/readers by
confronting them with examples of memory loss which, at a later time in the
play, must be recovered in order for sense to be made of the ongoing

14
Hypocrisis is not only the name of a character in the play. In Greek it does not mean ‘hypoc-
risy’, as we currently understand the word, but rather, ‘to play a part in the theatre’, thus em-
phasizing the self-reflexive quality of the play within the play.
15
Through such an unconscious shadow play, Bidermann criticises the Stoic tradition (l. 262-
70, 276) and also the consequences of the Renaissance’s praise of fortune (l. 211-15), as
well as the desire to immortalize oneself by acts and deeds (l. 237-39), an allusion to the
Pharisees in the Bible.
 The Figure in the Carpet 69

proceedings. The first play on the capacities of memory (Mariscus repeating

word for word what Dama tells him without realising for a moment that the
names Dama recites for him must be fictional), while in itself trivial, never-
theless already introduces the central motif of the last act of the tragoedia
with the making and staging of oblivion at the beginning of the comoedia.
There Cenodoxus, like Mariscus, remembers his life very well within the
limits of his own perspective, but what he remembers lacks the context which
condemns him. He has given alms to the poor, he has been a wise counselor,
he has prayed to God, etc. – all perfectly true, but what he does not remember
is that he acted throughout solely from self-interest. While Mariscus’ inabili-
ty to remember accurately is pathological – and, indeed, part of what leads
him to the asylum, Cenodoxus’ mnemonic inaccuracies are self-made, thus
marking his guilt. He has not gained experience through suffering. Perfectly
oblivious of what has made him what he is at the end, he cannot answer the
angry questions hurled at him by his exasperated guardian angel: ‘Have you
no memory of your own true self? / Is there no limit to your boundless
arrogance?’ (l. 932-33)
Bidermann here argues that the radical Stoicism that some of his contem-
poraries proclaim as a God-fearing way of life is, in fact, a perverted form of
what Bidermann in general values as a correct adherence to the Stoic tradi-
tion,16 as it does not allow for re-evaluating one’s actions and decisions in the
light of painful experience. It is not a philosophical fashion which concerns
Bidermann, but the fundamental problem of the foundation of law. Cenodox-
us is a lawyer, chief adviser to the King of France. The funeral Chorus la-
ments over Cenodoxus’ death:

Ah, courts of justice, now gone is your master.

Land of our fathers, now gone is your guardian;
Gone now, oh Gaul, is your own loving father;
Gone now, oh earth, is your safe-guard and strength! (l. 1767-70)

Occupying a position between Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, who
replaced the old concept of law as a reliable given with a new concept of law
as a renewable construction, Bidermann saw this latter change as mere horse-
trading. Even if one were able to deduce laws mathematically, he thought it
impossibe to deduce the law’s premises themselves by this procedure; even
more important, a mathematical construction fails to include social and cul-
tural traditions in what was essentially a social and cultural process.

16
As Pörnbacher, p. 22, justly argues.
70 Christian Sinn

First and foremost, the ‘carpet scene’ serves to illustrate this cultural
horse-trading as a third form of memory loss by humorously showing how
the physician Aesculap tries to acquire a carpet which actually already be-
longs to him, the carpet having been stolen by a thief who has been caught in
the act. The sophistic argumentation of the thief and still more Aesculap’s
ignoring his servant’s hints, together with several further misunderstandings,
finally lead to the physician’s paying the thief for a stolen carpet which
seems to be a double of one Aesculap supposes is in his possession. The con-
tent of this scene far surpasses its superficial entertainment value, as the
insistently stressed origin of the seemingly new carpet from the Netherlands
points to the Netherlandian philologist Justus Lipsius, who, in his Politico-
rum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex qui ad principatum maxime spectant
(1589), had argued for the supremacy of natural law over divine law. By
means of this intertextual reference, Bidermann hints critically at a similarity
between Lipsius and the thief, insinuating that what Lipsius purports to be
newly thought out by him is in fact nothing but the old philosophy of law
stolen and sold anew to wrongfully achieve the glory of originality.
Furthermore, it is highly suggestive that the subject in question should be
a carpet and not, say, a ring or a casket. The carpet being a metaphor for
textum, the woven, by which the old poetics referred to its own textuality, Bi-
dermann specifially alludes to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in almost every scene
of his play. These allusions are mostly to the sixth book, in which the
weaving of carpets is tied together with the very theme of the Cenodoxus,
pride and oblivion. The book opens with the story of the proud weaver,
Arachne, who provokes Minerva by representing the sins of the wicked gods
in her carpet. The gods want that scandalous piece of truth condemned to ob-
livion; Minerva, in particular, is so enraged that she slashes Arachne’s carpet
and strikes her. Minerva herself has woven another carpet, the four corners of
which depict the punishments which the gods inflict on proud mortals and
which are described by Ovid in the subsequent narratives. The final one of
these is the horrible story of the tongueless Philomela, who is only able to
reveal to her sister, Prokne, the unspeakable story of how she has been raped
and mutilated by weaving it into a carpet.
However, as this book with its aesthetics of both describing and perform-
ing the process of weaving is in itself part of the much larger texture of the
Metamorphoses, it is by no means clear which of the carpets in Ovid’s text is
to be compared with the weaving of the poet Ovid himself; it may be argued
that the figure ‘carpet’ as such refers to poetic weaving wherever it appears.
Along those lines it seems probable that Bidermann in turn refers to Ovid’s
text as to a figure representing a poetic program that tries to encompass the
 The Figure in the Carpet 71

totality of literature, showing it as a mise en abyme of the weaving of texts,

not least because the Metamorphoses are constructed similarly to the meta-
dramatic structure of Cenodoxus. By the intertextual interweaving of his own
play with Ovid’s narrative on the process of creating texts, Bidermann creates
a text which stages itself as an open system of thought. It is in sharp and criti-
cal contrast to the superbia with which fundamentalist dogma claims its in-
fallibility. Moreover, it is a text that analyses the loss of cultural and social
values incurred in the process of rewriting the philosophy of law (by scholars
like Lipsius) as a particularly vicious form of cultural amnesia, a deliberate
abandonment and consigning to oblivion of the great thesaurus of images and
thoughts as woven together by Ovid.
All in all, Biderman employs the case studies on memory loss as a strate-
gy to train both the spectator/reader’s perception of the play and his ability to
perceive the pitfalls of oblivion yawning throughout his present-day exist-
ence. There is the pathological loss of memory, induced by the parasite’s
uncritical pursuit of his victim and leading straight into the lunatic asylum;
there is Dama’s willingly incurred inability to remember the boundaries
between playing and ‘reality’; there is the sinner’s oblivion regarding what
has brought him to the threshold of hell, this oblivion in itself, tragically, the
final reason for his condemnation. There is also – and this is at least as im-
portant as the individual’s sinful loss of memory and played out far more
extensively – the sin of letting culture with its open systems of thought and
its proliferating weaving of texture sink into an oblivion which the play Ce-
nodoxus opposes by making that the real subject of its textual performance.
For all the generalizing attitude towards life and death that it articulates,
the following question, asked and answered repeatedly by the chorus –

What is the life of mortal man?

Scarcely are we born at all
Than we death’s sudden victims fall;
So must this life of mortals seem
Nothing but an empty dream. (l. 1624-28)

– shows precisely what Bidermann aimed at with his play, as the ‘dream’
which the playwright weaves around the ‘mortal man’ Cenodoxus’ story is
anything but ‘empty’. Quite the contrary – Bidermann does not teach resigna-
tion, but rather stages a wake-up call in accordance with the Jesuit poetics of
didactic instruction, a call implying that the audience might well be in danger
of forgetting that remembering their identity and its history is the key to lead-
ing a truly Christian life. Bidermann not only insists on the visionary, even
72 Christian Sinn

God-sent quality of dreams and other simulacra, but even includes poetry it-
self in his affirmative analysis of such phenomena.
This, however, poses a logical problem: To see the drama as a wake-up
call implies a belief that the reformation of evil times and bad conditions de-
pends on the will of man. But this voluntaristic position, represented by
Philaretus, i.e. by someone who idealistically loves virtue for itself, is explic-
itly refuted by Guarinus:

The times are evil, so are we,

And worsening with the times. We’ve finished living,
And so has probity. This must be said:
The world is vitiated, vile and ruinous.
Our crimes have reached their peak. Where now is found
Integrity and trust? Who now inclines
To modesty? We hate pride, but in others;
Our own, we cherish! Wicked, impious age!
What hemlock shall purge you? (l. 475-83)

The process of the drama shows more clearly than Guarinus himself knows
that evil times are not conditioned by history or men, but founded in the con-
dition of a world which is the battleground for the eternal strife between God
and Satan. Every word from the angel is countered by a word from the devil,
a perfect stalemate which seems to leave no space either for the will of man
or for poetry.
Poetry, however, offers one possibility that in Bidermann’s eyes legiti-
mates its existence – the potential to instil doubt, to irritate and thus ideally
preclude man’s falling under the powers of Hell by making him sharply and
fearfully aware of them (l. 160). The main difficulty of this strategy lies in
thinking and describing it:

Ah, who can contemplate the flames of hell

Eternally unceasing? Death’s long agony?
The serpents and the stinging worms of Conscience?
A thousand other things? – I’d rather spare
All speech than name but few! For what I name
Will be too little! nothing! My description
Will be sweet bliss and blessed in comparison
With sufferings in hell. (l. 2181-89)

The series of memory losses with which Bidermann confronts his audience
all converge on the construction of a Hell, the knowledge of which, in order
to become visual without the playwright resorting to merely spectacular stim-
uli of raw fear, is shown as having simply been lost to human memory and
 The Figure in the Carpet 73

now, by activating the whole cultural thesaurus of images of Hell, must be

brought forcefully back into remembrance. Thus, the general cultural amne-
sia attacked by Bidermann via the carpet metaphor is not only an abandon-
ment of debatable luxuries of imagination, but an excruciatingly dangerous
threat to man’s path to redemption.
The founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola, had already developed a
technique of how to imagine Hell in his Spiritual Exercises. The most impor-
tant textbook of Jesuit rhetoric in Europe, Cyprian Soarez’s Three Books
about the Art of Rhetorics (1560), points with equal insistence to the import-
ance of imagining Hell, paving the way for Bidermann’s combining the Clas-
sical rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian with Christian didactic poe-
try. At the end of the seventeenth century, Jacob Masens’ Dux Viae ad Vitam
puram, piam, perfectam, per Exercitia Spiritualia (1686) also strengthens the
concept of imagination, demanding it be forced to its extreme limits of pain.17
Following those scholars, Bidermann in the course of the history of imagina-
tion goes far beyond the boundaries of Jesuit theology, especially when he
stresses the difference between ritual and poetry,18 arguing that poetry, with
its power to inspire imagination, fulfils a specific theological function which
cannot be replaced by theological forms like ritual, liturgy or even treatises.
Following this idea, Bidermann develops an idea of Hell that shows it to
be just as orderly and planned as that of God’s sphere. Both God and the dev-
il fight on the same level, employing similar strategies to get the better of one
another. The protagonist of Hell in Bidermann’s play is Pan-Urgus, literally
the one who can make all things,19 even ordering Cenodoxus to return to the
game:

PANURGUS Now go, [Self-Love, and Hypocrisy]. I’ll not

report to our commander

17
See Günter Hess, ‘Die Kunst der Imagination: Jakob Bidermanns Epigramme im ikonogra-
phischen System der Gegenreformation’, in Text und Bild, Bild und Text, ed. by Wolfgang
Harms (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990), pp. 183-96.
18
Since the appearance of Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of
Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), this relationship has acquired some currency, as
is documented by Stanley J. Tambiah and others. See Ritualtheorien: Ein einführendes
Handbuch, ed. by Andréa Belliger and David J. Krieger, 2nd edn (Wiesbaden: Westdeut-
scher Verlag, 2003), pp. 227-50.
19
In François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52) Panurgus is a technician,
through whom Rabelais not only accepts but also satirizes the learning and pride of the new
knowledge of the Renaissance. In Cenodoxus he is the proper adversary of God because he
negates law, order, necessity and values by suggesting that anything goes, if only you have
the right technique.
74 Christian Sinn

Until I have my Cenodoxus back

Playing his game of pride to match my rules.
I’m damned if I’ll see him escape damnation! (l. 463-66)

Against the temptation of omnipotence represented by Panurgus, Bidermann

sets a strictly controlled and deeply moral concept of poetry, the poetry of the
comico-tragoedia, which serves to remind man of Hell by precluding a happy
ending from the outset. The fight between God and the devil thus preordained
to end with the sinner’s condemnation, it is only the temporal structure of Ce-
nodoxus which allows for God’s intervention: the multitude of plays within
the play all serve to temporarily cheat the devil of its prey. Even in the end
the doctor’s dead body comes back to life three times, until it finally gives up
its soul, while the devil’s growing impatience hints that his lack of time is his
one weakness:

PANURGUS Back to him quickly! Delay

Is dangerous. Urge him again, use all
The subtleties your zeal contrives, to rid
The house of Conscience; otherwise, we’re done. (l. 459-62)

But even the respite granted by God finally proves to be finite, when the
Conscience says to Cenodoxus: ‘You dawdle, tarry? / Wretch, these delays
will never serve your cause.’ (l. 1810-11). The shaping of time is of the great-
est importance from both theological and aesthetic perspectives. As a form of
limited deferment of the inevitable, the plays within the play alone cannot
change the course of justice. They rather instruct the audience that, in the
limited time allotted to him, mortal man must master a paradox: man should
and can only by playing acquire a form of life which is not play-acting,
meaning that the virtual reality of Bidermann’s play consists of a sphere in
which there is no play at all – a sphere which, of course, cannot in itself be
shown on stage.
Here lies the main historical difference between the reality hinted at by
Baroque metadrama and today’s awareness of reality’s intrinsic theatricality.
The modern mania for authenticity is only the reverse side of the irreversible
and unspoken understanding that authenticity is no longer possible, not even
in literature, and that man’s existence is not only communicated but must
even be supposed to be constituted by playing roles, social and otherwise.
Even then, Bidermann’s plays may be seen to contribute to the concept of
performativity which has become virulent after the ‘cultural turn’ towards a
semiotics of theatrical performances. As early as the seventeenth century,
 The Figure in the Carpet 75

Bidermann gives an ostentatious representation of ostentation20 as the found-

ing moment of what is nowadays called ‘performance’.21 Thus Bidermann,
shaking to its core the truth privilege automatically assumed by theological
discourse in his time, states that performance is the wellspring of theology,
truth and also philosophy, when, for example, he makes the actor playing the
part of Cenodoxus speak the lines: ‘I am not the actor, I am the Cenodoxus. I
am bad, but I should not be so and you should not be like I am. Therefore let
us convert together to the pure doctrine.’ It is the performance that creates the
power of ‘pure doctrine’, and emphatically not the doctrine that empowers
the performance. Seeing the complexity with which Bidermann reflects on
the relationship between poetry, ideology and rhetorics, it is obvious that Bi-
dermann was capable of employing the interference between ideology and
rhetorics to such an effect that any truth he made his characters utter is truth
only insofar as it points to the figure of self-referentiality painstakingly
woven into his text. This figure, in turn, creates a particularly paradoxical
bond between the text and its recipients, already investing Cenodoxus with
the very same ambivalence with which, centuries later in Henry James’ The
Figure in the Carpet, Gwendolen will reveal to herself – and to the reader –
the secret of her existence: ‘I don’t review [...] I’m reviewed!’22

20
See Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 87-92, who speaks of ‘presentational conventions’, which hint at the dramatical repre-
sentation itself.
21
Umberto Eco, ‘Semiotics of Theatrical Performance’, The Dramatic Review, 21 (1977), 107-
17.
22
The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols (New York: Scribner, 1937), XV, p. 268.
John Golder

Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and

Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-35/36

The Baroque period abounds in dramatists who held a mirror up their own profession and to the
arts of the stage as readily as to nature in Hamlet’s broader sense. The fifty-one years of
Molière’s lifetime, from 1622 to 1673, saw over thirty plays reach the Paris stage containing the
phenomenon of ‘internal performance’ or, in George Forestier’s words ‘action enchassée’, a per-
formance of some sort incorporated within the action of the play. This chapter considers four of
the earliest and most successful of these – Balthasar Baro’s Célinde (1628), two rival plays, both
called La Comédie des comédiens, by N. Gougenot and George de Scudéry (both 1633), and
Pierre Corneille’s masterpiece, L’ Illusion comique (1635) – and asks what it was about the state
of the theatre industry, about contemporary dramaturgy and performance conditions that
prompted such an exuberant outburst of self-referentiality.

In his Le Théâtre dans le théâtre, Georges Forestier examines forty examples

of French plays staged between 1628 and 1694 that incorporate some kind of
‘internal performance’, very often the play-within-a-play device.1 This chap-
ter will look at four of the earliest. One, Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique
(1635/36), is an acknowledged masterpiece. The others, less well-known, are
Balthasar Baro’s Célinde (1628) and two with the same title, La Comédie des
comédiens, both very probably first produced in 1633, one by the ‘sieur de
Gougenot’ and the other by Georges de Scudéry.2 Fascinating self-reflexive,
metatheatrical pieces, these plays present onstage, for an onstage audience,
action that is acknowledged within the play world as theatre. At the same
time, however, each differs from the others in both subtle and not-so-subtle

1
Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du dix-septième siècle, 2nd edn (Geneva:
Droz, 1996), Appendix II, pp. 351-54.
2
Balthasar Baro, Célinde (Paris: Fr. Pomeray, 1629); Le sieur de Gougenot, La Comédie des
comédiens, ed. by David Shaw (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1974); Georges de
Scudéry, La Comédie des comédiens, ed. by Joan Crow (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1975); Pierre Corneille, L’Illusion comique, ed. by Georges Couton, in Corneille: Oeuvres
complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), I, 613-88. Quotations
are from these modern editions, and all translations are my own. See also La Comédie des
comédiens et Le Discours à Cliton, ed. by François Lasserre, Biblio 17 (Tübingen: Gunter
Narr, 2000), pp. 323-35.
78 John Golder

ways. Indeed, there is a clear development from the first to the last of them.
In the first the inner performance is a mere plot device, and draws little
explicit attention to itself as theatre. In the second it is independent of the rest
of the action, but considerable attention is drawn to it as theatre. In the third
the play is just about incorporated into the plot, and again attracts consider-
able attention. In the fourth it is integrated utterly and completely. Corneille’s
play, his last flourish of flamboyant Baroque dramaturgy before he turned to
a more restrained, neo-Classical mode, is about the theatre in every way.
Interesting as they are, these structural issues need not detain us long: my
theme is really the nature of the mirror that these self-conscious plays hold up
to nature and the reflections shown in it.

1.
Baro’s 1628 ‘heroic poem’, as the title-page has it, is the first French exam-
ple we know of to incorporate an inner play, and it is as crucial to the plot of
Célinde as The Mousetrap is to that of Hamlet. The idea of an inner play is
first broached in Act II, when Amintor, Célinde’s father, and the father of a
young man named Floridan arrange for these two youngsters to marry – pre-
dictably, their inclinations lie elsewhere! – and to celebrate the event they
arrange a performance of Holoferne, the Biblical tale of Judith, played by
Célinde, and Holofernes, by Floridan. Act III is devoted to the inner play,
performed on a stage erected in Amintor’s house. As the Apocrypha insist,
Judith visits Holofernes. He falls for her and arranges to meet her that night.
In order to inspirit himself for their nocturnal encounter, he takes a drink …
and promptly falls asleep. Judith arrives, and, as he lies sleeping, stabs him.
Leaping from the stage, she brandishes the bloody dagger at her astonished
father, and declares that she loves someone else! (Incidentally, we discover
later, in Act IV, that Floridan isn’t really dead.) In other words, for Baro the
inner play serves merely as a convenient plot device. Which is not to say that
it does not implicitly raise any matters of theatrical interest – regarding the
popularity of private theatricals in the early years of the century, or the use of
plays based on Biblical stories in such circumstances – but the play is far less
rich in references to specific stage practices than those that followed three
seasons later.
The two ‘plays about actors’ probably reached the stage during 1633,
Gougenot’s early on and Scudéry’s prior to year’s end. Indeed, in all likeli-
hood, Gougenot’s tragi-comédie, which is about – and was written for and
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 79

played by – Bellerose’s troupe at the Hôtel de Bourgogne,3 still Paris’s only

permanent public playhouse in 1633, and Scudéry’s ‘newly conceived drama-
tic poem’ – written for Montdory’s rival troupe at the Marais tennis court4 –
followed upon the heels of one another: perhaps Scudéry hastily supplied a
script so as to enable the Marais troupe to capitalise on their rivals’ failure.5
La Courtisane, Gougenot’s inner play, takes up three of the play’s six acts.
The first two function as a kind of prologue to the inner play. The opening
scene is a genuine prologue, a profuse compliment-apology to the audience
by Bellerose, leader of the troupe, such as convention might have required on
the occasion of an eleventh-hour change to the advertised program: two of his
actors, Gaultier and Boniface, have argued and come to blows. Almost at
once the bickering pair appear, with arms in slings. They are quickly joined
by the other actors and a 750-line talkfest ensues on matters theatrical. The
troupe then presents La Courtisane – which has nothing whatever to do with
the preceding discussion.
Scudéry’s play is twice the length of Gougenot’s. But, if it bears a certain
formal similarity to Gougenot’s – Joan Crow argues that the dramatist seeks
to give it a more orthodox structure6 – it does present a timid technical ad-
vance. Scudéry’s inner play is bookended, but in no symmetrical way. Such
closure as it achieves, a perfunctory 10-line speech, is ambiguous as to its ad-
dressees, the actors in the inner or outer play. The prologue is a prose conver-
sation between actors under their own stage names; the inner play, a ‘tragi-
comédie pastorale’, preceded by a ‘prologue dialogué’, entitled L’Amour ca-
ché par l’amour (Love Hidden by Love), is a verse piece that they have re-
hearsed. The inner play is of no consequence: any play could follow the two-
act ‘prologue in dialogue form’.7
It all begins with Montdory explaining to us, the theatre audience, that he
reckons his colleagues have all lost a few marbles: they want to persuade him
that he is ‘a certain Mr de Blandimare’ (‘even though in reality my name is

3
This discussion is indebted to the introductions of both Shaw and Lasserre to their editions,
especially pp. v-xxvi and 40-86 respectively.
4
The Marais opened as Paris’s second permanent playhouse in January 1635.
5
On the dating of these two plays, see Shaw, p. vii, Crow, p. xi, and Lasserre, pp. 323-25.
6
Crow, p. x. I acknowledge a general indebtedness to Joan Crow’s introduction, pp. v-xix.
7
Indeed, on 28 November 1634, when Scudéry’s play was performed at the Arsenal for the
Queen, the inner play was replaced by another Marais play, Pierre Corneille’s first comedy,
Mélite (1629). According to Renaudot’s Gazette, 30 November 1634, Mélite became a
permanent replacement for Scudéry’s insipid original.
80 John Golder

Mondory’, he says8), that he is not on a stage, but in a street in the ‘town of

Lyons, that over there is an inn, and here a tennis court, where actors who are
not us, and yet who are, are putting on a pastoral’ – and that they should
pretend that they’re going to be there for twenty-four hours, even though the
pastoral only lasts an hour and a half – in which case he advises the
spectators to send out for food and beds, for they’ll need to wrap up warm if
they’re going to spend the night in a tennis court! He exits.
Enter the troupe’s doorkeeper, quickly joined by their drummer and Har-
lequin, who have been trying, in vain, to attract an audience. Two actresses,
wives of two of the actors, join them and they all talk about the theatre. Then
Blandimare enters, a rich merchant in search of his long-lost nephew. He
sees, from a poster on the wall, that the performance is due to begin soon.
However, when no other spectators turn up, the performance is cancelled.
Suddenly, he recognises the doorkeeper as his missing nephew and he invites
all the actors to eat with him at the inn where he’s staying. The next act takes
place in Blandimare’s room after supper. There’s more discussion, at the end
of which Blandimare commends his nephew’s choice of profession and de-
cides to become an actor himself. He joins the troupe and plays in the inner
play – which he happens to know by heart!
It would be going too far to say that the only similarity between the three
plays thus far described and that of Corneille is that they all contain inner
plays. But the truth is that L’Illusion comique is a considerably more complex
play than either of the others, and, at least until the final moments, a more
subtle apologia for theatre than Gougenot’s or Scudéry’s comparatively
artless efforts. Moreover, L’Illusion is a ‘play within a play within a play’ –
that’s about, on behalf of and for the theatre. Performed at the Marais, in late
1635-early 1636, by Montdory and his troupe, L’Illusion tells of a father,
Pridamant, who asks a magician, Alcandre, to help him find his son, Clindor.
As the father sits watching, Alcandre conjures up the spectacle of Clindor’s
life: he’s working as valet to Matamore, a commedia dell’arte braggart Cap-
tain, and has become his master’s rival in love; after twists too baffling to
recount, he ends up in prison and finally, after an amorous encounter in a
garden at night, he’s killed. Only when the father, the onstage audience, and
we, the bemused theatre audience, are convinced that Clindor is dead, does
the magician reveal that Clindor managed to escape from prison and that he
and his friends have become professional actors. The moonlit garden killing

8
Crow, p. 8. In fact, the real name of the Marais troupe’s leader was Guillaume des Gilberts.
Seventeenth-century French actors had shifting identities – a christened name, one stage
name for tragedy and another for comedy!
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 81

that we have just witnessed was the climax of a tragedy that they have been
performing in a Paris theatre. He raises a curtain and we see Clindor and
everyone else alive and well, and sharing out the afternoon’s box-office.
Corneille called the play ‘a strange monster’, which phrase he clarified
thus: ‘The first act is merely a prologue, the next three constitute an imperfect
comedy and the last is a tragedy.’9 In fact, Corneille might have considered it
more ‘monstrous’ than he did: a pastoral in Act I, a mixture of farce and com-
edy of intrigue in Acts II-IV, and a tragedy in Act V – the whole package
adding up to what the first edition called a ‘tragi-comedy’. In one sense, then,
in terms of generic homogeneity, the play is an utterly irregular sampler of all
the popular contemporary theatrical genres. In another, one might regard it as
wholly obedient to the strictest rules of unity: action that from one perspec-
tive moves from Touraine, to Bordeaux to Paris over a considerable period of
time might be said to have been conjured up inside a magician’s cave in the
merest twinkling of an eye. This apparent anomaly is not the least of the
play’s ‘illusions’.
Though plays such as Gougenot’s or Scudery’s on the one hand, and
Corneille’s on the other, are all apologias for the state, function and reputa-
tion of contemporary theatre, there is an important difference – namely that
with Corneille the essential illusion, the fiction, remains intact: the father and
the magician remain unquestionably themselves throughout, as do the central
characters of the magician’s conjured-up world (Clindor, Matamore etc.).
The illusion that they constitute is never broken, even when they are all
finally revealed to be actors.
Furthermore, despite first impressions, Corneille’s magician is not your
usual theatre director or playwright (creators of illusion). Neither is the father
any ordinary audience; neither compares the visions conjured up by the
magician to ‘theatre’. And, compelling as the equation may seem, Alcandre’s
‘dark cave [… where] Night lifts its heavy veil but to the rays of unnatural
light’ (I.1.2-4) need not be regarded as the description of an artificially-lit
indoor playhouse. Alcandre and Pridamant both see the visions as past reali-
ty, reproduced by real magic: the magician’s ‘spectres’ are ghosts, not actors
in disguise. The magician is not the author of the inner play, but simply re-
sponsible for its arrangement, choosing what to show and what not to show to
his audience of one. He falls somewhat short of fulfilling all the functions of
a real dramatist, whose work, according to Renaissance theory, would be
composed in the three successive operations of invention, disposition and

9
Couton, p. 613.
82 John Golder

elocution. Alcandre only has control over disposition, the other two being be-
yond his reach, in God’s hands and those of actors, respectively.
And while we, the theatre audience, have known all along that we’re in a
theatre, Pridamant thinks he’s in a cave in provincial France. Nor do we share
his perspective on events: while he is the father of a character within the illu-
sion, suffering along with his son, his pain is our pleasure. And when he sees
Clindor ‘restored to life’ and dividing up the box-office, we share his aston-
ishment. But, while we quickly realise what’s going on, he remains bewilder-
ed: ‘What’s this! Do they count out money amongst the dead?’, he asks
(V.6.1747). It never occurs to him that he’s been watching a theatrical perfor-
mance. Unlike the situation in the earlier plays, here the basic illusion is
never broken: all the characters remain behind the fourth wall, so to speak.
Everything has been as it was, so that the magician might reveal to Prida-
mant, in a speech often seen as the play’s raison d’être, just how prestigious
and worthy is his son’s new profession – that of professional actor.

2.
It is useful to think of these four plays as ‘Baroque’ – a label it became cus-
tomary several decades ago for literary historians to use –, markedly less con-
trolled and disciplined, governed by a much freer aesthetic, less straightfor-
ward and clearly defined, both in form and subject, than the neo-Classical
drama of the subsequent generation. There is no need to rehearse in detail
here the features of the Baroque aesthetic.10 Suffice it to mention a few key
words and phrases: delight in superficial embellishment; an appeal to the im-
agination and emotion, rather than the intellect and reason; themes of insta-
bility, surprise, disguise, metamorphosis; an indulgence in scenes of violence
and suffering designed to impact on the senses. In short, ‘Baroque’ denotes
restlessness, uncertainty, skepticism, subjectivity – and theatricality.11 It is
precisely at this moment, as our plays are in gestation, that the Parisian liter-
ary scene begins to reflect a more ordered and disciplined attitude towards
writing. However, the age responsible for the neo-Classical tragedy of Cor-
neille and Racine was similarly intoxicated by ballets, operas, comédies-
ballets and pièces à machines, the very antithesis of regular tragedy. Here, if
anywhere, was an age in which ‘nothing is but what is not’. It is not really
surprising, therefore, that the theatre, either as reality or metaphor – human

10
See, for example, Imbrie Buffum, Studies in the Baroque from Montaigne to Rotrou (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), especially pp. 29-39 &, on L’Illusion comique, pp.
164-72, and Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of his Art
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).
11
See P. J. Yarrow, Corneille (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 43-57.
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 83

beings as actors, life as a performance, the world as a stage –, should have

struck dramatists, Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca as well as Corneille,
as an ideal topic to write about, calling their plays The Great Stage of the
World or naming their playhouses ‘The Globe’. The whole enterprise of so-
cial living, of human perception and relationships, clearly had much to do
with emergent post-Renaissance theorising about the nature of dramatic illu-
sion.
But the preponderance of self-reference in the plays of this period must
surely tell us something about the theatre itself, as reality, as social institu-
tion, as profession, as art-form, at this specific moment in time. Of our four
plays only one has had a theatrical afterlife of any note, deservedly, Corneil-
le’s Illusion. In other words, they have spoken more eloquently to their con-
temporaries than to subsequent generations. It may be worth remembering
that of the twelve plays within plays created between 1633 and 1645/46, six
appeared between 1633 and 1635.
So, let us think now about the various ways in which these plays ‘hold a
mirror up to’ contemporary theatre practice – bearing in mind that Hamlet
overlooked to mention that it might be a distorting mirror, that the image it
reflects back to us will necessarily be to some degree inflected. Put simply,
the mirror’s purpose may be to advertise, to propagandise, to satirise, to satis-
fy the viewer’s curiosity to know how things work, to look backstage with
prurience. These playwrights may not have been writing for the benefit of fu-
ture historians, their work may nonetheless speak to us very eloquently. In-
deed, Edward Forman has recently asserted that ‘the authenticity [of Gouge-
not’s and Scudéry’s plays] allows us to take their documentary significance
at something close to face value.’13

3.
The mid-1630s were watershed years, one aspect of which is strikingly vis-
ualised in Abraham Bosse’s well-known engraving of the three most popular
farce actors of the years 1620 to 1630 on the stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne
(Fig. 1).16 When, in L’Illusion comique in 1635/36, Pridamant discovers from

13
David Shaw, p. VIII, goes further, calling Gougenot’s play, ‘as a document about the theatre
[… ,] possibly the most important play of the first half of the seventeenth century’. See also
Eveline Dutertre, Scudéry dramaturge (Geneva: Droz, 1988), p. 231 and ‘The actor’s pro-
fession in the 1630s’, in French Theatre in the neo-Classical Era, 1550-1789, ed. by W.D.
Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 164.
16
BnF, Est., Ed 30a. On this engraving, see the exhibition catalogue Abraham Bosse, savant
graveur: Tours, vers 1604-1676, Paris, ed. by Sophie Join-Lambert and Maxime Préaud
(Paris: BnF / Musée des Beaux Arts de Tours, 2004), pp. 135-36.
84 John Golder

the magician that his son Clindor has become an actor, he cries out in horror,
‘My son an actor! (V.6.1765) Like Scudéry’s unreconstructed Blandimare, a
year or two earlier, he sees the theatre as Bosse does here, all filth and ob-
scenity, low and vulgar farce, neither aesthetically nor morally attractive. He
who says ‘actress’, of course, says ‘whore’: as La Beau Soleil, an actress in
Scudéry’s play, puts it, the common perception is that an actress is ‘common
property […] the wife of any one of you is incontrovertibly the wife of the
entire troupe’ (77-79).

Figure 1. ‘L’Hôtel de Bourgogne’, by Abraham Bosse (c.1633). A farce scene in which

Turlupin robs Gaultier-Garguille, who is watching Gros-Guillaume make love to a woman.
(Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris)

By placing Gaultier’s eye-glasses in the very centre of his image, Bosse indi-
cates that eyes and looking are the key to the scene. Staring fixedly at the left
index finger of Gros-Guillaume – whose pop-eyed gaze is similarly riveted,
as it tickles the rim of his suggestively placed beret, unsubtly made to repre-
sent the exaggerated vaginal cleft of a not unwilling mistress17 – Gaultier is

17
Gros Guillaume’s obscene gesture calls to mind the opening words of Gaultier’s own Farce
de la querelle de Gaultier Garguille et de Perrine, sa femme (c. 1616), ‘As there is nothing
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 85

easy prey to Turlupin’s thieving fingers. Bosse’s engraving commemorates

the passing of these ‘bad and bawdy old days’. Gaultier-Garguille was buried
on 10 December 1633, shortly before this engraving appeared in the shops,
and only a matter of months after he had played himself in Gougenot’s play,
‘virtually on the threshold of his tomb’.18 But the days of farce were number-
ed.
Well before the end of the 1630s, all three farceurs in Bosse’s engraving,
who appear under their stage names in Gougenot’s play, were in their graves.
At the same time, new dramatists – the focus of whose concerns was above,
rather than below, the belt, in the heart and the mind – had come onto the
scene, our four authors for a start, and others, to whose plays Scudéry refers:
Jean Mairet (Sylvie, Chriseide and Silvanire), Pichou (Les Folies de Cardé-
nio, L’Infidelle Confidente and Philis de Scire), Racan (Les Bergeries), Scu-
déry himself (Ligdamon et Lidias and Le Trompeur Puni), Pierre Corneille
(Clitandre and La Veuve) and Jean de Rotrou (La Bague de l’oubli). And, to
bring this new work before the public, a new generation of actor-managers
had begun to appear. The two principals, Bellerose and Montdory, feature in
Gougenot’s and Scudéry’s play respectively. Bellerose, who brought a quiet-
ly rhetorical acting style to Paris in the 1620s, helped raise the prestige of the
serious actor. As did Montdory, a cutler’s son, who had established himself
in Paris in 1629, and, after working in a law office, attracted the patronage of
Cardinal Richelieu. Reputedly, he is the first great French actor never to have
played in farce. Indeed, on 15 December 1636 Guez de Balzac wrote to him:
‘[B]y cleansing your stage of all manner of filth, you can boast of having rec-
onciled […] sensual pleasure with virtue.’19
There are not many aspects of the business and craft of the theatre in the
early 1630s that completely escape mention in these plays. None, however, is
so insistently laboured, from Célinde onwards, as that which Balzac congrat-
ulates Montdory on having corrected, namely its poor moral record. The
plays re-echo with the classical dictum that the theatre’s function is to act as a
corrective, and that of the playwright to teach, as well as entertain. As Scudé-
ry’s Blandimare says: ‘The stage has become the scourge of vice and the
throne of virtue’ (II.1). All our plays stress the positive value, the usefulness
– moral and/or social – of the stage: from Baro’s Célinde, in which Amintor
says: ‘There is nothing more honest, more pleasant, nor more useful [than
theatrical performances]’ (III.1) to Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, where

more responsive to a tickle in the lower abdomen than a woman …’, in Emile Magne, Gaul-
tier-Garguille, comédien de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne (Paris: Louis-Michard, 1911), p. 184.
18
Magne, p. 62.
19
Quoted in Couton, pp. 1423-24.
86 John Golder

Pridamant confesses: ‘I was unaware of [the stage’s] lustre, utility and attrac-
tion’ (V.6.1811: my emphasis).
The manners in most need of correction are the sexual. Pleas in defense of
actors as models of virtuous behaviour by the likes of Gougenot’s Beauchâ-
teau and his wife, when neither of their real-life counterparts was a reliable
advertisement for clean-living, must have amused more than one spectator.
The irony of hearing a man ‘whom nothing chaste can possibly resist, and
who only wants to be loved’20 reject ‘the opinion of many that life in the the-
atre is nothing but debauchery, a licence for vice, foulness, idleness and in-
continence’ (451-55) cannot have passed unnoticed. And the presence in the
cast of the three celebrated farceurs, especially Gros Guillaume and Gaultier
Garguille, whose comic songs were carried more by force of obscenity than
wit, can hardly have been reassuring to an audience all too ready to confuse
the onstage and offstage lives of actors. ‘[Mlle de Beau Soleil] has rather too
smart a tongue for a woman’ (69-70), remarks Belle Ombre, in response to
Mlle de Belle Espine’s smutty equivoque, ‘If my husband’s tongue isn’t as
loose as yours, he certainly has other parts that do him proud’ (63-65). In her
long defence of her fellow-actresses against the charge of immorality and of
leading offstage the life-style of the onstage wife in the traditional conjugal
farce – ‘everyone […] imagines that farce is a reflexion of our real lives’ (74-
75) – La Beau Soleil shifts the blame onto the backstage attentions paid to
her and her female colleagues by excessively assiduous male spectators:

Every one of them believes he has the right to make us suffer his importunate demands […]
One will spend an entire evening sitting on a skip and swinging his legs, without saying a
word, just to show us his moustaches […]. Another […] will talk nothing but nonsense, as
trivial as his mind: and, ever so obligingly, will try to place a beauty spot on our bosom, but
only so that he can touch us there. (77-91)21

In view of these concerns it is surprising to find so few overt references to the

Church and/or any Church control exerted over the behaviour of actors:
Scudéry’s Belle Ombre attributes the absence of an audience to the fact that
‘the entire town is at its devotions today and they have been ordered to morti-
fy their flesh by avoiding the playhouse’ (I.5). Similarly, it is no accident –
rather obedience to the exigencies of plausibility and morality – that Baro
chose the appropriate Biblical role of Judith for his heroine: ‘For a father to

20
Testament du feu Gaultier Garguille (1634), cited by Mongrédien, p. 114.
21
On the actress and the backstage door, see Georges Forestier, ‘L’actrice et le fâcheux dans
les Comédies des comédiens du XVIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 80
(1980), 355-65.
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 87

agree to his daughter going on the stage (even in private), it was absolutely
necessary that the subject matter be religious, lest the portrayal of ungodly
love leave a bad impression on her soul.’22

4.
On the other hand, both Gougenot and Scudéry make copious reference to
matters of internal control and company organisation/administration. Gouge-
not’s Beauchâteau speaks of there being ‘twelve actors at most’ constituting a
troupe (433). Anxious to join the troupe, he observes that, once Gros Guillau-
me and Turlupin have settled their differences and agreed to ‘take an equal
share in the rewards accruing from the work [of the troupe]’, (963-64) it only
remains for them to go before a notary and ‘draw up [a] partnership agree-
ment’ (969). Predictably, the picture Gougenot’s propagandist brush paints is
rosier than reality. His is a world governed by democratic principles of equal-
ity and fraternity, where differences are settled. ‘You think, Monsieur Gaul-
tier,’ says Bellerose, who in his role as company orateur, endeavours to re-
solve the casting dispute and restore peace between Gaultier and Boniface,

that your profession as a lawyer gives you preference over Monsieur Boniface, who is only a
shopkeeper. Indeed, we all know that a doctorate gives considerable prerogative to the mind,
that a knowledge of literature gives rise to fine thoughts and facilitates one’s understanding,
but these are not what an actor needs most. (198-204)

Gaultier is a lawyer, Boniface a draper, the Capitaine a soldier. Gougenot’s

theatre is a great equaliser, welcoming all ranks and conditions of men – and
women. And, in Bellerose’s troupe, all make an equal investment and draw
equal profits: as Guillaume reminds Gaultier, ‘People in the theatre recognize
neither subservience nor control’ (532-53). That is not to say that an absolute
equality reigned across the board. For example, the joint-stock reward system
drew a clear distinction between sharers and wage-earners. Indeed, the entire
second act of the play hinges on the decision of Gros Guillaume and Turlu-
pin, small-part players here, to leave the troupe, should their request to be
promoted, to ‘draw a share and not a wage’, be rejected. For Shaw, ‘the dif-
ference between salaried ‘employees’ and ‘shareholders’ is brought out
‘more clearly [here] than [in] any other contemporary document’.23
For Corneille, the need to bring his L’Illusion comique to a swift conclu-
sion supercedes any question of specifying whether his inner-play tragedians
have instituted a graduated share system: the stage-direction reads simply, ‘A

22
Forestier, pp. 330-31, n.17.
23
Comédie des comédiens, p. VIII.
88 John Golder

curtain is drawn back and all the actors are seen sharing out their takings’
(V.6.1746). Georges Couton comments on the actors’ accountancy proce-
dures: ‘Each day costs are deducted from the door takings, then what’s left is
shared out, not according to a fixed division, but by going round the troupe:
one livre for X, one for Y, one for Z … until everything is distributed.’24 This
is certainly the stipulation made before notaries on 7 April 1625, when Fran-
çois Chastelet (the ‘real’ Beauchâteau), along with Jean Valliot and his wife,
Gros-Guillaume, Turlupin and Gaultier Garguille undertook to play together,
sharing profits and losses equally, on pain of a fine of 500 livres.25 But it was
no more standard practice early in the century than it was in 1674, when
Samuel Chappuzeau arged that it was unfair ‘that those […] who render little
service […] have the same advantages as those who render considerable
service’.26 When Valleran Le Conte and his colleagues made arrangements
on 22 October 1615 for a four-year association, they agreed upon a most une-
qual division of profits: from 2 full shares for Valleran, Pierre Hazard and
Barnabé David, 2 shares for Léonard Cutin and his wife, 1 share for Jacques
Mabille and a two-thirds share for Charles Guérin.27 Even if there is no for-
mal hierarchy of share-division in Bellerose’s troupe, some receive a larger
share of the profits than others – or, at least, think they should. Doing no
more than emulate the ‘real-life’ Montdory, who according to Gaultier’s sa-
tirical Testament (1634) habitually took ‘twice as much as the others’,28 once
accepted into the troupe Gros-Guillaume insists his participation will be con-
ditional on his being given what amounts to a lion’s share.
On the other hand, it is not Bellerose alone, as autocratic troupe-leader,
who will decide the fate of the two bit-players, but the entire company, in-
cluding the three women sharers: ‘[W]e must necessarily submit our wishes
to the opinion and judgment of all our colleagues’ (194-97: my emphasis)
The same applies to Beauchâteau’s admission to the troupe. When arranging
the meeting at which the decision will be made, democratically, Bellerose not

24
Corneille: Oeuvres complètes, p. 1447 (my emphasis).
25
See Alan Howe, Le Théâtre professionel à Paris, 1600-1649 (Paris: Centre historique des
Archives nationales, 2000), pp. 270-71. Of the 20 partnership agreements summarised by
Howe, drawn up between 1600 and 1649 and detailing sharing arrangements, 18 specify a
clear hierarchy of shares.
26
Le Théâtre français, ed. by G. Monval (Paris: Bonnassies, 1875), p. 98.
27
For a complete transcription of the documents, see Howe, pp. 355-60.
28
Gaultier Garguille, Chansons de Gautier Garguille, ed. by Edouard Fournier (Paris, 1858),
quoted in Georges Mongrédien, Les Grands comédiens du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Société de
l’édition ‘Le Livre’, 1927), p. 30. Elie Cottier, Le Comédien Auvergnat Montdory
(Clermond-Ferrand: Mont-Louis, 1937), p. 140, says that Montdory drew a double share,
and Bellerose at the Bourgogne a share and a half.
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 89

only emphasises that he will not be sole judge, but stresses that the company
actresses will participate in the assessment of Beauchâteau’s talent:

We shall meet this evening at Monsieur Gaultier’s lodging, where […] you shall receive the
satisfaction you want and we that of giving it you; and these ladies, if they please, will take
the trouble to give their opinion. (406-10)

It would be rash, solely on the evidence of Bellerose’s remark, to conclude

that gender equity was the order of the day: involvement in the company
discussions did not necessarily mean having voting rights.

Figure 2. Frontispiece to the first edition of Scudéry’s La Comédie des comédiens (Paris:
Augustin Courbé, 1635)

If we turn now to performance practices, again we find our texts to be rich in

detailed references. The Tambour of Scudéry’s travelling troupe, accompa-
nied by the Harlequin, literally walks the streets of Lyon ‘drumming up’
business for the afternoon’s performance of a pastoral at a local jeu de paume
(Fig 2).29 Unfortunately, on this occasion to no effect:

29
The lower half of the frontispiece illustration to the first edition of Scudéry’s play appears to
illustrate the moment at the end of I.1, when a masked clown (Harlequin?) and a drummer
(Tambour) meet the doorkeeper (portier).
90 John Golder

There isn’t a main street or back alley that we haven’t been down half a dozen times, more
assiduously than if we had been under a magistrate’s orders to patrol them. […] I even did
more than I was supposed to, for what the posters showed them to look at I taught them to
listen to: there’s isn’t a crossroads where I’ve not played town-crier. (31-42)

Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer takes Harlequin’s advertising methods as evi-

dence that, except in the provinces, by 1632/33 posters had replaced drums
and criers as the most effective means of advertising: ‘[T]hey have a drum-
mer and a harlequin do the rounds, as minor troupes did in small towns’.30
Perhaps she had failed to notice that Gougenot pointedly sets his play in the
large town of Lyons? By a happy coincidence the earliest surviving, but un-
dated, French theatre poster advertises a play by Scudéry, Ligdamon et Li-
dias.31 The fact that the play was probably first given in 1629/30 has caused
commentators to date it ‘before 1633’. While early posters rarely carried any
actors’ or authors’ names, they did name the troupe and, of course, their
venue: ‘that there are actors in this town and the tennis court where they are
playing’ (I.2). It was not unusual for troupes to over-dignify themselves – the
real ones in Scudéry’s Ligdamon – by calling themselves the ‘Chosen
Troupe’, the fictional ones by the common strategy of dubbing themselves
‘Actors in Ordinary to the King’! (‘BLANDIMARE: (Reading the poster)
The King’s Players. Ah, that goes without saying!’32) And there is no hint of
exaggeration in Belle Ombre’s reference to ‘the poster’s lies’ (I.1): the Ligda-
mon et Lidias poster asserts immodestly, ‘The trivial amount you’ll pay at the
door wouldn’t buy you a single scene of this divine play’.33 Nor, as Scudéry’s
Comédie suggests, could potential spectators be sure to find the ticket prices

30
L’Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre français à Paris de 1600 à 1673 (Paris: Nizet,
1960), p. 112. Posters were hardly a novelty in the 1620s. W. L. Wiley, Early Public Thea-
tre in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 219-20, quotes an
agreement of January 1599 in which Benoist Petit seeks assurance that Valleran Le Conte
will perform in farces, otherwise, ‘the said Petit will not be able in any way to name the said
Valleran on the posters that will be put up’.
31
This poster – for ‘Les Comédiens de la troupe choisie à l’Hôtel de Bourgogne’ – is pre-
served at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal; see Exposition du IIIe centenaire de la mort de
Molière, 1973-74 (Paris: Hummerlé & Petit, 1973), p. 14. The ‘chosen troupe’ was the
‘King’s Players’.
32
Although Valleran Le Conte’s company is described in legal documents of 1598 and 1599
as ‘King’s Players’, Louis XIII dispensed no annual subsidies until 1629 (John Lough, Paris
Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford University
Press, 1957), pp. 24-25.
33
Quoted by Deierauf-Holsboer, Mise en scène, p. 113.
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 91

printed on the poster: it is the portier, Belle Ombre, who tells Blandimare
that they cost ‘eight sols!’ (I.5).34
If early posters announced the starting time of a performance, they never,
of course, indicated its playing-time. Although the reference is as slippery as
the ‘two-hour traffic’ of Shakespeare’s stage, Gougenot’s Beauchâteau does
say that ‘twelve actors […] have to enact in five acts and two hours what in
the real world might have happened to a thousand people in twenty years’
(433-36). But, hardly a considered remark about playing-time, this is rather a
general theoretical statement about theatre as ‘a digest of the world’ (431),
condensing ‘th’accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass’. Scudéry’s
Blandimare may be nearer the mark when he implies a much shorter playing-
time. Alluding to the consideration increasingly given to the unity-of-time
rule and the real time/stage time opposition in the manufacture of dramatic
illusion, he says that plays ‘should only last for an hour and a half, but these
irregular madmen make sure [they] last for twenty-four, and call that follow-
ing the rules’ (25-27).
Blandimare has seen the troupe’s posters at street intersections and, if the
frontispiece illustration to the first edition of Scudéry’s play is to be read
literally, on either side of the entrance-door to tennis courts (Fig. 2). It was
Blandimare himself, in his real-life persona of Montdory, who converted the
Marais tennis court – where Scudéry’s play is actually, though in a Lyons
tennis court fictionally, taking place – into a permanent public playhouse in
1634.35 That neither Gougenot nor Scudéry draw special attention to such a
venue is not surprising: converted tennis courts were capable of housing far
more complex mises-en-scène than the multiple settings required by both
these dramatists.
In his opening address – or ‘compliment’, as seventeenth-century troupe-
leaders called this conventional practice – Gougenot’s Bellerose says that
‘our stage is set for our Play about Actors’ (42-43). If the first 1080 lines
offer no evidence of what that setting might represent – the action takes place
‘on the stage where the actors are playing’ and was probably played in front
of curtains – the inner play, La Courtisane, is very different. Obedient to the
rules of time and place as understood in the early 1630s, its action runs for
fewer than twenty-four hours and is set in Venice, for the most part in a sin-
gle street. There are references to a ‘lodging […] close by’, ‘this palace’ and

34
In 1619 the Lieutenant civil limited the price of theatre tickets in Paris to ‘five sous in the pit
and ten in the boxes and galleries’, N. de Lamare, Traité de la police, 4 vols (Paris: 1705-
38), I.440, quoted by Lough, p. 14.
35
See John Golder, ‘The Théâtre du Marais in 1644: a new look at the old evidence concern-
ing France’s second public theatre’, Theatre Survey, 25.2 (November 1984), pp. 127-66.
92 John Golder

a ‘canal’ (1084-6), and a ‘gondola’ (1853). Much use is made of the heroine
Caliste’s window (‘Caliste is at her window’ (1102), ‘She […] closes her
window’ (1147)) and for a couple of scenes the action moves inside her hou-
se: ‘Caliste and Filame go into a room, sit on a small day-bed. The room re-
mains open’ (1847). The action opens at night: ‘It is as the night comes on,’
(2) says a stage direction, after which a new day dawns: ‘The cock is singing
already, / Up, fair Caliste, get up!’ With complicated love intrigues, consider-
able onstage violence, one character attacked and stripped naked by robbers
and a case of cross-dressing (Clarinde is breeched throughout as Floridor36),
La Courtisane is a typical example of 1630s’ pre-Classical tragi-comedy.
Indeed, the multiple setting implied by Gougenot’s text is the staging sys-
tem required by the plays, largely tragi-comedies, which make up the touring
repertory of Scudéry’s travelling troupe. These are ‘all [the plays] of the late
[Alexandre] Hardy’, ‘Pyrame [et Thisbé] by Théophile [de Viau], ‘Sylvie’,
‘Chriséide [et Arimand], ‘Silvanire’ [all by Mairet],‘Les Folies de Cardénio’,
‘L’Infidèle confidente’, ‘Philis de Scire’ [all by Pichou],‘Les Bergeries’ by
Monsieur Racan, ‘Ligdamon [et Lidias], ‘Le Trompeur puni’ [both by
Scudéry himself], ‘Mélite’ [by either Rampalle or Corneille, ‘Clitan-dre’, ‘La
Veuve’ [both by Corneille] and ‘La Bague de l’oubli’ [by Rotrou] (263-82).
These had all been premiered at the Hôtel de Bourgogne by Easter 1632,
staged by the theatre’s décorateur, Laurent Mahelot. Mahelot’s celebrated
Mémoire contains the detailed production notes and sketches for all of them –
except three. Two of the three, Clitandre and La Veuve, early pieces by Pierre
Corneille, had probably been created at the Sphère tennis court by Montdo-
ry’s company in the 1630/31 and 1631/32 seasons respectively.37 The third is
Mélite, commonly assumed to refer to Corneille’s first play,38 also first
brought, by Montdory, to the stage of the Berthault tennis court.39 However,
as there is in Mahelot’s Mémoire a Mélite, convincingly shown by H.C.
Lancaster to be an alternative title for Rampalle’s Belinde, another Hôtel de

36
Was it pure chance that caused Gougenot to choose Floridor, the stage-name of Josias de
Soulas, who (a) comes first to historians’ notice in 1635, playing Corneille’s Mélite in
London; (b) makes his debut at the Marais in 1638, and (c) nearing the peak of his fame,
assumes Bellerose’s own position as director of the Bourgogne troupe? Can it be that the
military career, which, according to Mongrédien, p. 133, he took up in 1633, was short-lived
and that within the year he had made enough of a name for himself on the stage to warrant
Gougenot’s using it here?
37
John Golder, ‘The stage settings of Corneille’s early plays’, Seventeenth-century French
Studies, 7 (1985), pp. 184-97, and Couton, p. lxx
38
Crow, p. 62.
39
Golder, ‘Stage settings’, p. 184.
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 93

Bourgogne tragi-comedy and also listed in Mahelot’s Mémoire,40 we should

perhaps pause before leaping to the conclusion that it belongs with Clitandre
and La Veuve. Our hesitation is the more justified, if we recall that Rampal-
le’s play was first published by Pierre Drohet, in 1630 – in Lyons, the very
town where Scudéry’s play is set!

5.
Scudéry seems to have been at pains to give his actors an authentic repertoire.
Not only are all the titles ‘real’, but they might very plausibly have consti-
tuted the repertory of a troupe under Montdory’s leadership at the time Scu-
déry’s text was published, i.e. prior to 28 November 1634. Since the plays we
know to have originated at the Hôtel de Bourgogne were all published by
1634 – Scudéry’s own Trompeur puni was in print by mid-January 1633 – by
virtue of being public, they were available for any troupe to perform. Only
two of the remaining plays, Mélite and Clitandre, had been published by
then: La Veuve only went into print during the course of 1634. In other
words, these three plays are understood to have been created by Montdory’s
company, who have ownership rights over them until they are printed. There
can be no debate about the legitimacy of including any of the titles Scudéry
proposes.
Of the two Comédies, Scudéry’s is the more interesting from the point of
view of staging. As Dutertre has noted, the action of its frame play is set,
‘successively in the street, at the door of a tennis court, at an inn, then again
in the street’ and, finally, ‘at the inn’.41 It needs, therefore, two (probably
practicable) compartments, a tennis court and an inn, one either side of the
forestage, the open playing area before them representing the street. After a
brief discussion between the Prologue and the Argument, ‘the setting changes
to become woodlands’ (471). In other words, we might imagine that a trav-
erse curtain – hung just upstage of the side compartments and against which
the frame play has been played – is drawn, to reveal the bucolic setting re-
quired by L’Amour caché par l’amour. This we might imagine to consist of

40
Le Mémoire de Mahelot, Laurent et d’autres décorateurs de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne, ed. by
H.C. Lancaster (Paris: Champion, 1920), pp. 21-5. H.C. Lancaster, A History of French
Dramatic Literature, 9 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929), supposes
that Mahelot mentions neither Gougenot’s nor Scudéry’s play, because (a) Gougenot’s was
no longer being played when he compiled his Mémoire and (b) Scudéry’s was written for the
rival company, and still unpublished. He also asserts that Rampale changed his title from
Bélinde to Mélite in order that the Bourgogne might have a similarly titled piece with which
to oppose Corneille’s play (I.II.653 & 657).
41
Scudéry dramaturge, p. 219.
94 John Golder

rocks and bushes, elements placed upstage right and left, behind which char-
acters are required to hide in an overhearing scene (990-91 & 999-1001).
If both playwrights demonstrate contemporary stage practice to advan-
tage, they are no less interested to promote other arts of the stage, in particu-
lar those of the actor. There is some dispute, however, over the extent to
which Gougenot’s play reflects the membership of the Bourgogne troupe in
1632/33. Since he does not believe that by 1632 women were yet authorised
to sign leases (one of the historian’s most reliable sources of information re-
garding the composition of troupes), Shaw argues that ‘it is […] only from
[Gougenot’s La Comédie des comédiens that we learn the real list of [Gros-
Guillaume’s] company’.42 Lasserre disagrees – ‘[I]t is simply a list of names’,
he wrote in 1998 – arguing that some of these might have been editorial
additions.43 In 2000, Alan Howe sided with Shaw: four of the actors named
by Gougenot, he writes, Beauchâteau, Mlle Beauchâteau (Madelaine Du
Pouget), Mlle Bellerose and Mlle La Fleur (Jeanne Buffequin), were very
probably members of the Bourgogne company at this time, and should pro-
perly be added to the signatories of the lease document of 5 August 1632:
Robert Guérin (Gros-Guillaume), Hughes Quéru (Gaultier-Garguille), Henri
Legrand (Turlupin), Pierre Le Messier (Bellerose) Philbert Robin (Le Gaul-
cher) and Louis Galian (Saint Martin).44 On the other hand, although Belle-
rose was, indeed, as the play insists, the troupe’s spokesman at the time, in
dramatising Beauchâteau’s admission to the troupe, Gougenot massages his-
tory a little: Beauchâteau had, in fact, joined several years earlier, in August
1626.45
While both dramatists are interested in the actor as social animal as much
as stage artist, Scudéry is rather more concerned with the latter. Which is not,
however, to imply that his prescription for the ideal actor offers us any clear
impression of what pre-Classical acting might have looked and sounded like:

42
Comédie des comédiens, p. xi. Although Bellerose is the troupe leader in the play-world, it is
unlikely that his namesake assumed that role at the Hôtel de Bourgogne until the death of
Gros-Guillaume in 1634.
43
‘Un ouvrage sous-estimé: La Comédie des comédiens de Gougenot’, Papers on French
Seventeenth-Century Literature, 25 (1998), p. 518.
44
Howe, p. 116. For the 5 August 1632 lease, see Eudore Soulié, Recherches sur Molière et
sur sa famille (Paris: Hachette, 1863), p. 164.
45
Lasserre, ‘Un ouvrage sous-estimé’, p. 513 and Howe, p. 273. Gougenot may also have mas-
saged the ‘real’ Beauchâteau’s character a little. The portrait in Gaultier-Garguille’s (albeit
satirical) Testament of someone ‘whom nothing chaste can possibly resist’ (quoted in Mon-
grédien, p. 115) hardly measures up to Gougenot’s portrait of someone who, ‘to be account-
ed a good actor’, must be ‘learned, bold, obliging, humble, a good conversationalist, sober,
modest and, above all, hard-working’ (450-52).
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 95

First, nature must give [the actor] an attractive appearance, for this is what makes the initial
impression on his audience: he should carry himself well; be free and unrestricted in his
movement, have a clear, strong voice, and speech that is free from poor pronounciation and
untainted by any provincial accent. […] He should have the wit and sound judgment to ena-
ble him to understand his part, and a good memory to learn it quickly and retain it for ever
after. He needs some knowledge of both history and legend; otherwise he will talk nonsense
and regularly misconstrue his text, be as out of tune as a tone-deaf musician; he will move
like a bad dancer, capering half an hour out of time and rhythm, which will lead to his
striking so many extravagant attitudes and removing his hat inappropriately, the way one
sees on the stage. Moreover, all these qualities must be accompanied by a modest boldness,
which, without being either impudent or timid, maintains an equitable moderation. Finally,
his face must be able to register tears, laughter, love, hatred, indifference, scorn, jealousy,
anger, ambition – in short, every possible passion – whenever they are required. (225-50)

Using language that occasionally echoes Blandimare’s, Bellerose seems to

imply that a good actor needs the advantages of nature, plus others that he
must acquire for himself. He lays particular emphasis on elegance, control
and moderation of both physical and vocal expression, underpinned by intel-
ligence. If his primary requirement is aesthetic, that the actor present well, his
final word is that the actor be able to express emotion in the face – a tacit
acknowledgement that, as the more Baroque and expansive, action-packed
drama of the pre-Classical era begins to give way to the more regulated and
intense, psychological drama of the Classical period, a more internalised,
contained mode of acting is developing, in which the face and the voice are
the primary signifiers.46
Bellerose’s reference to a presumably conventional etiquette of hats – the
only fleeting glimpse he gives of the actor ‘at work’ – and Boniface’s refer-
ence to his wife’s gloves seem somehow to suggest a further recommenda-
tion, namely that good manners never be forgotten. In fact, the wearing of
gloves, in both comedy and tragedy, was standard practice until late in the
eigteenth century.47 ‘You always have to have needless extras in your cos-
tumes’, scoffs the tight-fisted husband, allowing us a glimpse, not only of the
patriarchal culture of their domestic life, but also of the fact that the provision

46
Cf. Dutertre’s reading of this speech (p. 219). Scudéry is surely having a little fun at the
great actor’s expense when – having put his ‘definition of the ideal actor’ into the mouth of
Montdory, an actor who (as Blandimare), having played in the troupe of the duc d’Orange,
brought Corneille to the world’s notice, acted for Louis XIII and secured the patronage of
Richelieu, known as ‘Roscius’ – he makes him request a ‘try out’: ‘[I]f you agree, I shall try
out in a role tomorrow’ (369-70).
47
See John Golder, ‘Costume in the second half of the [eighteenth] century’, in French
Theatre in the neo-Classical Age, pp. 524-25.
96 John Golder

of stage costumes was the responsibility of the individual actor, not the
troupe, ‘What’s the point of these ribbons, lace and embroidery on your
gloves […] It’s all a drain on my purse’ (26-29). Kept on short supply, Mlle
Boniface despairs of being able to dress herself appropriately, ‘with orna-
mentation suitable for empresses and queens’ and is fearful that ‘instead of
gold brocade, brocatelle, flowered satins and taffetas, and other expensive
material’, she will be reduced to appearing in ‘gilded leather, garishly painted
fabrics with cheap tinsel, and instead of fine pearls, Venetian beads’ (843-
49).
There is a reference in Bellerose’s brief remarks to the actor’s need for a
prodigious memory. His suggestion that lines must be learnt quickly, then
subsequently retained for ever, may well contain very little exaggeration. The
fifteen-plus plays listed by Scudéry’s Blandimare (263-82), all played in
repertory and not in runs, may be the only example we have of a travelling
troupe’s repertoire in the 1630s. We are even less well informed about a
troupe’s playing schedule at this time. Such evidence as we do have, however
– that performances were given ‘at least three times a week’ 48 – suggests that
the onus on the repertory actor’s memory in the 1630s was as heavy as that
placed on any of Molière’s actors a few decades later. Molière’s Les Fâ-
cheux, conceived, written, rehearsed and presented in a fortnight, may be an
extreme example, but the evidence of La Grange’s Registre makes abundant-
ly clear, not only that an actor had to hold numerous roles in his head at any
one time, but also that there could have been little time for, especially group,
rehearsals.49 Private study must have constituted the bulk of an actor’s pre-
paratory work. And since any one play might remain in the repertoire for
many seasons, without being given frequent or regular performances, an actor
was indeed expected to retain his lines in his head ‘for ever’.
Preparations for a new production, it would seem, began with a company
meeting at which roles are cast and individual parts distributed. ‘As we’re
going to cast the play,’ Bellerose tells his colleagues, ‘you must come and get
your parts, so that we can get on with learning them and try out our first play
as soon as possible’ (639-42). Then follows a period of ‘study’ and consulta-
tion, after which they proceed to (probably only a handful of) group re-
hearsals: ‘Let us go’, says Bellerose, ‘and rehearse our first play, and put it
on as soon as possible’ (1080-81).

48
AN, Min. centr., XV.21 (2 September 1611), reproduced in Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer, La
Vie d’Alexandre Hardy (Paris: Nizet, 1972), p. 205.
49
Le Registre de La Grange, ed. by Bert and Grace Young, 2 vols (Paris: Droz, 1947).
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 97

Although Gougenot makes no mention of the kind of role to which each

actor might be suited, he implies that lines of business were the order of the
day. It is in part over the emploi of kings that Gaultier and Boniface have
fallen out: ‘[Y]ou both claim a preference for the characters of kings in plays’
(176-77). If the troupe has more kings / noble fathers than it needs, it could
do with a juvenile lead: ‘(Y)ou know,’ says Bellerose, ‘that you don’t have a
young man to play lovers: we must make a concerted effort to choose some-
body decent from amongst the thousands who are turning up now that word
of our business has spread.’ (315-19) And the Capitaine – a real soldier be-
fore becoming a stage braggart, and now no more able than Corneille’s Mata-
more to distinguish between art and life – is anxious to establish that ‘[i]f
[they] needed two captains’, it would be ‘something [he] could not tolerate’
(323-24).50 While these self-conscious plays offer modern historians an abun-
dance of evidence concerning the pre-Classical stage, their original purpose
was different, probably to give an insatiably inquisitive audience a peep
behind the curtain into the ‘reality’ of contemporary theatre and the on- and
offstage lives of those who created it, and certainly to proselytise on behalf of
an art form making desperate efforts to renew itself.
The establishment by cultivated women of literary salons where literature,
poetry, language, psychology were discussed helped generate a new refine-
ment of taste, of manners in literature – and in theatre writing – and gradually
encouraged respectable women to frequent the playhouses. A more refined
theatre of moral dilemma began to replace the colourfully rambustious drama
of the earlier years. A prime mover in these developments was the Prime
Minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who drafted and commissioned plays, gave
France its first proscenium-arch stage, was an active patron of the arts and
who not only rebuilt the Sorbonne, but, in 1634, established the French
Academy. According to article XXIV of its charter, the Academy’s main
function was ‘to […] render [our language] pure, eloquent and capable of
treating the arts and the sciences’, and also to maintain literary tastes, to
which end Richelieu gave them for critical examination the work of contem-
porary writers (e.g. Corneille’s Le Cid). Nothing was more responsible for
bringing into focus the enormous amount of critical thinking, recently come
from Renaissance Italy, about the theory of drama and the stage, and was fur-
ther refining the neo-Classical aesthetic in France.
It is commonly said that it was for the sake of one speech – which
acknowledges Richelieu and alludes to the favour theatre had long enjoyed at

50
Lasserre, ‘Un ouvrage sous-estimé’, pp. 514-16, insists that Gougenot’s ‘Capitain is not yet
a Capitano (a stage braggart), but a soldier, who is a candidate for various roles’.
98 John Golder

court – that Corneille wrote his L’Illusion comique. The speech in question is
that of the magician in the play’s final moments, disabusing Pridamant of his
attitude to theatre:
At present the theatre
Is so prestigious everyone adores it;
And what your age looked on with scorn
Is today the darling of all men of good taste,
The talk of Paris, what the provinces all want,
The gentlest diversion of our princes,
The people’s delight, the pleasure of the great,
It holds first place amongst their pastimes:
And those who with profound wisdom
And great care keep all our nation safe
Find in the sweet joys afforded by the stage
The means to relax from such demanding tasks.
Even our great King, that thunderbolt of war,
Whose name strikes fear in every corner of the earth,
His head crowned with laurels, deigns sometimes
Lend ear and eye to the French stage.
It’s there that Parnassus displays its marvels;
And to which the finest minds give up their evenings;
And those on whom Apollo casts his most favourable eye
Devote to it a share of their learned work.
Besides, if wealth’s regarded as a measure of worth,
The theatre is a business that pays well;
Your son has gained more wealth and honour from this trade
Than he’d have won by staying home with you.
So, in short, put this common error from your mind,
And stop feeling so miserable about his good fortune. (V.5.1781-1806)51

This is the raison d’etre of all our plays. The picture they all paint, to a cer-
tain extent, is rosily attractive: rarely does any of them have a bad word to
say about the stage or about actors. And while they are not beyond occasion-
ally treating their subjects with gentle mockery, there is not much comic dis-
tortion or irony of tone in them. Everything and everyone are seen in a posi-

51
As he wrote these lines, Corneille surely had in mind the conversion of Blandimare,
Scudéry’s bourgeois merchant and would-be actor: ‘One would be out of ones mind to scorn
something so estimable: the theatre, venerated for as many centuries as science has flour-
ished; the theatre, once the diversion of emperors and topic of intellectual discussion: the
portrait of the passions, the picture of human life, talking history, philosophy made visible,
the scourge of vice and the throne of virtue. No, no, far from thinking it an abomination, I
see how you all glory in it, and I praise my nephew’s good sense in joining your troupe: and
to show you that […] far from suspecting your profession of ignominy, I consider it glo-
rious, if you will have me, I should like to join too.’ (345-58).
 Holding a Mirror up to Theatre 99

tive light. Indeed, if anything, it all reads less like a report on past achieve-
ments, and more like wishful thinking on the part of a profession in need of
strong support. Here is the distortion to which Hamlet failed to alert us.
Manfred Jurgensen

Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play

Believing that all human life consists of self-conscious role-playing, Frisch adopts a theatre of
rehearsal as paradigm for staging imaginary variations of personal identity. In his comedy Bio-
graphy, marriage is seen as the most intimate social model of role-playing. Linking its drama-
turgy to the reconstruction of a lost game of chess, the fictional freedom of self-expression as-
sumes fatal finality. Antoinette is the ‘queen’ with ‘all the moves’, while checkmate Kürmann
loses his life. Based on playful identification of the actors with the spectators, Biography trans-
forms the audience into participants. In an almost Brechtian manner, it demonstrates the model
character of human identification, thereby allowing the theatre to reveal and play itself. The
place of comedy is the stage, ‘completely identical with itself’. The ultimate self-realisation is
death. Live rehearsals prove terminal. The comedy about death reflects the paradoxical nature of
fiction and reality, identity and authorship. ‘Life theatre’ is a play within a play, a rehearsal of
variable selves until the game is over.

Max Frisch’s Biografie: Ein Spiel appeared in 1967, at the height of the au-
thor’s international reputation, both as a playwright and a novelist.1 It takes
its subject from a couple of lines, spoken by Vershinin, in Act One of Che-
khov’s classic Three Sisters:

I often think: what if one were to begin life over again, but consciously? If one life, which
has already been lived, were only a rough draft, so to say, and the other the final copy! Then
each of us, I think, would try above everything not to repeat himself, at least he would create
a different setting for his life, he would arrange an apartment like this for himself, with flow-
ers and plenty of light … I have a wife and two little girls, but then, my wife is not in good
health, and so forth and so on, and … well, if I were to begin life over again, I wouldn’t
marry … No, No! 2

1
Max Frisch, Biografie: Ein Spiel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). All quotations in this
chapter are mine and refer to this edition, to which page numbers will be given in the text. It
has also been translated by Michael Bullock as Biography: A Game (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1969).
2
In Anton Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. by Ann Dunnigan (New York: The New Amer-
ican Library, Signet Classic, 1964), p. 250.
102 Manfred Jurgensen

But, of course, the idea of living one’s life over again, with the aim of ‘cor-
recting it’, applying the wisdom of hindsight, is not merely a quotation from
one of the great plays of world theatre. It’s a widely indulged-in popular re-
flection of wishful thinking, by no means confined to men experiencing a
midlife crisis, trying to escape their marriage. It is not a literary theme asso-
ciated with one specific period of history or belonging to only one particular
culture. Indeed, Frisch believes that, far from being pathological, it is in the
nature of individual identity to be made up of multiple fictional personalities.
Like Vershinin, his own protagonist, Kürmann, has no doubt that ‘If he could
start again, he’d know exactly what changes he’d make in his life’ (Biografie,
p. 7).
Having decided to take Chekhov’s character (as well as his own) at his
word, Frisch adopts a surprisingly simple dramaturgical model, uniquely suit-
ed to put their assertion to the test. It is a theatrical form designed to enact a
wide range of incomplete, variable projections. In spite of the protagonist’s
determined resolution to escape repetition, it is ironically in the starting-point
of theatre, the rehearsal, that the playwright finds the perfect paradigm for
staging imaginary variations of personal identity. It is precisely because of its
constant repetition, the freedom to correct, change, vary and improve, that
Frisch elevates the rehearsal to the dramaturgical level of performance. In the
process of rehearsing, projecting, testing and evaluating various possibilities,
fictional characters and self-conscious actors amalgamate.
Such theatre lends voice to Frisch’s conviction that ultimately all human
lives (‘biographies’) consist of self-conscious imaginary role-playing. The
drama’s programmatic title proclaims this very correlation quite unequivo-
cally. It is significant that in his notes the author compares this dramaturgy
not just to a ‘game’ of chess, but, more precisely, to the ‘reconstruction’ of a
‘lost game’ of chess (Biografie, p. 111). The repetition of constant variation,
emerging as the central formal device from which all other aspects of the
play (plot, dialogue, etc.) derive, nonetheless leads by design to a final, fatal,
ultimate version – the defeat in a fictional game promising unlimited moves
and possibilities, a triumphant freedom of self-expression.
The special feature of Frisch’s ‘comedy’, as he labels it, is that, as for
Chekhov’s Vershinin, marriage appears as the most intimate social model of
role-playing. In an ironic double entendre, Kürmann explains the game of
chess to his future wife, Antoinette, ‘That’s the queen. She’s got all the
moves’ (Biografie, p. 11). Later in the play Kürmann is asked, ‘Is that all you
ever think about, your marriage?… Is that your problem in this world?’ (Bio-
grafie, p. 84). As almost all of Frisch’s plays and novels do in fact feature
tragi-comic marital conflicts, it is difficult not to recognize in these questions,
 Rehearsing the Endgame 103

as in the earlier analogy with chess, playfully serious allusions of self-criti-

cism.
Despite Frisch’s undeniable, albeit ironic, at times self-indulgent, mascu-
line perspective, it could be argued that it is indeed in marital and other inti-
mate personal relationships that the problematic ‘game’ of self-realization
unfolds. Kürmann ends up losing it, and, with it, his life.
As it happens, German has a word denoting both theatrical staging (with
an implication of both time and location) and the very nature of imaginative
projection. The dual meaning of Vorstellung (literally ‘pre-positing’) thus
calls for an intertwining of the production’s actual performance with the au-
dience’s imaginative, empathetic and socially responsive participation in the
play. It is a correlation particularly applicable to Frisch’s Biography: A Play,
because it relies, more heavily than his other plays, on the spectators’ com-
pulsive identification with the actor’s rehearsing a role they, too, have been
trying to escape. Their participation in the play thus amounts to an act of re-
cognition. What they are watching on stage is a process of variation including
and defining their own selves. From the beginning the audience is confronted
with the reflective spectacle of their own collective biographies. Once they
become aware of this fact, they cease to be mere onlookers. In that sense, it
could be said that, strictly speaking, a performance of Frisch’s Biography: A
Play has no audience, only participants. Whenever it seems its protagonist
Kürmann is speaking to the spectators – ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking
now …’ – he is, in effect, addressing his own consciousness (cf. the opening
of Part Two, Biografie, p. 61), the persona of the Registrar, as defined by the
author in his postscript to the play (Biografie, p. 111).
It is hardly a coincidence, then, that quite early in the play Kürmann
makes a seemingly casual reference to the Italian playwright, Luigi Pirandel-
lo, for here Frisch has written what might well be described a variation of
Pirandello’s classic, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Mindful of its
own dramaturgical adaptations, the play could have been called either some-
thing like One Author in Search of Six Characters (referring to the six varia-
tions of Kürmann’s biographies) or else An Audience in Search of Itself. Even
in the context of comparative modern world theatre, then, Max Frisch varies
and ‘rehearses’ the nature and scope of role-playing. His Kürmann is not a
purely fictional stage character play-acting individual projections of personal
freedom; he also functions as a playwright’s, director’s and actor’s dramatur-
gical voice in contemporary theatre. In other words: Frisch’s Biography: A
Play allows the theatre to reveal and play itself.
The name of Frisch’s protagonist implies, of course, that he is a man who
can choose (German Kür, derived from kiesen, ‘to choose’, ‘to examine’;
104 Manfred Jurgensen

MHG kür[e] or kur[e], OHG kuri, OE cyre, OIC kør). But in ‘choosing’ and
declaring, ‘I know how it goes’ (Biografie, p. 10), he continues to make the
same mistakes (‘Registrar: Then why do you always end up doing the same?’:
Biografie, p. 26). Kürmann begins to ask himself, ‘How can I choose some-
thing different …’ (Biografie, p. 41). One possible reason for his recurring
dilemma is provided by the Registrar when he explains to Kürmann: ‘You
have permission to choose again, but with the same intelligence. That is a
given’ (Biografie, p. 29). There is only one other consideration limiting the
likelyhood of repetitions in personal history – ‘the others, too, can choose’.
Again, it is the Registrar who reminds Kürmann that he is not alone in the
world (Biografie, p. 46).
In a socio-cultural context, the ‘given intelligence’ of a white European,
‘middle-class’ behavioural scientist like Frisch’s Kürmann may be assumed
not too dissimilar to the social, political and moral preoccupations of the
play’s general audience. His theatrical performance therefore does not merely
relate to the fictional assumption of his own character; in line with the Che-
khov quotation, it implicitly enacts the paradigmatic part of a collective iden-
tity. The representative nature of such role-playing powerfully asserts an in-
escapable identification between spectator and actor. In juxtaposing the
personal and the social, the private and the public, Frisch stages his model
concept of a shared role-playing identity.
In such a context, it is important to bear in mind that throughout the play
the location remains the stage, or, as Frisch puts it so succinctly, ‘a place
completely identical with itself’ (Biografie, p. 111). In rehearsing variations,
the theatre manages to realise what ‘in reality’ cannot be: experiencing possi-
bilities of another life, choosing the option of a different biography. Because
of the protagonist’s representative identity, the audience themselves leave the
passive realm of the auditorium, as it were, and join the actors on the stage.
Quite different from his more Brechtian, politically didactic, ‘morality with-
out a moral’, The Fire Raisers,3 Frisch likens this kind of paradigmatic thea-
tre to the reconstruction of a ‘game’ of chess with the aim of discovering if,
where and how alternative moves would have led to a different outcome
(Biografie, p. 12). With its heavy emphasis on rehearsal his dramaturgy of
theatrical ‘play’ always remains a ‘game’. In the final conciliatory sentence
of his notes, Frisch explains, ‘I consider it a comedy’ (Biografie, p. 111).
Aurally, the play reinforces its structural logic with frequently repeated
incomplete or interrupted sounds of a piano, emanating from rehearsals of a

3
See Max Frisch, Three Plays, trans. by Michael Bullock (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 1-88,
also The Firebugs, trans. by Mordecai Gorelik (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963).
 Rehearsing the Endgame 105

ballet class next door. With its very first lines the persona of a Registrar in-
troduces the theme, the subject or the challenge of the play by summarising
the essence of the Chekhov quotation: ‘So he said: If he could start all over
again, he’d know exactly what he’d do differently in his life’ (Biografie, p. 7).
Thus, Frisch clearly considers his Biography part of a continuing drama-
turgical development in the European theatrical tradition. In theatrical terms,
the figure of the Registrar is a kind of director, who rehearses variable scenes
based on a ‘dossier’ script expressing the consciousness of the play’s central
character, Kürmann. Alternations of Arbeitslicht (work light) and Spiellicht
(stage light) are designed to mark frequent switches from dramaturgical
workshop reflections to rehearsals of ad hoc script variations, both prompted
by coinciding determinations of actor, playwright and audience.
From the beginning, then, dramatic production, fictional characterisation
and projected plot are in a complementary relationship. Frisch’s Biography is
not merely a play within a play, but a ‘life play’, exposing variable forms of
role-playing by all individual and social identities, including that of the thea-
tre itself. It explicitly endorses the concept of theatre as all-embracing para-
digm of human life, applying Jaques’s famous declaration, ‘All the world’s a
stage,/And all the men and women merely players’ (As You Like It, II. 7. 139-
40).4 It is, indeed, no coincidence that in this kind of dramaturgy quotations
from, or allusions to, other dramas frequently play a vital part in the act of
self-identification. For the history of the theatre itself is made up of self-
quotations, variable interpretations and productions. Thematically and drama-
turgically, Frisch’s play declares itself, somewhat self-consciously, to be part
of this history, in that broader sense a ‘play within a variety of plays’. Corre-
spondingly, in the consciousness of Frisch’s protagonist biography consists
of a long chain of theatrical self-quotations.
The challenge of expressing an authentic life is one of Frisch’s central
themes. In his novel, Stiller, the eponymous hero makes the startling discov-
ery that ‘[i]t’s possible to tell any kind of story except the reality of one’s
own life’ (Stiller, p. 101).5 Elsewhere in the novel he goes even further. The
imprisoned Stiller begins to grasp the frustrations of recognizing one’s own
identity: ‘He who remains silent doesn’t even have the slightest idea of who
he is not’ (Stiller, p. 119). In a 1964 essay entitled ‘Der Autor und das Thea-
ter’ (The Author and the Theatre), Frisch states, ‘However theatre projects

4
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W. J. Craig (London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1906; repr. 1962), p. 227.
5
Originally published in Frankfurt by Suhrkamp in 1954, it is translated by Michael Bullock
as I’m not Stiller (London: Abelard-Schumann, 1958). All translations here, however, are
my own and references, to the original, Frankfurt edition, will follow quotations in the text.
106 Manfred Jurgensen

itself, it is art: Play as response to the inability to reproduce the world’ (p.
76).6 His novel, Mein Name sei Gantenbein, written the same year, offers
perhaps its author’s most succinct definition of individual lives. In almost
formula-like precision the blind narrator declares, ‘Sooner or later everyone
invents a story of himself which he comes to accept as his life.’ 7 (The Aus-
tralian poet, James McAuley, a contemporary of Frisch’s, summed up his
own, very similar, belief in the words, ‘For what we are can only be imagined;
/The story never lies.’ 8)
All these quotations prove to be of immediate relevance to Frisch’s play.
As the Registrar clearly demonstrates, the desire to change the course of
one’s life is invariably based on a selective range of self-quotations. It is in
effect always an attempt to re-write the biographer’s own account of himself.
As we have seen, Frisch primarily likens aspects of such rehearsals of im-
aginary change to the reconstruction of a game of chess. By contrast, Antoi-
nette, Kürmann’s wife-to-be, ‘the queen with all the moves’, is in turn
fascinated by musical boxes that continue to delight, despite their figures
forever repeating the same gestures following the same drum. Ironically, she
longs to hear Kürmann’s ‘old musical box’ (Biografie, p. 8-9). In the context
of the play’s production it is an ‘instrument’ not unlike the ballet practice’s
piano in a nearby apartment condemned to play forever incomplete pieces, as
it pro-vides a telling background to the protagonist’s tragic-comic attempts to
im-prove the record of his own life. There is, of course, a decisive difference
between the game of chess (Schachspiel), a game Kürmann is determined to
teach Antoinette, and the moving figures of musical boxes (Spieluhren), a
mechanical performance his wife-to-be loves to watch. Both may be Spiele,
‘games’ or ‘plays’, but only chess allows for direct, practical involvement
and the possibility of actual change. The most appropriate staging of Frisch’s
play, then, would need to aim for a balance between these two kinds of
movement – seeming passivity and active control. What’s more, such
‘counter-acting’ would have to apply to both actors and spectators.
Throughout the play, its protagonist, a professional behaviourist who fails
to recognise the pattern of his own conduct, responds to the rehearsals of his
life’s alterations with the same frustration: ‘I already know how it was!’ (Bio-
grafie, p. 10). In vain, the Registrar tries to explain the life-actor’s predica-
ment. ‘You see,’ he informs Kürmann, ‘you don’t relate to the present but to

6
In Max Frisch, Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). The translation,
from this edition, is my own.
7
See Michael Bullock’s translation, A Wilderness of Mirrors (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 74.
8
‘Against the dark’, in Collected Poems, 1936-1970 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971), p.
196.
 Rehearsing the Endgame 107

a memory. That’s the problem. You think your experience can anticipate the
future. That’s why you keep arriving at the same story’ (Biografie, p. 17).
Repetition wrongly assumes the cognitive role of knowledge. Frisch’s play-
rehearsal is not merely a comedy of variable role-playing. What gives his
Biography its full weight is its primary theme, the search for authentic exist-
ence.
All attempts at self-realisation share an ultimate point of reference, death.
Play-rehearsing seemingly endless variations of individual identity proves to
be terminal after all. Beyond the realms of self-dramatising, human mortality
determines physical reality, individual authenticity and social actuality. The
second part of Frisch’s drama presents a decisive turning-point. Confronted
with his fatal illness, the protagonist appeals to the Registrar, ‘You always
said I could choose’ (Biografie, p. 105). In response, the Registrar once again
confirms Kürmann’s Faustian pact to rehearse imaginary variations of his
biography, their agreement to let the theatre explore the range and conse-
quences of an alternative life. But when faced with the finality of his own life,
Frisch’s protagonist wonders what there is left to choose. In stark contrast to
the variability of his earlier self-projections, the answer is unconditionally
brutal: ‘How you’re going to respond to losing it’ (Biografie, p. 105). The
play of Kürmann’s biography ends with the fateful pronouncement: ‘You’re
free – for another seven years …’ (Biografie, p. 110).
In the final analysis, then, Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play is a powerful
comedy about death. With judgmental severity, but very appropriately, given
that the figure personifies the theatre, the Registrar delimits the stage from a
variable presence to the finality of life. Biography turns into an end game, a
theatrical play ending in death, the terminal fall of the curtain. Thus, Frisch’s
correlative play remains as much about the theatre as it is about the freedom
and limitations of individual life. Of the ten plays Frisch has written, Biogra-
phy is, in more ways than one, by far the most theatrical – if at times rather
self-consciously so. The last of his plays, its subject is both a homage to the
theatre and a live rehearsal of his own obituary.
As his health began to deteriorate in 1966-7, Frisch began work on his
Tagebuch, 1966-1971 (Diary, 1966-1971).9 Central features in the book are
recurring, seemingly playful, reflections on death and suicide – Frisch joined
a group of men forming a Vereinigung Freitod (Association for Suicide). Pre-
ceding and following his joyful entry, ‘Renewed pleasure in the theatre!’

9
Originally published in Frankfurt by Suhrkamp in 1972, it is translated by Geoffrey Skelton
as Sketchbook, 1966-1971 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971; London: Eyre Methuen, 1974).
The translation here, however, is my own, from the original German.
108 Manfred Jurgensen

(Diary, p. 93), Frisch reports on the activities of the Association for Suicide.
The playwright becomes increasingly aware that one function of the theatre
has always been to enlighten its audience about the inevitability of death.
Early theatre in particular saw the staging of different kinds of dying as one
of its main social functions: the tragedies of classical Greece and Rome ha-
bitually enacted ‘biographies’ of heroic individual lives culminating in death.
When Kürmann is told he remains free to choose what he will do with his
life ‘for another seven years’, it is the mere passing of time that turns the mir-
ror of theatrical self-reflection back to front. Confronted with the blunt dull-
ness of death, the staging of self, the playing with images of varied lives,
comes to an end. In modern theatre it is the captive spectator who, sitting in
the dark auditorium, witnesses the complex unfolding of imaginary lives
from the terminal vantage point of death. Frisch’s Biography offers the re-
construction of a post-mortem, even as its dramaturgy continues to antici-
pate, project and instruct. Ultimately, the staging of dramatic conflict poses
only one all-embracing challenge: could a particular ending have been avoid-
ed? For, more than anything else, theatre is about ‘the end’. In comedy as in
tragedy, plot and characterisation, performance and direction are geared to an
inescapable, powerful conclusion. The very nature of the dramatic embodies
a critical forward movement seeking resolution and finality. In the stage reen-
actment of life at least one of the aims of theatre is to function as intellectual
and moral reflection, relating directly to the audience’s own experience. In
Frisch’s terms, the spectator witnesses the transformation of an interchange-
able biography into a play.
Not the least reason for the worldwide success of Frisch’s Biography: A
Play is the entertaining quality of its witty, at times scathing, social criticism,
such as the Registrar’s biting comments when, crucially juxtaposing the pub-
lic with the private, he tells the pseudo-revolutionary Kürmann: ‘You’re
under suspicion of wanting to change the world, when in fact all you really
want is change your biography’ (Biografie, p. 55). Kürmann himself catego-
rically denies the assumption that a particular kind of meaning can be attri-
buted to biographical events merely because they have occurred, and in doing
so questions, in quite a fundamental way, any belief in a discernable meaning
of life. In his Tagebuch Frisch appears to be doing the same thing, by inte-
grating periodic questionnaires (Fragebögen) into personal analyses and criti-
cal self-reflections. German literary historians have characterised most of the
author’s writings as the ironic or self-critical role-playing of a theatrical
persona called ‘I’ (Ich-Theater). Both Frisch’s narrative and dramatic style
do indeed express an ironic consciousness of the variable nature of author-
ship. As his narrative prose demonstrates so clearly, the author remains ever-
 Rehearsing the Endgame 109

conscious of the analogy between the freedom of occasional diary entries and
the spontaneous, casual nature of stage rehearsals.
What, then, is Frisch’s specific contribution to a dramaturgy of the play
within the play? In the first instance, it is his belief that ‘life theatre’ is a pri-
mary, powerful, non-metaphysical means of projecting and reflecting the na-
ture and limits of our being. Biographical role-playing defines man’s freedom
to determine and vary self-images, individual as well as social values and
commitments. However, as in the paradigmatic game of chess, motivation for
such changes may at times seem frivolously willful or purely coincidental,
only to be subsequently revealed as inevitable, indeed, logically inescapable.
Either way, whatever the variety of moves, ultimately the range of self-ex-
pression remains fatally limited.
Frisch’s analogy of life as a play within a play does not imply that either
human existence or the theatre amounts to little more than self-centred exer-
cises in pastime. Rather, it asserts the conviction that life must be understood
and accepted as an end in itself. Frisch’s staged visions of homo ludens con-
tain no metaphysical references. The paradigmatic nature of his dramaturgy
calls into question even the assumed certainty that all dramatic conflict must
lead to an end. While, on a practical level, in a time- and plot-related sense, a
theatrical performance culminates in its designated conclusion, the paradig-
matic character of most of Frisch protagonists – in particular, Kürmann in
Biography: A Play, Biedermann in The Fire Raisers and Andri in Andorra 10
– extends their continued existence beyond finite dimensions. It is in the
play-like model of their logic and validity that the cultural ‘game’ of individ-
ually, socially and theatrically staged biographies survives.
Yet within this self-reflecting drama Frisch is anxious to prove there are,
in fact, a number of special events in human life, unique experiences that
cannot be altered, varied, repeated, recaptured, rehearsed or exchanged.
Prominent among them are Freude, ‘joy’, Erwartung, ‘anticipation’, and
Eregung, ‘excitement’. ‘How can one repeat something,’ his protagonist asks,
‘when all mysteries and uncertainties are spent?’ With bitter poignancy he
adds, ‘You try reliving a joy, if you already know what’s going to follow!’
(Biografie, p. 70). Rehearsing play-like composite identities fails to come to
terms with the unpredictable uniqueness of human individuality and the mys-
terious impact of shared intimacy. It is because Kürmann ‘loves’ Antoinette
that he cannot escape into a life without her (Biografie, p. 92). Yet, once the
‘mysteries’ of a relationship are ‘spent’, he finds it impossible to re-experi-
ence ‘happiness’ (Biografie, p. 70, 69). He is stuck. The repetitions of

10
See Frisch, Three Plays, pp.165-254.
110 Manfred Jurgensen

Frisch’s play do not move forward; they are ‘dead ends’ demonstrating the
impossibility of Vershinin’s, as well as his own protagonist’s, longings for a
different life.
Unlike much traditional drama, Frisch’s theatre nonetheless does not de-
monstrate inevitability either. Instead, it questions the search for a meaning
of life beyond itself. Essentially, its dramaturgy amounts to a staging of un-
answered questions. ‘I’m asking’ is the most characteristic of the Registrar’s
repeated comments (Biografie, e.g. p. 95). Despite the fact that his plays are
essentially models, or as he calls one of them, ‘a morality without a moral’
(Lehrspiel ohne Lehre), Frisch explicitly acknowledges the powerful influ-
ence of coincidence or chance on the staging of life. Biography: A Play cul-
minates in the following exchange between Kürmann and the Registrar:

KÜRMANN You mean, I have to search for the meaning of what has happened;
otherwise I won’t be able to bear it.
REGISTRAR I’m asking.
KÜRMANN And that meaning would lead me to believe that this was the way it
had to be. Which no one can prove. But you can believe it. Only this
way. Fate. Providence.
REGISTRAR Let’s call it that.
KÜRMANN I know how it happened.
REGISTRAR – coincidentally?

The dialogue concludes with the timeless question: ‘Mr Kürmann, it’s your
choice.’ – ‘To believe or not to believe.’ – ‘Yes.’
When, in a final variation of his life having killed his wife Antoinette,
Kürmann realises too late the full consequence of having destroyed someone
else’s life. ‘How can I still think of choice?’, he calls out, ‘She’s dead – dead,
and I choose between believing and not believing … Whether I believe or not,
what difference does it make to her?’(Biografie, p. 95). The imaginary re-
hearsals and wishful variations of his life do not only come to an end with his
own death. Finality, even in a model theatre of self-projection, is reached
when there is no more identity to be challenged. Having killed the person he
loves, the authenticity of Kürmann’s own life ceases to have any relevance.
Death destroys the very assumption of his ‘life theatre’, the precondition
which allowed him (and others) to play with, or rehearse, variations of his
own, and thereby someone else’s, biography. The game is over. Even though
he himself is not yet dead, his obsessive role-playing has come to an end.
Without life there can be no theatre.
The paradigmatic variability of Frisch’s life theatre is responsible for the
continuing dialogue between actors and spectators, play and audience. It is in
this very exchange that individual and social existence unfolds, the play
 Rehearsing the Endgame 111

within the play, the variable biography of who and where and what we are,
the reality of fateful coincidences and arbitrary roles based on chance per-
ceptions, the few precious, mysteriously shared, encounters of anticipation,
pleasure, love and joy, sometimes referred to as ‘happiness’, even though
they, too, may carry no ultimate purpose, no meaningful design, hold no
promise of metaphysical ‘redemption’ or ‘salvation’.
Barnard Turner

Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real
Thing (1982): New Frames and Old

Tom Stoppard has adapted the conventions of the play within the play frequently in his work,
manipulating the relationships between ‘inner play’ and ‘outer play’ (and thus those between the
audience and the performance) in ways which destabilise the former relationships while leaving
intact those implicit in mainstream Western contemporary theatre-going practice. While there is
great creativity in Stoppard’s staging and his correspondent adaptation of theatrical and literary
conventions, tropes and gestures (ranging from a quasi-Brechtian episodicity to the classical
contaminatio), the stage-audience dialectic itself is unshaken. Stoppard then offers only the illu-
sion of flux or instability and, while this gesture increases the entertainment value, it lessens the
provocation of the theatrical encounter. Considering two plays from different points in Stop-
pard’s career – The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982) – this chapter
argues that, while in their various ways they compound generic postmodernist ludic fragmen-
tation, they remain traditional in their core theatrical value.

‘Commercial recordings of orchestral rehearsals are now available, presumably to allow

audiences an intimate glimpse of the conductor at work. One wonders how these strips differ
from the real thing.’
Erving Goffman1

Intertextuality as theme and structuring device informs Tom Stoppard’s plays,

which often incorporate elements of other authors’ plays for purposes of
parody or – more importantly here – of frame-shift. These inflexions produce
role-reversals and misunderstandings, as in the mixture of sub-plot and vari-
ous off-sides in Professional Foul; discordant time-frames, as in Arcadia or
Travesties; the bric[k]olage of Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, and the
more – at first glance – ‘traditional’ plays within plays that are The Real Ins-
pector Hound 2 and The Real Thing 3 (the former one scene, the latter a se-

1
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), p. 126.
2
Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound, in Tom Stoppard: Plays 1 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1996), pp. 1-44. Further references will be given in the text as RIH followed by page
number.
3
Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing (New York: Faber and Faber, 1984). Further references will
be given in the text as RT followed by page number.
114 Barnard Turner

quence). Harold Bloom has described Stoppard’s trans-generic plays in terms

of Senecan contaminatio, the ‘interlacing between an old play and a new
one’,4 and such is in miniature the case with both the Real plays with which
this chapter is principally concerned. Often, Stoppard rewrites existing or
hypothetical but possible scenarios, or – in the Real plays – has characters do
so, as, in Hound, critics Moon and Birdboot both comment on the play that
they are watching and modify it by transgressing through what for them, if
not for Stoppard’s audience, should be the ‘fourth wall’. In the second scene
of The Real Thing, a professional writer (Henry) tries to imagine the conver-
sation of a young soldier (Brodie) who has met an actress (Annie, later
Henry’s wife) on a train (RT 32). While Henry is far from accurate in his
suggestions for the dialogue, which is based on stale pick-up lines, Brodie’s
own writing of this scene, in a play which Henry resists reworking, but which
eventually is made for television, is in no way more accomplished or provoc-
ative. If Brodie’s play is meant to ‘catch’ the national ‘conscience’, it is –
like Hamlet’s interpolation into The Murder of Gonzago – an easy target,
proving nothing and providing little which would encourage viewers to re-
flect on its more general political claims, any more than might the allusions
to Shakespeare’s Danish play that litter the surface of Stoppard’s play, such
as ‘these few precepts’, ‘what’s a petard?’, or the attention to ‘words’, inno-
cent or superfluous (RT 63, 75, 53). In many of these superimposed contexts,
not entirely ironically perhaps, playwright Henry takes on the questionable
status of critic and anxious father Polonius.
All drama has always been in the detective mode: ‘[T]oute pièce est une
enquête menée à bonne fin [Every play is an enquiry brought to a successful
conclusion]’, says Choubert in Ionesco’s Victims of Duty (1953),5 a play
which in some ways prefigures Hound in its playing with the detective genre
(a detective calls here, too), in its staged monologue (more minor however
than the interstitial play in Hound), and, of course, in its absurdist humour. In
this game of detection, the contaminatio also extends to the assessment of
motivation, and the audience must be nimble in assigning motive, role and
guise. While the theoretical, but oxymoronic, task of seeing through the mask,
the persona, is required in normal circumstances of, say, Faust, Othello and
Volpone, this is particularly apparent in the play within the play. Actors play
their titular characters; they represent themselves playing other characters;
they take each other for real and take a tableau – fake to them – as a prick of
the conscience. And, of course, the paradigm of this last is not Hamlet, but

4
Tom Stoppard, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 1.
5
Ionesco, Plays. Volume II, trans. by Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1958), p. 269.
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 115

Macbeth at the banquet, ‘starting’ at what appears to his wife to be the ‘very
painting of [his] fear’ (III.iv.60).
In The Real Thing, actors play actors acting onstage and offstage in their
‘real’ lives. So far so Pirandello, in a sense, even if Stoppard’s debt to the
Italian playwright is more applicable to the earlier play. As Felicia Hardison
Londré has argued of Hound, it is difficult to assess whether Stoppard is
‘building upon Pirandello’s technique of forcing the spectator constantly to
reexamine his [sic] assumptions about different levels of reality’, or ‘merely
spoofing Pirandello for the amusement of the cognoscenti.’6 From Hound to
Real Thing, indeed, Stoppard’s is the theatre of the crisis deferred, of a rather
comfortable, even disengaged foregrounding of mediated reality.7 Much of
the interest in his plays stems from the Wildean cliché about life imitating art,
where – as in Henry James’s short story ‘The Real Thing’ (1893) – what best
passes for ‘the real thing’ is a fake.8 Since this is by now but common, in his
later work – The Real Thing, for example – Stoppard disengages the clichés
with which he had charged his earlier work. Yet perhaps for those who cut
their teeth on the critical chestnut of reality versus illusion, particularly as a
stipulation of limit or framing conditions for a play, it is one difficult to ex-
tract. For example, June M. Schlueter says of Hound that it destroys the ‘dis-
tinction between reality and illusion’;9 Paul Delaney says of The Real Thing
that the first two scenes ‘establish the contrast between real life and art’ and
‘the contrast between the real and the imaginative accounts for the genesis
[…] of the play’s form.’10 Here, one need only to note that in the theatre all is
faked and feigned, but all is a real theatrical event, which is all that matters.
The Real Inspector Hound presents what might be called a ‘play between
the play’: the easy target of criticism, the spoof of Agatha Christie’s The
Mousetrap – but also, if incidentally, of Hamlet’s identity politic – is placed
between the first acting area, where critics Moon and Birdboot are sitting,
and the audience. The disgruntled grocer in Beaumont’s The Knight of the
Burning Pestle (1607/08), or the semi-cardboard audience, mystics and all in
Alexander Blok’s The Fairgound Booth (1906) are transformed into the critic

6
Tom Stoppard (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), p. 119.
7
See, e.g., Londré, p. 119; Anthony Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1987), pp. 160-61; John Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding
Order amid Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 160; and June M. Schlueter,
‘Stoppard’s Moon and Birdboot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’, in Bloom, p. 81.
8
Henry James, ‘The Real Thing’ (1892), in Tales of Henry James, ed. by Christof Wegelin
(New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 239-59.
9
Schlueter, p. 81.
10
Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard: The Moral Vision of the Major Plays (London: Macmillan,
1990), pp. 114, 105.
116 Barnard Turner

Birdboot, who wanders from the stage-auditorium onto the stage-stage to

take up a real phone-call, i.e. from a supposedly functioning phone. Here
Stoppard, like Beaumont before him, with what we might call Living or Fo-
rum Theatre, while at the same time disallowing it. If in his 1914 letter, ‘The
Theatre of the Future’, Leonid Andreyev could opine that in ‘the theatre of
the future there will be no audience’, since ‘the performing theatre will
gradually fade away’ along with its edifices and conventional framings,11 in
Stoppard’s real, existing future theatre, from Andreyev’s perspective at least,
all notions of audience and theatre are mere convention. He therefore rein-
states that separation, the relegation of the audience to the shadows, which
his play literally highlights. Thus, the play is avant-garde in its content, its
material, but not in its form and nature. According to Richard Schechner,
‘[E]ngaging intercultural fractures [here in a limited sense, of course], philo-
sophical difficulties, ideological contradictions, and crumbling national
myths does not necessarily lead to avant-garde performances.’12 Unfortunate-
ly, Stoppard’s critics have often been sidetracked or ‘ambushed’ by the seem-
ing chaos, and have retreated into paraphrases of that critical rhetoric which
plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Hound and Foul parody.
In one such case, William E. Gruber says of the first-named play, ‘Here we
touch the core, I think, of the play’s literariness […] What, this play asks
again and again, is valid dramatic language?’ 13 Even the intonation appears to
be Birdboot’s.
And yet the search for such transcendent ‘validity’ is seldom a primary
objective in the Bauhaus, the house of prompt-cards, of Stoppard’s plays. At
times, and uncannily perhaps, he detaches showing and speaking roles,
almost as in a mime or in the way some Asian theatres separate the performer
who moves and the performer who speaks; so at least can these plays be read
(and performed). After going onto the stage and answering the ringing on-
stage phone, and remaining there as the actors begin the scene, Birdboot
speaks as himself while the actors repeat lines from a previous scene. As
puppets or marionettes, they then feed off Birdboot’s manner and dialogue,
which is so uncannily like Simon Gascoyne’s in the play between the play
that they take his cues from his dithering and general demeanour, both of
which override the actual words, even if some are reproduced, accidentally
perhaps (or because the situation is itself clichéd), in what might be called an

11
The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An Anthology of Plays and Critical Texts, ed. and trans. by
Michael Green (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986), p. 367.
12
The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993),
p. 17.
13
‘Artistic Design in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, in Bloom, p. 105.
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 117

innertextual contaminatio.14 But what they say fits the context of Birdboot’s
philandering between the actress playing the Felicity role and the one playing
Cynthia, so that the flurried Felicity actress confuses him and Gascoyne:

‘original’ ‘inner’ play scene (pp. 16-17)
SIMON I love another!
FELICITY I see.
SIMON I didn’t make any promises – I
merely –
FELICITY You don’t have to say any more
– –
SIMON Oh, I didn’t want to hurt you –
FELICITY Of all the nerve!
SIMON Well, I –
FELICITY You philandering coward –
SIMON Let me explain –
FELICITY This is hardly the time and place
– you think you can barge in any-
where, whatever I happen to be doing
–
SIMON But I want you to know that my ad-
miration for you is sincere – I don’t
want you to think that I didn’t mean
the things I said –
‘contaminatio’ scene (p. 33)
BIRDBOOT I want to call it off.
FELICITY I see.
BIRDBOOT I didn’t promise anything – and
the fact is, I have my reputation –
people do talk –
FELICITY You don’t have to say any more
BIRDBOOT And my wife, too – I don’t
know how she got to hear of it, but –
FELICITY Of all the nerve! To march in
here and –
BIRDBOOT I’m sorry you had to find out
like this – the fact is I didn’t mean it
this way! –
FELICITY You philandering coward!
BIRDBOOT I’m sorry – but I want you to
know that I meant those things I said
– oh yes – shows brilliant promise – I
shall say so –

FELICITY I’ll kill you for this, Simon FELICITY I’ll kill you for this, Simon
Gascoyne! Gascoyne!

Here the new has been assembled as part of the frame of the old, and the
new action has taken the old with it into a third trajectory, distinct from each,
but which partakes, loosely, of each. Down register (Birdboot wants to ‘call it
off’, since he can hardly ‘love’ anyone or claim the stridency and Noel Cow-
ardly quasi-camp of Simon’s ‘I love another’ line), pragmatism (‘my reputa-
tion’) and the farce of self-interest in the supposedly disinterested promotion

14
As between the acts of Pinter’s The Homecoming and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In res-
ponse to Elliot Norton’s observation that he did not care much for the second act of The
Homecoming, Pinter famously responded, ‘I'm not going to do anything about the second
act. The second act is the second act.’ See Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London:
Nick Hern, 1994), p. 34.
118 Barnard Turner

of others outweigh the farce of the heart’s impermanence. The occlusion of

frame-play and framed play is here both metatheatrical and a denial of that
related but detachable (here detached) viewpoint that makes metatheatre pos-
sible. Most surprisingly, Felicity’s line about Simon’s inopportune arrival is
not repeated, but perhaps this goes without saying, or rather – since it is the
point of Stoppard’s humour – saying it would be merely verbose, and would
go around the Hamlet principle that a play within a play allows a speed, pre-
cision and laconicity to the dialogue-action inter-face. Anthony Jenkins, still
not detaching himself enough from the theatre-as-staged-illusion/theatre-as-
real-event opposition, has said that the Birdboot/Felicity confrontation ‘loops
[the play within the play] back to what went on before. In a sense, nothing in
the second half of Hound actually happens.’ 15 What does it mean to use
motion as a metaphor for motive here, that which ‘goes on’, that which ‘hap-
pens’, ‘actually’ or not? To quote Erving Goffman, ‘[H]ere it is probably best
to leave open the question of necessity, obligation, and interdependence.’ 16
Once the idea is set, that the critic will walk onto the stage, all else follows
after, merely because it is possible to create a play this way.
For all this wayward trajectory – ‘mad, according to [Stoppard’s] custom’,
to quote Sheridan’s The Critic (III.1.286)17 – Hound still remains faithful to a
traditional, layered or box-set conception of ‘play beneath the play’, even
while it appears to have shifted the frames along a horizontal axis separating
the traditional longitudinal spaces of any theatre event (the theatron, or ‘place
for seeing’, and the dramaton, ‘place where things happen’). Stoppard works
with the assumption, suppressed in most Western theatre, that seeing (thea) is
an event (drama), even if the event (drama) is what one has come to see, and
therefore needs to be separate from the seeing; in other words, seeing is an
act too. It is therefore still a long way from the abandoning of ‘the skin of
only one character’ which Eugenio Barba laments as uncommon in Western
theatre,18 or even Strindberg’s ‘splitting, doubling, evaporating and recom-
posing’ of ‘personerna’ in his preface to A Dream Play.19 While Western
theatre can partake of such diffusion through the use of image – from cyclo-
rama to computer screen, and pre-taped segments, from Wagnerian adap-
tations in the 1920s through Beckett, Lanterna Magika, and the incorporation
of audience typology in Peter Handke’s Publikumsbeschimpfung and Die
Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten (see the three spectators incorporat-

15
Theatre of Tom Stoppard, p. 51.
16
Frame Analysis, p. 44.
17
Plays, ed. by Cecil Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 383.
18
Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), p. 126.
19
Ett Drömspel (Stockholm: Kungliga Dramatiska Teatren, 1986), p. 3. My translation.
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 119

ed at the end),20 – such innovations are impossible in Stoppard’s Hound. In

The Real Thing, which could go further in ‘evaporating’ character through
these means, and in which the media play a more contemporary role, multi-
media is again only incidental. In the final scene, and in some ways updating
the distinction between visual and sound of the Noh Theatre, from a darkened
stage set is heard the recorded dialogue from a television set projecting a vi-
deo of Brodie’s play. Stoppard clings, as Henry does, to a humanist concep-
tion of the theatre, where characters have no prosthetics but their memories.
In Stoppard, where character meaning and audience meaning are distinct,
there is seldom a necessity or plot to make of this distinction a source of dra-
matic irony. The audience can see that characters are ‘playing roles’, al-
though the relations between and among these are both indiscreet and indis-
crete. What else should one expect? In The Real Thing, Henry makes snide
remarks about urbane witty rhetoric: ‘I don’t believe in debonair relationships.
“How’s your lover today, Amanda?” “In the pink, Charles. How’s yours?” I
believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness’
(RT 71). Here, in a gesture which would uncover real emotion beneath polite
conversation, Henry succeeds in sidestepping Noel Coward, only to summon
Richard and Sarah at breakfast in the opening scene of Pinter’s The Lover,
and therefore merely substitutes one level of farce for another:

RICHARD (amiably) Is your lover coming today?

SARAH Mmnn.
RICHARD What time?
SARAH Three.21

Claiming a belief is a telling, a description, even if this belief is that emo-

tion should not be described but should be shown. Since Henry can both ex-
press faithfully his own belief and the limitations of that belief, there is little
left for the audience to do in tracing irony, except to reflect on the layering
within one role and one character who can so reflect on his framing but
cannot escape it except by alluding to a cultural milieu with which the audi-
ence is familiar and the implication that – almost a commonplace for those
critics who think lightly of British middle-class drama post-Osborne – many
of the plays of Pinter, Stoppard and Hare are in a sense all one play.
Erika Fischer-Lichte has cogently remarked that the framing process oc-
curs on two levels one specific to a play and its theatricalized events, and the

20
Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten (1992) (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp.
63-64.
21
The Collector and The Lover (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 49.
120 Barnard Turner

other more general, establishing the perception of the theatrical itself as an

event ([dass] Vorgänge überhaupt erst als Theater wahrgenommen werden).
‘And yet’, she writes, ‘the rules […] of combination and relation of percep-
tion and signification […] must first be formulated.’ 22 Similarly, the framing
process accommodates the perception of connections between plays, those
pertaining not only in Wagnerian sequential drama, or multiple plays (such as
Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, Shakespeare’s Henry VI cycle or Stoppard’s
Coast of Utopia plays), but also more widely those of theme, generation and
characterization. In Stoppard or some of Hare, the character of a playwright
or some other media figure or writer might well intercede between the drama-
tist and the work, and be seen as ‘himself’ in one play and as the implicit
writer of another. This again is a debt Stoppard at least might owe to Piran-
dello, or even to Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
Yet perhaps this is stretching the significance of the play within the play a
little too far, as the audience is expected to take the immediate as real. It is
still quite common, as audience member, to leave one’s reality outside with
one’s overcoat. In a quaint, pre-Brechtian fashion, Goffman contends that au-
diences ‘hold [their] understanding [of dramatic unreality] to one side’, but
he also makes the self-evident point that ‘it is perfectly obvious to everyone
on and off the stage that the characters and their actions are unreal’.23 So it is
with the mise en abyme: external occurrences have internal effects, perhaps
the transference principle of dramatic communication in general. Yet, to keep
the heraldic allusion, what is the fesse-point, the exact centre, which is extra-
polated from and into? The two are related, not perhaps by mere transposition
of the same, mere ‘inescutcheon’, but in the manner of an escutcheon of pre-
tence, that is where the heiress’s or successor’s smaller shield or charge is
placed at the fesse-point. In the contrast, the embryonic presence of the
smaller icon within the larger, a forward momentum, a dramatic necessity for
action (even if only taking control) is implicit. Stoppard plays with such con-
trol in the critical diatribe of Hound and the rehearsals, known as such by the
audience in advance or not, of Real Thing, including the shifting of frames
through repetition (sometimes rehearsal) of lines from Brodie’s play (pp. 47,
54, 72). Ever since Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, a rehearsal or
an interrupted performance has provided an inherent opportunity for a play
within a play. Hamlet, of course, has both, as does Real Thing, though in the
latter case it is through the video performance Brodie etc. are watching.

22
Die Entdeckung des Zuschauers: Paradigmenwechsel auf dem Theater des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Tübingen: Francke, 1997), p. 61. My rough translation.
23
Frame Analysis, p. 136.
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 121

When considering the mise en abyme and its roots in heraldry – but
without recourse to the figure of the escutcheon of pretence – the stasis
implicit in the pictorial allusion foreshortens its theatrical application. In a
journal entry for 1893 André Gide notes that ‘in a work of art’, he likes ‘to
find transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject of the work.’ 24
Here the analogy is with simple compression and repetition, rather than with
a forward motion as in the figure of a rehearsal. While Gide does mention
Hamlet, his other references are to paintings and prose works, and the use of
the term ‘transposition’ implies a miniaturization of the whole, even if this
provides another angle on the foreground (as in Hamlet’s own ‘hold[ing] the
mirror up to nature’). This may be seen in the use Velázquez makes of spec-
ular reflection in Las Meninas (1656), which Gide mentions, Van Eyck’s
Arnolfini Marriage (1434), or Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533), where a skull
replaces the mirror, which he doesn’t. The dramatic specular makes of the
clear the enigmatic, as in the original use of the Vulgate for St Paul’s ‘see
through a glass, darkly’ (I Corinthians 13. 12), where the Vulgate reads per
speculum in ænigmate and the Greek di’esoptrou en ainigmati, a paradig-
matic case of sight not being equal to that which can be said (the root ainos
or tale, later riddle).
Many of Vermeer’s paintings of interiors include maps, globes, or paint-
ings of the countryside and, need it be said, the all-important light falling
from an open window. All these give an implicit pictorial inescutcheon, as in
the case of the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (1657), with the
girl’s face symbolically reflecting and reflected in the window as she reflects
upon the contents of the letter. We are all in nature, in the macrocosm, even if
the actual exterior to the room etc. is not shown at what would be the outer
fringes of the frame. In his Woman with a Lute near a Window (c. 1663), the
woman looks out the window to her right; she would see more, symbolically,
and better understand her place in the scheme of things, were she to gaze be-
hind her at the intricately painted map of Europe. As Sheridan’s Mr. Puff re-
marks on his actress announcing her vision of approaching ships, which are,
of course, invisible to everyone else, ‘[O]ne of the most useful figures’ of a
tragedy writer is that which allows a character ‘in consideration of their being
often obliged to overlook things that are on the stage […] to hear and see a
number of things that are not’ (The Critic, II.2.331-35).25 This is the case
with the dead body under the sofa in Hound, which escapes the notice of
many of the characters, including Mrs Drudge, who cleans so meticulously. It

24
Journals, 1889-1949, trans. by Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 30.
25
Plays, p. 369.
122 Barnard Turner

is this tradition of the ‘picture window’ which Magritte parodies in his Do-
main of Arnheim (1949 version), and which is particularly crucial here since
a companion piece to Hound has been After Magritte (1971).
However, Stoppard’s experiments with frames do not reach this level of
the lucid ludic, the impingement or transfer of the exterior onto, and thus into,
the medium through which it is seen. Thomas R. Whitaker has called Hound
a ‘game of mirrors’,26 and Stoppard’s opening stage-directions give a hint of
the allusions both to Hamlet’s line about ‘mirror’ and ‘nature’ and to the
specular genre: ‘The first thing is that the audience appear to be confronted
by their own reflection in a huge mirror’ (RIH 5). Thus Moon and Birdboot
are seated in the ‘royal position’, facing the auditorium, with the ‘play be-
tween the play’ interposed between them and the audience. Traditional,
proscenium-arch stagings of The Murder of Gonzago suggest a somewhat
similar arrangement, with Hamlet and Ophelia to one side of the stage and
Claudius and Gertrude to the other, framing the Players’ acting area.27
Following from this, Hound’s ‘play between the play’ may be seen as an
updating of The Arnolphini Marriage: a comparison of it with a performance
still makes clear that the characters in the play Moon and Birdboot are watch-
ing are interposed between the critics and the audience of Stoppard’s play
itself. In both Van Eyck’s painting and Stoppard’s play, the background pres-
ences constitute an act of testimony, of corroboration, and the legitimacy of
the roles of painter/marriage witness in the Van Eyck is only marginally
questioned by Birdboot’s betrayal of trust in philandering with actresses
whose reputations he has meretriciously made (RIH 17).
Stoppard does not so much break frames as play with them, and his work
is as culinary as ever, the mirror of the audience as consumer. The Real Thing,
then, is described as a play about the ‘reality’ of one’s emotions, rather than
about the medium itself. The play’s revival at London’s Donmar Warehouse
in 1999 prompted John Peter in the Sunday Times to say that the first scene
was ‘only a play within the play’, to speculate at length about the characters
as real people and to praise an actor’s ‘luminous’ performance (all this, as if
Brecht had never written). Michael Coveney engaged in a Birdboot moment
by talking of ‘the delectable Miss [Jennifer] Ehle’, who played Annie. (He
was writing in the Daily Mail after all!) Even the Guardian’s Michael Bil-
lington foregrounded the real emotional content over the form: ‘Stoppard is
really a romantic who uses cerebration as a shield against emotional excess.’

26
Tom Stoppard (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 74.
27
Cf. Van Lochon’s well-known engraving, ‘Le Soir’, showing Louis XIII and other members
of the French royal family watching a performance of Le Ballet de la Prospérité des Armes
de France at the Palais-Cardinal in 1641.
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 123

And the Spectator’s Sheridan Morley said that the play involved ‘not just
love but betrayal, divorce, obsession, anger, anguish and reconciliation’ (Was
it a Hollywood movie?), and only added afterwards that ‘in it somewhere are
some truly wondrous insights into the craft of the dramatist.’ 28 Again, then,
these critics present paradigms of ‘the real thing’ in their insouciance to that
Futurist irony, as depicted in Marinetti’s ‘Variety Theatre, 1913’, which
would foreground a viewpoint which ‘mechanizes sentiment’,29 but which in
these critics apparently partakes more of the knee-jerk reaction to what news-
paper reviews should be, the equivalent of the human interest story in the arts
section or feuilleton perhaps. The changes of scene, frame and register appear
incidental to this criticism, although it could well be said that, by foreground-
ing Henry and his woes, Stoppard indeed slips back into what Kandinsky, in
his 1912 essay ‘On Stage Composition’, claims was the ‘form of the drama’
of the time: ‘External happenings and the eternal unity of the action.’ 30 How-
ever, given that so many of Stoppard’s critics have focused perhaps too much
on the ‘inner life’, it is paradoxically (contra Kandinsky) in the oscillation
between the Kandinskyesque external (the regard for the outer world) and an
interstitiality that has replaced the ‘eternal’ that Stoppard’s drama moves.
Toby Zinman draws attention to the ‘Chinese-box succession of sets as
[The Real Thing] moves from one living room to another.’ 31 Yet the juxtapo-
sition of scenes is necessarily temporal rather than spatial, and one set is not
subsumed within the other. Every scene, as Brecht notes of his ‘epic form’,
should be regarded on its own terms (‘jede Szene für sich’),32 and Stoppard
goes partway to this fulfilment. In Jenkins’s view, ‘[I]nterconnecting pictures
dictate the structure of the entire play, so that we continually challenge the
reality of one such picture in relation to another.’ 33 One painting or tableau in
a series cancels out, or at least modifies, the impression created by the one
before, as in Macbeth’s imagination at the banquet and, to give a more
contemporary example, Heiner Müller’s Bildbeschreibung.34 To return then

28
All quotations from reviews of David Leveaux’s 1999 production of The Real Thing are
taken from <http://members.aol.com/dramaddict/dwthing.htm> (accessed 21 April 2006).
29
Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Apollonio (1970), trans. by Robert Brain and others
(Boston: MFA, 2001), pp. 128-29.
30
Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Bert Cardullo and Ro-
bert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 182.
31
‘Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing’, in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard,
ed. by Katherine E. Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 131.
32
‘Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater’, in Über experimentelles Theater, ed. by Werner
Hecht (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 81.
33
Theatre of Tom Stoppard, pp. 160-61.
34
Werke 2. Die Prosa, ed. by Frank Hörningk (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 112-19.
124 Barnard Turner

to Bloom’s argument adumbrated at the beginning here, one could say that
one frame ‘contaminates’ the next one, even though the principle is that what
is described as chronologically prior is not necessarily aetiologically or caus-
ally antecedent. Post hoc, of course, is not propter hoc, either in chronology
or in any identification of scenic series. For example, in scene 11 of The Real
Thing, Henry – jokingly – says that Bach had plagiarized Procul Harum: he
had heard the latter’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ before Bach’s ‘Air on a G
String’ and so for him the pop song predated the baroque piece (RT 74). The
audience laughs, perhaps rather mildly, at this ignorance (more likely we are
puzzled by it), yet Stoppard plays with the hysteron proteron principle
throughout. Henry can differentiate ‘good writing’ from the banal (RT 50),
but he cannot apply such generic principles to music. He confuses Verdi with
Strauss (RT 44) and thinks that there are two Italian composers named Verdi,
one Giuseppe and the other Monty (as in ‘the full’, rather than ‘mountain’).
All that which would constitute the ‘frame’ of one composer’s music, and place
it generically and historically – its instrumentation, patterns of repetition, gra-
dients of crescendo and diminuendo, etc. – are not salient features for him; con-
sequently, any musical historical charting of oppositions and progress is im-
possible.
This inability to define an origin and thus a cogent holistic perspective in
an immanent world which provides anticipation, but which by definition den-
ies transcendence, is evidenced in the sequencing of rehearsals, where per-
sonal motivation and desire contaminate the words. Henry says that ‘words
are sacred’ (RT 53), but the play shows that such transcendence is impossible;
there is always in a performance what Brecht calls the attention ‘to everything
unsteadfast, fleeting [...] to the contradictions in all conditions’;35 one should,
as he suggests in his defence of Peter Lorre’s acting in Mann ist Mann, ‘play
against the flow’,36 or, as he writes, famously, in a later piece, an actor should
‘go on functioning as long as possible as a reader’.37 One can ‘read’ the
words of another, in this sense, but one is always taken to imbue them with
one’s own voice and discursive purpose. In The Real Thing, this is most
apparent in a short section from John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, which
Annie (now married to Henry) and the younger actor Billy act out on the

35
‘. . . auf alles Unfeste, Flüchtige . . . auf die Widersprüche in allen Zuständen’ ‘Notizen über
die Dialektik auf dem Theater’, in Über experimentelles Theater, p. 154.
36
‘The Question of Criteria in Judging Acting’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. by John Willett
(London: Methuen, 1964), p. 55.
37
‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect’, in
Brecht on Theatre, p. 137.
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 125

InterCity train from London to Glasgow, where they are to appear as incestu-
ous lovers, Giovanni and Annabella:

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (I.iii.176-219)38
GIOVANNI Come, sister, lend your hand, let’s
walk together;
I hope you need not blush to walk with
me;
Here’s none but you and I.
ANNABELLA How’s this?
GIOVANNI I’faith, I mean no harm.
ANNABELLA Harm?
GIOVANNI No, good faith; how is it with
thee?
ANNABELLA (Aside) I trust he be not frantic –
(Aloud) I am very well, brother.
GIOVANNI Trust me, but I am sick; I fear so
sick,
’Twill cost my life.
ANNABELLA Mercy forbid it! ’tis not so, I
hope.
The Real Thing, scene 6 (pp. 57-58)
ANNIE If you weren’t a child, you’d know
that you won’t get anywhere with a
married woman if you’re snotty
abut her husband. Remember that
with the next one.
BILLY I’faith, I mean no harm, sister. I’m
just scared sick of you.
How is’t with ye?
ANNIE I am very well, brother.
BILLY Trust me, but I am sick; I fear so
sick ‘twill cost my life.
ANNIE Mercy forbid it! ’Tis not so, I
hope.

GIOVANNI I think you love me, sister.
ANNABELLA Yes, you know I do.
GIOVANNI I know’t, indeed – y’are very fair.
ANNABELLA Nay, then I see you have a
merry sickness.
GIOVANNI That’s as it proves.
BILLY I think you love me, sister.
ANNIE Yes, you know I do.
BILLY I know’t, indeed. You’re very fair.
ANNIE Nay, then, I see you have a merry
sickness.
BILLY That’s as it proves.

[…] […]

ANNABELLA Fie upon ’ee! ANNIE Fie upon ye!

GIOVANNI The lily and the rose, most sweetly BILLY The lily and the rose, most sweetly
strange, strange,
Upon your dimpled cheeks do strive for Upon your dimpled cheeks do strive
change: for change:
Such lips would tempt a saint: such hands Such lips would tempt a saint; such
as those hands as those
Would make an anchorite lascivious. Would make an anchorite lascivious.

[…] […]

38
While Stoppard appears to have used the text edited by W. Gifford in vol. 1 of The Dramatic
Works of John Ford, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1827), I have used the Revels edition, by De-
rek Rogers (London: Methuen, 1975). Stoppard’s own text is in italics.
126 Barnard Turner

ANNABELLA Oh, you are a trim youth! ANNIE O, you are a trim youth!
GIOVANNI Here! – BILLY Here!
(Offers his dagger to her) (His ‘reading’ been getting less and
ANNABELLA What to do? less discreet. Now he stands up and
opens his shirt.)
ANNIE (Giggling) Oh, leave off.
(She looks around nervously.)

GIOVANNI And here’s my breast, strike BILLY (Starting to shout) And here’s my
home! breast; strike home!
Rip up my bosom, there thou shalt Rip up my bosom, there thou shalt
behold behold
A heart in which is writ the truth I A heart in which is writ the truth I
speak speak.
Why stand ’ee? ANNIE You daft idiot.
ANNABELLA Are you earnest?
GIOVANNI Yes, most earnest. BILLY Yes, most earnest You cannot
You cannot love? – love?
ANNABELLA Whom? ANNIE Stop it.
GIOVANNI Me. My tortured soul BILLY My tortured soul
Hath felt affliction in the heat of death. Hath felt affliction in the heat of
Oh, Annabella, I am quite undone! death.
Oh, Annabella, I am quite undone!

‘His “reading” been getting less and less discreet’ (RT 58): he is not
cautious, circumspect enough (given that they are on a train), but also – to
trace the word back to its Latin root – not discrete enough in discriminating
between the play and the present purpose. The relapses to the personal serve
as commentary on the material’s ebullience, its balance, and on the clichés
apparent – and even in Ford’s day, perhaps – in the metaphor of love written
on the heart. With Billy’s shirt open, the primary connotation of ‘undone’ is
changed to buttoning, rather than the moral dilemma of loving one’s sister.
That the passion can only be conveyed through seventeenth-century language
shows that this passion is as unreal as the characters portrayed. This in turn
reverses the Hamlet paradigm; if Hamlet wants to use the play within the
play to discover something of which he is not certain (Claudius’ guilt), Billy
would like to think that Ford’s dialogue here reveals what is known but
which, for decorum’s sake, cannot be expressed.
And yet there is no such distinction between what is thought and what is
expressed, either in authentic sentiment or in linguistic theory, as the expres-
sion does not predate the content of the message, but both forms and informs
this message itself. Set on a train, this scene is not, of course, a rehearsal in
the true sense, nor a read-through, as the primary frame – Billy’s desire for
Annie – is retained throughout, unlike scene 8, which shows a presumed re-
 Stoppard: New Frames and Old 127

hearsal of a slightly later scene from Ford’s play (II.i), which shows Giovanni
and Annabella after they have consummated their love. While Stoppard’s
later scene, played twice ‘to accommodate a scene change’ (once as a ‘word
rehearsal’ and once as ‘an acting rehearsal’), plays the Ford straight, with no
interpolations or interruptions in its twenty or so lines, it ends with the ‘ear-
nest’ kiss Annie gives to Billy. Again, in its details, there is a ludic, ironic
ephemerality in the scene, worthy of much modernist writing, but Stoppard
collapses this, as the imperatives of the outer frame require.
Here then, as so often in Stoppard, the provisional is regulated by the
compulsion to exact decisions and pattern climaxes, and thus inevitably per-
haps relapses to traditional mimetic Aristotelianism at last. The play within
the play, therefore, even if, as here, it extends to the very limits of the transi-
tive space between theatron and dramaton (that is, the audience cannot know
at the outset whether they are watching ‘the real thing’), shows both the limi-
tations of all theatrical innovation, which a predominantly middle-class au-
dience increasingly expects and against which, therefore, it is already inocu-
lated, and also the limitations of the societal role of theatre today.
Ulrike Landfester

The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss’s Postmodern Metadrama and

the History of Theatrical Reality

In the traditional play within the play established most notably by Shakespeare, the Fool is the
one persona allowed or even bound to speak what the drama stages as ‘the truth’, this ‘truth’
being the knowledge of just where the boundaries between the metadrama’s different levels of
playacting are to be found. In postmodernist play-within-the-play structures, for example in
Botho Strauss’s comedy Besucher (1988), the Fool as a stage persona has become invisible. This
very invisibility, however, underscored as it is by the recurrence of the word ‘Narr’ and other
allusions to the theatrical tradition of the visible Fool in the play within the play, serves to keep
the Fool very much present, in the shape of a blank which must be filled by a knowledge about
‘truth’ which threatens to be lost together with theatre itself.

In the traditional play within the play established most notably by Shake-
speare, the Fool is the one persona allowed, or even bound, to speak what the
drama stages as ‘the truth’. This ‘truth’ is the knowledge of exactly where the
boundaries between the metadrama’s different levels of playacting are to be
found – and, more importantly, where they are superseded by those levels’
structural affinities to each other. Whenever the Fool tells the truth about the
relationship between the play and the play within the play, he also tells the
truth about the structural affinity between the drama onstage and reality off-
stage. Thus it is the Fool’s privilege to reveal that fact and fiction, or, in
terms of the drama, playacting and reality, not only both participate in basi-
cally the same formal designs of communication, but that the significance of
each is dependent on that of the other. The Fool makes it clear that there is no
speaking the truth without using theatrical forms to express it, while on the
other hand the form’s self-conscious theatricality paradoxically serves to
underscore that what is spoken is, in fact, the truth.
Especially in his later works, Botho Strauss stages patterns of the play
within the play that finally allow no one, least of all the audience, to locate
such boundaries. Again and again his protagonists lapse from their parts on
one level and relapse into them as soon as another level seems established.
The simple concept of the play within the play turns into an undistinguishable
multitude of what, in the end, cannot even be called different levels of acting.
130 Ulrike Landfester

Strauss’s metadrama thus surpasses the epistemological doubt introduced into

the play within the play by German Romanticism, doubting the ontological
security of there being, after all, recourse to a single reality. Strauss makes it
very clear that while Romantic playwrights at the end of the eighteenth centu-
ry took up the Shakespearean tradition of the play within the play and show-
ed an artistic value derived from the blurring of any difference between play-
acting and reality, in the twentieth century there are no such boundaries to be
blurred, only a compound of realities derived from individual ways of per-
forming one’s identity.
The perception of reality that is the subject matter of postmodern theatre1
does not allow for the secure knowledge of a sphere that is perfectly and un-
shakeably authentic, untouched by any infestation of fictional elements. Rea-
lity is constituted by a flow of information that owes as much – and probably
a lot more – to the techniques of simulation used by the new media in con-
veying such information as to the factual events reported. Between the ritual-
istic aspects of communication and the loss of any co-ordinating influence on
the ever-growing multitude of specialized micro-languages, this ‘medialisa-
tion’ of reality confronts the postmodern theatre with a singularly paradoxical
situation. The lack of a co-ordinating macro-code of communication throws
everybody back on his or her own self-conception for the security of his or
her identification, as Lyotard put it, concomitantly instilling knowledge of
this security’s arbitrariness,2 while the growing awareness of the imminent
theatricality of the ‘real’ led to the paradigm of performance taking hold in
literally every sphere of social existence. If this is what the postmodern thea-
tre aims at exhibiting, then it is anything but remarkable that it can, even
must, dispense with the Fool persona. The differences once managed by the

1
For a typological description of the postmodernist theatre see Alfonso de Toro, ‘Die Wege
des zeitgenössischen Theaters – Zu einem postmodernen Multimedia-Theater oder: das
Ende des mimetisch-referentiellen Theaters?’, Forum Modernes Theater, 10 (1995), 135-83.
De Toro states that postmodern theatre, developing since ca. 1970, ‘ist gekennzeichnet durch
seine Ambiguität, seine Diskontinuität, seine Heterogenität, durch Pluralismus, Subversion,
Perversion, Deformation, Dekonstruktion und Dekreation, es ist antimimetisch und wider-
setzt sich der Interpretation. Es handelt sich um ein Theater, in dem Kunst als Fiktion und
das Theater als Prozeß, Performance, Nicht-Textualität gefeiert werden (‘is characterized by
ambiguity, discontinuity, heterogeneity, pluralism, subversion, perversion, deformation, de-
construction and de-creation; it is anti-mimetic and resists interpretation. It is a theatre in
which art is celebrated as fiction and theatre as process, performance, non-textuality’; 137).
See also Dieter Kafitz, ‘Bilder der Troslosigkeit und Zeichen des Mangels.: zum deutschen
Drama der Postmoderne’, in Tendenzen des Gegenwartstheaters, ed. by Wilfried Floeck
(Tübingen: Francke, 1988), pp. 157-75.
2
See Jean-François Lyotard, Das postmoderne Wissen: ein Bericht, trans. by Otto Pfersmann,
ed. by Peter Engelmann (Vienna: Passagen, 1986), p. 54.
 The Invisible Fool 131

Fool seem to have comprehensively lost their importance for the state of
consciousness with which theatrical discourse used to concern itself.
In Strauss’s postmodern metadrama, however, there remain two aspects
of the Fool’s absence to be accounted for, aspects which lead one to believe
that this absence must be treated as conspicuous, indeed even as an invisible
presence. On the one hand, by having his personae lapse in and out of roles,
Strauss obviously works on the assumption that there is a difference between
two or more levels of playacting, so that his aesthetics of metaleptics still
realise the Fool’s privilege, however rudimentary. On the other hand, the
term ‘fool’ (Narr) itself appears recurrently in his plays, sometimes in a title,
such as the 2001 Der Narr und seine Frau heute abend in Pancomedia (‘The
Fool and his Wife Tonight in ‘Pancomedia’), where there is no Fool among
the protagonists, and sometimes, even more significantly, in lines spoken by
protagonists who are desperately seeking hold where the sequence of meta-
leptic changes offer none, as in the earlier comedy Besucher (1988). These
appearances serve to create an intense awareness of the Fool’s presence, even
if the concretisation of a dramatis persona is denied him.
The lines sketched above suggest that the invisible Fool’s significance in
Strauss’s metadrama may well be due, at least in part, to a radicalization of
what has always been part of the visible Fool’s history. The earliest Fool on
record dates back to ca. 3000 B.C.; the position of the Fool in the sense of the
jester was a social institution and as such part of the institution of the royal
court. His job description covered the typical function of merry-making at
public events as well as, more often than not, that of close companion, even
friend, to the king. The institution of the Fool was found by Beatrice Otto to
have existed in every historical society that was hierarchical, the king’s caste
strictly distinguished from that of his subjects.3 It is in fact this distinction
which both fuels and marks the Fool’s specific social position. Sheltered by
an a priori acknowledgement of his words’ fictionality, the king’s jester is
privileged to speak truths which, if spoken by anybody else, would be deem-
ed treacherous; armed with this privilege, the Fool can act as intermediary
between the sphere of the king’s perception of reality formed by the ritualist
behaviour of court life and that of the framing, ‘real’ reality of his subjects.
Taking on the Fool as its structurally most important dramatis persona,
Shakespearean metadrama stages his truth as that of a fixed world order kept

3
See Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World (Chicago and London: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2000). For the history of the Fool, see also Enid Welsford, The
Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935) and Sandra Billing-
ton, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984).
132 Ulrike Landfester

in place by God.4 This God, master director of all, directs man’s playacting
just as he directs reality, so that all boundaries between playing and reality
are those between different levels of playing installed to advance awareness
of God’s omnipotence.5 As such they are mirrored by the play within the play
on the theatre stage, the structure of which in itself simply exhibits the rela-
tionship between playing and being as it is placed by the topos of the thea-
trum mundi: ‘Ist die ganze Welt Spiel, so ist das Theater schon Spiel im
Spiel’ (‘If the whole world is play, then theatre is always play within play’).6
Under these circumstances, the persona of the Fool, pointing out, in the
words of the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It, that ‘[a]ll the world’s a
stage, / And all the men and women merely players’,7 balances precariously
on the narrow brink between the affirmative and the subversive. Even in his
ostentatious resignation he seems to imply blasphemously that there is a
sphere where men and women might be more than ‘merely players’. Precar-
ious it is, but balance he does, a trickster jesting his way across the bounda-
ries between levels of playacting.
If the ‘purpose of playing, […] both at the first and now, was and is, to
hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’,8 reflecting an historical reality con-
sisting of separate political and social spheres, the Shakespearean Fool em-
bodies the aims of the play within the play, i.e. the privilege of both showing

4
The terms ‘play within the play’ and ‘metadrama’ have been repeatedly discussed. The
former is generally applied to a structure which puts forth a play within the framework of a
consistent masterplot, this structure being not necessarily a priori concerned with the subject
of the theatre, while the latter explicitly denotes the processes of creating, staging and per-
forming. As I am concerned with the concept of theatrical reality as shown by the play
within the play, this distinction is academic in my case and I use both terms synonymously.
For the term ‘Spiel im Spiel’, see Joachim Voigt, ‘Das Spiel im Spiel: Versuch einer Form-
bestimmung an Beispielen aus dem deutschen, englischen und spanischen Drama’ (unpub-
lished dissertation, University of Göttingen, 1954); for the term ‘metadrama’, see Karin
Vieweg-Marks, Metadrama und englisches Gegenwartsdrama, Literarische Studien, 1
(Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1989).
5
See Manfred Karnick, Rollenspiel und Welttheater: Untersuchungen an Dramen Calderons,
Schillers, Strindbergs, Becketts und Brechts (Munich: Fink, 1980), pp. 16-17.
6
Bernhard Greiner, Welttheater als Montage: Wirklichkeitsdarstellung und Leserbezug in
romantischer und moderner Literatur, Medium Literatur, 9 (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer,
1977), p. 19. See also Dietrich Schwanitz, Die Wirklichkeit der Inszenierung und die Insze-
nierung der Wirklichkeit: Untersuchungen zur Dramaturgie der Lebenswelt und zur Tiefen-
struktur des Dramas, Hochschulschriften Literaturwissenschaft, 22 (Meisenheim: Hain,
1977).
7
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. by H.J. Oliver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),
II.7, p. 87.
8
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), III.2, p.
288.
 The Invisible Fool 133

up and bridging the chasms which divide said spheres by speaking the truth.
This truth in the play within the play encompasses not only information
carried from one sphere into the other, but also points to their similarity,
knowledge of which is deemed necessary for holding both spheres’ function-
ing intact by making it clear that the difference between them must be held
up willingly and strategically. Fulfilling this function, the Fool is the axis
which guarantees both the play’s and the world’s integrity by allowing the
spheres to meet, even mesh, under the tight control of a trickster who, by al-
ways doubting the restrictions put upon man by God, effectively seduces his
audience into accepting them. So it is fitting that the first invisible Fool to ap-
pear in the history of the play within the play should turn up in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, his invisibility representing the threat to ‘all the world’ incurred by
the tragedy’s starting point, the vicious murder of the rightful king by his bro-
ther. Shortly before the final showdown rights this wrong, Hamlet’s encoun-
ter with the Gravedigger opening up old graves for further use gives the
crucial clue as to what precisely lies at the bottom of Hamlet’s seemingly
mad behaviour. ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, Hamlet mourns, holding in his hand the
skull of the late King’s dead jester; without the Fool’s ‘most excellent fan-
cy’,9 the time is ‘out of joint’,10 lacking the trickster to mediate between the
spheres and thus endangering the theatrum mundi onstage as well as (by im-
plication) offstage.
To put the time back into joint, to pave the way for revenge of his father’s
murder by providing the framework of communication necessary for percep-
tion of the truth about the murder, Hamlet himself has to take the place of the
Fool. To do this, he simulates a madness whose very efficiency depends on
being taken seriously by everybody concerned, including himself: assuming
the Fool’s privilege, Hamlet can speak the truth about the theatre mirroring
‘nature’ and thus uncover the structural affinity between them. As it is the
true content of the play within the play that makes the closure of revenge pos-
sible in the framing master play, the closure of the master play in turn points
to the truth that theatricality is common to all communication. Precariously
and self-destructively replaced as the legitimate heir to the throne – who is
himself king in all but form, as the acting king having murdered his predeces-
sor has no right to his position – the Fool’s importance for the theatrical dis-
course and, through that, for the discourse on reality’s theatricality, is em-

9
Hamlet, V.1, p. 386.
10
Hamlet, I.5, p. 228.
134 Ulrike Landfester

phasized once more by Hamlet’s last words, as with the death of the King
turned Fool: ‘The rest is silence’ indeed.11
In the history of German theatre, Gottsched’s banishment of the Fool
from the Enlightenment stage in the early eighteenth century was due to the
phenomenon that the role of the Fool in early modern theatre had transformed
the court jester’s truth privilege into the Fool’s license to improvise freely –
and lewdly – in direct reaction to his audience. This meant that the Fool con-
stitutionally threatened the distance between play and audience necessary to
the ideal moral and aesthetic wholeness of didactic Enlightenment theatre.
Gottsched’s cleansing act, however, might have remained merely an episode,
had not the French Revolution of 1789 rendered the classical Fool obsolete
by dramatically challenging the pre-modern idea of man ordained by God to
fill the social position he was born into. The fact that dramatists from then to
the present have chosen to set their plays within the play in the context of this
Revolution – e.g. Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller – is testimony to the fundamen-
tal change wrought in 1789 when the hierarchical separation of social spheres
was, at least in theory, overthrown in favour of the idea that man could and
should take responsibility for his own life and its achievements.
This development affected the history of the metadrama in a contradictory
way, reflecting already the ontological problem later tackled by postmodern
dramatists like Strauss. On the one hand, Romantic authors like Ludwig
Tieck and Clemens Brentano created metadramatic plays that mirrored the
new reality by subverting the traditional structure into a perfect mise en
abyme that afforded no security of perception on any levels of play. With the
background of the metaleptic breaking up of the ancien régime, metalepsis,
once carefully controlled by the Fool, now changed into a near-autonomous
mode of representation. The Revolution had effectively exposed the historical
structure on which the traditional play within the play had been based as what
its Fools always had known it to be – an artificial instrument for imposing
order on a reality which, in truth and opposed to what clerical and political
powers had argued before, was not naturally organized by class separations.12
Consequently, the Romantic metadrama no longer needs the Fool to point out
explicitly that all the world’s a stage. Moreover, as the Fool’s voice cannot
but imply the authority of a sovereign power that keeps the playing spheres
apart, the Fool finds himself dethroned along with his king. In his comedy
Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss In Boots) Ludwig Tieck ascribed the same ridi-

11
Hamlet, V.2, p. 416.
12
See Axel Schalk, Geschichtsmaschinen: über den Umgang mit der Historie in der Dramatik
des technischen Zeitalters (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsverlag, 1989), pp. 71-96.
 The Invisible Fool 135

culous superfluity to both King and Fool, pointedly leaving to the Poet the
privilege of telling the truth about the time being out of joint without any
possibility of restoring its former status quo.
However, the Romantic metadramas’ reception in their time proved that
the public depended on the tangible separation of spheres now more than ever
before: Brentano’s metadramatic capriccios were not even staged, and the
first performance of Der gestiefelte Kater was not successful because the au-
dience, far from being amused, were openly furious at the disorienting pro-
ceedings onstage – particularly when actors crossed the border between the
stage and the unsuspecting spectators in the front rows. The audience felt
cheated of the hoped-for theatrical illusion. While the Shakespearean meta-
drama had exhibited ‘truth’ as the knowledge that man’s existence on earth
was nothing but that of a puppet, the emancipation of man in the name of
reason required a strict separation between playing and reality in order to
establish a firm ground of authenticity on which man could rely for his sense
of self; that included plays being unquestionably and consistently fictitious.
Subsequently, at least German metadrama has more or less had to revert to
conventional lines to achieve stage success, and the Fool has subsided into an
unobtrusive, if persistent, existence at fairgrounds, in carnival festivities and
puppet shows.
With the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea – still mainly theo-
retical, of course – of man shaping his own social position without being
hampered by prescribed roles merged with the development of the then new
audiovisual media into a conception of reality which focussed on epistemol-
ogical frameworks of perception. The questions posed to reality were now
concerned with ways and means to organize knowledge about it which, as
Brian McHale notes, is a typically modern approach, as opposed to the post-
modern questioning of ways and means to organize reality or even realities.13
Looking at the play within the play within this period of so-called ‘classical
modernism’, the Fool (in contrast to Romantic ‘early modernism’, when he
still played at least a token role) is already invisible in a way similar to the
postmodern play within the play; his presence is part of the play without ma-
nifesting itself as a dramatis persona.
Arthur Schnitzler’s one-act play Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cocka-
too), first staged in 1898, gives a particularly fine example of the early
invisible Fool. Set on the day when the Revolution of 1789 began, the play
denounces the difference between play and reality as a collective cultural
fantasy. In a pub called The Green Cockatoo, the former theatre director

13
Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987).
136 Ulrike Landfester

Prospère combines his old profession with that of host: his ensemble assume
the roles of prostitutes and murderers, thieves and even revolutionaries to
provide the blasé nobility visiting the pub with the frisson of mixing with the
most dangerous subjects in all Paris. (Of course, the audience remain secure
in the knowledge that the atrocities narrated and partially enacted by Pros-
père’s crew are nothing but make-believe.) When the Revolution breaks out
in the streets outside the pub, it only confirms what is happening inside the
pub. None of the characters assembled there manage to tell play from reality,
so much so, that when the leading actor gives a spectacularly passionate
account of having murdered the Duke of Cadignan moments earlier because
he had found the Duke in bed with his – the actor’s – woman, the host’s
horrified reaction provides him with the information that the said woman has
indeed been betraying him with the Duke for months. Right on cue, the Duke
himself appears and is promptly murdered by the infuriated actor, this time
‘for real’. With the Revolution already under way, the rules that would have
condemned a nobleman’s murderer to death mere hours before the crime was
committed have changed, and the murderer is forthwith celebrated euphori-
cally for his service to the young republic.
At the beginning of the play the Duke had explicitly ascribed the term
‘Fool’ to one of its characters, thus the Duke’s murder equals the abolition of
King and Fool alike along lines similar to the Romantic metadrama. Having
been elaborately insulted by Prospère, the Duke muses aloud: ‘Wenn ich der
König wäre, würde ich ihn zu meinem Hofnarren machen, das heißt, ich
würde mir viele Hofnarren halten, aber er wäre einer davon.’ (‘If I was king I
would make him my jester, that is I would have many jesters, but he would
be one of them.’).14 Prospère’s position can indeed be said to resemble that of
the classical Fool, to the extent that at first he is the only one of the characters
who can explain to the police officer investigating his pub for revolutionary
tendencies precisely where the boundaries between playing and reality are
drawn in his pub. During the course of the play, however, the qualities of the
knowledgeable functionary of theatricality are successively deconstructed,
until Prospère’s Foolishness degenerates into mere foolishness when he fails
to realise that Henri’s story is an act, thus unwillingly instigating the Duke’s
murder, while the revolution outside the pub sets the stage for a reality no
longer in need of anything like a Hofnarr. As it is, the Duke’s musing itself is
conducted in the speculative mode of fiction, the Duke no more a king than
Prospère is a traditional Fool (either as the King’s jester or even as the Fool

14
Arthur Schnitzler, Der grüne Kakadu, in Der grüne Kakadu und andere Dramen, Das
dramatische Werk, 8 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1977-9), III, p. 25.
 The Invisible Fool 137

onstage). Prospère had set up his business without the sheltering author-
isation of jesting by the sovereign and, moreover, collapses out of his role as
a director in unintended and therefore perfectly un-Fool-like clumsiness.
The introduction of the term ‘Hofnarr’ thus serves to hint that what lies at
the core of the play directed by Prospère (collapsing into its framework and
vice versa) is not the category of knowledgeable Foolishness impersonated
by one dramatis persona in disguise; rather, it is the embarrassing triviality
of a foolishness common to all protagonists without exception. In its extreme
form of not being able to even realise, much less articulate, the difference be-
tween playing and not playing, this foolishness is most clearly represented by
two characters, one of whom speaks only the unadulterated truth, while the
other speaks anything but. Early in the play, a ragged newcomer by the name
of Grain enters the Green Cockatoo to ask Prospère for a job in the mistaken
belief that the pub-theatre’s director would be delighted to have an actor who
is entirely truthful about his felonies; Grain hails straight from jail where he
has served two years for murdering his aunt. Now Grain wants to become an
honest man, but Prospère is appalled at the thought of a real murderer on his
premises, and only consents to let Grain stay because of his convincing ap-
pearance, the perfect makeup of a murderer. While Grain implicitly insists on
‘reality’ being the perfect stepping stone for an actor imitating it mirror-
fashion, the former actor and present politician Grasset suggests the contrary,
that playacting is the key to acting ‘real’. Grasset begins boasting of the in-
flammatory public speeches he makes while drawing on his experience as an
actor, and in the end claims authenticity for the voice of the Revolution by
loudly approving of the Duke of Cadignan’s murder. He is a liar turning his
playacting into a representation of a new political truth. Having shifted the
attribution of foolishness once from the honest felon to the dishonest politi-
cian, the play leaves its cast wide open to further shifts, by implication in-
cluding the historical citizens of 1789 Paris as well as the actual audience of
1898; small wonder, then, that Schnitzler’s play was closed by the Austrian
court not long after its very successful first night.
Boasting many of the characteristics of the postmodern play, especially in
view of the connection between metalepsis and the Fool’s invisibility,
Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu is in substance still distinctly modern. For
Schnitzler, disillusionment concerning the indistinction of playing and not
playing still remains a truth, however arcane; moreover, the play’s author can
make this truth systematically available to its recipients. Following the logic
implemented by Tieck, Schnitzler even has the poet Rollin, in the manner of
the author’s mouthpiece, voice the generic impossibility of distinguishing be-
tween playing and being: ‘Sein…spielen…kennen Sie den Unterschied so
138 Ulrike Landfester

genau […]? […] Ich nicht.’ (‘To be…to play…do you know the difference so
very well […]? […] I don’t.’)15 There is, however, at least one important
difference to be discerned between the Fools in modern and postmodern
invisibility. While Schnitzler is still concerned with the topical analysis of
reali-ty’s theatricality as such, presenting at least an atrophied version of the
Fool’s role onstage to be identified, Botho Strauss in his comedy Besucher
(1988) uses the term ‘Fool’ only to signify that no such role can any longer
be distinguished among the dramatis personae. Here Strauss is concerned
with the modes and techniques of simulation through which a given indivi-
dual might define him- or herself within the flow of images – visual and
others – constituting reality at the end of the twentieth century.16 The play
begins and ends in a theatre, but what looks like a simply constructed frame
for a play or plays within quickly dispenses with any pretention to coherent
levels of playing, shifting abruptly from rehearsal stage to living room to bar
to fairground to a TV station and back to a stage.
Crossing all those spaces without ever motivating his transitions, the
young actor Max is driven by the desire to fill his existence’s empty stage by
means of performing a charismatic, even auratic identity.17 To achieve this,
he draws all the play’s characters into a playing game seemingly promising
himself as prize – seemingly, because the others are playing just the same
game with just the same end in view. The famous actor and male protagonist
of the rehearsed play, Karl Joseph, imposes the double bind of ‘Sei frei’ (‘Be
free’) to enforce the actor’s conventional adherence to the script which marks
his (Karl Joseph’s) hitherto successful technique of playacting, while Max,
feeling threatened and marginalized by the play’s rigid textuality, tends to

15
Der grüne Kakadu, p. 33.
16
Strauss’s earlier works are mainly concerned with the relationship between contemporary
consciousness and the perception of the theatre in its conventional sense. It is only with Be-
sucher that he programmatically crosses the line towards a theory of the theatre in connec-
tion with contemporary media, even if studies written before the publication of Besucher
already diagnose many of the elements that later became part of his concept of theatrical as
‘mediatised’ reality. It might, however unlikely, even be supposed that Strauss was aware of
these diagnoses when he wrote his comedy. See Monika Sandhack, Jenseits des Rätsels:
Versuch einer Spurensicherung im dramatischen Werk von Botho Strauss, European Univer-
sity Studies: Series 1, German Language and Literature, 905 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang,
1986); Ursula Kapitza, Bewusstseinsspiele: Drama und Dramaturgie bei Botho Strauss,
Literarische Untersuchungen, 9 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1987) and Verena Plümer, Zur
Entwicklung und Dramaturgie der Dramen von Botho Strauss, European University Studies:
Series 1, German Language and Literature, 942 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1986).
17
For the ambiguous significance of the paradigm ‘performance’ for postmodernist drama, see
Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Postmoderne Performance: Rückkehr zum rituellen Theater?’, Arca-
dia, 22 (1987), 55-65.
 The Invisible Fool 139

disrupt rehearsals, feeling that performance should develop from the process
of playing itself. The equally famous actress Edna Gruber, cast as the female
lead, at the same time seduces Max with devastating efficiency by prophesy-
ing that he will only have one other chance of love during his entire life – a
prophesy she uses on men she desires at every given opportunity, unasham-
edly using it to introduce yet another love scene into her life. At the same
time, Max is in danger of losing Lena because he won’t tell her that he loves
her, believing the words Ich liebe dich to be an exhausted line and not worthy
of his feelings.
The problem exposed by Max’s violent detestation of textuality in all its
forms, private or public, is that of being conscious that however authentic the
individual experience, the words necessary to communicate it have been used
before and thus, considered in their textual materiality, can never be anything
but lines quoted from somebody else’s script.18 Thwarted in his hopes to con-
vert Karl Joseph to his aesthetics of a living, ever-changing performance on
stage – ‘Revolution um der Revolution willen, das ist l’art pour l’art’ (‘Revo-
lution for the sake of revolution, that is l’art pour l’art.’) 19 – Max is rebuked
by Karl Joseph and his ideas denounced as intrinsically conventional and, by
implication, textual. Having delivered a catastrophically incongruous, if
spontaneous, statement during a conference on TV, Max turns to the fair-
ground for a space in which to stage an unrestrained identity performance.
Here, however, where the traditional play within the play – see, for example,
Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair – establishes a kind of topos in which the
script followed by everyday existence is annulled by the carnivalesque’s laws
of exception, Max still more emphatically than before finds himself anything
but a singular individual. Looking into a broken mirror,20 he gains ‘einen
äußerst verwechselbaren Eindruck’ (‘an impression extremely susceptible to
being mistaken’) of the face reflected there. Worse still, when he identifies
the entrepreneur of the throwing range as a fool, obviously hoping for the
Fool’s authority on the difference between playing and being, the entrepre-
neur echoes Max’s line like that rehearsed from a script:

MAX Ich sehe, Sie sind ein Narr.

WURFBUDENMANN Sie sind ein Narr.

18
See the study of this particular problem in Andreas Englhart, Im Labyrinth des unendlichen
Textes: Botho Strauss’ Theaterstücke, 1972-1996 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 171-88.
19
Botho Strauss, Besucher, in Drei Stücke (Munich: Hanser, 1988), p. 22. Further references
will be by page number in the text.
20
See Kenneth Little, ‘Masochism, Spectacle, and the “Broken Mirror” Clown entree: A Note
on the Anthropology of Performance in Postmodern Culture’, Cultural Anthropology, 8
(1993), pp. 117-29.
140 Ulrike Landfester

MAX Es ist enttäuschend, am Ende seiner Wege anzukommen und dort

als erstes jemanden wie sich selber zu treffen. (66)

(MAX I see you are a fool.

SHOWGROUNDMAN You are a fool.
MAX It is disappointing to reach the end of one’s road and the first
thing you’ll find there is someone like yourself.)

Max’s desire for the truth includes a pathological misinterpretation of his per-
ceptions, a quality which might be pronounced narcissistic self-love if any-
thing approaching a positive and distinguishable self were not so utterly and
conspicuously absent from the persona itself. The concept of ‘someone like
yourself’, disappointingly encountered at what Max believes the end of his
wanderings, is that of a negative self, the image of a vacuum created by the
excess of identically preformed images inscribed into the idea of ‘self’
through the intermedial linkages in the fabric of what Max experiences as
reality. Contemporary media of communication – represented by the TV con-
ference, a walkie-talkie, an advertisement whose subject, a girl posing with a
diamond, talks back at Max, and, last but not least, an eye-shaped loud-
speaker – have left techniques of mimesis behind in favour of a referenceless
flow of audiovisual artifacts which lead any quest for identity ultimately to
the unsubstantial existence of oneself as a bodiless image generated by those
media. ‘Gehen Sie ins Kino!’ (‘Go to the movies!’), Max desperately cries
out: ‘Sehen Sie dort: die Methode erzeugt Gespenster’ (‘you’ll see: the me-
thod creates ghosts’; 22), populating countless worlds with equally countless
ghosts or spectres like Max himself. Now that everybody speaks the truth
about everybody else, everybody talks in jest, and no position of power main-
tains the order once imposed on reality by guarding it fiercely against the in-
trusion of different spheres of playing on each other: ‘Jeder des anderen Narr.
Und keiner mehr gehört zu einem König.’(‘Everyone everyone else’s fool.
And nobody belongs to a king anymore’; 74)
And at the end of the comedy the rehearsal begins again – similar to what
it had been earlier in every detail save one: the director’s table is now no-
where to be seen. This missing table opens Strauss’s comedy programmatic-
cally towards virtual reality. With the electronically-based possibilities of
simulation, everybody owns his own director’s table; the rules organizing the
simulation of artificial worlds are rules implemented technically and their re-
lationship with what Schnitzler still recognized as a ‘reality’, however onto-
logically doubtful, has lost any representational quality. Now, not even the
tension between textuality and performance remains as a space for the Fool to
appear invisibly between the textual term ‘Narr’ and the process of Max’s
fruitless revolution against the strategic elements imminent in any, even the
 The Invisible Fool 141

most radically self-centred, performance; a process which still bears a remote

resemblance to the classical Fool’s ambivalence. Characterised by Karl Jo-
seph as a time when ‘das gesprochene Wort noch König war auf der Bühne’
(‘when the spoken word was still king on the stage’; 81), modern theatre has
lost its authority to postmodern performance theatre, while the latter is in
danger of losing even its precarious hold on the reality of the act of staging,
as the director’s table and with it the last bastion of the boundaries between
playing and being is removed from sight, leaving behind the omnipresence of
an intrinsically theatrical reality where offstage is always onstage: ‘Zuletzt’,
Karl Joseph resignedly states finally, ‘verlassen der König und sein Narr die
Bühne. Ordnung und Unordnung ziehen gemeinsam ab’ (p. 84) (‘Finally, the
king and his jester leave the stage, order and disorder disappear together’;
84), and as far as the institution of the ‘real’ theatre is concerned, now more
than ever the rest is indeed silence.
In 1992 Strauss elaborated on this melancholy diagnosis by publishing a
collection of essays titled Beginnlosigkeit (Beginlessness). All the essays deal
with the relationship between theatricality and reality as determined by the
field of tension between, on the one hand, the loss of authenticity characteriz-
ing the so-called ‘real’ at the end of the twentieth century and, on the other,
the indubitable reality of cultural theatricality. Within this field of tension,
postmodern drama is only one of many different media existing simultane-
ously, indistinguishably intertwined. Seen with this background, the Fool’s
invisibility in Strauss’s plays gains its significance from the idea of play-
acting as such: ‘Der Mime’, Strauss remarks on the development of the art of
drama since early modernity, ‘Trickster des modernen Bewusstseins, dem es
gelang, sich der Affekte der früheren Epochen zu bedienen, deckt eine Weile
noch seinen zerrissenen Zustand mit zerrissenen Gebärden ab. [...] Im Spiel
der Spiele indessen gewinnen weder Tod noch Leben, sondern allein der
künstliche Gesell.’ (‘The mime, trickster of modern consciousness, who suc-
ceeded in appropriating the affects of earlier epochs, could manage for a
while to cover his tattered condition with tattered gestures. […] However, in
the play of all plays neither death nor life can win, only the artificial com-
rade.’) 21
Careful to use the word ‘Mime’ instead of ‘Schauspieler’, the actor,
Strauss develops his concept of playacting from the mimetic capacity used by
the actor to embody a persona instead of simply speaking its lines. Thus, the
‘Mime’ represents the tension between the power of the textual material to
which Karl Joseph adheres and the art of performance practised by the perso-

21
Botho Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit: Reflexionen über Fleck und Linie (Munich: Hanser, 1992), p. 25.
142 Ulrike Landfester

na of Max, displaying this tension as the ‘zerrissenen Zustand’, the tattered

condition, of playacting within a present in which the distinction between
playing and ‘Tod und Leben’, death and life, has become obsolete. What re-
mains is the ‘künstliche Gesell’, the artificial comrade who has not only lost
whatever ‘life’ the actor identifying with his role breathed into it during times
when theatre and reality were clearly separated, but who also (due to the
same logic which, because of this separation, had invested the artificial life
onstage with its specific reality) has become a descriptive category for man
both onstage and offstage.
Seen in this light, the postmodern play within the play texts’ invisible
Fool still acts as an intermediary in the sense of bridging and at the same time
stabilizing the chasms between different levels of playing. He is an interme-
diary who, by being turned into an invisible presence at the time when the
aesthetics of metalepsis replaces the traditional structure of the play within
the play, becomes a means for underscoring the truth privilege of metalepsis
in itself, while his conspicuous absence functions as a blank to be filled – and
identified with – by actors and audience alike. Quite literally, however, there
is more to the invisible Fool than meets the eye: in postmodern drama he
transcends his significance for the once different spheres of playing towards a
new significance both linking and keeping apart different media as different
modes of cultural theatricality. One notes that the concept of theatricality ap-
plied to the texts quoted above is based mainly on literary, i.e. textual, evi-
dence. The reason for this is the condition of the invisible Fool’s existence:
part of postmodern drama courtesy of its techniques of intertextual bricolage
drawing from traditions which, especially in the Fool’s case, are markedly
literary and thus textual, the invisible Fool, apart from his structural signifi-
cance as such, represents the residuary of literary aesthetics in the flow of au-
diovisual artifacts which constitutes present-day perceptions of reality, so that
his invisible presence may even be said to retain the memory of the knowl-
edge that the systematic employment of intermediary strategies has its roots
in dramatic literature.
2. The Theatre and its Audience
Shimon Levy

Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin’s Political, Aesthetic and

Ethical Metatheatricality

Hanoch Levin (1943-1999), the most prolific contemporary Hebrew playwright, has written 60
plays that have proven to be a major contribution to Israeli culture. He began with scathing poli-
tical cabaret reviews, continued with ‘Neighbourhood and Family plays’, some of them highly
metatheatrical. Since the early 1980s he dealt intensively with the very ethics of the theatrical
event and its vicarious enjoyment of agony. In concentrating on the theatrical gaze itself and on
the much-too-often merely entertaining aspects of theatre, his play-within-the-play techniques
question the precarious relationships between art, message and box office rather than exploiting
a free-floating general self-referentiality typical of post-modern tendencies. Many of his horror
stricken scenes ought to be appreciated as moral traps for the audience, who are invited to ask
themselves to what extremes they are willing to witness in life (as ‘theatre’) the suffering of an
other.

1.
By far the most prolific, keenest and best-known Israeli playwright, Hanoch
Levin is less known outside of Hebrew-language cultural circles. Beginning
in the late 1960s, Levin, born in 1943, wrote 60 plays (22 of which he direct-
ed himself) of increasing finesse and sophistication, and they have gradually
proven to be a major contribution to Israeli drama and theatre.1 Levin began
with political, satirical cabaret reviews such as You, I and the Next War
(1968) and Ketchup (1969), attacking the militaristic hubris that flooded Isra-
el after the Six-Day War victory in 1967. He continued his dramatic course
with ‘Family and Neighbourhood’, existential malaise plays depicting lower
middle-class anti-heroes who set out to meet the world, the ‘others’ and espe-
cially themselves with a sharpened sense of valuelessness. His deliberately
two-dimensional puppet-like characters are often motivated by a pseudo-
Cartesian ‘I humiliate (alternatively: ‘I am humiliated’) – ergo I am’. They
are also stripped down to basic needs of survival, sex, food, excretion and –

1
About 25 of Levin’s plays have not yet been performed; for details see The Man with the
Myth in the Middle. Anthology of New Essays on Hanoch Levin, ed. by Shimon Levy and
Nurit Yaari (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 2004). All translations from Levin’s plays are
my own, except otherwise indicated.
146 Shimon Levy

rarely – a minimal degree of respect. Perhaps not so strangely, Levin’s char-

acters are recognizable by Israelis as lower middle-class ‘Ashkenazi’ (Jews
of European origin), although he hardly ever uses idiosyncratic characteris-
tics. Later Levin engaged in a dramatic discourse with the Classics, adapting
the Bible and various Greek and Sumeric mythological sources in plays such
as The Sorrows of Job (after the Biblical Job), The Lost Women of Troy (after
Euripides), Everybody Wants to Live (after Alkestis and Everyman). Levin
also wrote The Child Dreams, an open parable, examining not so much the
Holocaust itself, but rather the Holocaust as an existential filter through
which Israelis see their lives. At one and the same time he was a provocative
critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians (and other ailments of Israeli
life) and a central culture hero deeply rooted in the Israeli social consensus,
presented in and represented by the two biggest State- and city-subsidized
theatres in Tel Aviv, Habimah and The Cameri. Levin, who died prematurely
in 1999, is the most written-about Israeli playwright, whose shows aroused
many public scandals as well as receiving enormous critical acclaim.
The Queen of a Bathtub production in 1970 was the third in a series of
Levin’s three satirical cabarets, and did not comply with the tacit Israeli thea-
tre commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any ugly image of thyself.’
Nonetheless, Queen of a Bathtub must be regarded as radical less because of
its politically offensive messages per se, already experienced by squeamish
audiences from Aristophanes’s Greece to Brecht’s Germany, and more due to
its uniquely local reception. Levin’s characteristically satirical weapons such
as exaggeration, distortion and the frequent usage of oral, anal and genital
images were reciprocally turned against him by critics and audiences alike,
and perceived as clear indications of his overall infantile character and per-
verse sexuality.
Queen of a Bathtub, rather than playing to an aggrandized perception of
Zionism, presents the country as a bathroom, a centre for bitter feuds between
family members cooped up in a much too small space. The radical rejection
qua mode of reception given to Queen of a Bathtub occurred in a country that
still takes pride in the highest per capita theatre attendance in the world.
Whether a reflection of entertainment or snobbery, theatre in Israel is some-
times taken more seriously than politics, especially such as those criticized by
Levin in his shows. Public response to Levin’s scathing satire proves that his
critique was right, and serves as a sadly amusing example of the sanctimoni-
ous escapism in Israeli society almost forty years ago.
More than other Israeli playwrights, Levin harnessed secular liberal Jew-
ish values in waging his war against the right-wing pact between secular
national-Israeli and national-religious Israeli political movements. Until the
 Queen of a Bathtub 147

late 1960s, Hebrew theatre had been intensely harnessed to the ideology of
the Zionist endeavours. In the Hebrew plays of those days, the Palestinians
played minor, sometimes symbolic roles as dramatic characters in the work
of conscience-burdened Jewish Israelis.2 By the 1960s, Hebrew drama had
gained a certain distance from burning ideological issues, a fact well reflected
in a more international choice of plays for the repertoire together with a more
universal, less local flavour in Hebrew drama itself.3 Nissim Aloni, for exam-
ple, introduced a highly poetic stage language side-by-side with a kind of
Hebrew idiom that had not been used before. His plays, like the highly self-
referential The American Princess that has a film instead of a play within a
play and The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter, have enriched the Israeli stage
with theatrical imagination while aspiring to emerge from a world drama,
ironically not at all Israeli. Similarly pretending to ignore the local political
and social scene, Nathan Alterman wrote the self-reflexive ‘ars-poetic’ play,
The Inn of Ghosts, vaguely in the footsteps of Goethe’s Faust and Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt. These are some examples of the delicate balance that Hebrew
drama still manages to maintain between specific local issues and an overall,
universal struggle of Eros and Thanatos.
At the same time, such important plays in the Israeli repertoire (or even
canon) present the question about the interrelationships between theatrical
self-reference and political messages. In 1969, A.B. Yehoshua wrote A Night
in May, examining the precarious thresholds of Israeli sanity threatened by
inner and external conflicts, using no metatheatrical devices. The play is set
in a small Jerusalem apartment, a semi-underground, tomb-womb-like space
in which the members of one family try to sort out their interrelated neuroses
on the eve of the Six-Day War (June 1967). During the early 1970s (because
the politically and aesthetically radical 1960s reached Israel belatedly, due to
more pressing political and military issues), Israeli theatre examined its own
capacity to portray reality in a theatrical and forceful way without losing
either local or universal elements. Among the important contributions during
this period were Josef Mundi’s socially critical, political-absurd play Around
and Around, in which a ‘Herzl’ and a ‘Kafka’ are locked in an asylum, com-
paring two extreme images of the Israeli: the sadistic thug and the passive,
masochistic spiritual Jew. Whereas Mundi depicted the State of Israel as a
besieged, claustrophobic prison-hospital space, Ya’akov Shabtai’s Spotted
Tiger compared the country to a circus. In the wild fantasies of Pinek, the

2
Shimon Levy, Here, There and Everywhere (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996), pp.
64-65.
3
Shimon Levy and Corina Shoef, The Israeli Theatre Canon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameu-
chad, 2002).
148 Shimon Levy

protagonist, the Land of our Forefathers will be ‘normal’ only if we have a

circus. Both Mundi and Shabtai employ play-within-a-play techniques, espe-
cially regarding the dramatic space: the State of Israel as an asylum (not un-
like Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade), the country as a circus without a safety net.
Also in the 1970s, Hillel Mittelpunkt began writing social plays about the
down-and-out characters of society and, like many other playwrights, did not
forget to depict the Arab as lowest on the Israeli totem pole in his Under-
ground Waters. He, like many other Israeli docu-dramatists, resorted less to
metatheatrical techniques qua message. These plays reflect on the most per-
nicious of problems: how to think universally (later called ‘globally’) while
acting (dramatically, theatrically) effectively in the local sphere.
Yet it was Levin’s politically radical theatre that tore apart the Israeli
post-1967 War hubris. His work, too, promoted radical political activity in
Israel. He slashed political, pseudo-emotional sanctimonious and blackmail-
ing attitudes to the Holocaust, presenting it as a poor excuse (among others)
to oppress the Palestinians and occupy their land. Levin went furthest in tell-
ing his Israeli audience how inhumanly the Arabs have been treated under the
Israeli ‘liberal’ regime.4 He also attacked the Israeli petty bourgeoisie, dealt
with ethnic social taboos, and chose to project a precise, highly unfavourable
image of Israel and the Israelis. Ironically, probably consciously as well,
Levin paraphrases Samuel Beckett’s lines in Endgame: ‘Can there be misery
– (he yawns) loftier than mine?’ 5, transposed to the Arab-Jewish-Israeli con-
text of manipulated comparative post-Holocaust suffering.6
Queen of a Bathtub raised the biggest theatre-related scandal in Israel to
date because Levin’s play exemplifies a uniquely sharp mode of theatrical re-
ferentiality, the socio-political one. Obviously, most plays ‘refer’ to their au-
dience in one way or another. Levin, however, placed the psycho-sociologi-
cal Israeli self-image at the centre of his Queen of a Bathtub and attacked it.
Moreover, I contend that Levin’s extensive future engagements with play-
within-a-play devices, metatheatricality and self-referentiality, can already be
clearly detected in his first political plays.

4
The newspaper Ma’ariv (17/5) reported that an Arab Member of the Knesset, Tawfik Toubi,
and some friends had seen Queen of a Bathtub in Haifa and enjoyed it tremendously. How-
ever, this is still far short of a balanced cultural ‘textual exchange’. I suggest that Emil Ha-
bibi’s (Arabic) novel The Optimist has been read, thanks to Anton Shamas’s Hebrew transla-
tion, by far more Israeli Jews than Levin has been read or seen by Arabs.
5
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p.93.
6
Shimon Levy, ‘Beckett and Levin, Greatness and Death’, Theatre, 01 (2000), 22-27.
 Queen of a Bathtub 149

Queen of a Bathtub contains 24 scenes, 12 songs and 12 dramatic skits in

its published version.7 The following is an annotated outline of the content,
emphasizing the Israeli collective ‘self’ as Levin depicts it.
1. The Interview with a group of Israeli youth unable to explain their at-
titude to the ‘Arab problem’, while using self-righteous Zionist clichés.
None of the youngsters says anything coherent, and other than presenting
their empty selves, they do not relate to the question posed.
2. (Song) The OK People, with lines like ‘Late at night when no one sees,
we’re out in the garden to fart bluish farts of self-satisfaction’ and the re-
frain ‘A finger in the arse and a song in the throat, because it’s good and
stinking and warm.’ The impression implied in the first skit is reinforced
in the second: self-satisfaction is the key notion, yet this very ‘self’ is por-
trayed in a state of moral autism.
3. Courting is an encounter between Boaz and Hulda, stereotypes of
young male and female Israelis, hopelessly in love with themselves while
pseudo-courting each other. Hulda (‘rat’!) is caught on a public bench
‘enthralled with her own inner charm’. Levin then uses the worst clichés
in depicting the image of the Sabra – the Israeli-born ‘healthy’ young
people with no experience of exile, unable to recognize an ‘other’ even
when in love. Following the first skit where the ‘Arab problem’ was total-
ly ignored for the same reason, the message is made utterly clear: pure
self-reference is unethical – in theatre as in social life.
4. (Song) I’m Unhappy completes the previous skit with a song in which
the lovers bewail the impossibility of kissing their own buttocks.
5. Shluki and Fatzluches are two proud mothers praising their sons for
eating when they say ‘I eat’ and sleeping when they say ‘I sleep’. Levin
not only exposes banality, he also slashes the Israeli version of the ‘Jew-
ish mother’ syndrome and portrays a particularly ugly ‘Israelification’ of
traditionally Jewish characters, such as Elija the Biblical prophet. Elijah
indeed enters and praises the two mothers for their sons’ credibility and
character traits necessary for building the country and fighting the enemy.
Finally he salutes in military fashion.
6. (Song) I Met a Bashful Cannon tells of a shy cannon with a charming
beauty spot.
7. (Song) At the Age of Three ends with a warning to three- and five-year
old children, prematurely aged due to war, that their best years are already

7
Hanoch Levin, Siman Kri’a (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987). Quotations in the text
refer to this edition, all translations are my own.
150 Shimon Levy

behind them. Typically for political cabarets, the order in which skits and
songs are edited is important.
8. Fly, a monologue, is the (self-) praise of a man in light of the realiza-
tion that he is not a fly. At the same time the Arabs are compared to flies,
only to realize at the end of this fly-reflective monologue that the Israelis
themselves are (not-) flies.
9. (Song) My Ghetto sends a poisoned arrow to the Israeli ‘ghetto’ syn-
drome, portraying it as a pretext to commit crimes ‘because we suffered’.
Levin turns the well-known Israeli ghetto-excuse into a womb and tomb.
In fact, the song tells of an internalized ghettoization, another aspect of
distorted Israeli self-reflectiveness.
10. The National Library (presented on stage as a matchbox hanging on a
thread, reminiscent of the Hebrew University library building in Jerusa-
lem) is an encounter between a tourist, an Israeli driver and a tourist
guide, poking fun at Israeli pride in anything Israeli, especially the high
culture of books – ascribed to Jews but blatantly nonexistent in contem-
porary Israeli culture.
11. Chambalulu is a meeting between two men, one rich, one poor, per-
haps one oriental Israeli, the other of European origin. They fought to-
gether in a war. Only war, Levin says, is a social equalizer in Israel.
12. (Song) Brothers Chambalulu delivers the message explicitly: ‘Once in
ten years we get a war, and (only) then we [i.e. the rich] are with you.’
13. Samatocha is one of the first and sharpest satires on the relation of Is-
raeli Jews to Arabs. Here especially Levin’s characters use a deliberately
silly, child-like style that renders them flat, puppet-like and exaggerated
in an overly theatrical way.
14. (Song) Beautiful Moments praises regular, normal death by suicide,
murder or accident in counter-distinction to death in war. ‘God in Heaven,
surrounded by [war] pilots, will comfort us with everyday dead.’
15. (Song) Ten Commandments tells how on Mount Sinai, for reasons of
national security, the Israelis of today returned all Ten Commandments to
God and came back without them, relieved and breathing freely. Levin
often measures Israeli behaviour by classic Jewish values.
16. Government Meeting is directly addressed to then Prime Minister Gol-
da Meir and her dealings with her male ministers (including more imme-
diately identifiable characters such as Moshe Dayan and Abba Eban)
whose testicles she squeezes to make them obey. The government meet-
ing is depicted as a pseudo-theatrical congress of fearful twits.
17. Promise is a take-off on Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Blood, Sweat
and Tears’ speech. Levin prefers: ‘And if I promise you blood and tears,
 Queen of a Bathtub 151

not to mention sweat […] and if I say that some will survive, then some
will survive, but do not ask what for.’
18. The Binding opens with the Biblical Abraham saying: ‘Isaac my son,
you know what I’m going to do to you now?’, continues with a series of
infantile emotional blackmail, and ends with Abraham so excited that he
does not hear the angel telling him to stop. Intertextuality is a mode of
metatheatricality which is superbly used here. The myth of the eternal
victim is clearly satirized.
19. (Song) Dear Father, When You Stand at my Grave changes the maca-
bre mood of the skit and introduces an Isaac who says ‘Dear Father,
When You Stand at my Grave, old and tired and very bereaved … then
ask for my forgiveness, my father.’ Isaac here is the Israeli soldier, sacri-
ficed by the ideology of the elder leaders of Israeli society.
20. In Queen of a Bathtub (the title piece), Yekutielli is a sub-tenant (a
Palestinian) in his cousin’s small flat, and the use of the bathroom be-
comes a major feud. The (‘rock-bottomed and copper sheathed’) One and
Indivisible Whole Kingdom of Bathtubia becomes the ridiculed issue.
Later Levin will develop the skit into his full-fledged play Hefetz. Many
of Levin’s later characters too, as noted, are deliberately shallow, thus
theatrically exaggerated.
21. (Song) But the Kingdom is Whole is a mock lullaby comforting a child
for all evils with the (right-wing religious) Israeli slogan ‘But the King-
dom is Whole’.
22. (Song) Lick, Brothers, Lick engages in a variety of licks: lick fingers
not yet lost, lick wounds, lick arses (so as not to look at faces): ‘“Good
night” says the warplane, “good night” says the cannon. “Good night and
golden dreams” say the children in the gas-masks.’
23. How I met my Husband is a woman’s monologue, replete with the
words piss and shit, a reaction to Levin’s critics who accused him of ex-
cessive usage of such words. Towards the end of Queen of a Bathtub, Le-
vin becomes explicitly self-referential in the first-person singular and sa-
tirizes his critics relating to his two previous cabarets.
24. In his Personal Declaration after the show was hounded off the stage,
Levin published a mock apology in which he takes back everything he
has said and wishes to be given a second chance to prove himself as a
useful citizen. This speech is not even camouflaged as theatrically self-
referential because the author signs the speech with his real name.
152 Shimon Levy

2.
The following is an analysis of Queen of a Bathtub’s reception, in particular
with regard to the very people it set out to attack. It is based on hundreds of
newspaper clippings: news items, personal columns, caricatures, (counter-)
satires, advertisements, editorials, letters to the editor and other sources. The
items were taken from the eight main Israeli daily newspapers, Ha’aretz
(‘liberal’-left), Davar (socialist, centre), Lamerchav (socialist, ‘hawkish’), Al
Hamishmar (socialist, left), Yediot Ahronot (centre), Ma’ariv (centre), Omer
(in simplified Hebrew for new immigrants, centre), and Hatzofeh (religious,
right-wing). They range from February to December 1970, with the majority
between April and June.
In February 1970, Davar reported that the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre re-
pertoire for the coming season was to include Shakespeare’s Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Neil Simon’s Plaza Hotel and Hanoch Levin’s Queen of a
Bathtub. Journalist Michal Snunit, who published a survey on Tel Aviv
fringe theatre, (Al Hamishmar 27/2), ended her review with the few rare
words that Levin was then still willing to give the press about his new show:
‘This time it is a satire on the national self-satisfaction in the shadow of the
“security situation”. The ministers compete among themselves as to which of
them can promise a bleaker future. The Minister of Defence promises con-
stant war. Hatzofe reported that National Religious Party officials in the
council of the Tel Aviv municipality would not support the motion to adopt
the Cameri as the municipal theatre of Tel Aviv. Right-wing religious mem-
bers of the city council suggested that the theatre censure the ‘repulsively
tasteless’ scenes in Queen of a Bathtub, especially the Ten Commandments
scene. The Director-General of the Cameri Theatre, Mr. Weinberg, com-
mented by saying: ‘The song does nothing of the sort, in fact it criticizes
those who think that contemporary conditions permit “neglecting the moral
values of the Ten Commandments”.’
Some of the founding members of the Cameri, well known public figures
such as actor Orna Porat (shortly to found the Youth Theatre), Hannah Meron
(who had recently lost a leg in a terror attack) and Yossef Yadin (son of
archeologist Professor Sukenik and brother of ex-chief-of-staff Yigal Yadin),
demanded a vote of no-confidence by the Theatre Board and artistic commit-
tee because of the show. Ha’aretz (25/6) quoted actors (like Yossi Graber
and Israel Gurion) who had quit the show because they could not ‘identify
with its message’, and others who were allegedly blackmailed by right-wing
activists. Director-General Weinberg was under pressure: to lose the financial
support of the Tel Aviv municipality because of religious-party opinions in
the city council would have meant fewer productions, firing actors and loss
 Queen of a Bathtub 153

of reputation. ‘Putsch at the Cameri’, wrote the daily Yediot Ahronot, but
Weinberg, bravely, did not give in. Finally the Cameri board decided to back
Weinberg, who might have realized that the Queen did not have any real
chance of survival anyway (Yediot Ahronot, 28/6).
Right-wing students of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem frequently
interrupted the show. The University even filed a (very rare) complaint
against one student, Shalom Goldman, one of the first settlers in Hebron, who
was found in the auditorium with eggs he had planned to throw at the actors,
should he decide that the evil rumors about the show were justified. The
second show for the same evening was cancelled since Dean Cohen was un-
able to vouch for the actors’ personal safety (Yediot Ahronot, 28/5). A fascist-
oriented new group called the ‘Wolf-cubs’ planned riots against all the
‘lifters of the flag of defeatism’, with Queen of a Bathtub first and foremost
among them.
Interestingly, Yigal Alon, then minister of Culture and Education and
Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence, who saw the show and were thoroughly
observed by the audience, especially in the scene that mentions the Minister
of Defence, indeed disapproved of the content but more so of the hooligan-
ism of the show’s opponents. Dayan thought the play should not be taken off.
However, most audiences were vehemently against the Queen. Many threw
eggs, stones and stinkbombs, ran on stage, tore microphones from their
sockets, yelled, held posters, and whistled. There were fistfights, even one
real bomb scare (Ma’ariv, 15/5). The Jerusalem Workers’ Union cancelled a
visit to the show on May 28. Bereaved parents, who had lost their sons in the
war Levin repudiates, yelled at the actors ‘Shame on you! Take pity on our
wounds!’ – referring to the lines in which a son accuses his father of sending
him to die in an unnecessary war – and ‘It is a pile of filth, a vicious dese-
cration of the nation’s holiest values’ (Ha’aretz/5).
The extra satirical twist, genuinely – and deliberately – shocking many Is-
raelis, was the allusion to the myth of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). The
Israeli Censor ordered this scene cut and the theatre appealed to a higher
judiciary. The censorship rescinded its decision (Hatzofel, 7/4) and the show
could then be performed in full and, consequently, no further changes were
allowed without the author’s explicit consent. A group of war invalids can-
celled their plan to demonstrate against the show (Ma’ariv, 21/5). At the
Writers’ Association’s twenty-fourth anniversary meeting there was a motion
to accept Arab writers (!), and writer Anda Amir spoke out against the Queen
of a Bathtub. The President of the Israeli Lawyers’ Lounge, Dr. Rotten-
streich, wrote a harsh letter of protest to the Tel Aviv mayor regarding the
Queen. The police were often called in to keep order.
154 Shimon Levy

More and more voices in the ongoing scandal related to the issue of Free-
dom of Speech. Towards the end of May even the Cameri Theatre actors
were demanding the removal of Queen of a Bathtub. ‘“Bereavement mustn’t
be a source of income”, they claimed’ (Lamerchav, 17/5). Shortly before the
inevitable execution of the Queen, Levin presented a poster with a big Z on it,
linking his show with Costa Gavras’ famous film on silencing criticism and
on dictatorship in Greece. Finally, towards the end of May, the Cameri Thea-
tre gave up and closed the show; the headline of the sleepiest Israeli daily,
Yedioth Hadashoth (in German), read: ‘Königin der Badewanne wird vom
Spielplan abgesetzt’ (‘Queen of a Bathtub taken off’; 20/5). In early June
there was talk that the Queen was to be resurrected. But satirist Levin and the
director of the show, his brother David, soon after confessed that they were
unable to rent, even at cut-throat prices, any auditorium in Tel Aviv or its vi-
cinity in order to stage the show because no landlord would take the risk.
In May, when the scandal was at its peak, the Queen was to be discussed
in a new talk show called Free Entry, on Israel’s then single television chan-
nel. However, the TV managers cancelled the original program for fear of
further public scandal, thus missing the actual relevance of relating to a still-
running show. Several relatively harmless excerpts were shown a few weeks
later to the television audience as well as to some panelists who had not seen
the original. ‘The Queen’s ghost haunts the Israeli Broadcasting Service like
Caesar’s ghost haunts Brutus’, wrote Yediot Ahronot (16/5), ‘and the discus-
sion on Freedom of Speech added nothing new.’ For the medium of televi-
sion, then in its infancy in Israel, Queen of Bathtub was wrongly timed and
much too moderately presented. Although the televised Queen was therefore
a negligible event, this paradoxically proved its socio-artistic importance. Is-
raelis identified with the ugly picture reflected in Levin’s production.
As late as September 1970, Yediot Ahronot reported on the cancellation of
the trial of a 53-year old man accused of misdemeanour; he had allegedly
snatched a microphone and caused heavy damage during a Queen of a Bath-
tub performance. Judge Aladgem explained: ‘The judicial process may take
too long and become a focus of various matters, likely to disturb the bon ton.’
In December, both Lamerchav and Al Hamishmar (9/12), briefly reported
that 19-year old Aviva Neumark from Bat Yam was fined 50 Israeli pounds
(a symbolic rather than financial burden) for having thrown a stinkbomb dur-
ing a performance of Queen of a Bathtub. Judge Dov Levin [not a relative of
the playwright; SL] showed consideration to the girl, whose fiancée had been
killed in the 1967 war and who was therefore ‘deeply shocked and hurt by the
show’.
 Queen of a Bathtub 155

Many influential columnists and public figures participated in the Queen

of a Bathtub Freedom of Speech debate. Among them were Yoel Markus
(Ha’aretz, 6/5), Law Professor Dr. Amos Shapira (26/4), Moshe Oren and
Steven Gelbart (Al Hamishmar, 7/5 and 8/5), and Azaria Alon (Lamerchav
8/5), to name but a few. Poet Haim Guri’s reaction is particularly interesting,
since in 1948 it was he who had written ‘To Danny and his Friends’ (follow-
ing Wilfred Owen’s well known poem ‘In Flanders Fields the Poppies
Grow’), using an indigenous Israeli red flower given the symbolic Hebrew
name ‘Maccabean Blood’. Guri’s lines ‘Here our bodies are lying in a long-
long row, we do not breathe, death looks from our eyes’ immediately became
a major component in the nationally canonized texts of mourning the dead in
all of Israel’s wars, long after 1948. It is indeed this very sentiment (or
‘myth’) that Levin was trying to shatter in his satire. Guri, the epitome of a
writer presenting conformist, established national consensual values, never-
theless defended Levin’s Freedom of Speech: ‘Instead of discussing the
Akeda [the Biblical scene of the Binding of Isaac] song in the show, we are
forced to discuss the right to express our mind.’ Poet, translator and colum-
nist Moshe Ben Shaul (Ma’ariv, 28/4) understood that the satirical review
was addressed to and against the self-satisfied, those who commercialize
wars and bereavement. He considered Queen of a Bathtub to be an educa-
tional play. So too thought Rubik Rosenthal (Al Hamishmar, 12/6), who sug-
gested that whoever did not make the effort to think in response to the play
had missed a personal opportunity.
Chief Censor Levi Gerri told his interviewer (Lamerchav, 26/6) that ‘the
majority of the Israeli population is not against censorship.’ He based his opi-
nion on the many letters he claimed to have received from people demanding
ever-stricter censorship. (Regrettably, my research in the Israeli press proves
him right.) Ma’ariv theatre critic Nahman Ben Ami loathed the production
(24/5) and refused to accept the image he believed Levin wanted to impose
on him. ‘Lick, brothers, lick the right arses,’ he quoted, and added that ‘Levin
cannot force the audience to satisfy his desires.’ Poet Moshe Dor (Ma’ariv,
25/5) ended up defending Levin. Novelist and critic Yoram Kanuk (Davar,
22/5) put in a word about directing, texts, acting and other theatrical compo-
nents that had been largely overlooked in the overall public hysteria, but was
unable to abstain from offering a pun he created on ‘anal’ and ‘banal’.
Baruch Adler and Dr. Emil Feuerstein (Hatzofe, 29/5) of the right-wing
religious sector represented the extreme opposition to Queen of a Bathtub, for
easily understandable reasons. Levin had re-appropriated the Holy Scriptures
and harnessed them to his own wagon. Theatre critic Feuerstein went out of
his way to defame the show: ‘This is a perverted (satirical) whip, self-hatred,
156 Shimon Levy

spiritual degeneration as never seen before in this country.’ He concluded:

‘Quite a few years will pass before the scar inflicted upon us by the Cameri
Theatre will heal.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Feuerstein’s heavy-handed dic-
tum has unwittingly proven right. Almost thirty years after Queen of a Bath-
tub’s glorious flop, Levin inserted the Binding-of-Isaac song ‘Dear Father,
when you stand at my grave’ into his new play Murder, a grim reminder that
the lyrics were still as relevant (in 1997-8) as they had been in 1970. The scar
has not healed because the wound is not the one that had been identified by
the play’s critics.
Among dozens of public figures repudiating Levin, the show, and the
Cameri Theatre, we find Dr. Herzl Rosenblum, Yediot Ahronot’s editor, who
attacked the production in an editorial (12/6), and even law Professor Amnon
Rubinstein who suggested that journalists were courageous enough to attack
the government, but not the ‘anti-establishment establishment’. Rubinstein
(later Minister of Education) debated the issue with columnist and publicist
Boaz Evron on the pages of both Ha’aretz and Yediot Ahronot. General
Chaim Herzog, soon to become the President of Israel, expressed his view
that the permission given to the Queen to show herself was nothing less than
proof of our admirable national strength and sense of security (Ma’ariv,
29/5). Winner of the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize for Peace’ Uri Avneri wrote in
his Haolam Hazeh weekly on 27/5 that Queen of a Bathtub had become a tar-
get, a symbol for hatred in the eyes of the Israeli fascists. He was only partly
right since many left-wingers too had hated the show, less because of politics
and much more because of their own liberal self-image.
A number of counter-satires to Queen of a Bathtub were written and pub-
lished. Yossi Gamzo wrote Princess of the Shower about a theatre manager in
deficit, saved by the sewer language of a new play (Davar, 12/6 and Ma’ariv,
1/5). Binyamin Galai (Ma’ariv, 24/4, 19/6) published Kings of the Bathtub.
Yonatan Geffen (Al Hamishmar, 22/6), like many others influenced by
Levin, published a pseudo self-accusing confession in the style of ‘I did not
mean to offend the government.’ This was done in the wake of Levin’s own
mock apology. Haim Heffer, (Yediot Ahronot, 18/5) wrote ‘In Praise of
Tolerance’. Amos Kenan (Yediot Ahronot, 8/5) wrote ‘Confessing my Guilt’,
another mock confession, also in line with Levin’s style. Haolam Hazeh
(27/5) experimented with humorous attempts proposing the Cameri Theatre’s
next shows: King of the Toilet, Princess of the Bowl, Count of the Corridor,
Duke of the Bedroom, Prince of the Public Pissoir.
On the other hand, there were writers, translators and columnists who
spoke in favour of the Show. Yoram Bronovski and Mark Geffen, satirist B.
Michael, and theatre critic Michael Handelsaltz are some of the Israeli pub-
 Queen of a Bathtub 157

licists whose reactions to Levin’s play were mildly favourable – or at least

‘understanding’, and who subsequently became much more politically criti-
cal. These people’s reactions, to name but a few known journalists, show
how Levin’s writing helped radicalize their socio-political perspectives. If
satire can be considered a success because it is fiercely attacked, Queen of a
Bathtub was a smashing hit. The enormous upheaval, consequently, ought to
be ascribed to Levin’s ability to stir the self-image rather than his (equally
aggressive) talent for presenting a (generally unpopular) political alternative.
In staging a negative view of Israeli self-reference, he forced his audience to
reflect upon themselves.
Levin influenced, directly or indirectly, such interesting authors and play-
wrights as Itzchak Laor, mediocre epigones such as Shmuel Hasfari, and
younger talented writers like Boaz Gaon, Naphtali Shemtov, Lilach Dekel or
Shai Shabtai. Levin’s highly critical works certainly influenced the modality
and tone of the theatre reviews of Amir Urian (Ha’Ir, Tel Aviv’s main week-
ly), and performance artists like Danny Zackheim, Honni Ha’Meagel, direc-
tor Dudy Maayan and many other young and old theatre-makers alike, espe-
cially on the fringe theatre scene. Since Levin’s works are studied in Israeli
high schools, he has also had influence on young peoples’ sensibilities, as is
clearly noticeable when many of them come to auditions at the Tel Aviv
University Theatre Department and other theatre schools. Levin seems to be
the playwright they know best and identify with most.
Queen of a Bathtub made a real, noticeable change in Israel’s theatre life.
Judging by the unsurpassed public response to the show, it was a major cul-
tural, social and political event. Considering that the show ran for only ten
performances, this necessarily means that the vast majority of the people who
responded to the show (in many hundreds of written and broadcast reactions),
could not possibly have been even remotely familiar with the actual subject
matter, or with the actual mode of presentation to which they were so vehe-
mently objecting. Consequently, it becomes clear that the ‘subject matter’ in
question was neither the satirical text in the show nor the theatrical mode of
directing, acting or designing it. The crux of the matter thus lay in the 1970
Israeli reception of projected, reflected, staged and spoofed Israeliness itself,
its myths, its hubris and its self-satisfaction.
To conclude, unlike sly universal Jewish exile humor, the edge of Israeli
satire has been blunted by an overdose of sentimental affection combined
with real love and identification with the State and its conformist values. As
long as the British ruled Palestine (1917-1948), it was easy to poke fun at
‘them’. As long as ‘our’ life, values and regime are endangered, Israeli thea-
tre resorts to parodies, political burlesques and harmless ironies. Weaned on a
158 Shimon Levy

softer diet, Israelis therefore found it hard to stomach Levin and to deal with
all the other orifices he uses and intentionally abuses. Hardcore satire like the
Biblical Prophet Elijah’s (not the character mentioned in the Queen of a
Bathtub) was made of sterner stuff. When Elijah spoke to the priests of Baal:
‘Cry aloud! […] Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened’ (I Kings 18:27),
it was politically a risky thing to do. Aristophanes took real chances with his
Peace and Frogs and naturally less so with Lysistrata, because sex can be a
wonderfully soothing padding for harsh politics. When Brecht and George
Grosz wanted to mount a procession of handless and legless war invalids in
the epilogue to their Brave Soldier Schweyk, director Piscator had to cut the
scene immediately after the premiere. The post WWI audience could not
stomach it. Costa Gavras chose to film Z outside of Greece. Lenny Bruce was
not always ‘liked’. Queen of a Bathtub was theatrically radical because it
forced Israelis to think concomitantly with their wounded guts and feeble
heads. Often the stimulation was too violent and produced a counter reaction.
People who are, or believe they are, facing existential survival problems rare-
ly appreciate the type of ideological gallows humor that Levin offered, espe-
cially when they are called upon to change their self-image.
Levin’s followers are a legion. He has been widely performed on profes-
sional stages and in drama schools and high schools. His work constitutes an
important part of the obligatory reading list in high schools. Lines by Levin
are often quoted by people who have never seen his plays. Some of the plays
have become (relatively) popular even among the Arab sections of the Israeli
population. The unprecedented public response to Levin’s belligerent politi-
cal satires reflects a variety of the modes in which Israeli society in the early
1970s reacted to the global nature of 1960s radicalism.
Levin’s early political-satirical writing relied on predecessors from Aris-
tophanes to Swift, and from Karl Krauss to Bertolt Brecht. He used a unique
blend of social theories borrowed from the Biblical prophets and Herbert
Marcuse, a touch of the Beatles and the radical student movement of 1968,
together with a dollop of pure political common sense, and applied them to
Israeli society. Levin’s political satire not only reacted to Israeli society, it
also responded to American imperialism, to the USSR and the UN, from the
perspective of radical vectors that arose in the late 1960s all over the world.
Levin, moreover, brought an ‘exile’-liberal Jewish left-wing mentality to an
Israel that was power-drunk and right-wing following the victorious (to Isra-
el) 1967 Six-Day War, at a time when Israelis were least tolerant to criticism,
perhaps understandably but to Levin, unforgivably. First rejected then toler-
ated, in the last twenty years of his life Levin was the best known and most
performed Israeli playwright. Levin’s secular, anti-national and fundamental-
 Queen of a Bathtub 159

ly humanistic ‘diasporic’ views still serve as a wonderful theatrical antidote

to chauvinist national-religious tendencies in contemporary Israeli society.

3.
In the context of Levin’s political engagement, it is important to consider the
function of self-referential and metatheatrical devices in his other plays, too. I
contend that Levin’s usage of this dramatic and theatrical device is predom-
inantly of a moral-ethical nature, rather than reflecting, often self-indulgent
‘aesthetics’. In its many manifestations in Levin’s drama as well as in his
short prose pieces and poetry, self-reference is particularly enhanced by his
often highly metatheatrical direction of his own plays. In his political satires,
later in his semi-camouflaged political pieces Shits, Hefetz, Murder or The
Patriot, the socio-political message understandably dominates the self-refer-
ential dramatic and theatrical elements. In his so-called ‘Family and Neigh-
bourhood’ plays, metatheatricality and other self-referential elements are
often harnessed to enhance deeper self-awareness and achieve a tragicomic
realization; ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ 8 to use Samuel Beckett’s
words. Both Beckett’s and Levin’s protagonists are frequently maimed,
blinded and paralyzed, but their (self- and stage-) consciousness still flickers
on with a criminally zestful humor and brilliance. In fact, they both exhibit
self-reference as a powerful performative act, creating rather than describing
itself, as obvious in Beckett’s Not I or in many of Levin’s monologues.
Moreover, actors performing self-referential texts can hardly avoid ascribing
the self of the characters to their own selves. Audiences are invited to follow
suit.
Many of Levin’s self-conscious characters deprive the spectators of the
easy, pseudo-cathartic pity so often extended to earlier, less self-referential
dramatic sufferers. In Jacobi and Leidenthal the latter indulges in a mock
self-referential soliloquy:

Why should anybody like me? What’s there to like in me? Is there anything worthwhile in
me? There’s nothing in me. Am I tall? Strong? I am neither tall nor strong. And maybe I am
a little tall? No, I am doubtlessly short.9

In this early play Levin explores the gap between great expectations of the
self and petty exploitations of ‘the other’, male and female alike, sex and
friendship, human frailties, and loneliness. Leidenthal’s reflection on himself

8
Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in Collected Dramatic Works, p. 101.
9
Hanoch Levin, Jacobi and Leidenthal, Translated by Shimon Levy (Tel Aviv: Institute for
the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1979).
160 Shimon Levy

is quite obvious. The Labor of Life ends with an appeal to a playwright, in-
deed the very one writing it. Shortly before her husband dies right next to her,
and in a Chekhovian atmosphere reminiscent of Uncle Vanya, the heroine Le-
viva appeals to (and in fact through) the implied playwright:

A writer will arise. A noble man, with a conscience, a heart, and a soul. He’ll understand.
He’ll listen and understand. He’ll hear the whole story of our life, he’ll find the right words,
he’ll create something beautiful and profound with us, something full of compassion and
feeling. With all the mistakes, the flaws, there’s still material in us for a good creation.10

Similarly, Levin’s Rubber Barons ends focusing on the image of life as a

poorly lit cheap melodrama,

Like that moment at the play, twenty years ago, when the light in the auditorium went out
and the light on the stage hadn’t yet come on, and we sat in the dark and waited in silence,
all expectation, all dreams focused on one spot in the dark before us: and then the old curtain
creaked open, a weak yellowish light rose on the stage, and three miserable people stood on
the boards up there with cardboard and rags, and for two long hours churned up our lives, as
if there was something there we didn’t know.11

Levin’s tragedies (such as The Sorrows of Job, The Lost Women of Troy,
Everybody Wants to Live) and, generally speaking, his later plays are replete
with a variety of plays within plays, metatheatrical references to play-
wrights, actors and audiences, to the myriad visions and revisions of the thea-
trum mundi metaphor. In his tragedies, sometimes designed along thematic
and structural patterns of classical Greek drama, metatheatricality fulfils yet
another and, I argue, more sophisticated and much more demanding func-
tion, appealing to the spectators’ ethics: what does it mean to witness humi-
liation, shame, oppression, cruelty, torture and death, mourning and suffering
– if ‘only’ on stage – and what, if any, are the implications of theatre-watch-
ing, of theatre as entertainment – for ‘real’ life?
Everybody Wants to Live presents a man summoned by the Angel of
Death, pleading for his life and looking for someone, anyone, to sacrifice
their lives to save his: his parents, his wife, or a poor boy who happens to
pass by. As a poetic device Levin supplies a little mime performed by The
Angel of Death and a maiden, a lovely image of the major conflict between
Eros and Thanatos, love and death: ‘Death chases her to kill her and wave the
sickle over her. At the very last moment she manages to free one hand, grabs
his penis and begins to rub it.’

10
Hanoch Levin, Labors of Life, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, trans. Barbara Harshav
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 126.
11
Hanoch Levin, Rubber Barons, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, p. 50.
 Queen of a Bathtub 161

The Sorrows of Job is Levin’s fifteenth play. He seems at first to shift

from tragic-comic situations to full-fledged tragedy, in which the most classi-
cal Biblical sufferer becomes an Everyman agonistes, demanding an answer
regarding the very origins of pain. Here Levin examines the theocentric
Jewish-Hebrew religious doctrine to justify, if not to explain, human sorrow,
and finds it insufficient. With Job’s three friends, Levin explores the anthro-
pocentric, Christian-Catholic alternative, which turns out to be equally disap-
pointing. What is left as a possible – and certainly dramatic – explanation for
suffering on earth is theatricality itself. People like to see:

[…] such a performance as this to go to waste.

All those potential tickets mutely crying out
Like the souls of unborn children dying.
Not to mention the educational worth
For those who will still think god exists on earth.
[…] five hundred Dinars to the royal treasury
For the right to put this man
In my circus. (The Sorrows of Job, p. 95)

The circus director buys Job, skewered and about to die, from his torturers
and sells his sufferings, because they are ‘theatrical’, to the on-stage audi-
ence, incidentally quite similar to the audience of Levin’s play on Easter and
Passover Eve in 1981. Elsewhere Job’s friend Bildad expresses the ultimate,
perhaps inevitable cop-out of all those who see suffering from afar:

Look how he looks at me. His tormented eyes

Pierce me with the impudence of a person to whom you owe something.
What’s the matter? What did I do wrong and what do I owe?
Does a skewer in your stomach suddenly make you a just man?
[…] And if I were sitting up there in your place
On the skewer and pierce you with my look, what then?
Would you have come to sit instead of me?
[…] So remove this imploring from your eyes!
I told you: you are you and I am I.
You hear? You are you and I am I! You are you and I am I! (The Sorrows of Job, p. 93)

The audience is invited to dislike Bildad, but then again to reflect further and
wonder who of us would (like Jesus?) take upon him- or herself to climb onto
this mock-cross and feel the skewer tearing our bowels from behind? The
Sorrows of Job harnesses self-reference to a moral rather than a predominant-
ly emotional or even mental reflection of the self. Levin, paradoxically, sacri-
fices the entertaining aspect of theatre to its morally efficacious potential,
162 Shimon Levy

perfectly in line with the implicit promise made already in his first, ‘purely’
political shows.
In The Child Dreams, he examines this point yet more analytically in
dealing less with an actual Holocaust ambience but rather with the Holocaust
as a filter through which Israeli Jews (or whoever suffered immensely) might
see their own lives as well as theatrical plays, especially self-referential ones.
In a particularly cruel scene a mother is about to lose her child, and they will
both die. Characteristically, Levin employs dramatic tactics of enhancing ex-
treme emotions while pretending to neutralize them with chilling irony.
Having heard the mother’s lamentation over her son, a ‘poet’ (in fact, Levin’s
Doppelgänger in the play, or the implied playwright) ‘rips up his notebook of
poems and tosses the scraps into the sea’ as though unable to poetically cope
with the horror he has witnessed. But an ‘idler’, another Doppelgänger of the
previous ‘double’, comments:

You wrote your poems to make an impression

And now you’re trying to impress
By tearing them up.
It’s too dramatic, superfluous, unnecessary;
You attribute more importance
To them than they have.

You might just as well

Publish them in a book, even
Win a little fame;
The world would still look the same.

You’ll learn to despair

More quietly, more modestly,
In silence. Properly.12

Levin’s Requiem (the last play he fully directed, which is still being perform-
ed in 2006) is based on three of Chekhov’s short stories. In it two elderly
people get sick, some die, and a baby is scalded by boiling water that another
woman purposely poured on him. The bereft mother now meets three cher-
ubs, who perform a little story-theatre for her:

Once there was a child. He was a prince, but nobody knew that except him. How sad he was
when all the princesses in the world passed by his window. He lay in bed and didn’t want to
eat. He grew thinner by the day. In the end, he became very sick. He couldn’t move; he just
lay with his eyes open and waited. One night, when the moon was shining, a gorgeous prin-
cess finally passed by, stopped at his window, and looked inside. Through the mists of frost,

12
Hanoch Levin, The Child Dreams, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, p. 158.
 Queen of a Bathtub 163

dust, and dirt, through her own reflection, she saw him. He wasn’t strong enough to speak.
Tears flowed from his eyes.13

Requiem completes a fascinating theatrical circle Levin began in Hefetz (a

Hebrew word that connotes both ‘thing’, ‘object’ and ‘will’), where human
characters became reified, objectified, and ending with Requiem, where liv-
ing people play stage properties such as the horse, the cart, the house. On
stage, the theatrical self-reference enables the audience to move quickly be-
tween a ‘thinged’ person and a personified prop.
The prologue of Agape, perhaps Levin’s most acutely self-referential
play, tells of a mother and her boy who sit in an onstage theatre box. The pro-
logue ends with the opening of yet another curtain, actors come on stage, and
the mother says:

And here are the actors too, ready to begin.

But don’t get overly excited,
It is a wonderful world, but
Nothing here is real.
You will see the world’s entire tale of agonies
Through the veil.
Now open your eyes or shut them –
The show is yours. (Agape, p. 188)

Immediately thereafter an agape, ‘open-mouthed’ sentry, pacing in front of

the Queen’s bedroom, utters the words ‘Who is there’, the first in a series of
allusions to Hamlet, and especially to its intricate play-within-a-play layers,
the ‘mouse trap’, the pantomime before the ‘mouse trap’, Hamlet’s speech to
the actors, etc. Levin, however, turns ironically and explicitly to his onstage
audience, represented by one actor who dies at the end of the play within a
play and is buried on stage. This actor represents the real audience who, it is
clearly implied, will also die soon.

CHILD: And tell me, mommy,

About the frightening creature
Who is half above the earth,
Half underneath.
MOTHER: Son, it is the gravedigger
Standing in the pit,
Waiting to cover you
With a blanket of dirt. (Agape, p. 223)

13
Hanoch Levin, Requiem, in Labor of Love: Selected Plays, p. 259.
164 Shimon Levy

Certainly Levin alludes here to the Hamlet graveyard scene, and to Beckett’s
‘They give birth astride a grave’ in Waiting for Godot. However, the
metatheatrical tension between the temporal, tentative and suspended reality
of experiencing an onstage performance, and the usually less entertaining
mo-ments of offstage real life, is self-referentially expressed as well as
flaunted:

Gentlemen, people have expended here their best money and time, sitting here in the dark
for two hours, seeing on stage another darkness, so either create here some surprise, bring
the dead back to life or something, or else let the curtain down and let us all go home.
(Agape, p. 221)

In Agape Levin clearly poses the question whether the auditorium sucks vi-
tality from the stage or vice versa: the stage buries its audience. Theatre, in
the gospel according to Levin, is an amusing torture generated by a displaced
hope for eternity. Ironically, only the dramatic characters can be and are in-
deed eternal: because they never had a real life. In Agape, Death is not only
‘the show’, but the show itself is Death. The tortures of hope are the
metatheatrical materials with which Levin plays with his characters, his
onstage audience and his auditorium audience.
More explicitly than in other plays, Agape deals with the ethics of experi-
encing performances. The actual audience is constantly goaded to examine its
‘spectating’ motivations; the morality of peeping, the audience’s vicarious
enjoyment of agony, of the suffering of others, whether real or acted-out. In
Levin’s plays since the 1981 Sorrows of Job, metatheatrical techniques are
harnessed primarily as a device employed against moral-stupor. The play-
wright focuses on the ethics of art, especially the public and much-too-often
only entertaining art of theatre. Through his play-within-the-play techniques,
Levin comments upon the precarious relationships between art, message and
cashbox, at least in their Israeli context. He is profoundly occupied with the
morality of those who see evil and do nothing, who see suffering and do not
extend a helping hand. In his own way (he himself would turn in his grave,
reading this), Levin is an angry satirist, a modernist committed to ideals.
Rather than exploiting a free-floating general self-reference typical of post-
modern attitudes, Levin harnesses his shrewdly metatheatrical modes first to
psychological ends, and then to ethics. Moreover, many of Levin’s extreme
pain and horror scenes ought to be appreciated not only in relation to their au-
thor’s inclination for S/M, but indeed as moral traps for the audience, now in-
vited to ask themselves to what extremes they are willing to go and witness in
life, in a performance of the suffering of another.
 Queen of a Bathtub 165

To conclude, (self-) conscious theatricality must be regarded as a tool for

enhancing deeper engagement of audiences with the stage, its theatrical
events and their addressees. It necessarily involves thinking, feeling and
(sometimes) acting – in theatre as well as in life. Metatheatricality also in-
volves an ethical approach to histrionics, rather than the more habitual non-
committal, sentimental, mostly commercial theatre most Westerners see. It
invites free and egalitarian participation by an audience and, sometimes, it
may even suggest that the playwright does not want solely to amuse us.
Gad Kaynar

The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious

Play in Israeli Stage-Drama

The chapter explores the aesthetic construction and prominent socio-political and ethical roles of
the play-within-the-play structure as a rhetorical device in Israeli stage drama. In view of the
enormous prestige of theatre art in Israel as identity generator, the rhetorical manipulation modes
of the play-within-the-play device often enable the ‘fictitious’ theatrical texts to serve as critical
parables that disseminate ‘higher’, ‘theological’ truths regarding the ‘authentic’, extra-theatrical
Israeli reality usually defined by the theatrical text as self-deceptive. This function asserts itself
in three strategies. Strategy A: Reality as a play within the play and the spectator as an ousted
outsider. Within this strategy – observed already in The Dybbuk, the signature performance of
Israeli theatre – the play-within-the-play device is devised as a defamiliarizing mimesis of actual
reality proper, thus exposing the discrepancy between it and the implied spectator’s predominant
reality convention. Strategy B: Social criticism through detached evidence. This strategy, cul-
minating in plays by the bards of Israeli drama, Hanoch Levin and Nissim Aloni, employs non-
realistic, a-mimetic and self-conscious theatrical means in order to ‘distance the evidence’ about
the extra-performative referent to the never-never land of myth, legend or autonomous stage
metaphor, thus stimulating the spectator’s suggestive interpretive intervention. Strategy C:
Merging the frame-play with the play within the play. This strategy blurs the boundaries between
framing and framed plots and involves the implied spectator in the process. Through these strate-
gies Israeli drama has transformed the play-within-the-play convention into a method for en-
abling society to present itself to itself.

‘Real Life is only in the Show.’

Nissim Aloni, Eddy King

In this chapter I offer several observations concerning the aesthetic construc-

tion and prominent socio-political and ethical roles of the play-within-the-
play structure as a rhetorical device in Israeli stage drama. This should be un-
derstood in the context of the special significance and high esteem that thea-
tre art enjoys in Israel’s young society, as the artistic medium that at the turn
of the twentieth century contributed to the revival of the Hebrew language
and to the modernized resurrection of the ancient Hebraic culture. In this
respect there is a correspondence between Israeli drama and the play within
the play, since this device also holds such elevated status within the affective
devices of world stage-drama in general. As a meta-theatrical enclave con-
168 Gad Kaynar

tained in a framing theatrical reality, the ability of the play within a play to
hold a mirror up to nature – namely, to reveal a higher degree of ‘truth’ re-
garding extra-theatrical (and sometimes theatrical) reality – is doubled, for
this truth has in many cases already been validated by the mediating prism of
on-stage spectators. (Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’ performance, the animals’ parody
on the human race in Woyzeck’s ‘Fair’ scene and Treplev’s lake-theatre per-
formance in the first Act of The Seagull are obvious examples).
Following these initial observations, my basic thesis is that the rhetorical
manipulation modes of the play-within-the-play device on the Israeli stage
often enable the ‘fictitious’ theatrical texts to serve as critical parables that
disseminate ‘higher’, ‘theological’ truths regarding the ‘authentic’, extra-
theatrical Israeli reality usually defined by the theatrical text as self-decep-
tive. This, in fact, leads to a role reversal in many plays: the play within a
play is charged with the connotation of an absolute, fundamental, dogmatica-
lly veritable reality, whereas the extra-theatrical referent is depicted as ‘play’
or pretense (or giving an extra turn of the screw to John O’Toole’s definition,
what we may call the play outside the ‘play outside the play’).1 This by no
means precludes the approach that occasionally subjugates the play-within-
the-play vehicle to transmit affirmative (or only mildly reserved) messages
on the ideology of Israeli society and its realization. Perhaps it is no coinci-
dence that this latter category mostly includes plays from the ‘naïve’, ideal-
istic pre-State era.
This phenomenological, ontological and socio-ethical function of the play
within a play as an affective device in Israeli drama asserts itself in three
modes. All three are rhetorical strategies devised to impose effectively the
stage drama’s usually critical input on the implied spectator’s mind.2 This ad-
dressee (the implied spectator) is defined, referred to and activated differently
in every stage-drama, thus indicating the dynamic and transmutable nature of
Israeli society, theatre, and hence, the different play-within-the-play strate-
gies employed.
The following subdivisions will examine the three major categories of the
rhetorical strategies through which the play within the play obtains its effects.

1
John O’Toole, The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 85. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Hebrew are mine. G.K.
2
‘Implied spectator’ means here the characterized dramatis persona and image of the play’s
intended addressee that emerges from the work’s rhetorical system as a prescribed spectator-
role that the real spectator has to play during the theatrical event. See for example my ‘Audi-
ence and Response-Programming Research and the Methodology of The Implied Spectator’,
in New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis, ed. by Günter Berghaus
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), pp. 159-73.
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 169

The most conspicuous phenomenon is that of the increasing involvement of

the implied spectators in deciphering and internalizing the ‘lesson’ they have
taken from the peculiar strategic use of the play within the play by the theatri-
cal text.

1. Strategy A: Reality as a play within the play and the spectator as an ousted
outsider
Within this strategy the play within the play is devised as a defamiliarizing
mimesis of actual reality proper, thus exposing the discrepancy between it
and the implied spectator’s predominant reality convention (i.e. the ideal or
mythologized collective self-image and the implied spectator as representing
the social sector addressed by the theatrical text. This self-image has become
so entrenched and institutionalized in the communal consciousness that reali-
ty is no longer interpreted but, rather, defined categorically according to the
history, ideology, and interests of the society).3 This strategy of processing
the play within the play is distinguished by signs that devise an extreme,
parodied or satirized representation of actual reality that enacts its ‘real’ ref-
erents in their own habitual pseudo-iconic and ontological manifestations.
The strategy is in most cases designed to engender a tension between the
implied spectator’s aspired to (and sometimes detested) reality convention,
on the one hand, and the performative manifestation of the truth about
‘reality proper’ on the other, even if the form of presenting it is unrealistic.
The implied spectators are consequently encouraged to revise their reality-
convention (i.e. their collective identity) and eventually reform their society.
As such this strategy has much in common with Brecht’s epic theatre tech-
nique,4 in the sense of being ideologically mobilized, didactic and instru-
mental, both in the formal and teleological respects.
The first strategy of the play-within-the-play device in Hebrew theatre
was already evident in this theatre’s formative signature production: The
Dybbuk (1922), Yevgeney Vakhtangov’s intercultural (Jewish-Armenian)
staging permeated by the director’s Bolshevist convictions, performed by the

3
Moreover, within the phenomenological realm of the reality convention there is no distinc-
tion between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic notions and no hierarchy of relative importance.
Reality convention constituents, whether they are ‘real’ or ‘fictitious’, represent each other
as segments of society’s collective mind and self-image in a synecdochal manner. On the the
subject of ‘reality convention’ sees also my ‘“Get Out of the Picture, Kid in a Cap”: On the
Interaction of the Israeli Drama and Reality Convention’, in Theater in Israel, ed. by Linda
Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 287-8.
4
See Bertolt Brecht, ‘Das epische Theater’, in Die Stücke von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 983-98.
170 Gad Kaynar

young Habima company (later the National Theatre of Israel), of S. Anski’s

allegory of love that conquers death and the oppressive society alike. The
story unfolds as follows: Leah and Hannan – two youngsters, who were
brought up in different stetls (small, mostly Jewish townships in pre-Holo-
caust Poland) – were betrothed by their fathers, the bosom friends Nissan and
Sender, even before they were born. Sender, who became wealthy, while his
friend remained poor, forgot his promise and offered his daughter Leah to the
pathetic son of a well-to-do Jew. Meanwhile, Hannan, Nissan’s son, arrives
in Leah’s small town as a bright, itinerant scholar, and as predestined by
Heaven, they fall in love. Hannan employs all possible means, including pro-
hibited Kabbalah rites, to prevent Leah’s marriage to another and dies utter-
ing God’s explicit name. His spirit returns as a dybbuk – a dead person that
haunts the living – to enter (literally penetrate, in the sexual sense) Leah’s
body, and he refuses to depart from his beloved. The Zaddik (a Hassidic
sage) manages to exorcise the spirit, but love proves stronger. Just before
Leah’s imposed wedding she dies, to join her true bride-groom in the other
world.
The exorcism of the dybbuk, the deceased Hannan, from the body of his
beloved, Leah, is not merely presented as a therapeutic rite, but as a deliber-
ately histrionic play within a play. It is performed by the Zaddik who serves
as the ‘director’ and main actor of the simulated religious ceremony – for an
audience of witnessing spectators, his devout followers, whose gaze and reac-
tions are among the major factors that frame this scene as an enclosed perfor-
mance. The syntax of this theatrical act is intended, under the legitimate and
sanctified cloak of a religious practice and the overpowering expressionist
style, to demonstrate to this stage audience the absolute hegemony of the Or-
thodox society. Devised as a grotesque and repulsive estrangement of the
elements that made up the most sacred segments of Jewish life in early twen-
tieth-century Eastern Europe – a reality that still existed when Vakhtangov’s
Dybbuk was first presented – this play within a play conveys a rather shock-
ing message to the Jewish implied spectator, whether traditional-religious,
atheist-Bolshevik or secular, Zionist-Socialist. The predominant utopian im-
age of the devout, spiritual and benign Jewish congregation is exposed as a
dystopian self-delusion when the Zaddik’s performance (or more precisely, a
show within the show) exposes the mech-anism of the reactionary authority
of the cruel Jewish bourgeois society, set upon crushing the free love of the
young and non-conformist lovers. Engendering an eerily discrepant attitude
between the stage audience and the implied spectator, the Zadik’s ‘number’
incites the addressed spectator against the materialistic Weltanschauung that
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 171

his play within the play serves, as well as against the overall decadence of the
represented Jewish Diaspora society in its entirety.
This rhetorical orientation is implicitly reflected in the claim to embody
the absolute truth inherent in the performative act of the Zaddik, Reb Azriel-
ke. This claim is, for instance, imbued in his instructions to his devotees con-
cerning the expected appearance of Nissan, Hanan’s father: ‘Soon there will
appear among us a man from the True World so that we may judge between
him and one who is from our world of illusion.’5 In this inversion of roles the
spectators, either on the stage or in the audience, belong to the theatrical
make-believe world of illusion, whereas the presented and enacted ritual in-
corporates the unveiled ‘true’ reality, which only the Zaddik can conjure up.
Such inversion is ironically modified when the Rabbi orders that his follow-
ers ‘make a partition for the deceased’, or in other words – to ostensibly (and
unwittingly, of course) expose his own pretense by screening it off through
the use of the arch semiotic sign for it: a theatre curtain.6
Let us look more closely at the defamiliarized ingredients, drawn from the
familiar and idealized icon-repertoire of the diasporic Jewish world, that con-
stitute this rhetorically mobilized play within a play. The following analysis
refers to the mythological production of Vakhtangov, as conveyed through
the extant visual and written documentation, rather than to the text of S.
Anski’s quite mundane melodrama.
The director converted the semi-realistic architecture proposed by the dra-
matist’s stage instructions into a symbolical play-within-a-play topography.
This was, first and foremost, manifested in the symmetrical, highly-stylized
visual composition, based on the ominously expressionist Schrei aesthetics
and choreographic mise en scène, juxtaposing the ‘performer’, Reb Azrielke,
and his engaged audience, the Hassidim. The Zaddik, with his blatantly white
visage and the shroud-like Kittel worn by rabbis on Yom Kippur (‘Day of
Atonement’) – a pronounced histrionic costume that transforms him into a
Jewish counterpart of Death in the Moralities – is seated on his throne at the
head of a perspectively distorted and upwards directed, phallus-like and stra-
tegically overpowering theatrical table. This alienating position lends him the
prominence of a meta-protagonist on a focused, optically centered stage
within the stage. His male entourage, the Hassidim, with their ghoulish, black
costumes and convoluted, vulture-like gestures,7 are lined up along the walls

5
Shlomo Anski, ‘The Dybbuk’, Act IV, trans. by Joseph C. Landis, in The Dybbuk and Other
Great Yiddish Plays, ed. by J.C. Landis (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 60.
6
Anski, p. 59.
7
See my ‘National Theatre as Colonized Theatre: The Paradox of Habima’, Theatre Journal
50 (1998), 13-18.
172 Gad Kaynar

awaiting their prey as involved spectators of the play within the play – i.e. the
exorcist ceremony performed by the Rabbi – thereby ‘keying’ or framing the
situation that, according to Goffman, is essential for defining its playful (and
here, its performative) character.8 The victim, the dybbuk-possessed Leah –
performed in Vakhtangov’s production by the would be First Lady of the
Hebrew stage, Hanna Rovina – appears in this meta-theatrical situation in the
performative costume of her deconstructed and multifaceted role as the bride.
She is at one and the same time the deceptive performer of the intended wife
of a husband imposed on her by the greedy, superstitious and inconsiderate
congregation, the loving bride of her true dead beloved, and – with her big
black eyes, neatly drawn lips and overtly made-up face alluding both to the
heroines of silent expressionist horror-features and No-theatre conventions –
the incarnation and tangible presence of this deceased soul-mate. These sali-
ent theatrical attributes of costume and make-up are magnified by Leah-
Rovina’s expressive body language. On the one hand it reveals the anguish of
an impotent, virginal girl exposed to the brutal, dark, male aggression of the
onlooking Hassidim crowd that apparently sets out to save her, yet is depict-
ed as if about to assault and rape her (both physically and mentally). On the
other hand, it embodies the defiant resistance of the girl and her alter ego
against the threatening mental, sexual, social and ideological violation.
The deictic markers of the play-within-the-play device in this scene, as di-
rected by Vakhtangov, are further foregrounded through the enclosed posi-
tion of Leah: she is situated standing stage-center, her back to the table, with
an harassed expression and posture, encircled – literally entrapped – by the
apparently well-wishing, yet actually malicious, wolfish representatives of
the Jewish congregation as regarded from a communist perspective. The
whole stage picture thus constitutes a highly charged, iconographic play-
within-a-play paradigm, which highlights the unbearable inner-contradictions
(exorcist-therapeutic aims versus offensive ones) inherent in it. It thereby
steers the implied spectators to decipher by themselves the performance’s
true politically-subversive message that refutes the habitually romantic read-
ing of the play. Vakhtangov’s Dybbuk is therefore a typical example of
Strategy A: namely, the manner in which a play-within-the-play structure –
constructed from radically estranged familiar elements – is rhetorically re-
cruited to expose, through the fictitious metaphor, the truth about established
deception for the sake of preserving reactionary social power; and to project
this truth on the referred to extra-textual society. This is done behind the

8
Erving Goffman, ‘From Frame to Analysis’, in Performance Analysis, ed. by Colin Counsell
and Laurie Wolf, (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 26-7.
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 173

back, so to speak, of the unsuspecting dramatis personae, and through the

mediation and hermeneutic deciphering of the implied spectators who, in this
case, do not belong to the society under attack (although the effectiveness of
the attack depends on their stemming from this milieu), but stand on the
verge of a new, enlightened era.
Another example of Strategy A is found in Yoram Matmor’s A Regular
Play, which premiered at the Tel Aviv Cameri Theatre in 1956. Here the play
within a play becomes the major rhetorical device of the entire piece and
clearly illustrates my argument that the allegedly fictitious meta-theatrical
world exposes the falseness of ‘actual’ reality. The spectators appear to be
‘attending’ a first rehearsal of an Israeli drama in which an inexperienced
playwright presents to a theatre manager and a group of young actors an un-
developed idea for a play ‘about life.’ This play is to depict scenes from the
life of the protagonist, Danny, a youngster who had fought – like the actors –
in the war of independence. A wooden plank stands in for the central charac-
ter, whose designated impersonator, Rafi, has left the troupe and gone to a
frontier kibbutz. The other characters evolve from improvisations. They are a
group of confused young men and women, who functioned admirably during
the struggle for the foundation of the State but have failed to find their true
identity and proper place after the war. Their parents’ generation is no better
off, delineated as ideologically and publicly engaged figures who neverthe-
less fail to communicate with their children and cannot help them overcome
their plight.
A Regular Play is an inverted ‘Pirandellian’ drama, not of characters in
search of an author, but of actors in search – through their dramatis personae
– of their own identities in the temps perdu of their glorious past and dreary
present. Meta-theatricality is used in this context to engender a quasi-existen-
tialist insight into the human condition of the loveless, disenfranchised, un-
employed and nihilist past heroes, who, as Gideon Ofrat puts it, ‘refuse to ca-
pitulate to the gradually spreading petit-bourgeois reality’9 that rejects them,
as symbolized by a short exchange between a waitress and a writer in a cof-
fee shop:

WAITRESS: What would you like? Tea or coffee?

WRITER: Love.
WAITRESS: Love we don’t have. Maybe a cake, with Schlagsahne.

In a reverse relation to Plato’s famous cave parable, the implied spectators

are drawn nearer to the ‘truth’ about their own modus vivendi through three

9
Gideon Ofrat, The Israeli Drama (Herzliya: Tcherikover, 1975), p. 84.
174 Gad Kaynar

agencies: that of the real actors as persons (i.e. the Cameri Theatre ensem-
ble), that of the fictitious actors in the play, and that of their roles. While
either acting or watching their imperfect counterparts, the fictitious actors in
this theatrically-conscious and self-referential play-within-a-play scenario de-
construct what Glenda Abramson terms the ‘myth of the sabra [native-born
Israeli]-hero’s perfection.’10 The audience for its part is entrapped in a
closed-circuit mirror situation: it finds itself reflected by its Doppelgänger,
the real stage actors acting the fictitious performer-characters, who, in turn,
are emulated by their alter egos, the dramatis personae of the rehearsed play
within the play. These characters – Chico, Yitzchak, Tzipora, the Mother, the
Father, the Theatre Manager, the Writer, etc. – close this vicious circle by,
once again, replicating the unacceptable existential circumstances of the audi-
ence as perceived by the implied dramatist. The play within a play as em-
ployed here is thus a highly efficient tool in amplifying the mutually-negating
experiential pulls of the play: towards identification (in a double sense) with
the agents of the three performed reality strata; and towards growing aliena-
tion from them (again in a double sense as this is, in fact, self-alienation).
Regarding Pinter’s initial stage-instructions for The Homecoming, Egil
Törqnvist contends: ‘The “square arch” within the proscenium arch may sug-
gest a play-within-a-play idea, helping us to see the family dwelling in the
large living-area outside the square arch as comparable to the audience dwell-
ing outside the proscenium arch.’11 Israeli drama, and especially A Regular
Play, quite often exposes the spectators to a similar kind of meta-theatrical
consciousness of their ‘ousted outsider’ position in a double sense: that of
being cast out from the territory colonized by the play within the play and its
intrinsic spectators, even if this territory resembles their own; and, on the
contrary, that of being incorporated ‘by proxy’, through these stage-counter-
parts, in the sphere of the performed parable, yet in the function of criticized
objects and referents. The consequent sense of frustration by the spectators is
intensified by their awareness that the social, political and aesthetic furor
raised at the time by the production of Matmor’s subversive A Regular Play,
which shows reality as is and refuses to partake of the officially boosted self-
adulation of the young and fragile Israeli society, has been prefigured from
the outset by and in the play itself. This is manifested in the form of self-
referential controversies among the actors, who endorse the play’s bleak mes-
sage; of conflicts with the manager who wishes to mitigate the hopeless situa-

10
Glenda Abramson, Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-
ty Press, 1998), p. 30.
11
Egil Törnqvist, Transposing Drama: Studies in Representation (Houndmills: Macmillan,
1991), p. 149.
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 175

tion according to the ideology of the day; and with the writer, who insists that
‘there is no connection whatsoever between the stage and reality, since reality
is not well-made, cannot be squeezed into two and a half hours and does not
have two intermissions.’
Furthermore, by resisting the spectators’ self-adulation, the play within
the play not only reflects, but also generates a revised version of the reality
convention that comprises its usually suppressed darker aspects, thereby
drawing this convention closer to ‘reality proper.’ It is this merged empirical
and phenomenological reality that constitutes the play within Matmor’s play,
both in the sense of being immersed in and molded by the dramatist’s pecu-
liar point of view, as well as in the socio-theatrical sense of the ‘regular’
make-believe play acted by the spectators in their everyday life: an unfound-
ed, false belief in a just society, true to its basic ideals and grateful to its
founders.
The overtly theatrical sign of a plank (keresh in Hebrew), stands in for
Rafi, the missing performer of the play-within-the-play’s protagonist, Danny,
a leading fighter in the Independence War whom disappointment with the
greedy, careerist society – mainly represented by his father – has turned into
a lazy, drunken bum. Rafi, in contrast to the character that he was supposed
to play, seems to be the only one to have shunned the theatre’s decadent so-
ciety and he has gone to a kibbutz as a productive existential solution, only to
be killed by Arab infiltrators. Therefore, his metonymic replacement, the
plank, symbolizes – as Glenda Abramson maintains – ‘absence: it is passive
and lifeless, unrelated to its environment, an image of non-existence.’12
Most critics go no further than that literary reading of the keresh symbol.
However, what has remained unnoted is that this plank, the paramount sign
of the play within the play, has a concrete stage presence and function in this
context as a ‘gap’ – i.e. as a self-referential point-of-indeterminacy,13 capable
of stimulating the imagination of the actors within the play. Yet failing to
realize the infinite potential that this object suggests, the actors fail to trans-
form the stage, the artistic endeavour itself, into their own self-assertion,
spiritual salvation and realization of their reality-convention – a place where
decadent, grey reality may be sublimated into a poetic piece of art – and are
consequently doomed to remain entrapped in this sordid reality.
An oblique analogy between Matmor’s A Regular Play and the perform-
ers of the Vilna Ghetto cabaret reality-theatre in Joshua Sobol’s famous
Ghetto (1984) might help us to understand the uniqueness of the play within

12
Abramson, p. 30.
13
Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1976), pp. 276-80.
176 Gad Kaynar

the play in A Regular Play. Sobol’s performers, dancing on the edge of a vol-
cano, enact their sardonic vaudevillian transposition of the gloomy life in the
Ghetto, within the external epic-realistic frame of the play that deals with the
‘authentic’ Holocaust reality. Far from trying to create an escapist haven and
delude themselves and their absent stage Ghetto audience as to the fate that
awaits them, these entertainers perform several functions aimed at the Israeli
implied spectator of the 1980s. By relativizing and humanizing the horror
through their slightly alienated, or hyperbolically melodramatic sketches and
songs – a typical example of Strategy A, in which defamiliarization is never
so far detached from the familiar as to render it unidentifiable) – they allevi-
ate the plight and dread in which their Ghetto audiences live, and (for Sobol’s
Israeli implied spectators) unravel the truth behind the fabricated, manipula-
tive, theological Israeli myth of the Holocaust. This black-and-white myth,
featuring innocent and thoroughly righteous martyrs butchered by inhuman
beasts, is promoted by Israel as a political argument to justify its belligerence
and its occupation of Palestinian territory. The play – especially the cabaret
parts – presents this myth in a more balanced and humanly credible light.
Moreover, the cabaret inserts break the Israeli taboo on dealing with the Hol-
ocaust in terms of grotesque black humour and light music, thus turning it
into an intelligible, discussible human experience and legitimate historical
analogy (in the well-known manner of George Tabori’s plays).
The rehearsing actors in A Regular Play prefer to delve, instead, into a
flat, dreary, self-pitying sociodramatic reconstruction of their plight. This is
the inverted Pirandellian aspect of A Regular Play, which highlights the real
tragedy lurking in the enclosed play within the play of the lost generation.
Matmor’s actors, who fail to create for themselves an alternative theatrical re-
ality that corresponds to their dreams, are akin to Pirandello’s Henry IV per-
formers, who are scolded by their master as his dissimulation mask is ripped
off: ‘You are fools! You ought to have known how to create a fantasy for
yourselves, not to act it for me […] but naturally, simply, day by day, before
nobody.’14 Thus, the fault of Matmor’s decadent freedom fighters, and of the
implied spectator that they represent, does not lie in their stars, i.e. in the de-
pressing reality depicted in the play within the play, but in themselves – in
Cassius’ words in Julius Caesar – that they are underlings.

14
Luigi Priandello, ‘Henry IV’, Act 2, in Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1952), p. 194.
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 177

2. Strategy B: Social Criticism through Detached Evidence

Strategy B conveyed the imperative critical effect on the existential, socio-
political or ethic-cultural circumstances of the implied spectator through a
direct, realistic or pseudo-realistic codification system. Strategy B of devising
the play within the play in Israeli drama employs, on the other hand, non-
realistic, a-mimetic and self-conscious theatrical means in order to ‘distance
the evidence’ about the extra-performative referent to the never-never land of
myth, legend or autonomous stage metaphor. The parable rhetoric of the
play-within-the-play device is thus based on compatible open-parable means
that by force of their enigmatic nature stimulate the spectator’s suggestive
interpretive intervention. In other words, the usually passive spectators are
empowered to choose and elicit the relevant meanings for themselves and –
as a shrewd affective tactic – on their own responsibility.
The most conspicuous auteurs in this respect in the Israeli theatre were
the dramatists-poets-directors Nissim Aloni (1926-1998) and Hanoch Levin
(1943-1999). The meta-theatrical bent of Nissim Aloni had already been de-
tected in the early stages of his work: ‘Aloni writes plays about theatre and
on theatre. Everything is theatre in his plays,’ contended the critic Gideon
Ofrat already in 1975.15 And, indeed, Aloni was the first Israeli dramatist to
transcend the narrow local-realistic approach of Israeli dramaturgy in the ear-
ly decades of the State’s existence. His iconoclastic plays revolve, in the
wake of the French so-called Absurd Theatre writers, around the central axis
of exclusively performative, a-psychological and complex metaphor and im-
agery of a play-within-a-play structure that often includes additional enclosed
layers such as a TV-show or a movie, a theatrical ceremony or a medley of
theatrical styles within the play. These metaphors and images abound with
mythical, legendary and poetic allusions that pertain exclusively to the realm
of the collective Israeli imagination, just like Brecht’s Londonese Soho in
The Threepenny Opera or Chicago’s grocery market in Arturo Ui, which bear
no resemblance to the authentic references of these loci but address the Ger-
man spectator’s mythological conceptions of them. Thus, they are never dis-
engaged from local ramifications despite their esoteric character.
Most of Nissim Aloni’s plays deal with the demise, abduction, or fall of
metaphoric archetypal kings (exiled rulers, mad Napoleons, vanishing Gypsy
dynasties, mob Godfathers and leaders, etc.). These ‘monarchs’ represent,
through various play-within-the-play forms, a professedly reactionary and ro-
mantic Weltanschauung that regards the past – either the historical past of
monarchist Europe or the idealistic past of the Zionist pioneers – as based

15
Ofrat, p. 213.
178 Gad Kaynar

upon a solid, hierarchical World Order, permeated by religious, humanist and

cultural values. This past is negated by the modern present, distinguished by
its materialism, commercialism, mass production and the media-brainwashed
masses that have lost their individual identity. When, for instance, in Eddy
King (1975), the fake astrologist, the identity-less and androgynous Teresa (a
grotesque paraphrase of the blind prophet Teresius in Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex) blinds the New York mob leader Eddy in his live TV show within the
play, Aloni transmits a provocative message concerning the intolerance of
instant, reproductive, false and substitutive modern reality towards real, sub-
stantial human greatness like Eddy’s, even if it’s the greatness of an arch-
criminal. The spectators, however, must by themselves draw this conclusion
from the enclosed meta-show’s fantastic elements, which do not lend them-
selves to easy, unilateral interpretations. ‘Each new play by Nissim Aloni is
an additional stage in the endless conflict between two eternal adversaries:
Performance and Death,’ contends Aloni’s first biographer, Moshe Nathan:
‘Theatre and Play are the only weapons that the dramatist has in the relentless
struggle against the bitterness of Death, a means to deceive death, to conjure
it.’16 This ‘magic against death’ as Aloni himself defined it, is a quality of the
framed play within the play, while dreary, prosaic and grey reality – death, in
Aloni’s terminology – is incorporated in the framing play level: namely, the
main plot that very often represents the implied spectators’ reality (and even-
tually the spectators themselves through onstage spectator-agents who
witness the play within the play). However, in several of Aloni’s plays these
‘real’, ‘fictitious’ and ‘super-fictitious’ reality-planes often change positions
and hierarchy in accordance with the dramatist’s motto: ‘Real life is only in
the show.’
These faculties could be distinguished in their embryonic mold already in
The Emperor’s Clothes (1960), Aloni’s second play which launched his
series of ‘Royal drama.’ Whereas Andersen’s original legend has a tectonic,
optimistic Happy End, in which the crooked tailors are unmasked, Aloni’s
ironic updated version begins from the end of the tale and progresses towards
a not so happy denouement. The person who shouts ‘the Emperor is naked’ in
Caspar the Eighth’s monarchy is not a child, but a young political opponent,
the poet Hector Bassone. He, together with his girlfriend, the singer Marie,
initially protests against the surrender of the citizens to the deceptive, dicta-
torial policies of the ruling Prime Minister, Baron Zum, and the financial
overlords, Dukes Turno and Corvo, the tailors who now head the syndicate of

16
Moshe Nathan, Magic Against Death: The Theatre of Nissim Aloni, ed. by Ze’ev Shatzky.
(Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1996), p. 85.
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 179

the Emperor’s Clothes. Baron Zum, with his keen political intuition, realizes
the true mettle of the young rebel, and manipulates him for his own devious
schemes, starting with promoting Bassone to a high-ranking official. Then,
while the entire population – in a similar manner to the characters in
Ionesco’s Rhinoceros – comply with the order to change into underpants and
admire them as breathtaking regal fineries, Hector Bassone also forgets his
former self, rejects the attempts of Marie to save him, brings about her execu-
tion, exposes the aging and sickly King Caspar to a severe draught that
causes his untimely death, marries Princess Lucy, exiles the Prime Minister
and becomes the new despotic Emperor.
This multi-layered piece, replete with allusions to the Dionysian and
Oedipal myths, to inverted Pagan fertility rites as well as to classical theories
of tragedy and comedy, intermingled with references to the Elizabethan
Chain of Being and modern politics, overflows with play-within-the-play pat-
terns. I shall here single out and concentrate on one device: the media image.
The media image evolves from the general orientation of Aloni’s adapta-
tion of Anderson’s tale. The play begins in the Prime Minister’s office. In the
midst of the resounding advertising jingle of the Emperor’s Clothes syndi-
cate and jubilant shouts coming from the outside, one hears a faint cry: ‘The
Emperor is naked!’ Count Zum looks at his watch: ‘Precisely on time’, he
utters. His deputy expresses his concern that the mob will lynch the rebel, but
Zum stays calm: ‘The police will save him. I gave orders.’ While the original
tale ‘ghosts’ in the minds of the Israeli implied spectators of the early 1960s,
whose predominant feature was their relative unfamiliarity with meta-theatri-
cal techniques and non-realistic rhetoric, they become privy to the stratagem
through which Hector Bassone’s authentic outburst was transformed into a
play within the play. The poet-rebel might consider his protest to be authen-
tic, yet – as the implied spectator has seen – in fact it is nothing but a vehicle
in the Baron’s pretence play machinations within the play, a trite and recy-
cled slogan serving the corrupt regime that the young, naïve boy wished to
topple. The cynical tailor Corvo confirms this impression: ‘A shouting guy is
worth more than a thousand publicity posters. Let him just agree – and I will
turn him into a TV star, shouting against… against whatever. Just let him
shout’. This reading is substantiated through the double framing of the act
that turns it into a play within the play: the fact that the (real, theatre) specta-
tors, rather than being directly confronted with the protester as in the original
tale, are a captive audience to Baron Zum’s opportunist mediation and inter-
pretation; and the framing by the TV coverage that conveys to the spectators
the entire proceedings through the moderator Bobo Fortuna, thus serving
both as a super-frame and onstage spectator of the play within the play. In
180 Gad Kaynar

being the one who transmits and comments on the inner plot, the TV corre-
spondent, like most of his colleagues, is more than simply a reporter: he is
actually the factor whose words and corporeal rhetoric engenders and
evaluates the inner plots about which he reports according to the media rules,
as a kind of a TV-drama-within-the-TV- coverage play. Seen through these
prisms, Bassone’s sincere protest is from the outset converted into a dubious
ostentatious pastiche.
Thus, almost ten years before the inauguration of Israeli television, Aloni
had unraveled what would become its underlying device of turning actual and
substantial, even incidental reality, into a play within a play, i.e. into its pub-
lic image. This image turns authentic life into an utterly absurd, grotesque
and hollow gesture, as the Baron himself maintains: ‘With all this media and
publicity, reality has such a negligible connection with life.’ However, in
contrast to the imagistic reception mode of reality on television, Aloni con-
fronts the spectators (at least in most of the scenes) with the real, living stage
presence of both the media agents (moderator and camera) – the play – and
their objects and victims – the play within the play – at one and the same time
and in the same space. In this manner the spectators can witness the brain-
washing process by the media in action. This becomes manifestly obvious in
the ceremonial ‘dressing’ scene of the ‘naked’ King that, being nothing but a
make-believe putting on of non-existing clothes, transforms this scene into a
play within the play attended by the courtiers as well as by the covering and
commenting media. The ‘fascinated’ TV moderator attempts to sweep us, the
theatre spectators, and the stage-audience alike, into boundless ecstasies of
admiration for the non-existing ‘wonderful garment, Ladies and Gentle-
men…What colours…What shape…the imagination…unspeakable,’ and the
attending courtiers are indeed ‘exhilarated’ by the beauty of the ‘clothes’. We
witness how the ostensive commentary and the act of its transmission eradi-
cate their referent – the naked king, in fact, reality itself, which succumbs to
the absolute, totalitarian authority of the media’s image-making mechanism.
And yet again, as a typical paradox, precisely by denouncing this brain-
washing and cynical twisting of the truth, as well as the herd mentality of the
crowd that adopts it, the unique play-within-the-play rhetoric of Aloni
charms us with this tangible evidence of the tremendous power ascribed by
the dramatist-director to theatrical imagination and illusion.
In Aloni’s second ‘royal’ play – The American Princess (1963) – Strategy
B of manipulating the play-within-the-play device for enhancing rhetorical
ends attains an even more traditional, and concurrently more elaborate,
manifestation than in The Emperor’s Clothes. The play’s frame-plot begins
with Prince Freddie, one of the two protagonists, who sits in a contemporary
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 181

police station in the unsuitable, stereotyped, and archaic stage costume of a

regal red cloak and black gloves, being charged with the murder of his father
in a movie studio. Thus, it intertwines at the outset mysterious and piquant
play-within-a-play elements, alluding to some obscure, remote and decontex-
tualised royal ambience, on the one hand, and the almost naturalistic, grey
and down-to-earth milieu of a contemporary detective play, on the other.
Freddie’s father is a dethroned, exiled, legendary King, an exclusively thea-
trical and self-referential ‘super-monarch’, as his heavily pregnant title –
Bonifatius-Victor-Felix of Hohenschwaden, King in Gratia Dei over big
Bogomania, Prince of Upper-Augusta and Count of the Puck Region –
implies. Yet he finds it difficult to accept the loss of his kingdom and his own
conversion into a nondescript French teacher in a nondescript democracy in
which ‘everybody searches his lost soul.’ When the cynical Freddie’s pro-
tracted alibi concerning the stages that led to the murder of his father be-
comes too fantastic for the unseen, ‘metaphysical’ interrogator to believe, he
demands that Freddie tell him ‘the truth! The truth!.’ ‘Look’, answers Fred-
die, and leads the interrogator’s and the implied spectator’s gaze to an inner
stage, on which the curtain (literally) rises on an obvious yet intricate play
within the play dealing with a ‘whodunit’ narrative, which becomes the main
core of the play’s plot.
This so formally presented, circumscribed and reified story (i.e. the
framed plot) of the cynical and opportunist Freddie, who is merely attempting
to escape capital punishment, is indeed a far cry from looking like the ‘ob-
jective’ truth; yet it suggests some higher, meta-truth, on the world we live in.
Freddie urges us to see a pathetic operetta King, standing in Cothurnae on a
raised platform that defines and highlights him as pertaining to a play-within-
the-play higher existential-aesthetic reality plane, being tempted by a mys-
terious American Princess to record his implausible romantic-theatrical kitsch
memories, and participate with his son in a grotesque movie within the play
within the play. This movie is an extreme ‘biographic’ parody on his life, on
Greek tragedy and on Hollywood epics alike. The greedy son, Freddie, has
no scruples about playing, for fame and a generous amount of money, his
father’s character in this pastiche version of his past; and then, unwittingly on
his own part, murders the King in collaboration with the old man’s movie
double. This latter actor, who undergoes plastic surgery for every new his-
torical part he plays – the skin for which is taken from his behind – is a
monstrous personification of the loss of identity in the modern, capitalist
world.
The entire play is removed from any familiar and ‘literal’ reality, indulg-
ing freely in its fantastic, lyrical, and enticing theatricality. The interplay of
182 Gad Kaynar

the cryptic, epic narration by the interrogated Freddie, and the different con-
centric planes of a play within the play and movie within the play within the
play, which are the farthest removed from any recognizable modern socio-
existential mode, accentuate this spellbinding impression. This polyphony of
meta-theatrical levels underscores the implied dramatist’s nostalgic identifi-
cation with the old monarch’s vanishing romantic world, with its poetic, even
if a little ludicrous, insubstantial and pathetic vision, against the cold, career-
ist, whorish and inhuman sphere of Freddie, the implied spectator’s counter-
part.
The most grotesque episodes, which Nissim Aloni uses to denounce the
cynical commercial exploitation of the truly emotional and imaginative assets
of the ‘old’, ‘European’ world, incorporated in the King’s figure, by the
modern consumer society, are those of the movie-shooting scenes. These
scenes apparently pertain to the realm of art aggrandized by the dramatist.
Aloni employs an absurd amount of blatantly theatrical props in these shoot-
ing scenes (like a wooden hobbyhorse, a paper crown or party balloons), as
well as stylized dialogue and expressionist acting – all invested by him with a
childish, naïve and poetic aura – as a blatant, provocative contrast to the
required iconic, lifelike, realistic film aesthetic (presented by Aloni as
glamourous, but ‘cold’ and heartless). This contrast is used to exemplify and
denounce the deformation of the human spirit by the unrefined, uncultured
and mercantile mental colonialism of the entertainment and film industry, as
a metonymic symbol of the entire modern era.
Owing to Strategy B of removing the play within the play – with its fa-
culty of transmitting ‘transcendental’ truths about empiric reality – from any
explicit formal connection with an extra-theatrical reality, this apparently
bizarre play is paradoxically capable of conveying codified, veiled yet
poignant messages about Israel in the early 1960s. It was then a young coun-
try, on the verge of liberating itself from the solipsist and zealous Zionist
ideology of its founders and developing a cosmopolitan orientation. Never-
theless, Israeli society was still absorbed in narcissistic self-glorification, and
reluctant to accept direct criticism, especially in the most prestigious cultural
institution at that time, the Hebrew theatre. Aloni therefore takes advantage
both of the Israeli theatre’s and the play-within-the play’s lofty phenom-
enological status, as well as of his play’s detached dramatic metaphor, in
order to impose his ironic judgment of society on the implied spectator’s
mind behind this spectator’s back. For this purpose, he manipulates Freddie’s
wry, sardonic discourse pertaining to the frame-play level (the police in-
vestigation, throughout which Freddie addresses the implied spectator while
apparently responding to his unseen interrogator), as a commentary on the
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 183

framed play within the play that features in its midst the abducted King with
his beautified, partly fabricated memories and romantic flair backed up, with
reservations, by the implied dramatist. The reception-regulation mechanism
of the play determines, in each context, the light in which Freddie’s com-
ments are meant to be seen – either as sarcastic remarks on his father’s
viewpoint, that boomerang-like, incite the spectator against the speaker, or as
witty insights that elicit the ‘super-truth’ from the proceedings at the play-
within-the-play level, formulate it and convey it to the audience. Thus, for
instance, while the old monarch reminiscences in his lyrical idiom about his
ex-lovers, and wonders whether one of them, the Jewish Zelda, has emigrated
to Palestine, Freddie remarks: ‘A small country in liberated Africa. Extreme-
ly fanatical. Lots of folklore.’ The haughty, ethnocentric self-image of the pa-
triotic Israeli spectator in the early 1960s is thus put in a belittling and
relative light, by shifting Israel through Freddie’s paternalistic approach from
its central position in the local consciousness to the peripheral position of a
not merely estranged, but also strange, negligible and exotic phenomenon. It
is thereby subject to the process that Guy Debord defined as détournement,17
explicated by Chris Megson as ‘The “turning around” of perceptions of a
phenomenon through the strategic, but often playfully irreverent, recon-
stitution of its familiar elements.’18 In other words, the Israeli spectators are
challenged to acknowledge their provincial position, and start to relate to
their collective self with appropriate humbleness. This is accomplished,
among other measures, by lending Freddie’s quasi-‘lexical’ definition of Is-
rael the attributes of an indifferent epigrammatic cabaret joke (in keeping
with Freddie’s build-up as master of ceremonies), and ascribing this ob-
servation to a foreign, legendary context, which is then even further relegated
to the superior meta-context of the play within the play that has triggered
Freddie’s satirical insight in the first place.
We might therefore contend, in general, that Strategy B of exploiting the
play-within-the-play device for rhetorical purposes by ‘detaching the evi-
dence’ about the referent, achieves its aims by heightening the fascinated,
medium-affiliated, theatrical consciousness of the implied spectator. Thus it
lulls such spectators’ critical awareness, making them open to endorsing the
play’s unflattering thematic observations at their own expense, and without
resistance. This process is substantiated through the legendary, parable char-
acter of the dramatic metaphor, which is even further removed from reality

17
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by David Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Press, 1994), pp. 144-5.
18
Chris Megson, ‘“The Spectacle is Everywhere”: Tracing the Situationist Legacy in British
Playwriting since 1968’, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 14, 2 (May 2004), 23.
184 Gad Kaynar

through the play within the play, thus forcing the spectators to draw and de-
code the codified social criticism by themselves, thereby converting it into
self-criticism.

3. Strategy C: Merging the frame-play with the play within the play
Strategy C of manipulating the play-within-the-play device as a rhetorical
vehicle resorts to the extreme measures of blurring the boundaries between
framing and framed plots and involving the implied spectator in the process.
This strategy applies mainly to theatrical events within which, due to the na-
ture of the Israeli collective memory and imagery, the manifestations and
meanings of the framing play and the play within the play are so inherently
interchangeable and interactive that the entire theatrical event, its space and
the role of the implied spectator in it are incorporated in, and modified by
these symbiotic and synaesthetic relations. Consequently, we are confronted
here not only with two enclosed reality-planes – the frame and the framed
plays observed as such by the outsider gaze of the audience – but with three,
which include the play of the spectator as participant.
The rhetorical effectiveness of this amalgamation evolves from the recog-
nition that it is not a merger based on a clear-cut and dichotomous relation
among the play-levels that constitute it, like the relations observed by John
O’Toole between ‘the fictional boxes [that appear] as the central box framed
within a number of other boxes representing aspects of the percipients’ real
context.’19 In the Israeli theatrical event these ‘boxes’ overlap and intermin-
gle, yet their intertextual interrelations are extremely uneasy, even eerie and
gory, especially when the framing, the framed and the spectators’ play-con-
texts are ethically and ideologically incongruent.
This kind of complex interplay comes most conspicuously to the fore in
theatrical events that deal with the horrendous and pathological imprints that
the Holocaust memory and heritage have left on the deformed Israeli social
ethos, human relations and quality of life, as for instance manifested in Adam
Resurrected, staged by the Gesher Theatre (1993). This production interpo-
lates Holocaust paranoia, represented as a show within a show performed in a
mental hospital for deranged Holocaust survivors, with the shockingly irrev-
erent attributes (in the context of dealing with the Shoah) of an encompassing
circus show (the frame-play). The implied spectators, sitting in the circus
tent, are partly flabbergasted witnesses to this ‘denigration’ of the Holo-
caust’s sacred memory, and partly – in their imposed role of circus addres-
sees – participants malgré lui in this ‘debasing’ show within a show within a

19
John O’Toole, p. 16.
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 185

show. Their dire situation critically reifies and reflects the manipulative atti-
tude of society to the tragic fate of European Jewry in World War 2, which in
Israel feeds trivial political controversies between the Left and the Right,
mainly over the kind of militant power politics ‘justified’ by the Shoah for
‘security’ reasons, as well as being exploited to extort financial and diploma-
tic support, thereby often treating the Holocaust in terms of cultural porno-
graphy. Blatantly exploitative forms of the play-within-the-play device have
attempted to drive this point home, such as through the obnoxious sado-maso
night-club ‘numbers’ of chained-Nazis-versus-Jews-and-vice-versa in Yosef
Mundi’s The Gay Nights of Frankfurt; the fascist striptease scenes in a cheap
German bar in Arnon Grünberg’s You are also very attractive when you are
dead; or Choni Ha’Meagel’s performative event at the Acre Festival for Al-
ternative Theatre that confronted the embarrassed, especially male implied
spectator – defined as a chauvinist voyeur by the performance and the jour-
ney that he had made throughout it – with a weird fashion show. This show
featured, among other ‘attractions’, half-naked models holding familiar Israe-
li rifles in a phallic position, provocatively posing as a receptively unbearable
mixture of porno dolls, Wehrmacht officers and Israeli Defense Force sol-
diers – a hybrid and deliberately offensive image within a symbolist perfor-
mance of the Israeli perverted Holocaust complex, the avenging victimized-
victimizer syndrome, erotic attraction to the cult of power as well as male-
chauvinist and sexist mentality.
The most significant project in this direction to date is Arbeit macht frei
from Teutland Europa (Acre Theatrical Centre, 1991), in which the interpo-
lation of the various play- and play-within-play planes is driven to its ulti-
mate and most perplexing manifestation. A small group of participant-specta-
tors is brought by bus to the Holocaust museum in a kibbutz, north of Akko
(Acre). In this authentic site and situation (reality) they meet their guide,
whose authenticity is the only dubious phenomenon in this context, conse-
quently setting the authenticity of the entire situation and the spectators alike
in doubt, i.e. rendering their reality a fictitious ‘play’ reality. This impression
ensues from their recognition that Zelma, the guide, is actually a young ac-
tress impersonating an elderly and mentally unstable Holocaust survivor.
This can be inferred from her twisted body-language, eccentric and utterly
grotesque dress, multi-lingual, broken articulation and methodology of pre-
senting the exhibits, all dealing with the Jewish persecution and extermina-
tion, with a kind of obvious affection and titillating ecstasy, as if siding with
the murderers. Thus, her enactment of a ‘regular’ museum guide nevertheless
rearranges and modifies the spectators’ standard conception of the Holocaust
by, among other means, drawing ‘unintentional’ and subtle analogies be-
186 Gad Kaynar

tween the German and the Israeli power cult, popular culture and occupation
patterns. She accomplishes this in several ways: by defamilarizing the
meaning of well-known Holocaust icons and ‘re-directing’ the agents acting
in these photographs, models, movies etc., thus reconstructing them as play-
within-the-play constituents, in order to associate them with contemporary
atrocities committed by Israel; and by intriguing the spectators into challeng-
ing their own habitual patterns of thinking and updating them in view of cur-
rent political events, by presenting them with an ongoing ‘Holocaust Quiz’.
Thereby Zelma triggers off the play within the play (or performative event)
of the spectators, making them apply to this dialogue its relevant interpreta-
tion. One overwhelming instance of criticism on society’s sick Shoah con-
sciousness is produced in the inter-medial station of film within the play
within the event, in which the spectators watch Zelma standing in front of a
screen on which is projected the Polish semi-documentary The Ambulance –
on Nazi experimentation with gassing via the exhaust gases of motor vehicles
– while she caresses with immense, self-conscious pleasure the horrid images
screened on her own body as if wishing to become immersed in the frame.
This presents an unusual utilization of multimedial performance art attributes,
intended to make the implied spectator internalize, and not merely accept, the
denunciation of exploiting the Holocaust memory for sociopolitical ends: an
iconoclastic museum scene in a performative event in which we, as half-spec-
tators / half-actors, empowered and driven to articulate taboo truths on the ef-
fect of the national trauma on our lives, are walked about by an actress in the
fake role of a museum guide, acting the part of a Holocaust survivor-instruc-
tor, who turns out to be as sort of a self-referential, victimized-victimizer SS
officer. And this is just the first part of the event’s manipulation of play-
within-the-play manifestations for critically exposing the ‘real’ Israeli Shoah
discourse as a hypocritical, theatrical and self-contradictory play.

Conclusion
In summary, the play-within-the-play pattern in its three-fold strategic man-
ifestations in Israeli drama and theatre as demonstrated here, fulfills a vital
function: either idealizing, affirming, fortifying and amplifying; or criticiz-
ing, condemning and denigrating the contemporaneous self-image of society
at each junction of its development. The young and fragile Israeli society,
having a constant need to boost its self-confidence and re-empower its na-
tional ideology in view of external threats and inner doubts, is shown to take
advantage of the theatrical institution’s enormous prestige, and especially of
the play-within-the-play’s ability to render a decisive verdict on the state of
social sectors and supreme interests. It has thereby transformed the play-
 The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play 187

within-the-play convention into a method for what the socio-theatrical critic

Uri Rapp called – enabling society to present itself to itself.20 This is achiev-
ed in an either ceremonial, self-ritualizing or self-deconstructing form, or by
incorporating the implied spectators themselves in the play within the play,
and exposing them to a tortuous emotional and ethical experience. In the end,
we are often confronted by an inverted pattern, in which the ‘authentic’ reali-
ty of the play within the play unmasks the self-deceptive foul play of society,
as well as unmasking the gulf that lies between society’s wishful reality-
convention and dreary reality per se.

20
Uri Rapp, ‘Theater als Artikulation von Alternativen’, in Uri Rapp, Rolle, Interaktion, Spiel:
Eine Einführung in die Theatersoziologie (Wien: Böhlau, 1993), pp. 30-1.
Zahava Caspi

A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflexive Theatre: The Case of

Israeli Drama

The reflexive split structure of the play within the play is a fitting form for serious themes, philo-
sophical as well as social. It is particularly suitable for the representation of a torn, split, wound-
ed, or complex culture – especially one conscious of itself as such. The chapter will discuss the
complexity and numerous faces of Israeli reality, through its dramatic representation in three
variations of the model of the play within the play. In the first play, Moshe Shamir’s He Walked
in the Fields, written in the ‘heroic’ period of the establishment of the state of Israel, the reflex-
ive structure of play within play exposes an ideological inner tension or contradiction. While the
outer play represents the normative and consensual ideological stand of the Israeli collective, a
subversive attitude arises from within the inner one and complicates their mutual relations. In the
second play, Nissim Aloni’s The American Princess, written in the early sixties, the structure of
the play within the play is only one of the multiplied devices of redundancy and hybridity used
by the author. A spiral form (a play within a play within a play) which dissolves time and space
and enables a fluidness between different levels of play without one main axis, is deeply rooted
in the ‘here and now’ of the multicultural Israeli immigrant society of the fifties. In the third play
finally, Hanoch Levin’s Mouth Wide Open, the author’s critical stand towards the political situa-
tion in Israel is detected through the way in which he manipulates the spectator’s response. The
blurred boundaries between the outer and inner plays arouse a sense of uneasiness, of perceptual
dislocation and hesitation in the spectator. These effects challenge the spectator’s usual modes of
reception and lead to a new gaze on the fictional and actual reality presented in the drama.

In the early days following the establishment of the State of Israel, when
Israeli culture was still in its infancy, a great need arose for an artistic
medium to reflect and express the developing new socio-cultural reality.
There was a need for a powerful apparatus that could take on a founding role,
shaping a new national consciousness and a new collective identity. These
challenges were met by the budding Israeli theatre. By staging plays for a live
audience, the dramatic mode of representation managed to reflect, and simul-
taneously to shape, Israeli society’s collective identity, its national and cul-
tural modus operandi and its most characteristic discourses. Theatre thereby
became deeply involved in Israeli society. The ongoing commitment to a
changing collective reality, parallel to the lengthy formation process of Israeli
190 Zahava Caspi

society, is a process that still continues.1 In the years following its inception,
Israeli theatre reflected mainly hegemonic national values, but in recent years
it has often provoked a re-examination of these values. Indeed, most of the
plays written in Israel reflect the central turning points and changes in the
country’s complex historical development. They are interwoven with power-
ful ‘regions of memory’, describing the collective Israeli experience, its trau-
mas and its conflicts. This may be the main reason why the structure of the
play within the play, which always makes a profound statement about the so-
ciety within which it is written, is so frequently used in Israeli dramas.
The play within the play is a dramatic model of a rhetorical device called
mise en abyme, which always contains a certain duplication. Reflexivity lies
at the centre of all mise en abyme structures.2 The reflexive structure, involv-
ing two (or more) levels of time and space, creates a semantic superimposi-
tion allowing different meanings, appearing one above another, to be seen si-
multaneously. The real play is thus situated ‘in-between’. This device works
not only on the thematic level; it affects theatrical transmission and reception
as well. Therefore, the model of the play within the play can provide insights
regarding the functions and meanings of the play as a whole.
The reflexive split structure of the play within the play is particularly
suitable for the representation of a torn, wounded or variegated culture, and
especially well suited to Israeli culture, which is conscious of itself as such,
while concomitantly compelled to adhere to an ideological consensus due to
its constant state of war. In addition to its self-reflexive dimensions, the play
within the play tends to comment, often profoundly, on the life, society and
era in which it is produced. Whenever the play within the play is used in the

1
The ‘Hebrew Theatre’ (as distinguished from the ‘Israeli Theatre’, the latter relating to the
Theatre that came into being following the establishment of the State of Israel) was commit-
ted to this national mission from its early days in Moscow, where the Habima Theatre Com-
pany performed in 1917; the Israeli Theatre continued this tradition. The term ‘Hebrew
Theatre’ relates not only to Israeli Theatre before and after the founding of the State of Isra-
el, but also to the Jewish Theatre performed in Hebrew in the Diaspora. For further reading
on the historical development of Israeli Theatre, see: Shosh Avigal, ‘Patterns and Trends in
Israeli Drama and Theatre 1948 to present’, in Theatre in Israel, ed. by Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 9-50.
2
The concept of the mise en abyme is taken from the image of a shield, which contains in its
centre a miniature replica of itself. The first researcher to refer to it as an artistic and literary
device was André Gide in 1893. Lucien Dallenbach developed it as a reflective model with
multiplied variations. Dallenbach presents its applications to the genre of the novel, but the
model is even more common in drama. See Lucien Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 7-74.
 Lacerated Culture, Self-Reflexive Theatre 191

theatre, it is ‘projected onto life itself, and becomes a means for gauging it.’3
Thus the play within the play is ‘conscious or overt metadrama […]; the
playwright examines in it the manner in which his society perceives reality.’ 4
In his book The Mirror in the Text, Lucien Dallenbach presents three sub-
genres of this model: simple duplication, in which a play is connected by
similarity to the play that encloses it; infinite duplication, in which a play is
connected by similarity to the play that encloses it, which itself is connected
to another play that encloses it, etc.; and aporetic (paradoxical) duplication,
in which a play is supposed to enclose the play that encloses it.5 This chapter
will discuss three functions of the structural model of the play within the
play, each based on one of the sub-genres and implemented in a different
Israeli play, representing different views of developing Israeli society.
From its inception, Israeli theatre, a new medium in a new country, was
ideologically committed to the national Jewish movement and to the forma-
tion of a new national and cultural identity. But at the same time, due to the
constant state of war with the Palestinians, the theatre was also compelled to
express opposing voices, especially following the occupation of the Palestin-
ian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. The mirroring
effect of the play-within-the-play format enabled the deep conflict between
conformity and opposition in Israeli society to be expressed in all its com-
plexity. In this chapter I will attempt to describe how, through means of
structural duplication or by implementing the fractured mirror technique of
the play within the play, Israeli drama became a mirroring apparatus of
change in Israeli society. In other words, I will show how change in ‘social
structure’ was translated into complex dramatic structures.
The first of three plays to be discussed is He Walked in the Fields by
Moshe Shamir, written in 1948, i.e. during the ‘heroic’ period of the estab-
lishment of the State of Israel.6 This was considered the first Israeli play to
deal with the highly dramatic current events of the period. Due to the circum-
stances in which it was written, the Israeli audience and critics regarded it as
a tendentious play, staged mainly in order to motivate and encourage the Isra-
eli public during the difficult period of the War of Independence. I would like
to present a different perspective on this play, whose complexity has largely

3
Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (London and Toronto: Backwell Uni-
versity Press, 1986), p. 45.
4
Hornby, p. 32.
5
See Dallenbach, pp. 35-38. Dallenbach uses the word ‘sequence’, which I have changed to
the word ‘play’, but the principle remains the same. Dallenbach comments that these models
do not necessarily appear in a pure form and have many complex variations.
6
Moshe Shamir, He Walked in the Fields (Tel Aviv: Or-Am Press, 1989).
192 Zahava Caspi

been neglected. I should like to suggest that the play’s reflexive structure of a
play within the play exposes an inner ideological tension: while the outer
play indeed represents the normative and consensual ideological stand of the
Israeli collective at that time, a subversive attitude emerges from within the
inner play, thus complicating their mutual relations.
The second play, The American Princess by Nissim Aloni, was written in
the early sixties.7 In The American Princess, the structure of the play within
the play is just one of the playwright’s many devices of redundancy and hy-
bridism. Nissim Aloni, son of an immigrant family who grew up in a margin-
al Tel Aviv neighborhood, uses the potential of infinite duplication of the
play within the play as reflective of the ‘here-and-now’ of the multicultural
immigrant society in Israel in the 1950s. The spiral form (a play within a play
within a play) in The American Princess allows fluidity between one play and
the other, creating more than one main axis in the drama. It thus reflects the
author’s conviction that there is no single valid truth. Instead, the spectator is
confronted with a variety of options. He is not expected to choose between
them, but rather to balance them all.
The third play, Mouth Wide Open, was written in 1995 by Hanoch Levin.8
Levin became one of the most extreme critics of the Israeli political situation
from the very start of the occupation of the Arab territories in 1967. In an at-
tempt to speak out against what he considered a growing and desperate indif-
ference of the Israeli public to this troubling reality, Levin expresses his criti-
cism by manipulating the spectator’s response. The demolished or blurred
boundaries between the outer and inner plays arouse a sense of unease, of
perceptual dislocation and insecurity. These effects, as I intend to show later,
rupture the spectator’s interpretation, challenging his habitual modes of re-
ception and compelling him to form a new view of the fictional and actual
realities.
The first play, He Walked in the Fields, represents the simple model. The
outer play takes place on the memorial day that commemorates the death of
the hero, Uri, one year earlier.9 The inner play is comprised of a series of
fragmented flashbacks that tell the story of Uri’s life from the day he returned
from boarding school until the day he was killed while attempting to blow up
a bridge during a clandestine military action.10 He Walked in the Fields was
first performed by the Cameri Theatre at the end of May 1948, just two

7
Nissim Aloni, The American Princess (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot Press, 2002).
8
Hanoch Levin, Mouth Wide Open, in The Whore from Ohio, ed. by Menahem Perri (Tel
Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad Press, 1996) pp. 183-224.
9
In the canonical 1966 version, twenty years have passed since Uri’s death.
10
During the time of the British Mandate in Palestine.
 Lacerated Culture, Self-Reflexive Theatre 193

weeks after the declaration of the State of Israel.11 Although the play’s events
take place during the years preceding the 1948-49 War of Independence, the
timing of the play’s presentation strengthened the bond between the reality
presented on stage and the ‘heroic’ reality being acted out in Israel. This is
only one of the reasons why the author’s critical stance was not noted by the
audience at the time. Shamir’s decision to use a version of what Dallenbach
termed a ‘simple duplication’ of the play within the play (albeit by way of
contrast) was probably intended from the start to moderate the criticism ex-
pressed in the novel on which the play was based, while truthfully represent-
ing the ethos of an Israeli collective fighting for its life and liberty. 12 Sha-
mir’s intention was to provide a mythical framing of the events of the inner
play in order to cover its subversive materials. The outer play was moulded
as memorial pageantry, designed to emphasize a communal commitment and
to underscore the ideological importance of the death of the nations’ sons.13
This connection is further indicated in the constant ‘skipping’ from outer to
inner play and back again, which takes place nine times in He Walked in the
Fields. This particular device can be seen as an effort to blur the boundaries
between the two plays in order to cover their contrasting stances and to
impose the ideological concept, reflected in the memorial service of the outer
play, on the ‘actual facts’ of Uri’s life as presented in the inner play.
Despite these efforts, the play does not reach a resolution between the two
concepts struggling within it. ‘Veneration’ of the fallen hero, the message of
the outer play, is shown in the narrator’s summary narrative and represented
by a static picture of the dead Uri, re-appearing in the background from time

11
The play was presented three more times: In 1956 it was performed by the Cameri Theatre
in Paris with the original cast, but some changes were made for the foreign audience and for
the new Israeli generation not familiar with the historical facts. In spite of the changes, the
structure of the play within the play and the characteristic features of each play remained the
same. In 1966 it was performed by the Haifa Theatre with minor changes; this became the
authorized version. In 1997 it was performed again by the Beer-Sheva Theatre on the 50th
anniversary of the State of Israel.
12
The concept of the moderating role ascribed to the outer play can be seen in the following
articles: Gad Kaynar, ‘The play He Walked in the Fields: A Milestone in the History of the
Israeli Theatre’, Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 39 (1999), 67-76; Avner Ben-
Amos, ‘He Walked in the Fields in 1948: Bereavement, Memory and Consolation’, in The
Cameri: A Theatre of Time and Place, ed. by Gad Kaynar, Fredie Rokem, Eli Rozik (Tel
Aviv: University of Tel Aviv Press, 1999), pp. 25-47.
13
For further insights into the ideological characteristics and propaganda of pageantry and its
origins see Gideon Efrat, Earth, Man, Blood: The Myth of the Pioneer and the Ritual of
Earth In Eretz-Israel Settlement Drama (Tel Aviv: Charikover, 1980), pp. 200-224; Stephen
J. Whitfield, ‘The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946’, American Jewish History, 84.3 (1996),
221-251 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_jewish_history/v084?84.3whitfield.html>.
194 Zahava Caspi

to time. In contrast, the inner play, portraying events as they ‘really’ happen-
ed and presented on stage for the spectators to watch and judge, presents us
with a character far from ideal. Uri is shown as a confused young man who
cannot deal with the separation of his parents and who avoids taking respon-
sibility for his pregnant girlfriend, using his national military service as an
excuse to escape his personal responsibilities. Thus while the outer play func-
tions as a mythical text within the framework of the dominant Israeli ethos,
the inner play subverts and mocks this idealization by revealing the falseness
of the mythical perception of its hero, Uri.
It becomes clear that the so-called ‘heroic acts’ which lead to Uri’s death
in military action originate in an inherent death-wish which is revealed on the
day he returns home from boarding school, when he learns not only that his
parents have separated, but also that his elderly father is leaving for yet
another national mission. Uri feels that his father, one of the founders of the
kibbutz, does not leave him, the first son born on the kibbutz, with any space
to grow. The founding fathers precede their sons in every area of life: in
settling, in farming, in absorption of immigrants, in volunteering for military
combat, and even in the hearts of the young women (it is hinted that Mika,
Uri’s girlfriend, is also attracted to Uri’s father Vili). The founders’ mighty
libido does not leave their sons’ generation with any space to conquer their
own virgin territory except through heroic death. Therefore, in the inner play
the blame for Uri’s death is laid mostly upon the founders, the fathers’ gener-
ation. And Uri the Sabra (the native-born Israeli), who is not able to cope
with the ideal they have set, is exposed as their victim.
As depicted in the inner play, Uri’s life is far from suitable for creating
the image of the ‘mythological Sabra’. Only after his death (which is com-
memorated at a memorial ceremony in the outer play) will his image be
recreated as the ultimate ‘new Israeli man’, who sacrifices his personal world
and his young life for the sake of the nation. This is why the play does not
end with Uri’s controversial death, but rather with the decision of his preg-
nant girlfriend, Mika (a Holocaust survivor), to give birth to his child. Uri’s
‘rebirth’ through his new son will sanctify his memory in the context of one
of the most powerful myths of the young state of Israel, that of the ‘living
dead’, promising eternal life to the young men killed in battle while serving
their nation. With regard to the adoption of the myth of the ‘living dead’ in
the iconography of the Israeli War of Independence, Hannan Hever claims
that nurturing the mythic immortality of those killed in battle was that gen-
eration’s ideological response to bereavement. This myth served as part of
the mechanism of denial and repression of the soldiers’ deaths, and even
 Lacerated Culture, Self-Reflexive Theatre 195

helped to compensate for unconscious feelings of guilt for the ‘sons’

murder’.14
While He Walked in the Fields used the simple duplication of a play
within to impose social myths on historical events, Nissim Aloni’s play The
American Princess uses a very different structure of the infinity duplication:
a play within a play within a play. The outmost play is a detective story:
Freddi, the Crown Prince, is accused of killing his father, the King-in-exile,
by a police officer. The inner play presents Freddi’s defense speech, inter-
spersed with examples and evidence from the lives of the King and his son,
which Freddi presents to the captain to prove his innocence. On another level,
the representation of representation (play within the play within the play) is
interlaced through scenes from the set of a film-in-progress depicting the
King’s life during his rein. In the course of Freddi’s presentation of events,
facts from the so-called reality are mixed with the King’s own memories,
with segments from the fictional film and with arguments which serve in
Freddi’s defense. This mixture reaches its climax when we learn that the
murder of the King by his son, which was intended to occur in the fictional
world of film, actually occurred in real life. The different narrative represen-
tations of the play within the play within a play offer, in fact, contradictory
versions of the King’s life without giving any of them the validity of truth.
Their truth-value equivalence, due to the structure of infinite duplication, is
increased by a wild intertextuality in the mode of pastiche, which results in a
very high degree of fluidity and the refusal of categorization.
Needless to say, this type of textual formation also determines the play’s
meanings. In contrast to most of the interpretations of the play, which see
Aloni’s main axis as comprised of binary and oppositional patterns,15 the lin-
guistic, stylistic, generic and structural plenitude of the play creates, in my
opinion, an open, dynamic and borderless textual world. These devices en-
able the co-existence of eclectic materials without hierarchical or opposition-
al classification and without judgmental evaluation.
A binary reading of this play tends to oppose the King and the Prince as
representing two generations in Israel: the generation of the founding fathers,

14
Hannan Hever, ‘In Prize of Labor and Political Controversy: The Emergence of Political
Poetry in Eretz-Israel’, in The Hebrew Literature and the Labor Movement, ed. by Pinhas
Ginossar (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 1989), pp. 116-157.
15
See for example Haim Shoham, ‘Duality and Duplicity: The Dramas of Nissim Aloni’, in
Challenge and Reality in Israeli Drama (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1975), pp.
166-218, and Yitzhak Ben-Mordechai, ‘Myth, Reality, Parody: On the Structure and Mean-
ing of Nissim Aloni’s The American Princess’, Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature,
xviii (2001), 292-308.
196 Zahava Caspi

the pioneers, who embody a superior ethos and who brought about the Zion-
ist revolution, and the generation of sons, the native-born Israelis, those cyni-
cal and sober citizens of the already existing state. This interpretation has
mistakenly led critics to identify the author’s ideological stand as giving pri-
ority to the past, to the majestic, to the mythic, to the generation of the fa-
thers; while the present, democracy, the modern age, the era of the sons’ gen-
eration, is deemed inferior. In my opinion, the structure of the play within the
play within the play allows Aloni to avoid a dichotomous presentation of the
King as a positive character and his son as a negative one. Aloni indeed sees
the sons’ generation as cynical, but at the same time he recognizes their
realistic attitude which allows them to cope with present-day realities. He
sees the manipulation of the fathers’ generation in re-shaping the past and
constructing a post-factum positive image of its own, but he also validates
their longing for the sublime, the heroic, the romantic and the mythic.
Aloni’s rich and heterogeneous poetic style was inspired by the Israeli
multicultural immigrant society of the fifties. This starting point affected how
Aloni captured the ‘Story of Israel’ not as an absolute meta-narrative but as
possible multi-narratives of the Israeli subject as an assemblage of linguistic,
historical, ideological and cultural constructs, substituting for and clashing
with each other but also confirming each others’ existence. By using the snail
structure of the play within the play within the play, as well as other compo-
nents of the text such as multiple points of view and complex combinations
of different layers of reality, Aloni creates a vivid and variably paced repre-
sentation of the multicultural immigrant society in Israel, and expresses it
with understanding and compassion.16
In contrast to Aloni’s accepting attitude towards the Israeli reality of his
time, Hanoch Levin’s play Mouth Wide Open offers an acute criticism of the
Israeli public of the 1990s, which tended to deny and suppress the violent po-
litical deadlock in which it found itself. The play was first performed by the
Cameri Theatre on October 28, 1995, a week before the traumatic assassina-
tion of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. We must take into account that, at this
point, the Israeli collective memory was already influenced by the divisive
Lebanon War and the first intifada (Palestinian uprising), which took place in
the mid-eighties. The Israeli public was tired of the constant state of war with
no solution in sight. Levin uses paradoxical duplication to create an interrup-

16
For a more detailed discussion on Aloni’s American Princess see Zahava Caspi, ‘“It’s like a
kaleidoscope. Try to hold something vital, real, in this play of colors”: Poetics of Pastiche in
American Princess by Nissim Aloni’, in On Kings, Gypsies and Performers: The Theatre of
Nissim Aloni, ed. by Nurit Yaari (Tel Aviv: The Porter Institution for Poetics & Semiotics,
Tel Aviv University, 2005), pp.110-121.
 Lacerated Culture, Self-Reflexive Theatre 197

tion in the very strongly channeled procedures of interpretation and recep-

tion, forcing the spectator to reconsider the fictional as well as the actual
reality. Similarly, Richard Hornby has stressed the fact that for the audience,
the meta-dramatic experience of the play within the play is always ‘one of
unease’ and ‘dislocation of perception’.17 Patrice Pavis notes that the scenes
that cause a cognitive distortion in the spectator’s perception are exactly
where the ‘real’ play takes place.18 These are the key moments when the au-
dience changes from passive to active: their consciousness is awakened and
they are challenged emotionally.
In Mouth Wide Open, the main technique used to create this cognitive
disruption is a split structure.19 In the framing play, a cast of spectators (a
mother, her son and an old man), go to the Theatre and see a show, the inner
play, which portrays the torture, punishment and execution of one of the
queen’s guardians, named Mouth Wide Open, who dared to peep into the
queen’s personal bedroom. As the plot unfolds, the characters from the outer
‘real’ play actively interact with the events of the inner play. Thus, the
boundary between the two plays is violated and the centre of gravity moves
discursively from the outer play to the inner play and vice-versa. This repeat-
ed crossing of boundaries between the different levels of reality cracks the
‘conceptual frame’, in Nelson’s terms, through which the spectator can iden-
tify the inner theatrical happenings as fiction, as separate from the so-called
‘reality’ of the outer play, evoking an unsolvable hesitation.20 The main effect
of this practice forces spectators to ‘see double’, undermining their channel-
led perception and forcing them to re-evaluate reality, both onstage and in the
real world. Spectators are forced to repeatedly waver between contradictory
options of orientation, an oscillation that breaks down defences, allowing
them to move beyond the ideological dimension in which every language is
trapped. This eventually causes them to recognize not just a fictional story far

17
Hornby, p. 32.
18
Patrice Pavis, ‘The Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception: Variations on a Few Relationships’,
in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 81-82.
19
For further discussion on Levin’s techniques of the play within the play, see Zahava Caspi,
Those Who Sit in the Dark. The Dramatic World of Hanoch Levin: Subject, Author, Audi-
ence (Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Keter Press,
2005).
20
Nelson argues that in order to confirm separation of the spectator from the play, the theatri-
cal happening must be formally presented as a performance. Only thus will it secure the au-
dience’s conceptual frame which will allow them to recognize the performance as fiction.
Cf. Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), pp. 1-10.
198 Zahava Caspi

from their actual lives in the horrible events that take place in the inner play,
but their own real and communal lives outside the stage.
I will present one prime example. In the play’s epilogue, the old man, a
spectator from the outer play representing the audience, leaps on stage and
protests the exaggerated cruelty of the playwright and his play. He takes his
protest a step further and physically interferes in the plot of the inner play, re-
viving Mouth Wide Open and restoring his eyesight. Suddenly the boundary
between what is supposed to be reality and the fictive story disappears. But is
there really a crossing of borders? In the Theatre it is not difficult to bring a
dead character to life. Moreover, this scene takes place at the end of the
show, when in any case the actor who plays Mouth Wide Open is expected to
come back to life in order to join the rest of the cast and take his bows before
a cheering audience.
The person who ‘actually’ dies on stage is none other than the old man
himself, from the outer play, who represents the actual reality, the real live
audience sitting in the auditorium. The old spectator, who a minute earlier
performed a miracle, collapses and dies, and this time all the fictional charac-
ters from both plays try to resuscitate him. On the other hand, the old man is
also no more than a fictional character in Levin’s play, and the actor playing
him will also take his bow before the audience after the show, resuming his
fictional life, which is internal, the following day. This, needless to say, is not
the case with regard to the play’s real audience, who are mortals. The specta-
tors’ inability to distinguish between the different levels of reality leaves
them in a state of anxiety, underlining the fragile existence of their/our actual
lives. Feelings of anxiety at life’s fragility rise from the depth of our subcon-
sciousness to our emotional surface, no longer allowing us to repress the cir-
cumstances and outcomes of our real lives which, like Mouth Wide Open’s,
are characterized by violence and death.
Another way of examining the structure of the play within the play is by
verifying each play’s genre, as suggested by Dallenbach. The essence of
plays within plays greatly differs between those whose outer and inner plays
belong to the same genre and those whose outer and inner plays belong to
different genres, and even to different sub-genres.21 This generic criterion
supports my conclusions in this chapter. In He Walked in the Fields, the inner
play is presented as a realistic story (a chronicle survey of Uri’s actual life),
while the outer play is a memorial ceremony, that is to say, the same story
‘improved upon’ retroactively by society, turning it into a myth. The different
genres of the inner and outer plays reflect the contradiction between historic

21
Dallenbach, p. 73.
 Lacerated Culture, Self-Reflexive Theatre 199

and mythic reality. In The American Princess, the mixed genres (detective
story, realistic story and melodramatic film) mirror the co-existence of dis-
harmonic components without creating any sort of hierarchic order. This phe-
nomenon is compatible with Aloni’s non-judgmental acceptance of the multi-
cultural immigrants’ society in Israel, to which he himself belonged. In
Mouth Wide Open the outer play has a realistic quality (spectators coming to
watch a show in a theatre), while the inner play is a fairy tale (a story about a
queen and her subjects). The audience’s awareness of the fictional existence
of the inner story (it is only a show) allows Levin to defuse their resistance
from the start and then lead them, via the techniques I have described, to ac-
knowledge the fundamental resemblance between the fictional fairy tale of
the inner story and the reality of their own lives. Thus, through these three
representative Israeli plays, we see how a complex and conflict-laden society
is drawn to the model of the play within the play as a means of signifying its
tensions, contradictions and even reconciliation.
 III

Perspectives on the World: Comedy,

Melancholy, theatrum mundi
Frank Zipfel

‘Very Tragical Mirth’: The Play within the Play as a Strategy for
Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy

The dramaturgical strategy of the play within the play can have different functions within the
structure of a play. Besides the rather technical function of foregrounding (i.e. the mirroring and
thereby highlighting an element of the outer play in the internal play) and the more philosophical
function of questioning our experience and our understanding of reality by blurring the borders
between the different levels of fiction, i.e. between drama and metadrama, one of the most im-
portant functions of the play within the play is to shed light on the same problem, the same
theme or the same element of a story from different, even mutually exclusive perspectives. The
tragic and the comic, if looked at from a systematic point of view, seem to represent such mu-
tually exclusive perspectives. Though both the comic and the tragic are in certain respects based
on the violation of a rule (i.e. a social, cultural or religious norm) by one or more characters, the
preconditions of tragedy are sympathy and compassion for the characters, their faults, and their
remorse whereas the preconditions of comedy are dissociation from the characters and a feeling
of superiority towards their misbehaviour. In the history of drama, however, there are quite a few
plays and even genres, where tragic and the comic elements are, more or less successfully,
brought together. The present chapter proposes to investigate and analyse the different ways in
which comic and tragic elements are combined by means of the play within the play by studying
some characteristic examples drawn from Renaissance/Caroline English, neo-Classical French
and modern German theatre.

Tragedy and comedy are traditionally regarded as contrary genres. Tragic and
comic action, or tragic and comic effect, looked at systematically, would
seem to be mutually exclusive. Though both comic and tragic conflict are in
certain respects based on the violation of a rule (i.e. a social, cultural or reli-
gious norm or premise) by one or more characters,1 the preconditions of tragedy
are the audience’s sympathy and compassion for the characters, their faults, their
suffering and the consequences of their actions, whereas the preconditions of
comedy are the audience’s dissociation from the characters and lack of empathy
for the unpleasant and awkward situations they provoke or are brought into. Over
the long history of European drama, however, there have been many plays in
which tragic and comic elements are, more or less successfully, brought

1
See Umberto Eco, ‘The frames of comic “freedom”’, in Carnival!, ed. by Thomas A.
Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 1-9.
204 Frank Zipfel

together.2 The object of this chapter is to examine different ways in which

comic and tragic elements – in examples drawn from Renaissance/Caroline
English, neo-Classical French and modern German theatre – have been com-
bined by means of the play-within-a-play device. My analysis will also focus
on the functions that these combinations may fulfil.

1. The Play within the Play: Form and Function

Studies of the play-within-a-play device have focused their attention on issues of
both form and function.3 Inquiries into formal matters deal with questions related
to a wide range of topics, for example, the nature of the inner play (play, rehearsal
etc.),4 the onstage/offstage audience, the characters in the inner and outer play.
The present chapter, however, will limit itself to a discussion of the question of
genre, that is, the relationship between the genre/s of the inner and outer plays.5
It will also examine the question of function. Two quite distinct functions
may be distinguished in plays within plays, the immanent, concerning the re-
lationship between the plots of the inner and outer plays, and the transcend-
ent, concerning the function of the total, play-within-a-play structure.6 At
least three kinds of immanent function may be distinguished: (1) the catalytic
function, which occurs when the inner play furthers the plot of the outer (e.g.
The Murder of Gonzago in Shakespeare’s Hamlet); (2) the function of resolv-
ing the conflicts of the outer play or simply of concluding its plot (e.g., in
revenge dramas such as Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy); and (3) the function of
creating or promoting a particular atmosphere, especially when the inner play
is not a substantial element in the plot of the outer play (e.g. in the case of the

2
There is also, of course, the genre – if such it can be called – of tragic-comedy, on which,
see J.L. Styan, The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy, 2nd edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Lionel Abel, Tragedy and Metatheatre:
Essays on Dramatic Form (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2003); J. Orr, Tragicomedy and
Contemporary Culture: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1991); R. Dutton, Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition:
Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee and Storey (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986); K.S. Guthke,
Geschichte und Poetik der deutschen Tragikomödie (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,
1961); V.A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3
See, e.g., the subtitle of K. Schöpflin, Theater auf dem Theater: Formen und Funktionen
eines dramatischen Phänomens im Wandel (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1993) or Georges
Forestier, Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz,
1996), pp. 85-171 (‘Structures et fonctions’).
4
I use the term ‘outer play’ to refer to the play as a whole and ‘inner play’ to refer to the play
embedded within it.
5
On these formal questions, see Schöpflin, pp. 668-72 and Karin Vieweg-Marks, Metadrama
und englisches Gegenwartsdrama (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 43-72.
6
Vieweg-Marks, p. 72.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 205

inner play in Goethe’s Das Jahrmarktsfest von Plundersweiler (The Fair at

Plundersweiler).7 These functions are technical and may be regarded as as-
pects of the play’s overall form. In the following, however, I will concentrate
on the play-transcendent functions of the play within the play.
Regarding play-transcendent functions I would like to distinguish be-
tween four different potential functions or ‘potentials’, meta-dramatic/meta-
literary, philosophical, response-centred and perspectival.8 As a kind of meta-
theatre, the play within the play always has a meta-dramatic, meta-literary
and meta-aesthetic potential, and lends itself to reflections on the technical,
social and political preconditions and practices of production of and response
to staged drama in particular and to literature and art in general.9 The philoso-
phical potential embraces ontological and epistemological concerns regarding
the distinction between fiction, illusion and reality in general. The response-
centred potential, on the other hand, originates from the fact that the reactions
of the audience of the inner play invariably have some influence on the real
audience, the audience of the outer play. The real audience may be intended
to identify with and approve of the reactions of the fictional audience or it
may, on the contrary, be led to rebel against the comments and responses of
the fictional audience to the inner play. Finally, the perspectival potential
refers to the fact that one of the most important potential functions of a play
within a play is to shed light on a particular conflict, theme or story/ story el-
ement from different, even mutually exclusive, points of view. This last func-
tion is evidently the most interesting in view of the combination of comic and
tragic elements in play-within-the-play drama.

2. Comedy within Tragedy: Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor

Massinger’s The Roman Actor, first performed in 1626, is unique within the
play-within-the-play tradition in that it contains no fewer than three different
inner plays. The outer play interweaves two stories: the fate of the ‘Roman
Actor’, Paris, and the reign of terror of the Roman emperor Domitian. Paris
becomes the victim of the ‘tragic triangle’ 10 of Domitian’s friendship for his
actor-protégé, of Domitian’s adoration of his wife Domitia, and of her

7
Vieweg-Marks, pp. 73-75.
8
Vieweg-Marks, pp. 75-80 and, on ‘potentials’, see Werner Wolf, ‘Spiel im Spiel und Politik:
zum Spannungsfeld literarischer Selbst- und Fremdbezüglichkeit im zeitgenössischen
englischen Drama’, Poetica, 24 (1992), 165-66.
9
These reflections are often linked to an impairment or breakdown of the dramatic illusion in
the inner play.
10
Patricia Thomson, ‘World Stage and Stage in Massinger’s Roman Actor’, Neophilologus, 44
(1970), 409-26 (p. 412).
206 Frank Zipfel

infatuation with Paris11 in a romantic ‘tragedy of circumstance rather than of

character’.12 Notwithstanding the title, the play’s central theme is the cruelty
of Domitian. Some of the emperor’s ruthless deeds are reported (his incest
with his niece Julia and rape of his cousin Domitilla), though most of them
are shown onstage. He forces the noble Lamia to divorce his wife Domitia
and leave her to the emperor, he sentences to death almost anybody who
dares to contradict him or disapprove of his actions13 (including Lamia), and
he eventually kills Paris out of jealousy. In the end Domitian is killed by a
conspiracy of his enemies.
The outer play, then, is full of intense and irrevocable suffering more or
less contingently brought about by the unrestrained power and will of the
emperor. It may be considered either a revenge tragedy, depicting Domitian’s
reign of terror and how he finally pays for it, or a de casibus tragedy, com-
bining ‘the vicissitudes of fortune with retribution for sin in bringing about
the fall of a prince’.14 The second and the third play-within-the-play se-
quences also have tragic plots: one depicting the Ovidian story of Iphis’s
unrequited love for Anaxarete (Act III) as a romantic tragedy, the other pre-
senting a revenge tragedy within the revenge tragedy (Act IV), following the
paradigm of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1587).
The first play-within-the-play sequence (Act II), however, is a comedy.15
The performance consists of a play called The Cure of Avarice,16 and depicts
the classical comic stereotype of a miserly old man who trusts no-one, not
even his son, and therefore keeps the key to his treasure fast between his
teeth. The obsession for guarding his wealth has driven the old miser into a
kind of coma or paralysis, described by his son:

11
Furthermore, Thomson, p. 421, describes the tragic fate of Paris as follows: ‘If Paris’ is the
tragedy of a man induced to act against the grain of a noble character, it is also the tragedy
of an actor whose well articulated professional ideals are refused their proper expression.’
12
Thomson, p. 418.
13
See Martin Butler, ‘The Roman Actor and the Early Stuart Classical Play’, in Philip Massin-
ger: A Critical Reassessment, ed. by Douglas Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), p. 151.
14
Douglas Howard, ‘Massinger’s Political Tragedies’, in Philip Massinger: A Critical Reas-
sessment, p. 120. Howard also notes that this kind of tragedy is ‘bleaker in outlook than
those where suffering results from some failure of the individual’.
15
Just how well the three plays within plays have been integrated into the outer play, or
whether The Roman Actor is an ill-structured patchwork play, has been widely discussed;
see Peter H. Davison, ‘The Theme and Structure of The Roman Actor’, AUMLA, 19 (1963),
39-56 (p. 39). These issues, however, fall outside my concerns in the present chapter.
16
The story is, as Domitia says, ‘filch’d out of Horace’ (II.1. 411). More precisely, it is taken
from Horace’s Satires, Book 2, Satire 3, see C.A. Gibson, ‘Massinger’s Use of His Sources
for The Roman Actor’, AUMLA, 15 (1961), 60-72 (p. 64).
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 207

O master doctor, he is past recoverie;

A lethargie hath ceas’d him. And however
His sleepe resemble death his watchful care
To guard that treasure he dares make no use of
Workes strongly in his soule. (II. 1. 287-91)

By staging a feigned robbery, the doctor (played by Paris) first startles the old
man out of his stupor and then cures him of his avarice by picturing how his
son would dissipate all his money after his death. He finally persuades the old
man to try to prolong his life by spending some of his money on treatments to
restore his health. Thus the inner play comes to a happy end. The opposite,
however, happens in the outer play. In fact, the object of staging The Cure of
Avarice was to cure Philargus, the miserly father of Parthenius, a freeman of
Domitian, in the outer play – as Paris explains to Parthenius: ‘Your father,
looking on a covetous man / Presented on the Stage as in a mirror / May see
his owne deformity, and loath it’ (II. 1. 97-99). Philargus actually recognises
himself in the miserly old man from the inner play (‘We were fashion’d in
one mould.’ II. 1. 298). He identifies with the old miser even to the point of
calling the emperor to help when the old miser in the inner play is about to be
robbed; but he rejects the outcome of the play and sticks to his avarice: ‘An
old foole to be guld thus! had he died / As I resolve to doe, not to be alter’d, /
It had gone off twanging’ (II. 1. 406-08). Thus the intended cure fails. Domi-
tian is not satisfied with this outcome and, taking Philargus at his word,
promptly sentences him to death because of Philargus’ lack of insight. Par-
thenius pleads in vain for mercy for his father.
In the few studies of The Roman Actor, the play within the play of the
second act has been interpreted differently.17 Some critics see a contradiction
of Paris’s famous defence of theatre as a moral instrument in the first act in
the fact that Philargus is not cured.18 Thus the play-within-the-play sequence
subverts the positive image presented in the first act’s eulogy on theatre,19
possibly because Massinger is much more sceptical about the power of art to
correct and inform the audience than his protagonist, and is therefore un-

17
On the lack of interest in Massinger and in staging his plays, see Anne Barton, ‘The Distinc-
tive Voice of Massinger’, in Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment, pp. 221-32.
18
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scenes defending theatre in Act 1 were often
performed by celebrated actors like Kemble, Macready and Kean; see Jonas Barish, ‘Three
Caroline “Defenses” of the Stage’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and
Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. by A. R. Braunmüller and
J.C. Bulman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 195-96.
19
Barish, p. 201, has pointed out that the other two inner plays also contradict what is said
about theatre in the first act.
208 Frank Zipfel

willing ‘to accept easy answers to complex questions about the relationship
between life and art’.20 Moreover, A.P. Hogan argues that the doctor/Paris is
anxious to cure the old miser/Philargus, but ‘has no real power over intracta-
ble human nature’,21 whereas Domitian has the power but lacks good inten-
tions and therefore his cure, putting Philargus to death, perverts the meaning
of ‘cure’. Hence The Cure of Avarice can be seen to unite the two main sub-
jects of the play: on the one hand, the power (especially monarchical power,
conceived as authorised by divine right) in conflict with human weakness
(lust and cruelty) and, on the other, the function and power of actors and
theatre.22 Finally, C.A. Gibson directs attention to the fact that Suetonius –
one of Massinger’s sources – selects avarice and cruelty as Domitian’s two
chief characteristics. The play shows Domitian’s cruelty well enough, but not
his avarice. Thus Massinger may indeed have transferred the second vice to
Philargus in order to present a second instance of what Gibson sees as the
main theme of the play:

And Such as govern’d onely by their will,

And not their reason, unlamented fall;
No Goodman’s teare shed at their Funerall. (V. 2. 91-93)

By the ‘juxtaposition of the avaricious Philargus gloating over his wealth and
the lustful Domitian praising the beauty of Domitia’, Massinger seems to
underline ‘the folly of uncontrolled appetite and will’.23
To these well-grounded interpretations of The Cure of Avarice, new in-
sight can be added by taking into account the genre of the inner play of Act II.
It is noteworthy that, of the three inner plays, only one is a comedy. All three
mirror situations in the outer play. But while the tragic love-triangle between
Domitian, Domitia and Paris can, it seems, only be represented in the roman-
tic and revenge tragedies of the inner plays in Acts III and IV, avarice lends
itself to comic representation. In fact, avarice, the actions and the behaviour
linked to it are or can be represented as a painless incongruity. Not spending
money on clothes, proper food or medical care and holding the key to one’s
treasure between one’s teeth are, perceived from an emotional distance, non-
destructive violations of rational behaviour. Hence, the miser in the inner

20
Howard, p. 123.
21
A.P. Hogan, ‘Imagery of Acting in The Roman Actor’, Modern Language Review, 66 (1971),
273-81 (p. 276).
22
See Davison, passim.
23
Gibson, p. 69.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 209

play and the avaricious Philargus in the outer play are comic characters.24 Re-
garded with somewhat diminished emotional distance, however, this avarice
and its consequences are not altogether harmless. The father of the inner play
has fallen into a stupor, making his son feel obliged to send for a doctor, and
the self-neglect of Philargus threatens to shorten his life. Seen from the point
of view of the loving sons (Parthenius in the outer play and the son in the
inner play), the avarice of the fathers is self-destructive and gains a tragic
apect insofar as the life and well-being of the fathers are threatened by their
own irrational behaviour. This tragic aspect is acted out in the outer play:
Domitian’s death-sentence is the logical consequence of the Philargus’s in-
tractability (he would rather die than change) and can be seen as the con-
densed representation of what the avarice would have done to Philargus any-
way, i.e., bring him to an untimely death. In the inner play the potentially
tragic elements of avarice are avoided by the cure of the miser and the happy
end typical of comedy. Thus we can conclude that by means of the play
within the play, avarice is shown from two perspectives: one highlighting its
comic, the other its tragic, aspects. Showing the tragic aspects of the typically
comic theme of avarice may also have helped integrate the comedy The Cure
of Avarice into the tragic outer play without dissipating too much of the
tragic tension. Comic scenes are by no means unusual in tragedy, of course,
but a play within the play is usually too complex a strategy and too long a se-
quence to have no other function than that of comic relief. The danger of
losing the necessary emotional participation of the audience when embedding
comedy in tragedy may be one of the prime reasons why literary history does
not offer very many examples of comedies within tragedies.25

3. Tragedy within Comedy

a) William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Of the several Shakespeare plays that make use of play-within-the-play tech-
niques, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96) is one of the most interesting.
The following analysis, however, will not focus on the intriguing multiplicity
of meta-theatrical devices used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – e.g., the
different ‘worlds’ or levels of reality represented,26 or the relationship be-

24
Philargus’s very name gives this character of the tragic outer play a comic note: character-
revealing names are typical, not of tragedy but of comedy.
25
Though he discusses Massinger’s The Roman Actor at length, Schöpflin, p. 671, wrongly
asserts that among the different possibilities for combining the genres of outer and inner
play there will be absolutely no comedy within tragedy.
26
For example, James L. Calderwood, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Illusion of Drama’,
Modern Language Quarterly, 26 (1965), 506-23 (p. 512), sees two plays within the play:
210 Frank Zipfel

tween reality, theatre and dream – but on the genre relationship between the
inner play staged by the mechanicals and the outer play.
The various plots of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are well known and
need no rehearsal here. It is well accepted that the outer play of A Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream is a comedy. The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the
imbroglio of the four young lovers, Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Deme-
trius in the Athenian forest, the quarrel between the king and queen of the
fairies, Oberon and Titania, Puck’s practical jokes, and the mechanicals’
efforts to stage a play for Theseus’s wedding celebrations are full of comic
elements of all kinds. There is much harmless incongruity in Titania’s falling
for the ass-headed Bottom under the influence of the magic love potion, in
the confusion between the four lovers, caused by Puck mistakenly giving the
potion to Lysander, and, last but not least, in the mechanicals’ shortcomings
as they rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe. The entanglements of the story, of
course, also bring forward some troubling and darker notes, especially in the
love story,27 but they are neutralized by the comic language in which they are
written and by the fact that the audience is granted broader knowledge of the
background of the imbroglio than the characters. The brutal insults hurled at
Hermia by Lysander, for example, who claims to love her and with whom
she has eloped, might well seem extremely painful:

LYSANDER Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! Vile thing, let loose;
Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent!
HERMIA Why are you grown so rude? What change is this,
Sweet love?
LYSANDER Thy love? Out, tawny Tartar, out!
Out, loathed med’cine! O hated potion, hence! […]
LYSANDER Get you gone, you dwarf,
You minimus of hind’ring knot-grass made,
You bead, you acorn. (III, ii, 261-331)

‘One, actual play in which Bottom and crew act the parts of noble lovers; the other, a meta-
phoric play in which the young lovers figure as actors in a drama written, produced and di-
rected by Oberon and Puck.’ And Stephen L. Smith, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shake-
speare, Play and Metaplay’, Centennial Review, 21 (1977), 194-209 (p. 196), who writes:
‘The questioning of reality is not just a theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is an in-
tegral part of seeing it, and […] reading it.’
27
E.g., Egeus threatens his daughter Hermia with a cloister, death even, if she refuses to re-
nounce her love for Lysander. Helena has been abandoned for Hermia by Demetrius, whom
she loves, and Hermia in turn will be abandoned by Lysander and Demetrius while they are
under spell of the love juice.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 211

But the outrageous and fantastic language of these insults is likely to distance
the audience emotionally from the pain they cause the characters, and thus
these insults are likely to provoke laughter. Moreover, even if Puck’s prac-
tical jokes occasionally frighten the young lovers and the mechanicals, the
play’s atmosphere clearly indicates to the audience that no-one will come to
any harm. This allows the audience to laugh at the incongruities in the reac-
tions of the frightened characters. The ‘follies of mispaired doting lovers,
their excessive praises and mispraises, their broken friendships, even the
threat of bloodshed’ add up to ‘potential tragedy were it not for Oberon’s
protection, of which we are so well aware that we can laugh at the folly they
themselves take so seriously’.28 Thus, even in its darker moments, the outer
play remains a comedy.29
The genre of the inner play, however, seems less easily identified, espe-
cially if we look closely at the evidence of the text. In the first act the inner
play is introduced as ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and most Cruel Death
of Pyramus and Thisbe’ (I. 2. 9-10) and later is presented as ‘A tedious brief
scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe: a very tragical mirth’ (V. 1.
56-57). These titles are probably not to be taken too literally as an indication
of the genre of the mechanicals’ play: they may have been intended to parody
the title of a play by a predecessor of Shakespeare’s, Thomas Preston: A lam-
entable tragedie, mixed ful of pleasant mirth, conteyning the life of Cambises
king of Pericia, from the beginning of his kingdome unto his death, his one
good deed of execution, after that many wicked deeds and tirannous murders,
committed by and through him, and last of all, his odious death by Gods Jus-
tice appointed. Still, the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe is chosen by Theseus
from the selection offered him as entertainment between the wedding supper
and bedtime, especially because of the contradiction in the title, which
promises a combination of tragedy and comedy.

28
R. W. Dent, ‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15
(1964), 115-129 (p. 120). Paul A. Olson, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Meaning of
Court Marriage’, ELH, 24 (1957), 95-119 (p. 117), also points out that ‘it is part of Shake-
speare’s art that, while the plight of the lovers seems more and more desperate to them, it
appears increasingly comic to their audience, possibly because in this play the benevolent
Oberon can send his Robin to rescue the squabbling pairs.’
29
For Jan Kott’s controversial reading of the dark side of the play, and David Bevington’s re-
ply, see Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 213-36 and
Bevington, ‘“But We Are Spirits of Another Sort”: The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream’, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: New Casebooks , ed. by Richard
Dutton (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 24-37.
212 Frank Zipfel

‘Merry’ and ‘tragical’? ‘Tedious’ and ‘brief’? –

That is, hot ice and wondrous strange black snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord? (V. 1. 58-60)

Theseus’s question is easily answered: the tragic elements stem from the plot
of the play, the mirth from the mechanicals’ performance.30
During the performance of the inner play in Act V, the comic effects cer-
tainly prevail. All the attention of the onstage audience is focused on the
comic features of the mechanicals’ performance, as will be that of the theatre
audience, if we assume that an identification of the audience of the outer play
with that of the inner play is indeed intended. On the other hand, there is no
doubting that the inner play is a tragedy. As in Romeo and Juliet, the two
young lovers Pyramus and Thisbe cannot unite because their families live in
enmity. Moreover, when they attempt to meet secretly at night, they both die
due to fatally bad timing and a tragic misunderstanding.31 But the story of
Pyramus and Thisbe does not only bear similarities to the tragedy of Romeo
and Juliet, it also parallels the starting point of the story of Hermia and
Lysander, whose love is threatened by the hardheartedness of Hermia’s father,
Egeus. Moreover, it shows us ‘how their story might well have ended: with
blood and deprivation’.32
Even though the mechanicals’ performance is hilariously funny, the plot
of Pyramus and Thisbe represents a tragic version of the outer play, and
thereby highlights the dark and potentially tragic notes of the outer play. The
inner play here directs attention to the fact that love relationships do not
naturally come to happy endings and are liable to be threatened by all sorts of
external impediments (for example, hardhearted parents) or internal ones (for
example, the lovers’ own inconstancy). Pyramus and Thisbe illustrates the
possibility of a ‘disastrous end of doting, of love brought to confusion’;33 ‘it
is the potential tragedy of the lovers in the woods’.34 Moreover, it is obvious

30
Schöpflin, p. 671, generalizes this situation to all tragedy-within-comedy plays: ‘If a tragedy
is inserted in a comedy, the small tragedy is distorted into parody by means of textual fea-
tures or by the way it is performed, so that the tragedy actually becomes a comic interlude’
(my translation).
31
On the similarities between Pyramus and Thisbe and Romeo and Juliet, which was written
during the same period as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Amy J. Riess and George Wil-
liams Walton, ‘“Tragical Mirth”: From Romeo to Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43
(1992), 214-18.
32
Barton, p. 220.
33
Frank Kermode, ‘The Mature Comedies’, in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon-
Studies 3, ed. by John Russell Brown and Bernhard Harris (London: Arnold, 1961), p. 216.
34
Olson, p. 118.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 213

that the outer play would not come to a happy end for the four young lovers
without the help of the fairies’ supernatural power, and specifically if Deme-
trius had not been left under the spell of the magic juice. Thus the outer and
inner plays deal with the same problem, but from different perspectives.35
Moreover, the comic perspective of the outer play is contaminated by the
tragic perspective of the inner play, and vice versa. The inner play tells a
tragic love story but converts it to a comedy through its staging;36 the outer
play is a comedy on the surface but ‘constantly flirts with genuine disaster,’ 37
and its happy ending is continuously threatened by potentially tragic
elements.38

b) Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique

Commissioned especially for the opening of the Théâtre du Marais in Paris in
1635, L’illusion comique had considerable initial success, and although it was
subsequently forgotten until the second half of the nineteenth century, it has
met with renewed interest in the twentieth century. Its plot may be summaris-
ed as follows: Pridamant is desperately trying to find his son Clindor, whom
his hardheartedness had driven from the parental home over ten years earlier.
He goes to a celebrated magician, Alcandre, who, in his cave – the locus
classicus of magicians in contemporary pastoral plays 39 – shows Pridamant
what Clindor has been doing since his departure. These ‘flashbacks’ are pre-

35
Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Spiel im Spiel: Formen dramatischer Illusion bei Shakespeare’, Archiv
für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 198 (1962), 209-26, also believes
the inner and outer plays deal with the same problem, but in his opinion their common issue
is metamorphosis. For him, the difference between the two perspectives lies in the ease of
the transformation of the outer play and the inability of the mechanicals to incorporate fic-
tive characters.
36
See Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Das Englische Drama:
vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Dieter Mehl, 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1970), I,
93. Dent, p. 124, points out that most critics recognise ‘the necessity that Pyramus and
Thisbe be treated farcically if it is to harmonise in tone with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as
a whole’.
37
Bevington, p. 32.
38
The potentially tragic elements are well described by Calderwood, p. 521: ‘The lovers make
the “perilous journey” beyond the safeguards of society and reason into the realm of night-
mare. Former relationships disintegrate; truth, honour, and love metamorphose into false-
hood, disloyalty and malice; and the whole structure of reason and order is swallowed up in
a chaotic absurdity whose effect on all of them is summed up in the helpless frustration of
Hermia’s “I am amaz’d, and know not what to say” (III. 2. 344).’
39
See Forestier, p. 209, and Hans Sckommodau, ‘Die Grotte der Illusion comique’, in Wort
und Text: Festschrift für Fritz Schalk, ed. by Harri Meier and Hans Sckommodau (Frank-
furt/Main: Klostermann, 1963), pp. 281-93.
214 Frank Zipfel

sented in a form similar to a play within the play during Acts II, III, IV and
part of Act V. There is a two-layer structure, with an inner play (scenes from
Clindor’s life) and an outer play (Alcandre and Pridamant watching them),
but the inner play is not actually staged as a play, rather as a kind of super-
natural vision.40 The plot of the inner play in Acts II, III and IV is mainly
comic. After leaving home, Clindor has not only become the servant of a
captain called Matadore, but also his rival for the love of Isabelle, whom her
father wants to marry off to the noble Adraste. Matadore, a boastful yet cow-
ardly captain, is a particularly comic character, descended from the Latin
miles gloriosus and the Italian capitano of the commedia dell’arte.41 Clindor
himself is a picaresque character, who has had many different professions
and is constantly on the lookout for new love affairs.42 He tries, not only to
marry Isabelle, but also to seduce her servant Lise, who is truly in love with
him, although she is aware that he is courting Isabelle. Although Clindor
stabs Adraste to death at the end of Act III, for which he is imprisoned and
sentenced to death in Act IV, the inner play maintains its comic tone until the
end of Act IV, when Clindor manages to escape from prison with the help of
Lise and Isabelle. In Act V, however, the story seems to turn tragic. Clindor,
who in the meantime has married Isabelle, has been pursuing a new love
affair with a noble lady. When Isabelle calls him to account, he promises to
be faithful in the future. But at just that moment he is killed by a servant of
his mistress’s husband. Seeing this, Pridamant bewails his son’s death and
wants only to go and die of grief. But Alcandre shows him another vision, in
which Clindor is revealed to be a member of a theatre company, counting and
sharing with his colleagues the night’s box-office receipts. The magician tells
Pridamant that Clindor’s death was not real but in fact part of a play, in
which both Clindor and Isabelle had leading roles.43 Alcandre also explains
that after Clindor’s escape from prison he became an actor and, along with
Isabelle and Lise, joined a theatre company. At first Pridamant is bitterly un-
happy about his son’s vocational choice, since it is not commensurate with

40
See Rainer Zaiser, ‘Struktur und Bedeutung des Metatheaters in Pierre Corneilles Illusion
comique’, Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 50 (1999), 110-126 (p. 116).
41
See Jürgen von Stackelberg, ‘Corneilles L’Illusion comique’, Das französische Drama vom
Barock bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Jürgen von Stackelberg, 2 vols (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1968),
I, p. 65.
42
Stackelberg, I, p. 63.
43
For a detailed explanation of how Corneille constructs the play within the play of Act 5 in
order to make the audience believe that we see the story of the magical vision of the previ-
ous acts continued, while in reality we see a stage representation of an analogous story, see
Forestier, pp. 242-45.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 215

his rank. But, in the light of Alcandre’s fervent apology for the theatre, he
forgives and decides to make up with his son.
Closer analysis of the play reveals that its structure does not correspond to
a simple play within the play. In Acts II, III, and IV there is a magic vision
within the play. Scenes 2-5 of Act V present a play within the vision, even if
neither the fictional onstage audience nor the real audience are initially aware
of this structure. Hence, the mentioned scenes actually follow a three-layer
structure: a play within a vision within a play. It will be necessary to consider
this structure for the inquiry into Corneille’s specific way of combining com-
edy and tragedy.
Corneille himself referred to his play as a ‘strange monster’:

Here is a strange monster […]. The first act is only a prologue; the next three constitute an
imperfect comedy; the last one is a tragedy. And all of this, sewn together, forms a come-
44
dy.

The plot of Act V scenes 2-5 is tragic, at least according to Corneille’s under-
standing of Aristotle, which he explains in his Discours de la tragédie. Cor-
neille quotes Aristotle’s rule that tragedy should excite pity and fear and
sums up Aristotle’s explanation in the following sentence:

We pity those whom we see suffer from misfortune that they don’t deserve, and we fear that
45
a similar misfortune may happen to us, when we see it happen to people like us.

What Pridamant and with him the audience see in Act V is the killing of
Clindor (actually the character played by Clindor) at the precise moment
when he decides to change his life and become a better person. The tragedy
then lies not only in the fact that the protagonist is killed, since it could be
argued that he deserved punishment for his former life and infidelity (though
perhaps not death). The potential tragedy stems mostly from the fact that

44
Dedicatory letter to The Theatrical Illusion, in Pierre Corneille, The Cid/Cinna/The Theatri-
cal Illusion, trans. and ed. by John Cairncross (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975), p. 200. R.
Albanese Jr, ‘Modes de la théâtralité dans L’Illusion comique’, in Corneille comique : Nine
Studies of Pierre Corneille’s Comedies, ed. by Milorad R. Margitic, Papers on French Se-
venteenth-Century Literature, Biblio. 17 (1982), p. 130, sees more than two different genres
combined in L’illusion comique: ‘Corneille […] uses alternatively the different genres en
vogue in his time like pastoral play, farce, picaresque novel, comedy and tragedy’ (my trans-
lation).
45
Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique, ed. by Bénédicte Louvat (Paris: Flammarion,
1999), p. 95. My translation.
216 Frank Zipfel

Clindor seems to be killed at the moment when he least deserves it, namely
when he repents and wants to change his life.46
For Corneille, the different elements of L’Illusion comique add up to form
a comedy. But while it is obvious that the vision-within-the-play is a comedy
and that the play-within-the-vision is a tragedy, the genre of the outer play is
more difficult to establish. That is because the outer play is rather short and
devoid of action. It consists only of the first meeting of Pridamant and Alcan-
dre and the preliminaries of the vision (act I), of Pridamant’s reactions to the
different parts of vision at the end of each act, and of Alcandre’s defense of
theatre in Act V. Thus the outer play is neither particularly tragic nor comic.
Yet the absence of tragedy, the playfulness with which Alcandre deals with
Pridamant and the happy ending may explain why Corneille sees his play as a
comedy. Thus, the structure of L’Illusion comique can be stated as a (feigned)
tragedy within a comedy (or magic comic vision) within a comedy.
In a way this structure also serves the function of shedding light on the
same issue from different perspectives. Pridamant’s initial reaction, on learn-
ing that his son has become an actor, is absolute disapproval:

My son an actor! […]

I thought his death was real; it was but feigned;
Yet I find everywhere grounds for lament.
Is this the glory, this the honoured rank,
To which good fortune was to help him rise? (V. 2. 1628-44)

Only after Alcandre has declared theatre to be a highly moral art form and
that acting should be regarded as an honourable profession does Pridamant
change his opinion. In the end he accepts and even praises his son’s choice of
vocation, which acting’s poor reputation had earlier caused him to regard as a
tragedy (in a broader sense of the term). But had he not minutes earlier be-
lieved his son to be dead, his change of opinion might not have been brought
about so easily. Ultimately, one of the functions of the (feigned) tragedy
within the comedy is to convince Pridamant that his son’s vocational choice
is not a tragedy after all,47 especially in comparison to his son’s staged death,
which he at first mistook for real. Moreover, this interpretation coincides
with Georges Forestier’s view, namely that the ending offers a double cathar-

46
Starting from a different conception of tragedy, Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The
Dramatist’s Conception of His Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New York: Da Capo Press,
1971), pp. 60-61, advances the dubious opinion that neither the final act of L’Illusion
comique nor the rest of Corneille’s theatre production are at all tragic.
47
For other functions of the play-within-the-play structure here, e.g., to allow Alcandre to re-
assess reflections on theatre, see Stackelberg, p. 41.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 217

sis. In Alcandre’s defence of theatre, Forestier sees not only a defence of the
art form, but also a theatrum mundi argument: the way to look at life is to see
it as theatre or play. Helped by experiencing his son’s death, Pridamant be-
comes able to accept the theatrum mundi vision of life and to acknowledge
that by becoming an actor his son has most likely already had the same in-
sight. Moreover, the intended cathartic change is not only directed at Prida-
mant but through him at the theatre audience, who may not only be invited to
accept theatre as a highly moral art form, but also to accept the same thea-
trum mundi vision of life.48

4. Tragedy and Comedy interwoven

My last example of tragic and comic elements combined in a drama that
contains a play within the play is Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s and Richard
Strauss’s opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. My analysis is based on the second and
final version (1916), which has a composed prologue and hence represents
the form of an ‘opera within an opera’.49 Moreover, I propose to concentrate
solely on the libretto and disregard its musical realisation.50
The prologue is set in a room in the house of the wealthiest man in Vien-
na, where two groups are backstage preparing for an after-dinner perfor-
mance: on one side the young composer of the opera seria, Ariadne auf
Naxos, his teacher, a soprano, and a tenor (the singers that are going to
perform the leading roles in the opera seria), and on the other side Zerbinetta
with her company Harlekin, Scaramuccio, Truffaldin, Brighella – all com-
media dell’arte characters – engaged to improvise a kind of opera buffa after
the opera seria. Shortly before the performance, the wealthiest man in Vien-
na decides he does not want to see the opera seria and the opera buffa per-
formed one after the other, but rather together, one within the other. Despite
the young composer’s protest, the performance is changed accordingly. In the
opera we see Ariadne on the desert island of Naxos. She has been abandoned
there by Theseus, whom she loved and who had promised to marry her.
Unable to live without her beloved Theseus, she is awaiting death. Zerbinetta
and her ensemble try in vain to cheer her up with songs and laughter.
Eventually Bacchus arrives on the island and takes Ariadne with him onto his

48
See Forestier, pp. 307-09.
49
In its original, 1912, version, Ariadne auf Naxos was included in a shortened version of Mo-
lière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and hence became an opera within a play.
50
On the relationship between music and text, see Klaus Felgenhauer, ‘Hugo von Hofmanns-
thal/Richard Strauß: Ariadne auf Naxos’, in Querlektüren: Weltliteratur zwischen den Diszi-
plinen, ed. by Wilfried Barner (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 1997), pp. 154-67.
218 Frank Zipfel

ship while she, ignorant of his identity, believes him to be the messenger of
death.
On the surface, Ariadne auf Naxos presents two opposing concepts of
love, Ariadne’s and Zerbinetta’s.51 Ariadne has found the love of her life in
Theseus. Even after he has abandoned her, she wants to remain faithful to
Theseus and cannot imagine loving anyone else.52 As there is no hope that
Theseus will return, Ariadne awaits death on Naxos. Her response to his infi-
delity could be described as a tragic conceptualization of love and life, in
which the unhappy love story is seen as an irrevocable loss leading to suffer-
ing so intense that death is the only remedy. Unlike Ariadne, Zerbinetta can-
not imagine loving only one man. She is faithful for the duration of an affair,
then without much regret leaves one love behind and moves on to the next
one. Where love is gone and Ariadne anticipates death, Zerbinetta sees
nothing but the time to be passed before a new lover appears. Her position
then can be seen as a refusal to view love and life in a tragic way. Far from
seeing an unredeemable disaster in the ending of a love story, Zerbinetta
takes existence (her own and that of others) with an emotional calm and dis-
tance that enable her to embrace the potentially comic elements of love and
life.
Yet Ariadne auf Naxos does not only depict two opposing concepts of
love; at the same time Hofmannsthal juxtaposes two conceptual paradigms.
The first embraces concepts of remembrance (and the inability to forget),
continuity, tradition, and faithfulness, but also rigidity, impediment of move-
ment or development, and death. The second embraces concepts of forgetful-
ness, discontinuity, and unfaithfulness, but also the possibility of renewal, the
capacity of movement or development and vitality.53 These two paradigms
are represented by Ariadne and Zerbinetta as well as by their mutual lovers,
Bacchus and Harlekin, and surface again in the character of the young
composer in the prologue. This composer is torn between his adoration for

51
See Hofmannsthal’s explanation to Strauss: ‘The symbolic, the contrast between the woman,
who loves only once and the one who gives herself many times is at the centre of the opera.’
In Richard Strauss und Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briefwechsel, ed. by Willi Schuh, 5th rev.
edn (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1978), p. 139 (my translation).
52
For Emil Staiger’s description of Ariadne as a typical case of a woman’s unlimited love for
a man who has abandoned her, see ‘Ariadne auf Naxos: Mythos, Dichtung, Musik’, in Emil
Staiger, Musik und Dichtung, 5th expanded edn (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1986), p. 295.
53
For Martin Sterns’s description of Hofmannsthal’s use of mythological elements, see
‘Spätzeitlichkeit und Mythos: Hofmannsthals Ariadne’, Hofmannsthal-Forschungen, ed. by
Wolfram Mauser, 9 vols (Freiburg/Breisgau: Hofmannsthal-Gesellschaft, 1985), VIII, 294-
95.
 ‘Very Tragical Mirth’ 219

Ariadne, in whom he sees the ideal woman whose love is absolute and un-
conditional, and his erotic interest in the inconstant Zerbinetta.54
Hofmannsthal pits those two paradigms against each other in different
ways in several of his other works, such as Elektra, Christinas Heimreise and
Die Ägyptische Helena.55 What is most interesting about the two paradigms is
that both contain positive as well as negative elements. In all likelihood, the
aim of pitting them against each other is not to come to a final choice, but to
present the consequences of favouring one. Specific to Ariadne auf Naxos is
the fact that, by means of the opera-within-the-opera structure, Hofmannsthal
associates the Ariadne paradigm (remembrance and death) with the opera
seria and the tragic vision, whereas he associates Zerbinetta’s paradigm (for-
getfulness and vitality) with the opera buffa and the comic vision.56 Thus
Hofmannsthal uses the play-within-the-play structure to shed light on the
exact same issue from opposing perspectives, although the tragic and the
comic perspectives are not linked exclusively to one level of the opera, that is
either to the outer or the inner play, but they run through both parts.57
In the prologue the composer is a somewhat tragic-comic character. He is
really suffering from the fact that the work in whose perfection he has put all
his heart will be combined with comic improvisations and thus, in his eyes,
destroyed – and to a certain extent this suffering is comprehensible. At the
same time, the composer’s youthful inexperience, his exaggerated serious-
ness, and the discrepancy between his adoration for Ariadne and his infatua-
tion for Zerbinetta lead to comic situations. In the opera the tragic suffering
of Ariadne is contrasted with the comic behaviour of the commedia dell’arte
characters. Moreover, the opera has an open ending, leaving unresolved
whether the misunderstanding of Ariadne’s mistaking young Bacchus for the
messenger of death leads to confusion and more tragic suffering or, in fact, to
new love and the happy ending so characteristic of comedy.

54
See Stern, p. 306. Moreover, it is noteworthy that besides the composer’s openly displayed
interest in Zerbinetta toward the end of the prologue, right at the beginning he tries to find
the Primadonna who is supposed to sing the Ariadne part in Zerbinetta’s dressing room: see
Ariadne auf Naxos, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke XXIV. Operndichtungen 2,
ed. by Manfred Hoppe (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1985), v. 12, pp. 10-15.
55
See Frank Zipfel, ‘“Machen wir mythologische Opern, es ist die wahrste aller Formen”: zur
Bedeutung des Mythos für die Libretti Hugo von Hofmannsthals’, in Komparatistik als
Arbeit am Mythos, ed. by Monika Schmitz-Emans and Uwe Lindemann (Heidelberg: Syn-
chron, 2004), pp. 161-63.
56
See Barbara Könneker, ‘Die Funktion des Vorspiels in Hofmannsthals Ariadne auf Naxos’,
Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 22 (1972), 124-41 (p. 125).
57
See Könneker, p. 129.
220 Frank Zipfel

5. Conclusion
I have tried to show how play-within-a-play structures have been used in
different ways to combine comic and tragic elements in one and the same
play: a comedy within a tragedy (Massinger), a tragedy within a comedy
(Shakespeare, Corneille), and comic and tragic elements interwoven in both
the outer and the inner play (Hofmannsthal). Though these four plays differ
in many ways (for example, in the theatrical conventions of their respective
periods, in their stories and themes, in their way of mixing comic and tragic
elements, in the messages that can be assigned to them), it is possible to see
common ground with regard to their combinations of tragic and comic
elements: in each one the combination of comic and tragic elements leads to
a realization of the play within the play’s perspectival potential. Thus, the
function common to all four dramas is to shed light upon the same situation
(young lovers in conflict with their parents), the same motif (avarice, incon-
stancy in love), or the same problem (choice of vocation) from different
points of view. This, however, does not mean that these different perspectives
are always comic and tragic in a similar way. In Massinger’s The Roman Ac-
tor we are confronted with the comic and tragic consequences of avarice. In
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the comic and tragic effects of a
conflict of young lovers with unsympathetic parents are enacted. In Cor-
neille’s L’Illusion comique, the exaggeratedly tragic vista of the father is
defeated by means of a feigned tragedy and transformed into a more balanced
arrangement which, though not comic in the narrowest sense, brings about a
happy ending to the story. Finally, in Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos we
are offered a comic and a tragic view of love and its inconstancies, yet both
seem to encompass positive and negative features.
Herbert Herzmann

Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister

Ludi

In Calderón de la Barca’s El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World), the Crea-
tor/God wishes to see a play performed, and he orders the World to arrange it. He distributes the
roles and then watches and judges it. In short, he is a Magister Ludi. The impact of the Baroque
tradition, and especially of Calderón’s paradigm, can be detected in many Austrian works for the
stage, works which show not only a predilection for a mixture of the emotional and the farcical,
but also a strong sense of the theatricality of life, which often leads to a blurring of the borders
between play and reality. This chapter concentrates on the function of the Magister Ludi and the
relationship between play and reality in Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (1633/36), Mo-
zart’s Così fan tutte (1790), and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo;
1898) and Felix Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube (In the Lion’s Den; 1998).

Felix Mitterer: In der Löwengrube (1998)

The Vienna Volkstheater premiered Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube on 24 Jan-
uary 1998.1 The plot is based on the true story of a Jewish actor, Leo Reuss,
who in 1936 fled from the Nazis in Berlin and went to Austria, where he took
on the guise of a Tirolese mountain farmer who claimed to be obsessed with
the desire to become an actor. He managed to be interviewed by Max Rein-
hardt, who employed him in the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, and he
enjoyed a remarkable success. However, he was ultimately recognized, and
in 1937 emigrated to the USA, where he died in 1946. Mitterer, who did not
intend to write a documentary play, used these facts very freely. He was par-
ticularly daring in the way in which he mixed different forms, genres and
styles. The result is a fascinating mélange of fact and fiction, play and reality,
tragedy and comedy, emotional drama and farce, which is very effective on
stage.
Mitterer’s plot runs as follows. In the guise of a Tirolese mountain farmer
named Benedikt Höllriegel, the actor Arthur Kirsch returns to the very theatre
in Vienna from which he had been expelled after the Anschluss a year earlier.

1
In der Löwengrube: Ein Theaterstück und sein historischer Hintergrund (Innsbruck:
Haymon, 1998). All references will be to this edition. With the exception of Così fan tutte,
translations of all titles and quotations are my own.
222 Herbert Herzmann

He is given the title role in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, in which he triumphs. The
Nazi press hails him as a true blood and soil ‘Naturtalent’ who can play the
archetypically ‘German’ Tell, by the equally essentially ‘German’ Friedrich
Schiller, in a way in which none of the ‘semitic’ actors who allegedly domi-
nated the Viennese stage before 1938 could have done. Kirsch-Höllriegel
plans to reveal his true identity after one of his performances. By unmasking
himself he would unmask the prevailing political system. Of course, this
would not only mean the end of his career as an actor, but also the end of his
life. Ultimately, he does not summon up the courage to do this and settles for
having gained the respect of his peers (who up to then had never recognized
his talent as an actor), the admiration and love of his wife (who is not Jewish
and who is the star actress of the theatre) and, of course, he succeeds in sav-
ing his own life and the lives of his children. His strategy almost goes wrong
when one of the Nazi actors recognizes him as an imposter, and calls the
Gestapo to arrest him. Minutes before the Gestapo rush in, the real Benedikt
Höllriegel (whose identity Kirsch had taken on) arrives. He had sheltered
Kirsch on his farm in the Alps and taught him to speak and behave like a
mountain farmer. The real Höllriegel passes the identity test (a scar on his left
knee) and the Gestapo arrest the Nazi colleague for falsely denouncing ‘den
größten Schauspieler deutscher Zunge’ (‘the greatest actor of the German
tongue’; Löwengrube, p. 103). This slapstick ending does not detract from the
serious message of the play, but rather fits in with it. Arthur Kirsch, an actor
by profession, is forced to act in real life. Everybody – the audience in the
theatre, his colleagues, his wife, the director of the theatre and the holders of
political power – become his audience, whom he must please. Failing to
please them would not only cost him his career, but also his life. Thus the
whole world becomes his stage, and his life is merely a play. It is of the ut-
most importance that he plays his role as well as he can.
The famous Shakespearean metaphor of ‘all the world’s a stage’ is a quin-
tessential Baroque figure of speech that expresses the world view of an entire
epoch. It was given its definitive shape by the Spanish playwright, Calderón
de la Barca in the middle of the seventeenth century. The way in which Mit-
terer revives this metaphor is as striking as the mixture of tragedy, comedy
and farce, of emotionally charged scenes and pure slapstick, which he em-
ploys and which also can be found in Baroque theatre. It is remarkable that
the theatrical language and sign-system of the Baroque proves suitable to ex-
press the dilemmas of twentieth-century Austrian and German history.
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 223

Calderón de la Barca: El gran teatro del mundo (1633/36) 2

In classical Greek tragedy human beings are shown to be pawns in the hands
of the gods, who devise all kinds of trials and tribulations, which humans ex-
perience as destiny, or ‘Fate’. The gods appear to enjoy watching how the
humans try their best to cope with them. What is entertaining theatre (play/
Spiel) for the gods is a serious matter for us mortals. The plot of El gran tea-
tro del mundo is a Christian variation of this model. El autor (Creator) orders
el mundo (World) to arrange a play for the glorification of his own greatness:
‘una fiesta hacer quiero / a mi mismo poder, si considero / que sólo a ostenta-
ción de mi grandeza / fiestas hará la naturaleza’ (‘I wish to arrange a festivity
/ in order to celebrate my own power as I see fit / that solely for the display of
my greatness / Nature puts on festivities’). El mundo provides the stageset-
ting and the props, el autor distributes the roles. In this way all human life be-
comes a theatrical performance, that is to say, an entertainment for el autor:
‘y como siempre ha sido / lo que más me ha alegrado, y divertido / la repre-
sentación bien aplaudida, / y es representación la humana vida, / una Come-
dia sea / la que hoy el Cielo en tu Teatro vea’ (‘and as a well received theatri-
cal production has always given me much pleasure and diversion / and hu-
man life is a theatrical representation / it shall be a play / which Heaven will
today attend in your theatre’; Gran teatro, pp. 8-9).
However, there is a difference between the theatre of the world and that
which we traditionally understand to be a theatre. In the latter the actors can
rehearse their parts; in the teatro del mundo there is no time for rehearsal.
The ‘actors’ must play their parts without ‘ensayar’ (‘rehearsing; Gran teatro,
pp. 30-31). They do not even know how much time they have, because el au-
tor can call them from the stage whenever it pleases him. What is a ‘fiesta’
and a ‘representación’ for the divine author is deadly serious for the human
‘actors’. After the play has ended the author will judge the performances and
invite those who have performed well to dine with him at the heavenly table;
those who have acted badly will be condemned.
The hero in Greek tragedy only had the choice between collapsing miser-
ably beneath the fate which the gods had sent him or bearing it heroically and
accepting it as his own. The human actors in Calderón’s auto sacramental
enjoy more leeway. True, they have no say in their choice of roles; the author
decides that for them. But he has given them ‘Albedrío’ (‘free will’; Gran
teatro, pp. 32-33), with the help of which they can decide how to play their

2
El gran teatro del mundo: Das grosse Welttheater, trans. and ed. by Gerhard Poppenberg,
Reclams Universalbibliothek, 8482 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988). All references will be to this
edition.
224 Herbert Herzmann

parts. Before they receive their roles, the humans are ‘informes’ (‘unformed’;
Gran teatro, pp. 22-23). It is the roles that enable them to live and to play
their part in the world. The only way of realizing one’s potential as a human
being is through (role-)play.
While the cruel gods of antiquity determine that Oedipus will kill his
father and marry his mother, the omniscient author of El gran teatro del mun-
do knows what his actors will do, but he does not determine it in advance.
Furthermore, he wants them to choose the right path to the heavenly table and
provides them therefore with a helpline. This is his law (ley), which will
serve as prompter, an inner voice which tells them what is right and wrong.3
In a sense, el autor is detached, but not uninterested. At no time is there any
danger that he will become entangled in the play and lose control. The autho-
rity of the author – who is at the same time creator (playwright), director of
the troupe, audience and judge – rules supreme. Although the human actors
have freedom in that they can realize their roles, they remain part of a team,
and that is more important than the individual. To the ‘pobre’ (‘pauper’) who
complains about the miserable part he has been given the divine author re-
plies that all roles are of equal importance for the staging of the ‘representa-
ción’ (Gran teatro, pp. 28-29).

Variations of Calderón’s model from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries

Once one has become aware of Calderón’s auto sacramental, it is easy to see
that his model of the world as a play has made a tremendous impact on sub-
sequent centuries, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Austrian theatre and
music theatre. Whether or not later authors knew El gran teatro del mundo,
they used its structure and varied it according to their different needs. In Mo-
zart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute; 1791), for example, Sarastro and
the Queen of the Night are the ‘gods’ who assign roles (tasks) to Tamino,
Papageno and Pamina, and observe how they perform with the intention of
dishing out the appropriate rewards or punishments at the end. In Mozart’s
Così fan tutte (1790), Don Alfonso is the equivalent of the autor who distrib-
utes roles to his friends for what becomes an intriguing mixture of play and
reality. He strikes a wager with them and observes how they perform. Of
course, there are differences, but the Baroque model clearly shines through.4

3
See Gran teatro, pp. 32-33.
4
Henry W. Sullivan, Calderón in the German Lands and Low Countries: His Reception and
Influence, 1654-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 290, is convinced
of Calderón’s influence on Mozart: ‘The number of direct and indirect borrowings in
Mozart’s output for the musical stage is so striking, moreover, that some selective intuition,
if not actual familiarity, must be allowed to have existed. Most of the Calderón materials
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 225

The same can be said of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (1870), in which
Doktor Falke acts like el autor and assigns roles to his friends and has them
caught up in a game of which they are largely unaware. He does so to re-
venge himself on his friend Gabriel Eisenstein, who had played a foul trick
on him some years earlier. I call figures like Don Alfonso or Doktor Falke
Magistri Ludi (Spielmeister) and interpret them as a secular (and therefore
less powerful) version of the divine author. Because they are neither omnipo-
tent nor omniscient, they are in danger of becoming caught up in the games
they start and, ultimately, of losing control. This happens, for example, to
Prospère, the innkeeper in Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (The green Cocka-
too; 1898). And, of course, Arthur Kirsch, in Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube,
is another Magister Ludi. He directs his own ‘play’, he assigns to himself the
role which he feels is the best under the circumstances. The main difference
between him and Calderón’s divine author is that he is drawn into the play.
This is already the case up to a point with Don Alfonso and Doktor Falken-
stein and, more radically, with Prospère. But Kirsch is author and actor in one.
He creates the play, but once he enters into it he must perform well in order
to survive. The part of the divine spectator who will judge in the end has been
taken over by his colleagues, his wife, the Nazi press, and the holders of po-
litical power. The highest representative of the political power is the ‘Doktor’,
a great supporter of German art, who pays a visit to the theatre. He – the
character is clearly recognizable as Dr. Göbbels – is so impressed by Kirsch-
Höllriegel that he invites him to dine with him and Helene Schweiger,
Kirsch’s wife (and probably the Doktor’s mistress) after the performance.
Kirsch has passed the test and is invited to the (albeit not heavenly) table of
the all-powerful Doktor!
The Magister Ludi who plays (or experiments) with humans has much in
common with the scientist. The scientist steps outside and above the process
he instigates and observes. In so doing he achieves – or hopes to achieve – a
sort of likeness to God. Faust is a case in point. Ilya Prigogine has pointed
out the analogy between scientist and God, one in which our Magister Ludi
can easily be included: ‘For God everything is given; only for us humans do
new things exist, choice and spontaneous action. In the eyes of God the pre-
sent contains the future as well as the past. Viewed like this, the scientist by
his knowledge of natural laws comes close to having divine knowledge.’ 5

reached Mozart through Italy, the usual intermediary in the diffusion of the Spanish comedia
to the theatres of Austria.’
5
Die Gesetze des Chaos, trans. from French by Friedrich Giese (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993), p.
17: ‘Für Gott ist alles gegeben; nur für uns Menschen gibt es Neues, gibt es eine Wahl und
spontanes Handeln. In den Augen Gottes enthält die Gegenwart sowohl die Zukunft wie die
226 Herbert Herzmann

Mozart: Così fan tutte (1790)6

When Don Alfonso persuades his young friends, Ferrando and Guglielmo, to
test the loyalty of their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, he is convinced
that the young women will fail the test and that he will win the 100 zecchini.
Ferrando and Guglielmo, however, are deeply convinced that the women will
remain steadfast as rocks and therefore accept the wager. On their honour as
soldiers they promise Alfonso that they will do everything he asks of them. In
his capacity as Magister Ludi Alfonso orders the men to pretend they have to
go to war. After a touching farewell scene the men return disguised as Alba-
nian noblemen and good friends of Don Alfonso and start to woo the women
with great passion. Like el autor, Alfonso is at once creator and spectator of
the play that unfolds. And, like el autor, Alfonso sees the performance as a
‘fiesta’ which shows his ‘poder’ (‘power’; Gran teatro, pp. 8-9). In the case
of Così fan tutte, Alfonso’s superior knowledge of the human psyche, along
with his ability to manipulate it, is confirmed. Alfonso also decides what
roles his friends are to play. Furthermore, he directs the play, provides the
props and takes part in it. In other words, he takes on the function of el mun-
do and does allow himself to be drawn into the play – but only up to a point.
In contrast to el autor, Alfonso is not omniscient. He runs a certain risk of
losing control over the game he has initiated. In contrast to the humans in El
gran teatro del mundo, Ferrando and Guglielmo have voluntarily taken on
the roles suggested to them by Alfonso. However, once they have accepted
them and once the game takes on its own momentum, they have no choice
but to continue playing as well as they can. So, once again, their freedom
consists only in how to play, not what to play. The success which both men
score proves that they perform exceedingly well: the women turn out not to
be angels, as the men had claimed, but humans of bones, blood and flesh, just
like men. Therefore they are susceptible to amourous advances. Ferrando and
Guglielmo would lose the wager if the women were to fall in love with their
partners whom they do not recognize. But there is worse to come. At first,
Guglielmo wins the heart of Dorabella, the fiancée of Ferrando, and, soon
after, Guglielmo’s beloved Fiordiligi declares her love for Ferrando, the fian-
cé of Dorabella.
Why do the two men continue to play, when they realize what is going to
happen? There are several reasons. First, they have accepted a wager and it is

Vergangenheit. So gesehen, nähert sich der Wissenschaftler durch seine Kenntnis der Natur-
gesetze der göttlichen Erkenntnis.’
6
Così fan tutte: Textbuch (Italian-German), ed. by Kurt Pahlen and Rosemarie König, Serie
Musik Piper-Schrott, 8004 (Munich: Piper, 1988). All references will be to this edition.
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 227

a matter of honour not to break the agreement. Secondly, they feel sure that
they will win – or do they? Perhaps, unbeknownst to themselves, they have
doubts, and wish to put their women to the test? Like the ever-doubting
lovers in Schnitzler’s comedies, they seem to be looking for certainty. There
may even be a third reason why the men do not stop playing: it is possible
that what they pretend – namely, that they are in love with each other’s wom-
en – becomes reality. In duet no. 23 the hearts of Dorabella and Guglielmo
begin to beat in the same rhythm. Kurt Pahlen and Rosemarie König argue
that the music Mozart has written for Guglielmo has lost all trace of irony
and expresses that he has caught fire.7
Alfonso turns love into a game/play, but this takes on its own momentum
and becomes reality. Intially, the line of demarcation between play and reali-
ty appears to be very clear: the women have real feelings and the men merely
pretend, but after a while things become less clear. Like El gran teatro del
mundo and In der Löwengrube, Così fan tutte is about life as a play. Intrinsi-
cally linked to this theme is that of the relationship between determinism and
freedom. In El gran teatro the humans do not have the freedom to choose
their part, it is merely left to them how they perform. In contrast to the ‘ac-
tors’ in Calderón’s world-theatre, Kirsch decides for himself what role he
will play. Like Calderón’s players, Kirsch must perform as best as he can in
order to be saved. What is the situation regarding freedom in Mozart’s opera?
Guglielmo and Ferrando enter into the game of their own free will. However,
once they have started they cannot readily stop. Their freedom to leave the
game/play is purely theoretical. The women do not even know that they are
taking part in a play. Nevertheless, their decision to start flirting with the two
‘visitors’ is a free one. This is apparent from duet no. 20, in which they de-
cide amongst themselves which of the two men, the dark-haired or the blond,
each of them will flirt.

DORABELLA Prenderò quel brunettino,

Che piu lepido mi par.
(I’ll take the dark one,
Who seems to me more fun.)

FIORDILIGI Ed io intanto col biondino

Vo’ un po’ ridere e burlar.
(And meantime I’ll laugh
And joke a bit with the fair one; Così, p. 259.) 8

7
See Così, p. 176.
8
The translation is taken from the text enclosed with the Deutsche Grammophon recording of
the 1974 Salzburg Festival production (no. 2740118, 1975).
228 Herbert Herzmann

They consider the whole thing to be nothing but ‘fun’. According to Pahlen
and König, Mozart’s music expresses their willful and increasing playfulness,
and the anticipation of a new kind of fun ‘in koketten Phrasen, unterneh-
mungslustigen Koloraturen’ (‘in coquetish phrases and daring coloraturas’;
Così, p. 160).
The highest measure of freedom is enjoyed by Don Alfonso. He has in-
vented the play, he directs it, and his actors have to follow his instructions.
For him, as Magister Ludi, the division between play and reality ceases to
exist insofar as for him everything is a play. In this way he comes very close
to the divine author in El gran teatro del mundo.
Although Alfonso is not omniscient, he has excellent insight into human
nature and therefore predicts more or less correctly the outcome. What he
could not predict is the cross-over of relationships. Just when the women
agree to marry their new friends, the trumpets sound, announcing the return
of the sol-diers from war. The two ‘Albanians’ run out and return almost
immediately in their original attire. The women ask for forgiveness, which is
granted. The two estranged couples reunite. It is a problematic ending, since
a great deal has happened to upset the original relationships between the
lovers. However, the happy ending does not consist of thoughtless recon-
ciliation, but rather is based on a newly-gained insight. The men now know
and accept that women are human (of flesh, bones and blood) just like men.
Everybody can now join the final ensemble:

Fortunato l’uom che prende

Ogni cosa pel buon verso
E tra I casi e le vicende
Da ragion guidar si fà.
Quel che suole altrui far
Piangere
Fia per lui cagion di riso
E del mondo in mezzo I turbini
Bella calma troverà.
(Happy is the man who looks
At everything on the right side
And through trials and tribulations
Makes reason his guide.
What always makes another weep
Will be for him a cause of mirth
And amid the tempests of this world
He will find sweet peace; Così, p. 267) 9

9
Pahlen and König’s German translation reads: ‘Glücklich preis ich, / wer erfasset / alles von
der guten Seite, / der bei Stürmen / niemals erblasset / wählt Vernunft als Führerin. / Was im
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 229

I fail to see the cynicism that Pahlen and König find here in da Ponte’s libret-
to.10 I think that Mozart agreed with this philosophy which reflects the views
of the Enlightenment of which he was a follower.
It is the mixture of opera buffa and opera seria, of fun and seriousness, of
play and reality, that has caused commentators such considerable difficulties
over the last two centuries. Mozart’s first biographer, Nikolaus von Niessen,
called the libretto a bad text – ‘einen schlechten Text’ 11 – out of which Mo-
zart managed to distil great beauty. Richard Wagner had a different view: he
found the music of Così fan tutte less impressive than that of The Marriage of
Figaro, and expressed relief because it would have dishonoured music if Mo-
zart had allowed himself to be inspired by such a weak text in order to com-
pose divine music.12 Beethoven could not understand what possessed Mozart
to compose the music for such a frivolous libretto. To him, as to many others
in the years following the French Revolution, women were sacrosanct.13
Throughout the nineteenth century most commentators found the libretto to
be in bad taste and unworthy of Mozart’s music. It was felt that it was not
proper to play with such a serious matter as love. Only at the beginning of the
twentieth century did a process of re-evaluation set in. Viennese modernism
around 1900 was, once again, fascinated by the relationship between play and
reality and it was not surprising, therefore, that Così fan tutte was seen in a
new light. Recent commentators like William Mann have praised the libretto
as a masterpiece.14 But even at the end of the twentieth century Kurt Pahlen
felt obliged to defend Mozart for having composed the music for da Ponte’s
text which, as he admitted, was a masterpiece – though a diabolical and cyn-
ical one. He felt that Mozart’s ‘herrliche Musik’ (‘exquisite music’) ignored
the abysses which the libretto opened up and that it made the basically deeply
disturbing story appear more harmless. However, the opposite is the case, and
as Pahlen himself points out, Mozart’s love melodies are not faked but genu-
inely felt.15 Surely, what Mozart’s beautiful music is trying to represent – the
cross-over of feelings and partners – is anything but harmless?

Leben andre / weinen macht,/ ist für ihn nur ein Grund / zum Lachen,/ drohn Gefahren noch
/ so fürchterlich, / wahrt er seinen heitern Sinn.’
10
Così, p. 13. On p. 16 they go so far as to accuse da Ponte of ‘Menschenverachtung’ (‘disdain
for human beings’)!
11
Quoted by Pahlen and König, p. 9.
12
See Pahlen and König, p. 9.
13
See William Mann, The Operas of Mozart (London: Cassell, 1977), p. 524 and Pahlen and
König, p. 11.
14
Operas of Mozart, p. 563. See also Pahlen and König, p. 13.
15
See Così, pp. 15-16.
230 Herbert Herzmann

Viennese Modernism and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (1898)

One must not overlook that Mozart and da Ponte created Così fan tutte while
the Bastille was being stormed and the ancien régime overthrown.16 Although
Mozart had a strong sense of his own worth and loathed the polished behav-
iour of the court, he had nevertheless assimilated the musical tradition of the
aristocracy of the eighteenth century.17 The tension between aristocratic norm
(beauty) and personal emotions characterizes his work.18 This may help us to
understand better the relationship between playfulness and seriousness (play
and reality), not only in Così fan tutte but in many of his compositions. The
culture of the Rococo allowed for genuine emotion, but it demanded that it
should be contained within the realm of beauty, that is to say, it had to stay
within certain boundaries.19 One could even show the terror of reality but it
had to be expressed in beautiful form.
The aestheticism and sensualism of Viennese modernism has a strong
affinity with the emotional culture of the Rococo. Indeed, many of the Vien-
nese artists of the turn of the century had a particular predilection for the
theme of play. Besides Greek tragedy and myth and German Classicism, the
theatre of Spain’s Golden Age – Calderón’s, in particular – was of paradig-
matic importance for the modernist dramatists. Hofmannthal’s Der Turm
(The Tower) is based on Calderón’s La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), and
El gran teatro del mundo is the model for Hofmannsthal’s Das grosse Salz-
burger Welttheater (The Great Salzburg Theatre of the World).20 Other sour-
ces for this Viennese obsession with the theatricality of life can be found in
the popular Viennese comedies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
which in turn are a continuation of the Baroque tradition.
Of all the Viennese modernists no one has been more fascinated with the
relationship between play and reality than Schnitzler. In his autobiography
Jugend in Wien (My Youth in Vienna), he relates the following episode that

16
Mann, p. 524.
17
Norbert Elias, Mozart: Zur Soziologie eines Genies, ed. by Michael Schröter (Frank-
furt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 139-140.
18
Elias, p. 140: ‘Diese Bindung seines Gewissens bot ihm genügend Spielraum, die höfische
Tradition in ganz persönlicher Weise weiterzuentwickeln, ohne daß er die Grenzen ihres Ka-
nons je durchbrach. Aber er trug sie durch seine individuelle Phantasie in vielen Fällen weit
über das Verständnis des realen höfisch-aristokratischen Publikums hinaus.’ (‘The embed-
ment of his artistic conscience in the courtly tradition allowed for enough freedom to devel-
op this tradition in a highly personal way without ever transgressing the borders of the canon.
But his individual imagination made him carry this tradition far beyond the expectations of
the contemporary courtly audience.’)
19
See Pahlen and König, p. 313.
20
See Sullivan, pp. 341-53.
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 231

occurred in his childhood. His parents once took him to a performance of

Gounod’s Margarete at the Theater am Kärtnertor. In the intermission two of
the singers waved a greeting to Schnitzler’s parents and then carried on repre-
senting Faust and Margarete. Schnitzler’s comment is the following:

Doch bei aller Verwunderung hatte ich keineswegs das Gefühl, auf schmerzliche Weise aus
einer Illusion gerissen worden zu sein; ja, ich zweifle nicht, daß mir schon damals – wenn
auch nicht so klar und bewußt wie heute – die Welt der Bühne duchaus nicht eine der
Täuschung und des Trugs bedeutete, deren Störung durch ein unvermutetes Eingreifen aus
der Sphäre der Realität ich wie eine Beleidigung oder wie das Aufgescheuchtwerden aus
einem holden Traum zu empfinden hätte; […]. Ja, dieses kleine Erlebnis mag in all seiner
Geringfügigkeit das Seine zu der Entwicklung jenes Grundmotivs vom Ineinanderfließen
von Ernst und Spiel, Leben und Komödie, Wahrheit und Lüge beigetragen haben, das mich
immer wieder, auch jenseits alles Theaters und aller Theaterei, ja über alle Kunst hinaus,
bewegt und beschäftigt hat.
(Although I was puzzled, I did not have the painful feeling of disillusionment. Even if I was
unaware of it at that time I did not, even then, look upon the world of the stage as an illusion
whose disturbance would have been like being woken up from a beautiful dream [...]. This
small event, insignificant as it may seem, may have precipitated the development of the leit-
motif of the fusion of seriousness and play, life and comedy, truth and lies which has occu-
pied me throughout my life beyond the realm of theatre and play-acting.)21

This brings us to our next play, Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu. It is no coin-
cidence that the action takes place in Paris in the evening of 14 July 1789: the
date of the storming of the Bastille. The doomed aristocrats attend the impro-
vised theatre performances which take place in the tavern Der grüne Kakadu’
because these enable them to enjoy as a play what is really happening outside
on the streets of Paris. The tavern of dubious repute called This brings us to
our next play, Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu.22 It is no coincidence that the
action takes place in Paris in the evening of 14 July 1789: the date of the
storming of the Bastille. The doomed aristocrats attend the improvised thea-
tre performances which take place in the tavern ‘Der grüne Kakadu’ because
these enable them to enjoy as a play what is really happening outside on the
streets of Paris. ‘The Green Cockatoo’ is a kind of theatre, whose ‘director’ is
Prospère. The play opens before the ‘performance’ proper starts. Grasset, a
former member of the troupe, who is visiting his old comrades, explains to a
friend what is going on:

21
Jugend in Wien: Eine Autobiographie (Vienna: Molden, 1968), pp. 27-28.
22
Arthur Schnitzler, Das dramatische Werk, 8 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1977). All refer-
ences to Schnitzler’s plays are to this edition, cited in the text as Schnitzler followed by vol-
ume and page numbers.
232 Herbert Herzmann

Meine einstigen Kollegen und Kolleginnen sitzen hier herum und tun, als wenn sie Verbre-
cher wären. […] Sie erzählen haarsträubende Geschichten, die sie nie erlebt – sprechen von
Untaten, die sie nie begangen haben … und das Publikum, das hierher kommt, hat den ange-
nehmen Kitzel, unter dem gefährlichsten Gesindel von Paris zu sitzen.
(My former colleagues are sitting around here pretending to be criminals [...] They tell hair-
raising stories they never experienced, talk about crimes they never committed ... and the au-
dience gathered here enjoy the pleasant sensation of mixing with the most dangerous ele-
ments of the Parisian underworld; Schnitzler, III, 10-11).

The audience is made up of the most elegant people of Paris. What the ‘ac-
tors’ perform in this improvised theatre is, basically, what happens outside:
the Revolution, which is going to start any moment. At first sight, play and
reality are clearly separated: the play takes place inside, reality is outside the
tavern. However, when Grasset, who has joined the revolutionaries, asks
Prospère in jest if he would take him back, should his career as politician fail,
Prospère replies with an emphatic ‘Nicht um die Welt!’ (‘Not for the world!’;
Schnitzler, III, 11). He is afraid that Grasset would attack one of the paying
guests in earnest. Prospère’s part consists of hurling verbal abuse at his
guests. Although he is worried that Grasset may turn play into serious busi-
ness, he indicates that his insults are seriously meant:

Es macht mir Vergnügen genug, den Kerlen meine Meinung ins Gesicht sagen zu können
und sie zu beschimpfen nach Herzenslust – während sie es für Scherz halten. Es ist auch
eine Art, seine Wut los zu werden. – Zieht einen Dolch und läßt ihn funkeln.
(It gives me enough pleasure to tell those wasters to their face what I think about them and
to hurl abuse at them to my heart’s desire – while they think it is only in jest. This is the best
way to get rid of one’s aggression. – He draws a dagger and holds it, gleaming, in the light;
Schnitzler, III, 11).

When Grasset teases him and suggests that the dagger is not sharpened, Pros-
père answers: ‘Da könntest du doch irren, mein Freund; irgend einmal kommt
ja doch der Tag, wo aus dem Spass Ernst wird – und darauf bin ich für alle
Fälle vorbereit.’ (‘You may be wrong there, my friend; the day will finally
come when this becomes real – and I am prepared for it’; Schnitzler, III, 11)
But we do not even know if his dagger is real, or simply a prop. Grasset,
however, who appears to have left the stage and joined the real world of re-
volutionary politics, is attracted to his new vocation because it offers him a
bigger audience and a grander stage. He boasts that at a recent gathering his
speech had been applauded more than that of Camille Desmoulins:

Ich habe mich auf den Tisch gestellt … ich habe ausgesehen wie ein Monument ... jawohl –
und alle die Tausende, Fünftausend, Zehntausend haben sich um mich versammelt – gerade
so wie früher um Camille Desmoulins … und haben mir zugejubelt.
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 233

(I jumped onto the table ... I looked like a monument ... yes, and a thousand, five thousand,
ten thousand gathered around me – just as they had around Camille Desmouslin earlier ...
and cheered me; Schnitzler, III, 9).

The distinction between play and reality, which appears so clear at first sight,
very soon becomes eroded. Some of the characters in the play find this con-
fusion disturbing, for example, Albin, the naïve gentleman from the prov-
inces. Others, like the poet Rollin, find it wonderful. Rollin is fascinated by
the fact that in all play an element of reality shines through. This he calls ‘en-
chanting’ (‘das Entzückende’; Schnitzler, III, 35). Reality revealed through
play (art, fiction) can be enjoyed aesthetically (as something delightful or
beautiful). In other words, the poet Rollin turns the threatening political reali-
ty into fiction (play). The erosion of the separation between the spheres of the
real and the fictitious is indicated very clearly by the stage setting. There is
the real audience watching a play called Der grüne Kakadu. The stage repre-
sents the interior of a tavern of that name. In the tavern we see a fictitious
audience onstage and the improvised play performed onstage, watched by
this fictitious audience. We are dealing with a play within a play. However,
the separation between the fictitious audience and the stage they are looking
at is not clear. The ‘actors’ move freely among the fictitious audience and
occasionally members of the (fictitious) audience join in the improvised play.
Furthermore, a small theatre could be turned into a tavern just like ‘Der grüne
Kakadu’ in which the real audience shares the same room and even the same
tables with the fictitious audience. In the course of the action the revolution
gets ever closer. What is at first perceived as noise outside (Lärm draussen),
at the end invades the tavern: ‘Es kommen Leute herein, man hört schreien.
Ganz an ihrer Spitze Grasset, andere, unter ihnen Lebrêt, drängen über die
Stiege nach. Man hört Rufe: Freiheit, Freiheit!’ (People come in, one hears
shouting. In front of the mob is Grasset, others including Lebrêt follow from
behind. One hears calls: Freedom, freedom’; Schnitzler, III, 40)
It is tempting to conclude from this that reality finally triumphs and that
the game is over. However, one may draw the opposite conclusion, namely,
that by invading the stage, the so-called reality of the French Revolution has
become a new kind of play: thus everything is just a play. But this is not the
end and the ambivalent relationship between the two spheres leads to further
confusion. The invasion by the mob brings an air of reality into the theatre
and the guests of the tavern finally believe that the star actor Henri is telling
the truth when he claims that he has murdered his wife because he has dis-
covered that she had been unfaithful to him with the Duke of Cardignan. The
trouble is that everybody except Henri has known for some time that Leoca-
dia was cheating on her husband and is therefore inclined to believe him.
234 Herbert Herzmann

There is a point when not only the fictitious audience but even the real one
can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality. It is only then, when he
becomes aware of the reaction of his friends, that Henri realizes that his wife
has indeed been disloyal and when, at this moment chance wills it that the
Duke enters the tavern, Henri stabs him. This surely must be the end of the
game/play? Nothing is more real than death – but it is not quite so. The police
inspector whose task it is to decide whether the goings-on in the tavern are
entertainment or meant for real, is completely confused and apparently thinks
that the murder of the Duke is not real but part of the play. When he says
‘Das geht zu weit!’ (‘This is going too far!’; Schnitzler, III, 40), he takes of-
fence that the murder of a high aristocrat should be portrayed on stage. And
the Marquise Severine de Lansac, when realizing that the murder is for real,
manages to turn this into a new kind of entertainment: ‘Es trifft sich
wunderbar. Man sieht nicht alle Tage einen wirklichen Herzog wirklich
ermorden’ (‘This is wonderful. It isn’t every day that one sees a real duke
really murdered’; Schnitzler, III, 40). While she converts bloody reality into
bloody art (as in a snuff movie), the revolutionaries celebrate Henri as a hero
for having killed the Duke – not realizing that his motive was entirely apoli-
tical. The Marquise, who is the mistress of the poet, feels sexually aroused by
the events of the past hour and is looking forward to an exciting night with
her lover. Play becomes reality, reality becomes a new kind of play, this
again becomes real, and so forth ad infinitum.
Although play and reality constantly swap over, it is impossible to see
precisely where the transitions occur. If there is a higher sphere, where the
distinction is obsolete, it is the sphere of the divine, of el autor of El gran
teatro del mundo. If humans are half-god and half-animal, it is understand-
able that they strive towards the divine. The scientist attempts to approach
divine knowledge by studying the laws of nature, the Magister Ludi strives
for divine power by playing with people. Schnitzler’s Paracelsus, which was
written in 1898, the same year as Der grüne Kakadu, sums it up like this:

Es war ein Spiel. Was sollt’ es anders sein.

Was ist nicht Spiel, das wir auf Erden reiten
[...]
Mit wilden Söldnerscharen spielt der eine,
Ein anderer spielt mit tollen Abergläubischen.
Vielleicht mit Sonnen, Sternen irgend wer, –
Mit Menschenseelen spiele ich. Ein Sinn
Wird nur von dem gefunden, der ihn sucht.
Es fließen ineinander Traum und Wachen,
Wahrheit und Lüge, Sicherheit ist nirgends.
Wir wissen nichts von andern, nichts von uns;
 Play and Reality in Austrian Drama 235

Wir spielen immer, wer es weiß, ist klug.

(It was a play. And what else could it be?
What is not play that we are mounting here on earth
[...]
One plays with armies of wild mercenaries,
Another with extravagantly supersticious persons,
Others with suns and stars, –
I play with human souls. Meaning
Is only found by those who look for it.
Dream and reality, truth and lies merge,
Security is nowhere to be found.
We know nothing about others and nothing about ourselves;
We are always playing, and he who knows is wise; Schnitzler, II, 240)
Helmut J. Schneider

Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical

Drama from Lessing to Büchner

This chapter argues that the transformation the genre of tragedy underwent in eighteenth century
German classicism, exemplified by the subgenre of the Schauspiel (serious drama with non-
tragic outcome), can be understood as a detachment of tragedy from itself through its integration
of playful self-reflection. This tendency can be traced from Lessing’s Philotas, Minna von Barn-
helm, Emilia Galotti and Nathan the Wise through Goethe’s classical dramas Egmont, Iphigenie
and Natural Daughter, Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg, and finally to Büchner’s Dan-
ton’s Death. Taking issue with Carl Schmitt’s distinction between ‘true tragedy’ (e.g., Shake-
speare’s Hamlet), which owes its political effect to a ‘kernel of historical factuality’, and the
German Trauerspiel alleged to be mere aestheticistic Schauspiel, I propose to show that the in-
ternal distancing of tragedy from its tragic substance via the device of the play within the play
itself constituted a political effect. The theatrical distanciation from tragic heroism served the
instantiation of a peaceful society.

As a theatrical device compounding the split on which theatre is based (be-

tween actor and role, body and meaning), the play within the play has its
roots in comedy rather than in tragedy; it serves as a defence mechanism al-
lowing many a comedy to forestall the encroachment of tragedy within its
genre. My objective here will be to turn the tables and explore how the play
with in the play came to act as a catalyst in a major transformation of tragedy
in eighteenth-century German classicism. It appears with increasing regulari-
ty in the bourgeois tragedy and the new subgenre of the Schauspiel, the seri-
ous drama with a non-tragic ending, to defuse the story’s tragic potential and
open the way for a happy resolution of the dramatic conflict. A common
thread emerges if we glance at some of the most important plays of the period
between 1750 and 1830, from Lessing’s Philotas (1759), Minna von Barn-
helm (1767) Emilia Galotti (1772) and Nathan the Wise (1779) to Goethe’s
Iphigenie (1779-86), Egmont (1788) and Natural Daughter (1803) to Kleist’s
Prince Friedrich von Homburg (1811) and finally to Büchner’s Danton’s
Death (1835), a historical drama which carried the device of the comical on-
stage play to a cynical extreme, thereby depriving political and revolutionary
action of all higher tragic meaning. In all of the above with the exclusion of
238 Helmut J. Schneider

Büchner, the tragedy that seems so inevitable is averted through the resolute
action of moral individuals who believe in communication and rational com-
promise or reconciliation – the Versöhnung grounded in the familiar ideology
of Humanität – with the help of a dramaturgical process that enables the
dramatis personae to distance themselves from the forces about to doom
them. If what Northrop Fry called the ‘myth of comedy’ is devoted to the af-
firmation and celebration of life over death (as symbolized by the victory of
the young lovers over the ossified order of the old generation), then this new
genre of the Schauspiel, which uses the play within the play similarly to
thwart impending doom, celebrates a heightened idea of ‘life’. This sense of
life seems implicit, to cite just one example, in the last line of Goethe’s
Iphigenie when the newly moralized barbaric tyrant Thoas bids farewell to
his Greek enemies. In the light of the preceding near-tragic conflict, Thoas’s
‘lebt wohl,’ (literally, ‘live well’), takes on a deeper meaning than that of a
simple ‘farewell’ or goodbye.
I begin with a discussion of Lessing as the seminal figure in the develop-
ment of the classical-drama tradition in Germany. The second section uses an
essay by the legal theoretician Carl Schmitt attacking the presumed ‘aestheti-
cism’ of modern tragedy, contrasting it with the political involvement of the
Greek and Shakespearean model. By this means I hope to deepen the Lessing
discussion and make the transition to the historical drama that forms the core
of the tragic tradition in Weimar classicism and its nineteenth century succes-
sors. Due to its referential character, the Geschichtsdrama (historical drama)
appears to be more resistant to the play-within-the-play device. Nevertheless
– and significantly – features of the latter find their way into its structure as
well, and in so doing, alter its character. As examples, I draw on Goethe’s
Egmont, Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg, and Büchner’s Danton’s
Death. I should mention from the start that I use the play-within-the-play
concept in a broad sense so as to include all phenomena in which a doubling
of the stage occurs, and not just the literal staging of a play within the main
play, as in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Such phenomena may
include fantasies or visions that are seen by the characters and that suggest a
‘second stage’, even though that stage may not be visible to the spectator. A
case in point is Orestes’s inner vision of the affectionate reunion of his family
and kin, once torn by internecine strife, in the underworld of Goethe’s Iphige-
nie, which contrasts with Egmont’s and Homburg’s theatrical externalization
of their heroes’ hallucinations.
 Playing Tragedy 239

1.
‘Perhaps you expect me to turn the steel against myself and conclude my
action as in a stale tragedy?’ (‘Sie erwarten vielleicht, daß ich den Stahl
wider mich selbst kehren werde, um meine Tat wie eine schale Tragödie zu
beschließen?’) 1 With these words, the old Galotti in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti
turns to the Prince after he has fulfilled his daughter’s wish to die (and be
killed by her father) rather than endure an assault on her sexual integrity. At
the end of this bourgeois tragedy, tragedy becomes conscious of its own
generic convention; by denouncing and rejecting suicide as a worn-off ploy,
the hero extricates himself from the tragic tradition. But Galotti had of course
already been tricked into the ‘stale’ script when young Emilia confronted him
with the image of the ancient Roman hero Virginius killing his daughter for
the sake of patriotism and freedom. The modern family father had been se-
duced by a wholly incongruous tragic-heroic scenario.
‘Bourgeois tragedy,’ one might say, is intrinsically unable to generate the
energy needed for a tragic ending; by borrowing from past tragedy it signals
the end of tragedy, along with its own tragic impotence. Lessing’s exhibition
of tragedy’s ultimate dispensability, however, is counterbalanced by his com-
pelling empathy for its victims. His audience is provoked into a response of
encompassing compassion – Mitleid – just as it distances itself from the ideo-
logy of tragic sacrifice. In Emilia Galotti, the two contradictory but neverthe-
less cooperating moments of empathetic identification and cognitive dis-
tancing find a symbolic expression in the way the dagger – the tragic prop
par excellence – circulates from one person to another, as though in desperate
search for a meaningful use to which it could be put. The parodistic point is
driven even further by its trivial substitute, the hairpin, with which Emilia
threatens to kill herself if her father does not obey her heroic wish.
To be sure, there is ‘meaning’ in Emilia’s tragic outcome, but not the
meaning associated with the demise of the traditional hero or heroine. Emilia
conceives of her death at the hands of her father as a rebirth, and Lessing’s
play as a whole can be read (and seen) as the transformation of the physical
body – especially the erotic, seducible, and procreative female body – into
the product of culture and pedagogy. As in the earlier Miss Sara Sampson
(1755), tragic death ushers in a higher life. The father who kills his daughter
in order ‘to give her a second life’ (‘ihr zum zweiten das Leben gab’)2 fathers
a spiritual family built on the sacrifice of that which is purely natural and

1
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. by Herbert G. Göpfert (München: Carl Hanser, 1970),
vol. 2 [Emilia Galotti] p. 204.
2
Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Emilia Galotti], p.203.
240 Helmut J. Schneider

which Nathan the Wise will reveal as the family of humankind. Correspond-
ing to this transformation of the physical into the cultural body is the genre’s
transformation of the comedic celebration of life’s vital procreative energy
into an idealization of the life of the spirit, ‘Geist’. The ‘new’ (bourgeois)
tragedy sacrifices the ‘old’ genre in order to articulate and initiate a spiritual-
ized ideal of collectivity set against pre-modern particularism (e.g., Roman
patriotism, aristocratic honour, absolutist rule etc.). From the perspective of
genre tradition, the split between empathy and reflexive distancing in audi-
ence response to tragic events is the experience of a sacrifice in which de-
privation (of the body) and gain (of spiritual unity) collapse.
Put still differently, and with respect to the play within the play, the dis-
missal of the tragic tradition is enacted as its ‘last performance’. ‘Do you
humans not believe that one gets fed up with it?’ (‘Glaubt ihr Menschen, daß
man es nicht satt wird?’).3 This rhetorical question, addressed to those on-
stage as well as to the audience, concludes Lessing’s earlier tragedy Philotas
(1759). The king Aridäus lays down his crown after he has witnessed the
spectacle of a heroic suicide acted out by his captive Philotas, son of the en-
emy king. Young Philotas, consumed with fantasies of bravery and war fame,
seeks to compensate for the perceived shame of his capture (brought upon
himself by his foolhardy inexperience) and to gain the name of hero after all
by killing himself and sparing his father the ransom. He indulges his heroic
obsession with the rhetoric of patriotic self-sacrifice and glory even against
the persuasive pleas of his captors, foremost the humane king and, moreover,
the potential of a peaceful resolution through a prisoner exchange. Aridäus’s
being ‘fed up’ with ‘it’ thus relates just as much to the heroic spectacle he has
been forced to watch as to the rule of the absolutist monarch and his obliga-
tion to conduct war. Disenchanted with the obsolete ethics and aesthetics of
heroism, Aridäus turns to the ‘humans’ on and off stage for support. The
king’s abdication effectively – performatively – creates a new audience of
mere human beings (‘Menschen’) distancing themselves from the ideal of
heroic sacrifice and harbouring the promise of a humane community.
The fact that this one-act play has been read for some two hundred years
as straight heroic tragedy (motivated by the groundswell of German patriot-
ism at the height of the Seven Years War) does not seem to attest to the suc-
cess of its critical intention. One cause for this failed reception lies in the
complex nature of the text that is not exhausted in being a polemical critique

3
Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Philotas], p. 126. Cf. for the following my article: ‘Aufklärung der
Tragödie. Lessings Philotas’, in Horizonte. Festschrift für Herbert Lehnert zum 65. Geburts-
tag, ed. by H. Mundt, E. Schwarz, W.J. Lillyman (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), pp. 10-39.
 Playing Tragedy 241

of heroism, but also offering a study of its psychological roots. The hero
Philotas is clearly adolescent in his fantastic images of war and fame, his nar-
cissism and puerile father fixation. The tent in which he is held prisoner and
which is the drama’s sole setting represents a ‘scene’ (the Greek word
‘skene’ means ‘tent’) in a literal and emphatic sense: the scene of a play with-
in the play in which the misled youth stages his personal tragedy against the
sympathetic remonstrance of the father figures around him. Before he turns
these father substitutes into helpless witnesses of his suicide, Philotas is his
own finest spectator. ‘You standing there, Philotas’, the hero addresses his
imagined mirror image (‘indem er sich selbst betrachtet’): ‘Alas, this must be
a superb, a sublime sight, a youth struck to the ground with the sword in his
breast!’ (‘Der du itzt da stehest, Philotas […] Ha! es muß ein trefflicher, ein
großer Anblick sein: ein Jüngling gestreckt auf den Boden, das Schwerd [sic]
in der Brust!’)4
The ironic effect Lessing produced by the play within the play in Philotas
becomes evident at the moment when the hero, struck by the sudden aware-
ness that he lacks the sword to carry out his suicide, is thrown from the height
of his imaginary self-glorification. Much of the drama’s plot consists in the
protagonist’s effort to procure the tool for the tragic action, as if tragedy were
reduced to the facilitation of its theatrical execution. (When he finally gets
hold of a sword, Philotas will lose himself in a rapture that again emphasizes
its association with ‘play’: ‘Dear sword! What a beautiful thing a sword is,
for play and for use. I have never played with anything else’.5 Yet apart from
this parodistic subversion of the tragic ideal (for which the text offers numer-
ous examples), one important aspect of Philotas’ heroic ‘play’ indeed makes
it a tragedy. The youth’s death has a remarkable impact on his older and en-
lightened onlookers. For a brief but revealing moment, they regress to an
earlier stage of their own psychic development; Philotas’ action awakens in
them a dormant archaic fascination. Even the humane Aridäus, before he
concludes the play as described, casts aside the barriers of civilized humanity
and revels in thoughts of barbaric revenge.
Philotas is the point of demarcation in Lessingian dramaturgy between
the baroque Trauerspiel and the tragédie classique on the one hand, and
bourgeois tragedy and the untragic Schauspiel on the other. Heroic tragedy,
we might say, is played out ‘once more’ or even – symbolically – ‘for the last

4
Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Philotas], pp.118-119.
5
P. 123. Similar to the dagger in Emilia Galotti, this is an example of these dramas’ coding of
the tragic instrument of death as a ‘comedic’ object, i.e. a mere stage prop; cf. also Emilia’s
hair pin. The guillotine in Büchner’s revolution drama takes this profanation of the tragic
death to an extreme end (see below).
242 Helmut J. Schneider

time’ (followed by yet another last time, and so on), staged for spectators
who are presumed to be intellectually beyond tragedy but who are emotional-
ly still bound to it. Tragic heroism, anchored as it is in the history of the hu-
man psyche, both onto- and phylogenetically, outlives its principal, historico-
philosophical end. The new tragedy offers its audience the opportunity to
relive tragedy vicariously and therapeutically; it sacrifices, as it were, its pre-
decessor and turns it into the object of dramaturgical compassion, Mitleid.
The encompassing frame of this ‘enlightened’, or meta-tragedy contains (in
both senses of the word) within itself the lure of an older theatre for an audi-
ence that is supposed to be emancipated from it. ‘Detaching tragedy from
itself’ is therefore not an easy but rather a highly ambiguous process.

2.
In his Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Hamlet or
Hecuba: The Incursion of [Historical] Time into the Play) from 1956, Carl
Schmitt argues that authentic tragedy (which he distinguishes from Trauer-
spiel) does not exhaust itself in the self-sufficiency of an aesthetic ‘play’, but
draws its force from a contingent historical or mythical reality shared by its
audience. To exemplify this ‘impossibility of doing away with the tragic by
playing’ (‘Unverspielbarkeit des Tragischen’), he uses the play within the
play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 6 The function of this most famous drama
within a drama, Schmitt argues, is not to offer the spectator a self-reflexive
view behind the stage and make him or her aware of the theatrical arrange-
ment but to promote the dramatic action of which it is a direct part. Already
the actor’s tears, shed while reciting Priamos’s death, have made Hamlet
aware of his own lack of motivation vis-à-vis a real and non-fictional tragedy.
Likewise, as a drama Hamlet shares with the theatre-viewing public a com-
mon historical and political background (the 1603 accession to the throne of
the Stuart Jacob I, whose mother Mary was accused of the murder of his fa-
ther) placing it beyond ‘mere fiction’. For Schmitt, to weep for the figure of
Hamlet in the same manner as the actor-reciter weeps for Hecuba is to revel
in a purely aesthetic enjoyment and to disregard any pragmatic interest; it
means acknowledging the fact that ‘in the theatre we worship other Gods
than in the forum or on the pulpit,’ 7 which runs fundamentally counter to the
essence of true tragedy. There does not exist, Schmitt postulates, such a thing
as ‘tragedy within the tragedy,’ for the inherent self-referential and artificial

6
Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Düsseldorf and
Köln: Eugen Diederichs, 1956), p. 42.
7
Schmitt, p. 45.
 Playing Tragedy 243

character of the play within the play by definition dispels the sense of tragic
seriousness. And this sense is indissolubly bound to the representation of
some significant reality, not mere invention or aestheticization.
Looking back at the brief discussion of Lessing’s two tragedies (Schmitt
would label them Trauerspiel), I propose that these do indeed employ the
play-within-the-play device as a performative act with respect to the contem-
porary audience. Philotas’s critical perspective on the ‘dangerous play of
tragedy’ constitutes a direct polemical commentary on the ideologically
charged atmosphere at the time of the Seven Years War. Twenty years later,
Lessing, as he battled orthodox Lutheran theologians and was subjected to
censorship, produced his last drama, Nathan (1779), using his ‘old pulpit’ of
the theatre as forum for the religious and (at the time) highly political debate.
The point here is not the promulgation of a dangerous message in a different
medium, but the change of the medium itself as message. The metaphorical
phrase of the stage as pulpit suggests more than the drama’s potential to dis-
seminate a secular imperative of tolerance and universal brotherhood. Rather
and crucially, Nathan the Wise enacts, in and through its very dramaturgy,
the instatement of the aesthetic medium as a means for establishing a new so-
cial ethic for the modern, ‘autonomous’ individual, an individual to be liber-
ated from the blind force and authority of genealogical – ethnic, religious,
feudal, etc. – allegiances.
This finds direct expression in the midpoint of the drama (III, 7) which
contains the well-known Parable of the Rings. The Jewish protagonist is chal-
lenged by the Muslim sultan to tell him which of the three great religions –
Judaism, Islam, Christianity – is the one and only ‘true’ faith. Instead of a
straight answer to the monarch’s peremptory and calculated question, Nathan
distracts him with his parable, the narration of which is distinctly marked as a
play within the play. The essence of the story is the substitution for absolute
truth – and, by inference, absolutist power – of a symbol used as pledge and
encouragement for never-ending moral striving. An aesthetic artifact, the
duplicated rings, takes the place of the lost metaphysical truth, while at the
same time instilling into its recipients a zeal for fraternal bonding and ethical
achievement. The action within the parable is doubled on the scenic level of
the action between narrator and listener: Just as Nathan’s tale – also a ‘play
for the king’! – stands in for a theoretically unattainable but morally realiza-
ble truth, its telling realizes the message when the wise Nathan and the pow-
erful sultan, the Jew and the Muslim, unite in friendship. Thus the parable
scene as a whole demonstrates the performative character of the aesthetic,
which breaks the absolutism of dogmatic truth, political rule, and blood ge-
nealogy – the stuff tragedy is made of. This is not, then, the Schillerian
244 Helmut J. Schneider

aesthetic play attacked by Schmitt; it is not the non-committal state of aes-

thetic mediation and compromise. Rather, it is the play as pragmatic inter-
vention: It is the theatre presenting indeed (in Schmitt’s words) other Gods
than those of the pulpit and the marketplace, but only for the purpose of de-
throning Gods altogether. When the bonding between Nathan and Saladin is
taken up on a larger scale in the drama’s final scene (which brings the mem-
bers of antagonistic ethnicities and religions together as members of one fam-
ily, who in silent embrace form a ring echoing the protagonist’s story), this
same embrace extends to the theatre audience.
Schmitt, of course, is concerned with what he calls genuine tragedy,
distinguished sharply from the modern Trauerspiel, including the historical
drama of German classicism. My point with respect to Lessing (and his
crucial dramaturgical reform) is that the new Schauspiel uses the distancing
techniques of the play within the play as a direct cultural involvement.
Nathan is much indebted to the comedic tradition; seen from this angle, the
generic transformation could be dubbed as comedy shattering tragedy. This
subversion lies at the heart of Lessing’s classic comedy proper, Minna von
Barnhelm, which transforms the familiar motif of love’s triumph through wit
and intrigue over social obstacles (father, the law) into a complex psychologi-
cal negotiation.8 Here it is the internalized obstacle of the officer’s adherence
to the honour code – the code of French tragedy – that is overcome by the
heroine’s playful role reversal in the so-called ‘ring intrigue’. The aim is no-
thing less than the mutual recognition of man and woman on the basis of
empathy and equality which extends the value system of Nathan to the level
of gender. With her play within the play, Minna adopts an enunciating func-
tion, becoming the author of a ‘new’ comedy inside of the traditional comedy
that turns a stock dramaturgical type into an individual character. With his
solipsistic fixation on ‘lost honour’ and the habit of narcissistic self-depreca-
tion, Tellheim falls at first glance within the comedic tradition of the stub-
born eccentric; at the same time, the object of his fixation is precisely the
value system of heroic tragedy. Through Minna’s role reversal, Tellheim
comes to look at himself from the outside and shed the tragic and heroic pos-
ture (strongly recalling Philotas!) – with the consequence that the other char-
acters and the audience come to see the ‘true’ nobility of his character. The
‘spectre of honour’ (‘Gespenst der Ehre’) 9 gives way to a new, interiorized

8
Cf. for the following my article: ‘Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm oder Das
Soldatenglück’, in The New History of German Literature, ed. by David E. Wellbery (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 371-376.
9
Lessing, Werke, vol. 2 [Minna von Barnhelm], p. 679.
 Playing Tragedy 245

moral seriousness. Comic role-play, consciously performed, frees the individ-

ual from externally imposed and alienating roles – genre roles as well as gen-
der roles, tragic-heroic posture or comic stiffness as well as masculine illu-
sions of superiority and self-sufficient integrity. Modern comedy thus gives
birth to the emancipated individual.
Minna von Barnhelm is a comedy that disarms (heroic) tragedy and its
ethics altogether. The hero’s pathetic injury (his disabled right arm) graphic-
ally illustrates the demise of the warrior and the dawn of peaceful civility.
That Lessing’s play was meant as a direct political intervention is apparent
from the original cover page which cites its full title, Minna von Barnhelm or
the Soldier’s Fortune (Minna von Barnhelm Oder das Soldatenglück), fol-
lowed by a titbit of misinformation: ‘Written in the year 1763’ (‘Verfertiget
im Jahre 1763’). By (inaccurately) predating his authorship, Lessing in fact
rewrote a politically historic date as a marker of literary history. The year the
peace of Hubertusburg ended the Seven Years War likewise terminates the
age of heroic tragedy, of honour, and of the soldiers’ fortune, ushering in the
emergent world of civility (and, indeed, femininity): a necessity and an
achievement that is enacted through and made conscious by its play within
the play.

3.
In conclusion, I wish to take a brief look at Schmitt’s contention regarding
the aestheticist character of the modern historical drama in contrast with, as
he sees it, the political thrust of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. My thesis
has been that it was the institutionalizing of the aesthetic in drama as per-
formed through the play within the play (broadly understood as a doubling of
the stage, be it literal or more indirect) which accounted for its political func-
tion. While the term ‘political’ here is, to be sure, taken in a broad sense, it is
nonetheless a sense that transcends aesthetic self-sufficiency. In Lessing, to
repeat once more, the function of the device was not to remove the audience
into a self-enclosed fictitious realm but, on the contrary, to make it aware of
aesthetic distancing as a method of negotiating and relativizing the absolutist
positions of the past, especially those embodied in the tragic hero. The dra-
maturgical self-referentiality of the play within the play served a pragmatic
aim.
Historical drama is bound, within variable limits, to a referential reality
and therefore appears less apt for the kind of self-reflexive distancing as here
described. It is no coincidence that the greatest of German classical tragedy
writers, Friedrich Schiller, devoted himself (with one exception) to well-
known historical subjects (Wallenstein, Jean d’Arc, Mary Stuart, Wilhelm
246 Helmut J. Schneider

Tell are the best known). On the other hand, there are historical dramas that
rewrite the tragedy inherent in their subject matter; they exploit the tragic
potential while at the same time superseding it with a turn toward the
Schauspiel. Again it is the play-within-the-play device through which this
turn is enacted.
Goethe’s Egmont and Kleist’s Prince Friedrich von Homburg offer perti-
nent examples. Both dramas insert self-reflexive theatrical spectacles into the
seemingly fatal course of events, thereby making historical factuality (as con-
firmed by the source material) and tragic necessity subject to interventions of
the imaginary – interventions vacillating between subjective hallucinations
and objective (stage) reality. Thus the Brabant Count Egmont’s imminent ex-
ecution by the Spanish occupants is suspended, and with it, tragic death and
sacrifice absorbed by the vision of a triumphant populace led by his beloved
Klärchen, a vision that unites the dreaming hero onstage with the theatre au-
dience in the communal experience of a liberated future. Similarly, Kleist’s
Schauspiel (its original subtitle) frames itself for the audience as a spectacle
originating in the protagonist’s mind: the spectacle of the hero’s self-generat-
ed coronation and premature aspirations to supreme triumph and power. The
juvenile prince follows the path, already delineated by Lessing’s Philotas,
from narcissist posturing according to the iconography of heroism to the final
realization of a heroic death in the jaws of defeat. But contrary to his adoles-
cent precursor, Homburg will be spared death at the last moment and even be
rewarded with his dream come true. The plot’s motivation for this graceful
ending is the prince’s insight into the transgressive nature of his action. Yet it
can not be overlooked that he uses his eventual conversion and voluntary,
even jubilant acceptance of the death sentence for the prospect of an even
more elevated act of self-glorification. If the life of Kleist’s hero is spared
and his overreaching fantasy fulfilled, this is due to the fact that the play as a
whole assumes the vision and offers it to the audience as an invitation to
share the theatrical dream. Whether this implies a critical intention must
remain, however, an open question.
A radically different case is Büchner’s revolutionary drama Danton’s
Death, which represents history itself as theatre – not in the baroque sense of
‘all the world is a stage’ but in the perception of the historical protagonists
themselves. These protagonists were still well-known to the play’s contempo-
rary audience, as were many of their historical speeches and statements, from
which Büchner quotes liberally. The drama represents the ‘heroes’ of the
French Revolution as spectators rather than authors of their own political ac-
tions; the characters’ consistent splitting into actor and role creates through-
out the play a double stage, also reflecting the audience’s own viewing posi-
 Playing Tragedy 247

tion. This correspondence is crucial: Büchner’s play concentrates on the well-

documented conviction of many revolutionary leaders that they are but tools
acting on behalf of a higher historical power, and uses it to achieve a self-re-
flexive perspective on its character as historical play. In contrast to Goethe’s
prerevolutionary drama (to which Danton’s Death prominently alludes sever-
al times), it is the utter powerlessness of mere spectatorship vis-à-vis an al-
mighty ‘history’ that unites the actors on the stage and the viewers in front of
it. This correspondence can be made even more specific. It is precisely the
dramaturgy of the ‘fourth wall’ with its assignment of a passive position to
the theatre viewer that finds its reflection in an empty spectacle that con-
demns its would-be authors to the status of passive onlookers (and vice versa).
The dramaturgy of the fourth wall was introduced in the middle of the
eighteenth century together with the bourgeois tragedy. It was intended to
seal off the theatrical stage from the audience in the theatre, thus effectively
separating a purely aesthetic world from the real community – exactly in the
sense criticized by Schmitt. Yet this also created the condition for the kind of
aesthetic intervention – intervention of the aesthetic – in the conventional
realm of society that I hope to have illustrated with Lessing. Further, it pro-
vided a possibility for historical drama to open a space for a potential revi-
sion of history’s fatal (tragic) course. Egmont’s and Homburg’s visions make
the fantasizing mind a (stage) reality visible to all, thus effectively fusing the
subject with the community. Büchner takes this meta-dramatic dimension to
a negative extreme in turning the theatre constellation into an awareness of
political powerlessness. When at the play’s conclusion the otherwise empty
stage displays the guillotine ready for the next strike, this instrument of death
becomes no less than an allegory of the Rampe, the stage apron or curtain.
Philotas’s sword, the stage prop Lessing had placed in the centre of a play
within the play demonstrating at once the historical obsolescence and the
emotional endurance of heroic tragedy, has now become a death machine sig-
nifying both a history devoid of meaning and a theatre slicing life into stills of
empty heroic postures, served up to silent spectators. Tragedy is detached
from itself only to return as a grotesque play of masks.
Gerhard Fischer

Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and
German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller)

The chapter discusses a number of plays by German authors who have chosen a play-within-a-
play dramaturgy as a special way to deal with historical matters (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, H.
Müller). These texts explore the dialectics of ‘historicity’ and ‘actuality’. The playwrights use
various framing devices to set up contrasting, historical levels which mirror and comment on
each other as well as on the actual historical time of the performance. In other instances, authors
construct fictitious historical settings or conduct imaginary, anachronistic dialogues that cut
across time and space. Apart from allowing a critical self-reflection and a self-referential take on
their own historical position, these ‘dialogues with the dead’ allow for an appropriation of his-
tory which acts as an antidote against historical amnesia.

1. Historical Drama and the Play within the Play

Within German dramatic literature of the modern age, there is a long tradition
of playwrights who have used the convention of the Spiel im Spiel in their
construction of historical dramas. The list would have to begin with Georg
Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Other names that could be mentioned include
Schnitzler, Brecht, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, Weiss, Grass and Heiner Müller. All
of these playwrights are concerned with history, not as documentarists or as
historicists who use the stage to create an illusion of the past as – supposedly
– it really was. Rather, they use historical events, settings and developments
in a playful, often fictitious way in order to do what historians also do, name-
ly to comment on and to interpret history, to offer re-evaluations of the past
and to critically reflect on the relationship between past and present. The par-
ticular structure of the play within the play has proven a very useful strategy
to resurrect forgotten histories or to construct alternative historical visions,
contrasting realities or thought provoking insights into social and societal
processes. Typically, the playing with history, with historical memory or with
the imaginative construction of historical alternatives, even utopian visions of
the future, also reflect the playwrights’ own processes of intellectual and po-
litical identity formation.
In the following, I should like to discuss some of the dramatic techniques
employed by Büchner, Brecht, Weiss and Müller in their use of the historical
250 Gerhard Fischer

play within the play. There is a clear line of influence that links plays such as
Danton’s Death, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Marat/Sade and The Mission
(i.e. Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag), notably with the focus on the treatment of
revolution as a historical phenomenon. The analysis will reveal the great va-
riety and versatility in the individual employment of the Spiel im Spiel con-
vention by these four playwrights who have used it for their individual and
very different purposes. In my own dramaturgical practice, issues concerning
the historical play within the play have played a central role in the construc-
tion of two original theatrical productions with which I have been associated.
As a last point in this chapter, I should like to briefly refer to these two works,
both of which are historical plays which playfully incorporate other historical
dramas.

2. Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death: History and Theatre as Stage Metaphor

In Danton’s Death, which in many ways has set the standard for modern
historical drama,1 Büchner does not use the play within the play in the tradi-
tional way, as he does for instance in Leonce and Lena. The play is notable,
among other things, for its use of theatrical metaphors. In the crowd scenes in
which the anonymous Parisians appear as an amorphous and anonymous
mass, a collective hero who constitutes a new kind of historical subject, one
single character, Simon, stands out, characteristically as an actor who plays a
double role, even though his ‘acts’ are more static poses than scenic inven-
tions. When Simon beats up his wife while invoking the heroic figures of
Roman republicanism along with its classical rhetoric, he appears twice re-
moved from the historical original. Simon is a prompter by profession; he
knows his lines second-hand from the tragedies of the contemporary reper-
toire and the gestic re-enactements of the historic poses from the perspective
of the prompter’s box. Simon thus offers an unwitting parody of the revolu-
tionary tableaux of old Rome, in stark contrast to the tragedy of the Revolu-
tion that is being played out in the tribunals, the clubs and the streets of Paris,
not to mention under the guillotine.
Büchner uses the street scenes to comment on the discrepancy between
the revolution’s promise of liberation and social justice and ist failure to im-
prove the material conditions of ordinary Parisians whose lives are ‘murder
through work’.2 Neither Robespierre’s rhetoric concerning revolutionary aus-

1
Georg Büchner. ‘Dantons Tod’. Kritische Studienausgabe des Originals mit Quellen, Auf-
sätzen und Materialien, ed. by Peter von Becker (Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat, 1985).
2
Georg Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose. Trans. and with an Introduction by Carl Richard
Mueller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 11.
 Playwrights Playing with History 251

terity, virtue and discipline nor the desperate acts of self-revenge of the
people who are ready to hang anybody who has not got ‘a hole in his jacket’ 3
will improve the situation of Simon and his family, or that of their neighbours.
The hapless drunken prompter has to accept that his ‘virtuous’ wife will al-
low their daughter to prostitute herself to make sure that some bread will be
on the family table. At the end of the scene, Simon quotes a few lines from
Hamlet to signal his acquiescence. The private revolt he has staged has
changed nothing, it was a futile act of rebellion fuelled by a drunken furor
and dressed up in second-hand theatrics; it shows and proves only the impo-
tence of the people who are – playfully – acting out history vis-à-vis a socio-
economic and political reality that remains beyond their control.
The historical characters as actors, or as marionettes led by some anony-
mous force, is one of the key concepts in a string of theatre metaphors, of
playing and acting, that runs throughout the whole play. It is the self-reflex-
iveness expressed in these rhetorical figures of speech which lends the play
its thoroughly modern aura. The reflection on history and its course, the role
of individuals who are thinking that they are in control of events and yet
realise, ultimately, that they are only being pulled along, is expressed in
terms and images of a theatrical consciousness. ‘We stand on the stage all our
lives,’ says Danton, ‘even though in the end we are finally stabbed in
earnest.’ 4 It is not the traditional Baroque metaphor of the world as theatre
that suggests a deep philosophical uneasiness concerning the human percep-
tion of truth and illusion, of Sein and Schein, which Büchner is exploring in
Danton’s Death. The world here is not an illusion behind which an ultimate,
transcendant or metaphysical reality is hidden. Büchner’s interest is wholly
human and secular, his focus is on the social endeavour to understand the
forces that shape and determine mankind’s actions and interventions, its
plans and projects to influence the ways of the world.
Danton, as Büchner’s mouthpiece, appears as a theorist of history whose
continuous reflections circle, time and again, around the same questions and
issues: responsibility and guilt, the burden of memory, the cleavage between
political intentions and actual outcomes. Danton’s realisation that we are ‘but
puppets, manipulated on wires by unknown powers’5 is followed, in a final
analysis, by yet another theatrical metaphor, namely that the play in which
we are involved as actors, called History, is only the ‘parody’ or ‘travesty’ of
an earlier play, or of something that has already once before ended in tragedy

3
Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, p. 8.
4
Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, p. 28.
5
Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, p. 36.
252 Gerhard Fischer

and that we are now condemned to experience as farce. Marx’s famous

dictum sounds, indeed, as if it could have been lifted word for word out of
Büchner’s text.

3. Brecht: Vorspiel and Vorspielen in The Caucasian Chalk Circle

In Brecht’s theatre, the notion of playing with history applies perhaps most
pointedly to his Caucasian Chalk Circle. The play is often seen as a kind of
timeless fairy tale, set in an exotic, quasi-medieval Georgia, which tells a uni-
versal tale of ‘true motherhood’. This reading, supposedly supported by the
view that Brecht intended his Chalk Circle as a kind of Broadway musical
(he had, in fact, a contract for a production which, however, never material-
ised), holds that the play’s prologue, or Vorspiel, set on a collective farm in a
remote region of the Soviet Union at the close of World War II and telling
the story of two villages and their dispute over the use and ownership of a
valley after the withdrawal of the Nazi troops, is merely an ideological, pro-
pagandistic addition that is essentially unrelated to the core drama. As a con-
sequence of such an interpretation, the play’s Vorspiel is very often omitted
in productions. The genesis of the text makes it very clear, however, that
Brecht’s prologue is an integral part of a history play about war and revolu-
tion, indeed about the nature and course of history itself. Darko Suvin has
rightly pointed out that at the heart of the play lies a concern with what he
calls Brecht’s ‘historiosophy’.6
Already in the first notes that outline his plan for a new play that would
be based on a thirteenth century Chinese song-play by Li Hsing-tao, Brecht
employs a second historical time frame as a theatrical point of reference for
the composition of his own drama. The original drafts date from 1938/39,
during Brecht’s early years of exile in Scandinavia, where he uses an elev-
enth century episode in the history of Denmark (the murder of a Danish king,
Knut the Holy, in Odense in 1086) as a setting for his own Chalk Circle.7 In a
second phase of his work on the Chalk Circle-material (in Sweden, January
1940), the central historical conflict of the early modern period between feu-
dalism and the rising bourgeoisie becomes the focal point of the setting for
‘The Augsburg Chalk Circle’, a short story set in the author’s native Bavaria

6
Darko Suvin, ‘Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Marxist Figuralism: Open Dramaturgy
as Open History’, in Critical Essays on Bertolt Brecht, ed. by Siegfried Mews (Boston, MA:
G.K. Hall & Co, 1989), pp. 162-75, p. 163.
7
See Jan Knopf, Brecht-Handbuch Theater. Eine Ästhethik der Widersprüche (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1980) p. 254. Knopf gives a detailed account of the genesis of the play, cf. pp. 254-
56.
 Playwrights Playing with History 253

in which the Thirty Years War provides an historical counterpoint to the un-
folding Second World War.
Towards the end of WWII Brecht takes up the plan for a theatrical version
yet again. This time – the first draft of the play is written in California be-
tween April and June 1944 – Brecht chooses a Caucasian setting and a late-
medieval, feudalistic time frame for the chalk-circle story, while the prologue
is set in the same place in 1934. In this first version, the decision over the use
of the valley is not spelled out in the Vorspiel; it is rather left to the audience
to decide at the end of the show. In other words, the performance of the inner
play is meant as helping the audience to come to a conclusion about a
question that is left open at the outset. In the second version of the play,
written only a few weeks later, the author’s own contemporary historical
reality is put on stage. In this version, the date of the prologue is moved to
1944 to coincide with the news of the defeat of Hitler’s armies in the Soviet
Union, and the question of what will become of the valley is already decided
at the beginning.
What is decisive for Brecht’s historical dramaturgy is that the particular
point in time chosen for the Vorspiel presents an exemplary junction of his-
tory with a potential for a new beginning after the devastation of the war.
Whether the victory over fascism and the subsequent moment of a ‘Point
Zero’ in 1944/45 did in fact create such an open situation (‘the most promis-
ing moment of modern history’ 8) can be debated, of course. What is clear be-
yond doubt, however, is that the optimistic Brecht of this period, inspite of all
his reservation about the Stalinist nature of the Soviet regime, did believe that
there was an opening in history that could be used for a new start towards
building a democratic society based on socialist values: of production, art,
social interaction, etc. His paradigmatic parable ‘Der Städtebauer’ (‘The City
Builder’), published two days after the iconic date of 8 May 1945 (VE-Day)
in the New York exile paper Austro-American Tribune, presents another and
very similar example of Brecht’s historical optimism at this time.
The second version of the play was also the first one to be published, per-
haps not coincidentally at a similarly critical junction in post-war German
history, namely in 1949, after the foundation of the FRG and the GDR,
respectively. The timing again underlines the author’s intention of submitting
his play as a contribution to the debate on how, at a historical crossroads, the
development of German society after the defeat of fascism might proceed. In
the published version of 1954, finally, which has become the final, authorised
one, Brecht makes one final substantial change. The story of the two collec-

8
Suvin, p. 172.
254 Gerhard Fischer

tive farms in 1944 is now no longer separated from the chalk-circle story as a
Vorspiel; it is rather incorporated into the main body of the text as Act I (with
its own title, ‘The Dispute over the Valley’). Brecht thus stresses once more
his determination to link the two time frames historically and in close dialec-
tical fashion, and to insist on their intrinsic linkage. In this final version,
printed with the author’s authority, the chalk-circle story is a play within a
play which serves as an historical exemplum both to the internal and the ex-
ternal audiences of the show as to how to conduct their social relations at a
very specific point in history.
The playing with different historical settings which Brecht thought of and
contemplated in the various stages of his work on the adaptation of the old
Chinese model makes it clear that his major concern lay in exploring the es-
sential historical-philosophical dimensions inherent in the dramaturgical po-
tential of the historical play within the play. This concern with history, and
with learning the right lessons from its study, provides the continuing interest
in the story of the play. Its main theme, as Suvin has convincingly argued, is
indeed ‘the goal towards which class history is moving’; it is ‘the theme of a
reasonable and humanized ultimate goal (telos) of history envisaged as a sys-
tem of human actions and interactions.’9
The various linguistic connotations of Vorspiel, and vorspielen, need to
be spelled out to explore the full dimensions of the complicated composition
employed by Brecht within his Spiel im Spiel. The ‘dispute over the valley’ is
clearly not a realistic portrayal of the political conditions of Soviet Russia in
1944; rather, it presents a fairly utopian picture of human relations that is
nevertheless based on concrete historical experiences, notably that of the
Soviet Union’s liberation from the forces of fascism. But in a strictly chrono-
logical sense, the first act is not a ‘foreplay’ at all, but rather a Nachspiel, or
epilogue in a continuing historical development that is happening over a very
long time span. A remark of one of the villagers in the first act, that the valley
had ‘belonged’ to them ‘from all eternity’, is countered by a soldier who says
that the old man in his youth ‘did not even belong to’ himself: ‘You belonged
to the Kazbeki princes.’ 10 Subsequently, the appearance of a Kazbeki ‘fat
prince’ as a character in the internal play establishes an historical link that
bridges Vorspiel and main drama: the present-day Soviet villagers are the

9
Suvin, p. 165. Italics in the original.
10
Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In: Bertolt Brecht. Parables for the Theatre.
Translated and with an Introduction by Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p.
117.
 Playwrights Playing with History 255

descendants and heirs of the protagonists of the characters portrayed in the

chalk-circle story.
In the play within the play, the farmers of 1944 thus present their own
history. Their historical memory, which has been preserved in the art of the
singer-storyteller, allows them to establish a legitimacy and a reference to a
revolutionary precedent, based on the exemplary models of Grusha (along
with Simon and Michael) and Azdak, models which are deeply rooted in
family and local history. Keeping this memory alive and making it productive
for their own contemporary reality, Brecht suggests, is as much a part of the
social production of the villagers as the re-building of their farms and the
construction of a new dam project that they are about to undertake. It is for
this reason that the request of the state’s planning and control ‘specialist’,
who has come from the capital to assist the villagers in their decision about
the valley, to shorten the performance is met with a simple, yet decisive
‘no’.11 The verdict of the villagers and of Arkadi Tscheidse suggests that the
planning of the future, the material re-building of society as well as decisions
about cultural heritage and social justice, must be based on a thorough appro-
priation of the lessons of the past.
The mixture of utopian and concrete historical elements is characteristic
of Brecht’s dramaturgy in his Caucasian Chalk Circle. While the concrete
historical situation demands that the urgent need for re-construction after the
war requires quick decison making and a curtailing of the time allowed for
political debate, a shortening of the performance time in which the whole
village is involved in a collective artistic action of political identity formation
is rejected. It is noteworthy that this rejection is maintained vis-à-vis the de-
mand by the representative of the central bureaucratic state agency; it is the
villagers who set the agenda for the day, not the ‘specialist’ from the capital.
In an emancipated socialist society, Brecht insists, art and production are not
separate. The first act thus anticipates or foreshadows, or vorspielt in German,
a new kind of social reality, free from bureaucratic domination, in which in-
ternal conflicts are resolved in an exemplary democratic fashion and in which
the arts, here the performing arts, play a fundamental role as a force of pro-
ductive imagination in a liberated society.
This Vorspiel of a peaceful, free, friendly and just society, in which de-
cisions are made at a grass roots level in an atmosphere of neighbourly sol-
idarity and in friendly competitive spirit for the common good, offers both a
contrast to the old barbaric times of war and oppression but also a link to the
brief moments of history where humanity was able to flourish, as in Grusha’s

11
P. 121.
256 Gerhard Fischer

story, and where justice could reign, as in Azdak’s story, however fleetingly.
Brecht’s image of what clearly amounts to a utopian situation is thus not
based on an imaginary final stage in history, as a classless paradise that co-
incides with a static end of history, but rather it emphasises the tentative,
hesitant, anticipatory and preliminary nature of the openness provided by the
historical situation that has been achieved in 1944/45. The utopian character
of the Vorspiel has of course been met with a great deal of criticism on all
sorts of grounds, and it is perhaps not surprising that contemporary critics,
both in the West but also in the Soviet Union and the GDR, found little in the
play that they were willing to regard as ‘realistic’.12
Another meaning of the German vorspielen, which is central to Brecht’s
Lehrstück theory, is also relevant in an analysis of the Caucasian Chalk
Circle. As in Die Maßnahme, where the four agitators present their story
(vorspielen) to the control chorus (the internal audience) in a series of re-
plays, or re-enactments, the inner play in the Caucasian Chalk Circle is
meant to engage both the fictitious players and the audience in its doubled
form, i.e. the fictitious audience of villagers on stage and the actual audience
of the show, in a learning process about what might be called the ‘lessons of
history’. Within the setting that Brecht devises, the villagers of Galinsk, the
goat-breeders, are protagonists in the frame play but play the internal audi-
ence of the interior play, while the other protagonists of the Vorspiel, the or-
chardists, in turn play the lay actors who act out the chalk-circle story under
the guidance and direction of the singer. The chalk-circle play itself consists
of two discrete stories or plots which are told consecutively. Only in the very
last scene are the two fabula, that of Grusha and that of Azdak, joined to-
gether. It is Arkadi Tscheidse, the singer and story-teller, in his role of com-
mentator and director of the play within who skillfully holds the entire com-
plicated structure together.
The significance of the role of the singer is thus obvious. His name al-
ready attests to the importance of the mixing of ‘old’ and ‘new wisdom’ of
which he speaks in the Vorspiel or the first act, respectively.13 While his first
name refers to the Arcadia of old, the time-honoured notion of utopian free-
dom, his last name recalls the role of the Georgian social democratic leader
Tscheidse, ‘an early opponent of Stalin who was convinced that the develop-
ment towards socialism was a long and laborious road.’ 14 The singer’s func-

12
Knopf, pp. 267-68.
13
Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, p. 120.
14
Barbara Buhl, Bilder der Zukunft: Traum und Plan. Utopie im Werk Bertolt Brechts
(Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1988). p. 231. According to Betty Nance Weber, Brecht’s playing with
history involves yet another time frame, namely references to various stages in the history of
 Playwrights Playing with History 257

tion in the Caucasian Chalk Circle is thus to keep alive the memory of the
dialectic of history, while at the same time integrating the audience as a kind
of ‘control chorus’. The de-illusionistic nature of Brecht’s epic theatre is in-
deed best served by a technique of vorspielen, i.e. by the doubling effect of
the play within the play. The playful demonstration of different levels of his-
torical perception is underlined by the singer in the Caucasian Chalk Circle
time and again. Arkadi Tscheidse’s story of ‘olden times, in a bloody time’ 15
is set in the past and told in the past; yet the actors, supported by the epic
commentary, play out the action in the immediate here and now of the perfor-
mance, thus emphasising to the audience the distance that exists between the
‘now’ and ‘then’, but also suggesting and provoking an idea about a possible
‘tomorrow’ within the framework of the concrete historical experience that
unites performers and spectators of the night.

4. Weiss’ Marat/Sade and the Battle of Ideologies

The ‘as Performed by’ in the full title of Peter Weiss’ play already reveals its
peculiar structure as Spiel im Spiel.16 It is theatre-on-theatre in its purest form:
the curtain opens to reveal a stage, the transformed bathhouse of the asylum
at Charenton, complete with actors and audience. As in Brecht’s Chalk Circle,
there is a central character, in this case the inmate/director de Sade, who es-
tablishes the link between stage and auditorium and who holds the dramatic
structure together. As in Brecht also, the spectators of Weiss’ show watch the

the Russian revolution, from 1905 to 1917 up to the situation depicted in the play, i.e. the
victory over the German armies in 1945. However, Weber has argued, Brecht chose an ‘in-
direct way’ of incorporating the history of the Russian Revolution by ‘disguising’ his refer-
ences, not only to his own period at the time of writing (between 1934 and 1944), but also
by disguising the events of an earlier past. One might say that the play has thus become a
kind of ‘key drama’, in analogy to the notion of roman à clé (Schlüsselroman), but in the
typical Brechtian way of Verfremdung which functions here as a kind of Verschlüsselung
(encoding). With regard to Brecht’s historical intentions, Weber speaks of the play as a cri-
tique of an ‘unhistorical’ Vorbildfetischismus in orthodox Soviet historiography, i.e. a fetish-
ism of positive models which Brecht cautiously tried to correct. The act of Verschlüsselung
serves as a challenge to readers and audiences to reflect anew upon the history of the revolu-
tion, a challenge to the power of historical imagination to think through, in a playful way,
the ‘possible constellations and sequences of history’ as an alternative to the Stalinist way of
development. See Betty Nance Weber, Brechts ‘Kreidekreis’, ein Revolutionsstück. Eine
Interpretation von B.N. Weber. Mit Texten aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1976), pp. 108, 109.
15
Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, p. 123.
16
Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. English version by
Geoffrey Skelton, Verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell (London: Calder and Boyhars, 1966).
258 Gerhard Fischer

actors as audience watching a performance, including numerous interactions

between the internal audience and the players who constantly fall out of, and
back into, the roles they have been assigned to play within the fictitious his-
torical setting of the house in which Marat, suffering from a skin disease, is
sitting in his bath writing an address to the nation. What the title does not tell
us are the precise dates represented on stage: 1793 (the 13th of July to be
exact, the day of Marat’s murder), and 1808, the period of Napoleon’s Resto-
ration, as seen from within the closed world of Charenton where its famous
inmate, the ex-Marquis de Sade, during the fifth year of his incarceration,
constructs fictitious dramatic encounters that suspend the conventional limits
of time and space in acts of theatrical imagination. A third time frame, relat-
ing to the author’s at the time of his writing in the early 1960s, and a fourth
one, that of the spectators at the actual time of performance (whenever that
may be or may have been), need to be added to complete the complex and
perplexing circle of historical allusions created by the author of the play. The
characteristic feature of Marat/Sade is thus a complex historical perspective
of time, place and action, as part of a surrealistic theatrical montage in which
the multiple levels interlace, mirror and comment upon each other.
As playwright, Peter Weiss owes as much to Büchner as he does to
Brecht. As in Danton’s Death, there are grandiose speeches, a rhetorical
battle to explore the historical characters’ response to the great political and
philosophical concerns of the day, then and now. From Brecht, Weiss takes
the device of the historical frame that constructs a second, contrasting time
setting that presents a platform for a critique of contemporary developments.
Yet, Weiss adds another variant to the historical play within the play. The
central action of Marat/Sade is neither located in 1793 nor in 1808; rather, it
is a battle of ideas conducted by the two protagonists that cuts across and
links the two periods in an imaginary now of the stage. Weiss’ main dramatic
strategy, the direct confrontation of the two central characters, is possible
only because of the composition of the play within the play. The playing with
history allows for the creation, as the very spine of the play, of a trans-histor-
ical philosophical dialogue in which the revolutionary leader is resurrected,
as it were, to bring back the memory of an era that is in danger of being for-
gotten by the contemporary powers that be.
The play links the two periods of conservative restoration, the post-revo-
lutionary Napoleonic era and the post-war era of West German Wiederaufbau
of the 1950s, and refers both of them back to the programmatic promise of
the original time of Revolution. As Jürgen Habermas has pointed out after the
Berlin premiere of the play in 1964, the net gain of this dramaturgy is an his-
torical reflection that acts as a counter towards the suppression of undesirable
 Playwrights Playing with History 259

historical memories. It ‘discloses’, in Habermas’ words, a ‘process of sup-

pression’ (‘ein Verdrängungsprozess wird enthüllt’).17 That the French Re-
volution was unfinished business in 1808 as much as in 1960, that neither the
lessons to be learned nor the Revolution’s potential of democracy and justice
had been appreciated, let alone put into practice – this was the provocative
message delivered by Weiss’ to his contemporary audience, and not all
theatre-goers in the years of the conservative Adenauer era were willing to
accept it.
Weiss’ playing with history is also apparent in the absence of a linear
historical narrative. The action constantly shifts back and forth between the
two time levels of Marat and de Sade. There are frequent interruptions, most
prominently in the scenes where Charlotte Corday appears to murder Marat:
twice she is prevented by de Sade, and only in the third attempt the historical
reconstruction is allowed to run its course. Towards the end of the play, the
ghosts of Marat’s past make an appearance, and de Sade as fictional author
presents a galloping survey of the developments between 1793 and 1808 in
order to synchronise the historical actions in the furious finale.
There is yet another aspect to Weiss’ playing with history that adds a
variant to the dramaturgy of the play within the play. The peculiar structure
of the script suggests that de Sade is not only the director, but also the author
of the internal play, that it is his script which is responsible for Marat’s
speeches as well as for his own. There is thus a strong, single consciousness
and perspective which lie at the heart of the historical matter. De Sade, who
argues with the benefit of historical hindsight, can agree with certain premis-
es of Marat, even if he finally rejects his conclusions. Of course, it is possible
to see in de Sade a dramatic self-portrait of the real author, Peter Weiss him-
self, and of his political-aesthetic convictions which exhibit sympathies with
both historical models, the extreme liberal individualist on the one hand and
the radical socialist activist on the other. The play then is also a drama of
self-reflection and self-discovery, even if the author does not, in an overt way,
put himself on stage or into the picture. i.e. even if he does not break the
boundaries imposed by the historical theatrical setting. The writing of the
play, as Weiss’ himself has confirmed, played an important role in the pro-
cess of his development to a ‘socialist’ author.18 It is mirrored in the battle of

17
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Ein Verdrängungsprozeß wird enthüllt’, in Materialien zu Peter Weiss’
‘Marat/Sade’ (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), pp. 120-124 (p. 120).
18
In his progammatic statement ‘Ten Working Theses of an Author in a Divided World’ (‘10
Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt’), which was formulated in part as a result
of his reflections regarding the reception of the different productions of his play in East and
West, Weiss writes that the ‘guidelines (Richtlinien) of socialism contain the valid truth’
260 Gerhard Fischer

theses and antitheses that are enacted in the play as an exercise in political
identity formation.

5. Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag in Post-revolutionary Europe

In Der Auftrag, Heiner Müller also tells a story set simultaneously at the time
of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. However, there is no
unifying outer frame, and Müller also dispenses with the epic story-tellers
present in both Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and in Weiss’ Marat/Sade.
The play’s structure features a surrealistic montage of seemingly unrelated
scenes and prose passages, and Müller goes a considerable step further than
both Brecht and Weiss in his postmodern dissociation of a linear plot in
which the time/space continuum is shattered. While the play contains numer-
ous boxed-in scenes, Müller refuses to subject his dramatic material to the
stringent formal dramaturgical requirements of the classical play within a
play. Most notably, in comparison to Brecht and Weiss, Der Auftrag does not
feature a central controlling character who ties the different dramatic strands
together. Rather, Müller seems to be going back to the Büchner model of pre-
senting history as an abstract, autonomous and contingent force. The aspect
of total theatre in Der Auftrag certainly recalls Artaud’s theatre of cruelty by
way of a detour to Weiss’ Marat/Sade, but the end result is a performance
phantasmagoria that is an example of Müller’s own unmistakably postmod-
ernist theatre.
The most extensive layer of the script, at the core of the dramatic scenario,
is the story told by Anna Seghers in her ‘Caribbean novella’, Licht unter dem
Galgen (A Light under the Gallows). In 1794, three emissaries of the revolu-
tionary French Republic are sent to the island of Jamaica, a British colony at
the time, to incite the slaves to revolt in order to found a Negro Republic.
Their mission is in the name of the universal message of the Droits des Hom-
mes, part of which is the recent decree that proclaims the equality of (skin)
colour: egalité des couleurs. Two of the emissaries are white, Debuisson, son
of colonial plantation owners and slave holders who has become a revolu-
tionary while studying in France, and Galloudec, an emancipated peasant
from Brittany. The third is black, Sasportas, a former slave who has been lib-
erated by the Revolution.
When, after years of clandestine struggle, they receive word that Napole-
on has come to power in Europe in 1799 and that the revolution is over, De-
buisson turns his back on his comrades. He betrays his revolutionary mission

(gültige Wahrheit) for him. Cf. Peter Weiss, ‘10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten
Welt’, in Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’, p. 119.
 Playwrights Playing with History 261

and returns to his previous role as a colonial master of slaves. Sasportas is

caught and hanged, while Galloudec dies on his way home to France. The
message of their failed mission, the voice of the dead, finally reaches the per-
son who had sent them off in the first place. Antoine, a former official of the
revolutionary National Assembly, is living in hiding after the Eighteenth Bru-
maire. He is anxious to conceal his past and fearful of Napoleon’s secret po-
lice. But in 1808, while the French armies are fighting in Russia, Galloudec’s
letter arrives, and the memories and the ghosts of history return to haunt An-
toine. The story of the Antoine of 1808 is the second layer of Müller’s text; it
is set in the post-revolutionary period of restoration and Napoleon’s dictator-
ship.
A distinct third part, set abruptly and unconnected within the previous
text, provides a historical link to the present tense of Müller’s writing. The
‘Man in the Elevator’ is a five-page long piece of uninterrupted, stream-of-
consciousness prose which offers a new take on the play within the play. The
first person narrator of the boxed-in piece remains anonymous, but it is clear
that the persona embedded in the prose text is intimately related to that of the
author, as Heiner Müller himself has confirmed in his autobiography War
without Battle. The self-referential, quintessentially postmodernist soliloquy
recalls memories of a visit to East German party chief, Erich Honecker, and
of a dream recalling a walk in a Third World landscape that has its source in
a trip by Müller to Mexico.19 Thus, the author incorporates his own story, or
at least aspects of his biographical self, into the dramatis personae and into
the dramatic narrative of his show. Told in a non-chronological and non-
sequential order, the text delivers a reflection on the role of the left-wing
European intellectuals who have lost their ideological bearings in a post-
revolutionary, post-Marxist political environment.
Müller’s debt to his predecessors is quite apparent. There is the dialogue
between Danton and Robespierre, enacted as a farcical battle, which recalls
Büchner. It is followed by an anarchistic mimicry of the Revolution by the
Jamaican slaves who kick around the severed heads of the revolutionary Eu-
ropean heroes, in stark contrast to the tragic dimension of Danton’s Death.
Brecht’s Lehrstück is similarly recalled when the three emissaries begin their
work after their arrival on the island by putting on masks to conceal their true
identities and by rehearsing the undercover roles they had previously decided
upon. In this scene, Müller does not resort to parody; he retains and shows off
the Brechtian concept of vorspielen and ‘learning by acting’ in a demon-

19
See Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in Zwei Diktaturen. Eine Autobiographie
(Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992), pp. 297-98.
262 Gerhard Fischer

strative and even, one might say, earnest Brechtian manner. And yet: the out-
come of the play, the utter failure of the mission at the end, confirms Müller’s
distance to Brecht and his scepticism regarding his predecessor’s optimistic
belief in an open course of history.
What Müller takes from Weiss, finally, is the juxtaposition of the two his-
torical frames, revolution and counterrevolution, and the dialogue that cuts
across time and space. Like Marat/Sade, Der Auftrag is also a play in which
ideological positions are developed in a grandiose rhetorical style: solid
chunks of seemingly endless soliloquy which appear like enormous granite
blocks of text, are set against nightmarish passages of Kafkaesque prose and
disturbing scenes of sado-masochistic role playing. As in Weiss’ play, the use
of fictional historical settings to comment on the politics of the present is a
recurring feature in Der Auftrag. In Müller’s text, Napoleon also reads as
Stalin. The play, ‘a circular essay on defeat’ to quote Black Australian author
Mudrooroo,20 reflects upon the history of revolution and counter-revolution
in Europe over the last 200 years. It also anticipates and predicts the end of
the grand socialist experiment in Europe, i.e. of the Eastern European re-
gimes, by at least a decade. Even more forcefully than Marat/Sade, Müller’s
script emphasises the evocation of the past as a dialogue with the dead in a
determined, if not desperate effort to counter historical amnesia and to keep
alive a utopian dream that was once the privilege of the European left-wing
intelligentsia. Both Antoine, who conjures up the vision of his former com-
rades for whose death he feels responsible, and Debuisson, who is plagued by
pangs of conscience when confronted by his own self as traitor, engage in a
painful process of self-discovery and self-reflection by remembering and
imagining the past. But it is the author himself, in the persona of the Man in
the Elevator, who most forcefully underlines the theme of the ‘Memory of a
Revolution’, as the play’s subtitle has it. In an anachronistic soliloquy that
cuts across time and space, he recalls his role as an intellectual who has lost
his historical mission in the doomed republic of Realsozialismus. In the self-
reflective recollection of the events of his own contemporary political situa-
tion and of the original failed mission civilisatrice of the bourgeois colonial
enterprise in the fading age of European enlightenment, the lonely figure of
the Man in the Elevator appears as the last representative in an ever repeating
cycle of utopian projection and post-revoutionary failure.

20
The Mudrooroo/Müller Project. A Theatrical Casebook, ed. by Gerhard Fischer (Kensington
[Sydney]: New South Wales University Press, 1993), p. 21.
 Playwrights Playing with History 263

6. Recent Variations: GRIPS and Müller/Mudrooroo

My own involvement in the theatrical practice of the historical play within
the play was very much shaped by both Brecht and Müller. It came about as
part of a working process dating back to more than twenty years ago, to the
German theatre season of 1983/84. At that time I was involved, as a guest
dramaturg with the GRIPS Theatre of Berlin, in the creation of a new play
which, like almost all GRIPS productions, was conceived in-house, in this
case on the basis of a dramaturgical concept by the writer, novelist Leonie
Ossowski, in close co-operation with members of the ensemble. The script,
eventually entitled Voll auf der Rolle (suggesting an actor who perfectly fits
his or her role), takes place on two historical levels at once. It is set in Berlin
in 1984 and tells a story about young people in Germany who are caught up
in a rising wave of right-wing extremism. It deals with the topical issues of
racism and hostility against foreigners, notably German residents of Turkish
origin, and with the threat of an emerging Neo-Nazi movement forty years
after WWII. Simultaneously, in a play within, the show tells the story of a
group of teenagers during the last days of the NS-Regime, a story of resist-
ance as well as of Nazi indoctrination and fanaticism, and of the persecution
and destruction of European Jewry. In Voll auf der Rolle, the interior play in-
vokes the Brechtian tradition of the Lehrstück.21 The intention of the framing
device is to use the process of a theatrical production to demonstrate an hy-
pothesis: students of the 1980s who show little interest in their prescribed
history project, i.e. the Third Reich, will perceive the relevance of history
upon discovering the connections with their own historical situation, and this
discovery will lead them to explore new modes of social interaction. The play
within instructs by being played, precisely as Brecht had formulated in his
notes on the ‘Theory of the Lehrstück’.22
In 1988, in Sydney, I began to think about another theatre project which
again featured, as its core, a Spiel im Spiel on several historical levels. The
point of departure here was the experience of 1788/1988, the celebration of
the Bicentenary of the British settlement (or invasion) of Australia, and in
1789/1989, the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.
The near simultaneity of the two events, and their commemorative re-enact-
ments in Sydney and Paris, neatly exposed the two sides of the dialectic of
European enlightenment: while the British sent a fleet of soldiers and con-

21
For a more detailed account see Gerhard Fischer, ‘The Lehrstück Experience on the Con-
temporary Stage. On Brecht and the GRIPS Theater’s Voll auf der Rolle’, Modern Drama,
XXX1, 3 (Nov. 1988), 371-379.
22
See Brechts Modell der Lehrstücke. Zeugnisse, Diskussion, Erfahrungen, ed. by Reiner
Steinweg (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 164.
264 Gerhard Fischer

victs to the Fifth Continent to take possession of what they considered to be

terra nullius, as well as to civilise and, in the process, almost exterminate the
indigenous population, the French disposed of feudalism and royalty and pro-
claimed the universal message of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. The bicen-
tennial re-enactment of the landing of the First Fleet, met by protests of Abo-
riginal demonstrators, made me think of another mission and another landing,
the one described by Heiner Müller in Der Auftrag in which the experience
of the French Revolution and the export of its ideas and its message to the
Third World feature as a central concern. Thus, a theatrical project was born,
namely to aboriginalize Heiner Müller by constructing a show in which
Müller’s text was to be used, adapted and performed by Aboriginal actors. A
long process of intercultural collaboration followed, involving Aboriginal
performers and theatre practitioners, notably the Aboriginal director Brian
Syron and the Black Australian writer Mudrooroo. Eventually, a frame play
was written by Mudrooroo around Müller’s script, based on a dramaturgical
concept by myself.23
Der Auftrag here becomes a kind of Brechtian Lehrstück, but within a
frame text that constitutes a historical counter projection to Müller’s play,
criticizing its historical pessimism by placing it into a very different social
context characterised by an ongoing, and open, process of political emancipa-
tion, and by finally rejecting Der Auftrag as a Eurocentric construct that does
not fit the local Aboriginal mould. In the fictitious plot, the Aboriginal per-
formers finally decide to abandon Müller’s play (ironically, after they have
presented it in full, and thus having appropriated it for themselves at the end
of the rehearsal process which the frame play describes). But the playing with
history in this play goes further. Mudrooroo’s frame play takes up Müller’s
notion of history as dialogue with the dead by recalling the history of the
Aboriginal presence in Australia and its fight for survival vis-à-vis the Euro-
pean colonizing project; at the same time, the play presents an alternative
scenario in anticipation of a near future. Set in the fictitious year 2001, i.e. six
years into the future, the script formulates a demand for Aboriginal sover-
eignty and for Aboriginal political participation within the democratic system
of the country in response to the calls for an Australian republic, thus linking
again the historical project of the French Revolution with an as yet unfinished
Australian project of (post)modernity. The play was premiered on 11 January

23
Cf. also my article on Mudrooroo’s ‘Aboriginalisation’ of Müller’s text, in Gerhard Fischer,
‘“Twoccing“ Der Auftrag to Black Australia. Heiner Müller “Aboriginalised“ by Mudroo-
roo’, in Heiner Müller. ConTEXTS and HISTORY, ed. by Gerhard Fischer (Tübingen: Stauf-
fenburg, 1995), pp. 141-164.
 Playwrights Playing with History 265

1995, 12 days after Heiner Müller’s death. The title of the play tells the story
of this theatrical-historical project, and how it has since then been overtaken
by history. Quoted in full, it reads: The Aboriginal Protesters Confront the
Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with a Produc-
tion of ‘The Commission’ by Heiner Müller.24

24
The text of the play, which contains Müller’s Auftrag in full, is published, along with other
material relating to the genesis of the project and to the writings of Mudrooroo and Müller,
in The Mudrooroo/Müller Project.
Birgit Haas

Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz’s Festung and Albert

Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie

Since the 1970s, the pastiche has become the most popular theatrical form in Germany. In the
1990s, the postmodern wave gradually petered out, and became the object of critical analysis, not
only by means of literary criticsm, but also through the plays themselves. In 1993, Rainald Goetz
published his trilogy Fortress (Festung), a harsh criticism of the media, which is composed of a
multitude of plays within the play, thus exposing the absurdity of the postmodern TV culture. In
his play The Making of B-Movie (1999), Albert Ostermaier picks up on postmodernism by pre-
senting the making of the would-be writer Brom and his ghost-writer Silber as a play against the
backdrop of a kitsch movie. This chapter will examine the structure of both plays, analysing the
different approaches to postmodernism in a consumerist society.

Introduction
The term ‘postmodernist drama’, which Barbara Kruger labelled ‘that va-
porous buzzword’, remains highly contentious.1 Despite their reserve towards
postmodern plays, however, researchers agree that postmodern drama has
developed its own set of conventions: the elision of fiction and auto-
biography, performer and subject, the monologue, and the emphasis on the
body as an expression of structural subjugation. Radical postmodern plays
are largely devoid of most of the features by which drama has traditionally
been recognised – dialogue, plot, character.2 In this sense, Goetz’s play,
Fortress, can be regarded as a typically postmodern drama which promotes
Baudrillard’s claim that the media imitation of ‘reality’ (simulacrum) has
completely replaced the real. He focuses on the detrimental effect of the
media society, dramatising the dominance of the mass media in postmodern
culture. Fortress heralds the dissolution of neatly separated catagories, such

1
Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1993), p. 4.
2
See Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. by Loren Kruger (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 59. Pavis’s definition of a postmodern theatre was that postmodern dra-
ma denies the ‘existence of rules and regulations governing dialogue, character, dramatic
structure, etc.’, the banishment of the narrative as well as ‘conversational dialogue from the
stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange’.
268 Birgit Haas

as genres, since it is not strictly speaking dramatic. As a result, the plays

within the play Fortress are multiplied like an infinite number of Russian
dolls, although this metaphor is not quite correct, since the pieces do not fit
neatly into one an-other.
By contrast, Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie merely quotes the
‘anti-features’ of postmodern art within the framework of a dialogically
structured narrative action. Through his more traditional approach, Oster-
maier examines the creative process of playwriting. He happily marries
Brecht and Bogart in order to expose the mechanisms behind the scenes of
mass culture. The play can be seen as a ‘drama about drama’.3 However, it
fits neither of Richard Hornby’s structuralist categories, because Ostermaier
blurs the boundaries between the so-called ‘inset’ type, where the inner play
is secondary, and the ‘framed’ type, where the inner play is primary and the
outer play merely a framing device.
Speaking of a postmodern play in terms of a playtext might seem para-
doxical at first, since the finalised, written version of a script contradicts the
infinite openness of the postmodern text. Viewed against the backdrop of
fluxes and Neo-Dada performances of the 1960s and 1970s, the two plays in
question do not fall into the category of postmodernism. As far as the formal
aspects are concerned, both examples can rather be seen as a return to mo-
dernism. It is therefore the aim of this chapter to show the various ways in
which Ostermaier and Goetz refer to postmodernism, bearing in mind that
neither author subscribes to postmodernism as such; clearly, they retain the
concept of authorship, as well as the concept of a basic ‘narrative’, i.e. the
critique of postmodern performance. It must also be noted that both believe
in Schiller’s idea of the theatre as a place of enlightenment. However radi-
cally dissolved the play-within-the-play structure seems to be, we should bear
in mind that, after all, both playwrights adhere to a more conservative vision
of theatre. The postmodern context is, therefore, parodied and criticised by
means of two plays which follow a modernist pattern. In my argument, I will
focus on the conflict lines between modernism and postmodernism. The
pivotal point of this essay is the question of how mass culture is represented
through the formal structure of a modernist metadrama: despite the ‘blasting’
of the formal structures and the use of montage, the plays do not dissolve the
category of the metadrama. Although both examples play with typical post-
modern features, such as Kristevan ‘intertextuality’, the message is different;

3
See Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 1986), p. 33.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 269

both authors refer back to the Frankfurt School, and the belief in the need to
educate and enlighten the individual.

Fortress (Festung)
Few contemporary German artists have entered as fully as Rainald Goetz into
the problematic of memory work (Erinnerungsarbeit), the German identity
crisis and and the media, represented by the decidedly superficial reproduc-
tion of television images. In the second part of his trilogy, Fortress (Festung,
1993), he depicts the entertainment business as intrinsically ‘fascist’, ac-
cusing the media of repressing the truth about the Holocaust, thus paving the
way for a new totalitarian state. Throughout the play, the numerous figures
remind the audience in a self-referential manner that they ‘are at an abstract
place called the ramp’ and that they sit ‘in the abstraction of gas’ (wir sitzen
am abstrakten Ort der Rampe / wir sitzen im abstrakten Gas).4 While Rampe
is the German word for the fourth wall of the stage, it equally recalls, indeed
has become synonymous for the selection process conducted at the Ausch-
witz train station, i.e. the Holocaust. Through this, the scenes have a strong
metadramatic effect because they comment on and criticise media culture as
such, since the 47 short scenes of Fortress are framed within the imaginary
borders of a live-show on television. The pre-titles sequence that starts the
second part of the trilogy can be seen as an induction, framing the inner plays
of the talk shows, which are intertwined through a simulation of switching
between channels. The title, announced by the talk-show host, ‘Hape Kerke-
ling’, says:
Times Table-talk Documents
Criticism in Germany
Monologues and Memories
Legends Disco Reality
and People Sources Characters5

The title, in itself a collage of loosely connected associations, points to the

tension between memory and the seductions of mass culture. This opposition
emerges in decidedly unsubtle fashion, as criticism is not lurking in the sub-
text of the scenarios, but is blurted out over and over again; in a scene enti-
tled ‘German’ (Deutsch), a character called ‘Hatred’ (Hass) openly an-
nounces his disgust in view of the ‘eternal mythological fascism’ and the
‘dishonest fascism of the memory’.6

4
Rainald Goetz, Festung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 228. My translation.
5
Goetz, p. 102. The original text is in English.
6
Goetz, p. 215. In the original text: ‘der ewige Mythenfaschismus; der verlogene Erinne-
rungsfaschismus’.
270 Birgit Haas

In the play, TV reigns supreme, any prospect of a better society is swept

away by the media industry, and the statement by the presenter, ‘Katja Eb-
stein’, is typical: ‘my favourite role now / forget forget forget’. 7 This message
is delivered by a vast number of figures, which are named after TV-present-
ers, philosophers, artists, or simply celebrities. Nobody is immune to the
media virus, to the effect that all are eager to please the audience with super-
ficial small-talk and cheap jokes:

TANJA SCHILDKNECHT profession

HANS-JÜRGEN KRAHL
WOLFGANG POHRT
HOMELESS PERSON
or person
de burb de burb
the perpetrator investigates
shall we let them in
yes
ladies and gentlemen
see for yourselves
this game is
history
this is fabulous
people are standing up
do you have a light
mister fireman8

Appropriating tactics from stand-up comedy in a typical postmodern man-

ner,9 Goetz mixes game-shows with carnival rites in Cologne, and quotes
from Max Frisch’s famous parable play on the rise of fascism, Biedermann
und die Brandstifter (The Fire-raisers). Through this, the illusion of televised
happiness is constantly destroyed, because the characters step in and out of
their roles in order to call into question the delusions of the mediatised world.
The characters who present the programme simultaneously intrude on the talk
show and raise pseudo-philosophical issues related to collective memory, the
Holocaust and the ‘fascist’ nature of present-day Germany. In fact, one could
argue that the text does not consist of actual dialogues onstage. It is rather a
sequence of intertwined inner monologues, which unveil the hypocrisy and

7
Goetz, p. 241: ‘meine liebste Rolle jetzt / Vergessen vergessen vergessen’.
8
Goetz, p. 103. The original reads as follows:
TANJA SCHILDKNECHT Beruf / oder Person
HANS-J ÜRGEN KRAHL da tä da tä / der Täter ermittelt / wollen wir sie hi nein [sic!] lassen
WOLFGANG POHRT jawohl meine / Damen und Herren / Sie sehen es selbst / dieses Spiel
hier ist / Geschichte / das ist sagenhaft / die Leute stehen auf hier
OBDACHLOSE haben Sie eben mal Feuer / Herr Wachtmeister
9
Stephen Watt, Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 39.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 271

false nature of the speakers. The fact that the lines are often cited out of con-
text disrupts the flow of the dialogues and heightens the critical effect. Goetz
provides numerous inset pieces in the form of lines and parodies from tele-
vision shows:
HAPE K ERKELING [...] and so we have reached the end
of our big live video conference
ladies and gentlemen, one day we will all stand in front of heaven’s door
nake- nake- knacking on heaven’s door
and I am calling
RAINALD Delta
I am calling
Delta answer
hey you
ALFI SWOZIL Delta here
Delta here [...]
RAINALD see anything?
ALFI SVOZIL naw
RAINALD hear anything?
ALFI SVOZIL naw
RAINALD ‘right then
seeya Svoboda
over.10

This parody of a closing sequence, which blends seemlessly into a two-way

radio talk between two none-too-intelligent security guards, highlights both
the confusion and the shallowness of entertainment. The example shows that
there are several layers of inset plays which overlap each other. In doing so,
the playwright creates a maze of inset plays which are bizarre, nightmarish
and confusing. The outer frame is only vaguely defined; the spectator can
never be exactly sure whether he is witnessing a documentary, a talk-show, a
feature film, or, indeed, a talk-show about a talk show, etc. Goetz is more
interested in creating a dream-like quality which allows him to present his-

10
Goetz, pp. 152-53. The original text reads as follows:
HAPE KERKELING [...] und damit sind wir am Schluss / unserer großen Konferenzlive-
schaltung / stehen eines Tages meine Damen / und Herren wie wir alle / nack nack
nackig an der Himmelstür nack nack / nackig an der Himmelstür und ich / rufe jetzt
ich rufe
RAINALD Dora / ich rufe / Dora melden / Sie sich Ihnen
ALFI SWOZIL hier Dora / hier Dora [...]
RAINALD siechst was?
ALFI SWOZIL naa
RAINALD hörst was?
ALFI SWOZIL naa
RAINALD dann is gut / servas Swoboda / Ende.
272 Birgit Haas

tory and the presentation of history in terms of an experience which cannot

be rationalised. In fact, the dream is more of a nightmare, because the dis-
turbing quality of the play, the overall negation of logic, provides no loop-
hole for escape. This is emphasised by the lack of a central figure, to whom
we can attribute the negative experience of watching and being watched.
Goetz amalgamates the plays within the play to create the impression that the
media have complete control of the mind both of the spectator and the
performer. The characters, such as talk-show hosts, are both framed and per-
formed in their own programme, making the boundary between the inner and
outer world fluid. In doing so, Goetz negates the existence of the grand
histoires, of overarching narrative structures, which help to organise the
world around us; he denies the possibility of explaining what is happening to
us. In Fortress, it is impossible to say whether the inner or the outer play is
the main one. As a result, the media-controlled world becomes an irrational
beast which is about to devour humanity and humankind, leaving chaos and
destruction in its wake.
Since memory work is the thematic focus of Festung, the postmodern
deconstruction of the boundaries between inner and outer play accuse the
media of destroying any sensible interaction between people. Along with the
strong political thrust of Goetz’s play, there is a great deal of propaganda in
it. However, critics have observed that blatant sermonising about Germany
being ‘fascist’ to the core, is ineffective.11
The assault on the spectators’ ability to think logically, the attack on the
ingrained ways in which people think about and perceive television, only
convinces those who are already convinced. Goetz’s play leaves no room for
the audience to re-examine their views; the lack of subtext results in a none-
too-subtle play which tells the audience what to think. At the same time, in its
penchant for absolute distinctions between high art and mass culture, For-
tress is resolutely anti-postmodern, in the ways outlined by Andreas Huys-
sen.12 In Goetz’s dramatic text, chance pretends to rule supreme, aided by
ever-growing networks of electronic media and the spectacle of images they
create. The only answer to this seems to be a drama which borrows ideas
from the narrative form of the ‘hype’, which Meaghan Morris describes as

11
Franz Wille, ‘Zeitgeistshows: Sinn oder Stuss? Rainald Goetz Festung und Katarakt in
Frankfurt, Volker Brauns Iphigenie in Freiheit in Frankfurt und Cottbus’, Theater Heute, 2
(1993), 15: ‘Weil kaum eine Beobachtung richtig stimmt, verflüchtigen sich Goetz’ Tiraden
zu leeren Behauptungen’ (‘Because hardly a claim is properly correct, Goetz’ diatribes pale
into empty claims’).
12
After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), p. 192.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 273

‘the frenzy of attributes outbidding each other in an ecstasy of one-upping.

Hype is always and blatantly falser than false [...] Hype is never realistic.’ 13
In recreating such an environmental ‘hype’, Fortress comes close to Richard
Foreman’s manifestos for the so-called ‘Ontological-Hysterical Theatre’.14 In
his writings, Foreman endorses a dramatic scheme which is ruled neither by
logic nor by pure chance, but lies in between logic and accident.
To sum up, Goetz’s drama can be understood as a paradox in itself, as it
foregrounds the need for high art by means of disrupted postmodern struc-
ture. At the same time, it mirrors and criticises a mass culture of instant con-
sumability. As a consequence, its postmodern content clashes with a formally
scripted text. Hence Goetz adopts the position of the Frankfurt School which
explicitly condemns mass culture, thus retaining the crucial opposition be-
tween art and mass culture. In short, Fortress can be seen to resonate with the
words of Adorno: ‘The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers
from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high
and low art.’ 15 Although Goetz employs postmodern devices, his aim is effec-
tively a modern one; he highlights the fact that, in our age of mass consump-
tion, high culture and art are needed more than ever in order to educate the
individual.

The Making of B-Movie

As Hornby argues, the notion of the play within the play does not only refer
to form, but has to include the ways in which existing texts are incorporated
and adapted within the framework of a new play in order to ‘dislocate the
perception’.16 As The Making of B-Movie was commissioned for the Brecht-
Year in 1998, it is hardly surprising that Ostermaier wove allusions to Brecht
into his play. But Brecht’s Baal (1919) and Drums in the Night (1922) are by
no means the only intertextual references, since the dramatist also draws on
the film Casablanca, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and, finally, mocks his col-
league, Rainald Goetz. The play consists of the following components: at
first, the framework seems to be the shooting of a film which is set in Africa.
Andrée, a poet who suffers from writer’s block, is rescued by Silber, an
agent; this is vaguely reminiscent of Brecht’s character, Andreas Kragler, a
disillusioned legionary returning from Africa. Silber takes Andrée to a train-
ing camp for mercenaries, then changes Andrée’s image by giving him a new

13
The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), p. 209.
14
Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos, ed. by Kate Davy (New York: New York Universi-
ty Press, 1975), p. 68.
15
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, New German Critique, 6 (1975), 12.
16
Drama, Metadrama and Perception, p. 32.
274 Birgit Haas

name, Brom. Named after the stinking and poisonous gas, the new, roughed-
up Brom behaves like a sociopath; modelled on Brecht’s Baal, Brom uses
and abuses everyone around him. However, now as then he is unable to pro-
duce even a single sentence. Brom has to rely heavily on his ghostwriter,
Silber, in order to impress the public and sell radically postmodern plays.
Only as a team can they perform their glitzy public appearances, like the
chemical substance silver bromide used in photographic flashes. Because
Silber lacks the necessary media presence, he employs Brom, who acts as the
angry young man in order to promote Silber’s violent plays. Everything goes
according to plan; the critics are enthralled by Brom’s rudeness, Brom-
Silber’s postmodern play is hugely successful. Their drama is devoid of any
deeper meaning, yet, in the typical postmodern fashion, contains naked
women wading through blood and gore. In the end, when Silber comes
onstage to reveal the true author of the piece, nobody believes him, and
during the premiere party, Brom stabs him in the back, to much applause by
the guests.
As the technical side of this filmic staging turned out to be more difficult
to realise than Ostermaier envisaged, the premiere at the Bayerisches
Staatsschauspiel in Munich in May 1999 was received with some apprehen-
sion.17 The director Minke took the idea of the play within a play a little too
seriously. This resulted in a confusing mixture of simultaneous projections, a
‘media salad’ (Mediensalat), which made it difficult to follow the plot. 18 By
contrast, the production at the Kölner Schauspiel in November 1999, which
was directed by Volker Hesse, was celebrated for honing in on the filmic
aspect of the play and its brilliant acting.19
In his introductory remarks, Ostermaier emphasises that the two layers of
action, the play and the shooting of the film, should run as parallels strands
throughout the performance: In doing so, he harks back to the ‘making-of’
films of the 1980s and 1990s which emphasised and, at the same time,
deconstructed the act of shooting a film. Ostermaier explicitely refers to
Brecht’s gestus, and demands that the film should produce a clash between
what is actually happening on stage and its mediatised version, which is to be

17
Petra Hallmayer, ‘Das Stück vom Film vom Dichter’, Berliner Zeitung, 3 June 1999; no au-
thor, ‘Herr Baal ballert Bilder’, Der Spiegel, 31 May 1999.
18
Jürgen Berger, ‘Wenn der Schwanz mit dem Hund wedelt. Albert Ostermaiers erstes Dialog-
stück The Making of B-Movie im Münchner Residenztheater’, Theater Heute, 7 (1999), 32-
33.
19
Jürgen Becker, ‘Die Dürftigkeit des medialen Scheins. Albert Ostermaiers The Making of B-
Movie, nachgespielt in Köln’, Theater Heute, 1 (2000), 46-47; Roland Koberg, ‘Danke, ge-
storben’, Berliner Zeitung, 29 November 1999.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 275

projected simultaneously on a screen at the back of the stage. Any production

should emphasise the difference between the two modes of perception: ‘The
camera movements become the second eye of the spectator, with the
intention to create a conflict between the sensual experience of the action on
stage and the manipulative effect of the mediatised transformation.’ 20 In em-
phasising the technical side of both the producing and receiving end of a
performance, Ostermaier indirectly refers to Walter Benjamin, specifically to
his reflections on the impact of the technical innovations on film. In line with
modernist thinking, Benjamin compared the spectator’s view to the eye of the
camera, thereby stating that the effect on the actual performer would be alike.
Although he does not mention Benjamin’s essay, ‘Das Kunstwerk im
Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), these reflections are certainly important
for the filmic framing of the play. Following in Benjamins’s footsteps,
Ostermaier tries to retain a Marxist and revolutionary element which Ben-
jamin believed to be at the heart of modern film-making. In this sense, he did
not reject the defamiliarising effect of film and photography, but embraced it.
Film cannot only reproduce reality, it can offer a multitude of views, thus
heightening our sense of what is real. It is up to the spectator to reassemble
the narrative which is lost by the cutting and montage of the film-strips. The
view through the camera lens thus wilfully alienates the spectator.21 Since
actors in films are ultimately detached from any real contact with their
audience, they are alienated from their audience through technology. Thus
the actor becomes an object, a commodity which can be consumed by an
anonymous viewer. In presenting the action as a play within a film, a bad
(Brecht) movie, Ostermaier achieves not only a defamiliarisation effect in the
Brechtian sense. Moreover, he foregrounds the impact of technology on all
three sides of the classic semiotic triangle, the actor (= sender), the spectator
(= receiver), and the medium (= the work of art). In doing so, Ostermaier
heightens our critical awareness of the artificiality of the postmodern
consumerist spectacle which is parodied onstage. As a result, the play not
only breaks up the B-movie narrative, but also destroys the unity of the actors
who step in and out of the various layers of representation. Thus Ostermaier
hones in on the consumption of drama as a cultural product, especially film,
which plays a crucial part in the deconstruction of the entity of the

20
The Making of B-Movie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 15. My translation.
21
See ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Walter Benja-
min, Illuminationen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1969), p. 162: ‘Das Eigentümliche der Auf-
nahme im Filmatelier aber besteht darin, dass sie an die Stelle des Publikums die Apparatur
setzt.’
276 Birgit Haas

posthumanist ‘subject’, Brom-Silber. Still, it needs to be emphasised that the

play clearly adheres to a very modernist structure in the sense that it is far
from a postmodern dissociation of the dramatic medium itself. The Making of
B-Movie pays tribute to both Brecht and Benjamin (who might also be
included in the abbreviation ‘B’); the intertwining of technical and actor-
based alienation effects. The means of the epic theatre, which culminated in
the parabolic style of Brecht’s models for contemporary society, are
combined with a calculated use of the film medium, thus adding Benjamin’s
alienation effect on top of Brecht. Seen from this perspective, Ostermaier’s
play is a far cry from being the postmodern deconstruction which it con-
templates in its content. The play is, by contrast, a very modernist piece,
harking back to the questions that were at the centre of the debates of the
early twentieth century: What happens to the individuality of the human
being within a culture of mass consumption and mass production? In the case
of Brom and Silber, the result is a flashy appearance, with nothing behind it
but two ruined lives. In offering both a mediatised take on the characters as
well as an insight into their personalities, Ostermaier resists the temptation to
simply replicate the postmodern viewpoint. Although he presents us with a
multitude of angles, he never uses them to deconstruct the inherent narrative,
which might be a self-reflexive critique of the creation of a postmodern
spectacle.
The kitschy Casablanca-type setting is juxtaposed to the ‘inset’ play, the
making of the celebrity Brom aka Andrée; the film setting recurs in scene 14
(Bild XIV), entitled Afrika II, where a soldier (played by the actor who also
impersonates Silber) gleefully exposes the meaninglessness of Brom-Silber’s
poems. Here, we find both Brom and Silber moving between inner and outer
play, with the result that the boundaries between inner and outer world
become blurred. As a consequence, Ostermaier creates deliberate confusion
as to whether the inner or outer play is the main or real one; towards the end
of the play, Brom announces his future project, the shooting of a film called
B-Movie. It remains unclear whether the play frames the shooting of the film,
or vice versa. Blending the metadramatic levels into one another, Ostermaier
creates a play with no framing reality. This is diametrically opposed to
Hornby’s definition of metadrama, who insists on ‘two sharply distinguished
layers of performance’.22
As regards the weighting of the various dramatic layers of the play, the
main focus of The Making of B-Movie is the rise of Brom’s prominence as a
writer. The inset play draws heavily on the literary context, both past and

22
Drama, Metadrama and Perception, p. 35.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 277

present, referring to Brecht, Artaud and Goetz. The number of direct quota-
tions from Brecht aside, the importance of gestus is clearly visible in the way
the main characters are structured; both Brom and Silber step in and out of
their roles, depending on the situation. In addition, the odd couple Brom-
Silber can be regarded as a means of splitting the personality of the writer in
two. The concept of the ‘author-god’ – pronounced dead by Roland – is pre-
sented as an efficient work arrangement. In other words, Ostermaier dissolves
the ‘entity’ of the poet, thereby offering the audience room for thought and
criticism. In a poem recital, this split is cleverly heightened. While Silber
reads ‘Brom’s’ poems, which glorify war and violence, Brom behaves as
rudely as possible in order to attract the attention of the critics: he assaults a
young man and conspicuously invites women back to his flat. The critics are
riveted, and compare Brom to Antonin Artaud, whose Theatre of Cruelty was
intended to physically torment the audience:

MÜLLER-SCHUPPEN I am going to write a portrait of you: A poet colder than death. When
are you free for an interview? This is going to be the sensation of the
year: Former legionary troops onstage: ‘The words are my weapons
now.’ Send me your manuscripts and you are a made man.
YOUNG MAN The authenticity and power of your verse is unrivalled in contempo-
rary poetry. A feast of slaughter, full of bleeding poetry and desperate
love. It is almost as if Artaud had inspired his speech.23

Like Artaud, the aggressive Brom seems to be fascinated by poetry which is

inspired by the experience of war. Despite Brom’s xenophobic and misan-
thropist ravings, the audience on stage loves him, and one critic even praises
the ‘breathtaking’ unity of the artist and his work.24 In the passage cited
above, a German audience might also recognise the allusions to Fassbinder’s
first feature film ‘Liebe ist kälter als der Tod’ (‘Love colder than death’) and
to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who announced that the poetry he writes
about in Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer (‘My poem is my knife’) was the

23
Ostermaier, p. 48. The original reads as follows:
MÜLLER-SCHUPPEN Ich werde ein Porträt über Sie schreiben: Ein Dichter kälter als der Tod.
Wann hätten Sie Zeit für ein Interview? Das wird die Sensation des Jahres: Ehe-
maliger Legionär stürmt die Bühne. ‘Die Worte sind meine Waffen jetzt.’ Schicken
Sie mir Ihre Manuskripte und Sie sind ein gemachter Mann.
JUNGER MANN Diese authentische Kraft Ihrer Verse ist einzigartig in der zeitgenössischen
Lyrik. Ein Schlachtfest voll blutender Poesie und verzweifelter Liebe. Man könnte
meinen, Artaud hätte ihm die Zunge geführt. [...]
24
Ostermaier, p. 49.
278 Birgit Haas

knife with which he would cut open the foul body of society.25 However,
both writers are mocked, since Brom-Silber’s empty bubble of gore and
blood is a far cry from the politically engaged literature of the 1970s. During
Brom’s appearance on television, he emphasises his commitment to his work
through an act of public self-harming: he cuts himself with a knife. This is a
clear stab at Rainald Goetz, who, during a reading of his texts in Klagenfurt,
cut his forehead, and continued his performance with blood dripping onto his
manuscript. In Ostermaier’s version, the theatricality of this act is unmasked
as pathetic. As soon as the cameras are switched off, Brom removes the stage
blood, much to the disappointment of the critics present. This episode laughs
at one of the ‘conventions’ of postmodern art, the ‘foregrounding of the body
as a site of institutional oppression’,26 unveiling it as sheer acting.
The ingeniousness of Ostermaier’s approach is to combine a modernised
adventure of Brecht’s characters Baal and Kragler – an outrageous poet and a
pseudo-revolutionary, who are moulded into Brom – with the frame of a
kitsch B-movie; ‘B’ meaning either Brom or Bogart (or Brecht), thus inter-
twining the African setting of Casablanca with the ravings of an untalented,
misbehaved poet with writer’s block, presented in an alienated manner.
Andrée aka Brom is deception personified; he fails to be a mercenary, cannot
write, and is a sociopath. Strictly speaking, Andrée-Brom does not exist, he is
quite literally a projection, both within the context of the film shooting, and
in the sense that he is merely what the other characters around him want him
to be.
Ostermaier blurs the differences between high and low art, the notion
which lies at the heart of postmodernism. However, his play marks a return to
the well-made play, since it contains characters, a narrative and dialogue.
Nevertheless, the artist is radical in the sense that, like Brecht, he challenges
tradition by making traditions seem unfamiliar, or ‘alienated’. But what
happens if a dramatist defamiliarises what has already been transformed into
a radical work of art? In Ostermaier’s case, we find that he draws heavily on
the Brechtian tradition, both by quoting from Brecht’s plays and by further
distancing himself by using a very Brechtian ‘alienation effect’. In typical
postmodern fashion he uses pieces from already written texts and inserts
them into his play. However, the result is not a seemingly random collage of
fragments, but a play which mirrors radical art, both modern and post-
modern. Instead of the postmodern pastiche Ostermaier uses a conventionally

25
‘Scherenschleifer und Poeten’, in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mein Gedicht ist mein
Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten (Munich: Paul List, 1961), pp. 144-48.
26
Watt, p. 39.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 279

structured play which merely cites what have become the markers of
twentieth-century art: in presenting the creative process of playwriting from
behind the scenes, as it were, Ostermaier tears down the media-constructed
facade of pseudo-radical postmodern art. In the play, Brom and Silber pri-
marily focus on their marketing strategy and are less concerned with the
actual product of their co-operation. In his attack on the conventions of post-
modern drama, Ostermaier criticises the postmodern culture industry by
holding it up for examination:

The dissociation of the consumer with regards to his ability to listen or watch attentively
ultimately dissolves both the texts and the perceiving apparatus. In order to counter this
trend, I insist on a highly condensed language which might even overburden people’s abili-
ties. Theatre exists through language. The textual construction which the author creates must
be stringent and logical, so that a director should be unable to adapt it to the demands of our
quickly-changing consumer society; both the aesthetic and the political attacks on this socie-
ty should remain inherent to any staging.27

In order to oppose the negative trends within a mediatised world, Ostermaier

returns to the concept of high art. The purpose of theatre is to enlighten the
spectators by challenging them intellectually through a very sophisticated
language. As a consequence, the dissolution of the play-within-the-play
structure does not mirror the prevailing postmodern theatrical style of the
time, but offers a parody. The blurring of the boundaries between high and
low culture merely serves to criticise the effects of postmodernism by means
of modern, mostly Brechtian, devices.

Conclusion
According to Andreas Huyssen, the major difference that distinguishes post-
modernism from high modernism is the end of the ‘modernist belief that high
and low culture have to be categorically kept apart.’28 From this point of
view, both plays corroborate Huyssen’s claim, because their articulation with
popular and mass culture remains crucial. The playwrights’ uncompromising
stance is that high art and humanism have been swallowed by capitalism, and

27
Frank Raddatz, ‘Sprache muss sein. Interview with Albert Ostermaier’, Stück-Werk 1 (Ber-
lin: Internationales Theaterinstitut, 1997), 86. The German text reads: ‘Die Emanzipation
der Konsumentenhaltung gegenüber dem genauen Hören oder der Präzision von Bildern löst
die Texte oder den Wahrnehmungsapparat letztlich auf. Gegen diesen Trend muss einfach
eine hohe Konzentration von Sprache behauptet werden, die auch überfordern kann. Theater
existiert eben auch durch Sprache. Das Textgebäude, das man als Autor herstellt, muss in
sich konsequent und stringent gearbeitet sein, um es dem Regisseur bzw. dem schnellebigen
Kulturbetrieb zu verunmöglichen, die ästhetischen und politischen Spitzen zu kappen.’
28
After the Great Divide, p. 192.
280 Birgit Haas

they express their concern through a radical juxtaposition of various art

forms. Each dramatist approaches the consumer society from a different
angle, the main difference being that while Goetz takes postmodernism
seriously, Ostermaier mocks it. In Goetz’s play high and low art clash loud-
ly, whilst Ostermaier subtly dissolves the boundaries between the two. Un-
derneath the dramatic form, or rather, in Goetz’s case, anti-form, the message
is the same: the plays show that the achievements of a cultured society are at
stake. Fortress and The Making of B-Movie mirror the basic conception of
postmodernity: the conviction that images will proliferate, that reality has
been effaced by simulation, that sudden cultural catastrophes are unpre-
dictable and unavoidable. The writers borrow from the experiments of former
playwrights and dramas, film and television culture, thus reacting against the
conventions attached to them. Their ways of borrowing are not the same;
significant differences exist between Goetz’s attempt to show the inter-
textuality of media spectacles and Ostermaier, who combines the reflexions
of Brecht and Benjamin for what ultimately becomes a modernist piece.
To sum up, none of the formally conventional dramas are subject to the
‘unreadability’ of postmodern culture, which, as far as Stephen Watt is
concerned, would be the major shortcoming of postmodern drama.29 As the
seemingly unfinished textuality of both plays is in fact an illusion, the plays
are more than mere ‘skeletons’ for a performance, to use the term coined by
Bernard Beckerman.30 In the plays discussed here, the dominant reading of
the text is countered by so-called negotiated readings, which means that an
active audience ‘decodes’ the dramas in more ways than one. Having said
that, I would like to emphasise that this does not result in a continual deferral
of meaning in the Derridean sense. In both cases, the writers are far from
negating the educational power of their writing. Although they imitate
deconstructive and subjective impulses, they retain a strong belief in the com-
municative power of drama. These two ‘postmodern’ plays serve a clear-cut
purpose. Both authors create an awareness of the meta-dramatic structure,
they call into question of established dramatic signs and help to pave the way
for a critical theatre which questions traditional modes of interpretation. Our
critical attention is challenged by the parody of the subversion of linear
theatre with the effect that our awareness of this loss is heightened. It is clear
that both authors are ultimately conservative. The alleged collapsing of the
meta-dramatic structure – an effect which is undercut by the formally

29
Postmodern/Drama, p. 34.
30
Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 3.
 Postmodernism Unmasked 281

scripted text – is meant to make us rethink our consumerist attitude towards

present-day society.
 IV

The Play within the Play as Agency of

Socio-Cultural Reflection and
Intercultural Appropriation
Lada Cale Feldman

The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre
Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique

The discussion will suggest that particular corpuses of playwriting that are called for to typify
the-play-within-the-play procedure may introduce specificities that challenge extant modes of
formulating its supposedly universally valid mechanism and its various possible functions. As
the post-WWII Croatian play-within-the-play strategies rely heavily on cultural and historical
specificities of the theatrical production and reception, emphasizing ‘the context within’, they in-
vite an approach which would not only rely on semiotic explanations of the procedure, but would
also include theatre anthropology, system theory and postcolonial critique.

My aim in the present chapter is to discuss certain methodological issues

concerning the theoretical definition of the play-within-the-play procedure as
it appears within playwriting, as opposed to actual theatrical performance.
While acknowledging the need to formulate the invariant structure of this re-
peatedly deployed device, the discussion will suggest that particular corpuses
of playwriting that are called for to typify the offered formulas of this proce-
dure may introduce specificities that challenge extant modes of formulating
its mechanism and its various possible functions, especially if these modes in
turn serve to propound broader conclusions regarding the role of the play
within the play within the historical development of the genre of drama as
such.
I derive my conclusions from my long-standing interest in the play-
within-the-play strategies in Croatian playwriting, where, until the advent of
modernity, plays manifesting this structure are rather scarce. The only excep-
tion to this rule, and an outstanding one, is the work of the Dubrovnik Re-
naissance playwright Marin Drzic (1608-1567), a striking example of ‘Shake-
spearean anticipation’, as Croatian scholars often insist, puzzled by the num-
ber of concordances among the two opuses – particularly among the multiple
frames of his play The Story about how Venus fell in Love with Adonis put in
Comedy and Shakespeare’s interweaving of dream, theatre and Athenian ‘re-
ality’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and prudent in their conclusions re-
garding their possible source in ‘the common atmosphere’, that is, the philo-
286 Lada Cale Feldman

sophical, literary and artistic cultural background shared by European Renais-

sance intellectuals.
The Croatian theatrical baroque abandoned Drzic’s aesthetic and critical
ambitions with respect to the relations between artistic theatre, popular cul-
ture and the theatricality of state power: in this period, pseudo-historical
plays and mythological-allegorical melodramas predominated and they
mostly served as flattering mirrors to the foundational myths of aristocratic
oligarchy ruling the Dubrovnik republic. The eighteenth century knew no de-
velopment of a bourgeois comedy, so that the comic repertoire relied instead
on farcical re-configurations of the commedia dell’arte scenarios, while
upper levels of society took pleasure in the so-called ‘francesarie’, dialectal
adaptations of comedies by Molière, still then performed by amateur enthu-
siasts. When professional theatre was finally founded in the Croatian capital
Zagreb in the nineteenth century, it offered a repertoire relying mostly on ro-
mantic historical tragedies supporting and stirring the outbursts of national
feelings, having other, constitutional priorities which prevented it from reach-
ing the luxury of self-reflection: the fight for the national, linguistic and cul-
tural autonomy and unity of a country continuously under foreign rule, as
well as for its own institutional and financial security.
Hence, the two major periods in the history of Croatian drama that present
a richer picture with respect to this form of theatrical self-consciousness are
twentieth-century high-modernism and postmodernism. In both of these pe-
riods authors displayed a tendency to complicate metatheatrical devices by
combining them with intertextual allusions or direct quotations from either
European or autochtonous drama, as well as with documentary, historical
references. The most important, largely implicit, inspiration for the modern-
ists was Luigi Pirandello’s famous trilogy, Ivo Vojnovic (1857-1929), Milan
Begovic (1876-1948), and Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981), who, though be-
longing to different avant-garde poetics (symbolism, aestheticism, expres-
sionism), all made use of the structure of internal bifurcation of ontological
levels, did it widely in the form of auto-quotation, for comparable purposes
of subverting the inherited patterns of representation and finding new forms
in which to write for theatre, a medium shown to be overlapping not only
with deadening constructs of social convention, but also with imaginative
outlets of unconsciousness and new artistic forms such as film.
Postmodern drama, however, besides its obvious intention to participate
in what Linda Hutcheon calls a ‘poetics of postmodernism’ 1 – said to rejoice

1
A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge,
1988).
 The Context Within 287

in thematizing, questioning and confusing the frames distinguishing various

diegetic levels in fiction – shows marks of particular, politically invested in-
terests in the exploration of the play within the play’s various articulations,
aims and interpretative outcomes, engaging in explicit intercultural framings
and demonstrating the discontinuities and incongruities of different, privi-
leged and underprivileged, strands of the European drama and theatre tradi-
tions when it comes to the forging of one’s individual or of collective identity.
That is why, when I attempted to define – within the context of a larger
project on the play within the play 2 – the dramaturgical logic governing the
use of the device, the first distinction which I tried to establish was the one
pertaining to the difference between the narrative and the dramatic use of in-
ternal framings, bearing in mind that narrative metafiction cannot escape the
limits of its own medium – language, while a play implies its double exist-
ence as both word and virtual body, a written text to be read and a virtual act
to be performed, a virtual experience to be lived. According to Anne Ubers-
feld, the play is characterized by its double referentiality.3 At the same time,
it is responsible for inducing in our imagination a possible world – the time,
the space and the agents of the dialogue, that is, the features of the fictional
story, and of suggesting the time, the space and the agents of the stage, that is,
the virtual performance of this story. The play functions at the same time not
only as an arrangement of linguistic signs comparable as such to any other
product of literary fiction, but also as a textual ‘matrix of representability’,4
or, in Marco De Marinis’s words, as ‘instructions for use’ to theatre practi-
tioners,5 since it is ‘defined and established in such a way as to be transfer-
able into the mode of perception (of the stage)’.6
As analyses of the pragmatics of dramaturgical enunciation, by Cesare
Segre7 and Ursula Jung8 demonstrated, the double function of the play auto-
matically involves two different but superposed enunciatory situations, two
intertwined contexts of production and reception, one literary and the other
theatrical. This, in turn, makes every dramatic text a holder of a double ontol-
ogy, issuing from two overlapping media, pertaining to two different institu-

2
Lada Cale Feldman, Teatar u teatru u hrvatskom teatru (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska i Naklada
MD, 1997).
3
Ecole du spectateur (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1981), pp. 34-36. See also Ubersfeld’s Lire le
théâtre (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1982), pp. 42-43.
4
Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre, p. 80.
5
Marco De Marinis, Semiótica del teatro (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), pp. 48-59.
6
Käte Hamburger, Logika knji evnosti (Beograd: Nolit, 1976), p. 115.
7
After De Marinis, pp. 46-47.
8
L’Enonciation au théâtre: une approche pragmatique de l'autotexte théâtral (Tübingen:
Narr, 1994).
288 Lada Cale Feldman

tions – that of the fictional possible world induced solely by the verbal text,
and that of a virtually embodied, concrete performance, which, to a degree
that characterizes no other art, shares its iconicity and materiality with the
extra-theatrical world, due to the fact that it does not have an existence inde-
pendent of its producers, live actors, and must always occur as a collective
public event.9
This referential, ontological, contextual, and institutional doubleness of
any play has certain conceptual consequences for the explication of the meta-
dramatic version of the general phenomenon of textual self-referentiality. If
we define self-referentiality in general as the realized capacity of any text –
text in the semiotic sense – to refer to all the enunciatory components of its
own textuality, inevitably thus including its own context of production and
reception, then meta-dramatic, self-referential effects can be produced on a
double scale, as precisely happens in the various devices of the play within
the play. The double ontology of the dramatic text, implied by its virtual per-
formance, can unpredictably multiply (especially if the procedure is combined
with explicit mise en abyme and intertextual relations), each frame claiming its
respective ontological doubleness and accompanying contexts of production
and reception, with all their imaginable, puzzling interpenetrations and discord-
ances: literary characters meeting the actors who are about to embody them, as
in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; boundaries between the
(‘real’) context and the (performative) text being blurred through rotation of
‘actual’ roles, as in Genet’s The Maids; fiction concretized through the reading
of a play (Shakespeare’s Coriolanus) becoming partly incongruent with the fic-
tion imagined by its performance (Brecht’s adaptation), but fairly well enacted
in the ‘outer reality’, as in Günther Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Up-
rising; a ‘real’ royal public turning into a fictional one, as in Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy; playwrights conversing with embodiments of their own characters
of malicious critics, as in Ionesco’s Improvisation at Alma; and actors in flesh
and blood feeling previously ‘swallowed’ by dramatic texts, as happens in
Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
In an attempt to methodologically overcome the way in which some histo-
rical overviews, by Robert Nelson 10 and Manfred Schmeling 11 for instance,
or various other studies on this procedure in separate plays and playwrights’
opuses, assume the evidence of the play within the play as a structural device,

9
De Marinis, pp. 61-64.
10
Play within a Play: The Dramatist’s Conception of his Art, from Shakespeare to Anouilh
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).
11
Das Spiel im Spiel. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Literaturkritik (VVA Gütersloh: Schäuble,
1977) and Métathéâtre et intertexte: aspects du théâtre dans le théâtre (Paris: Minard, 1982).
 The Context Within 289

often reducing it to the catch-phrase of an ‘interplay between illusion and

reality’, I endeavoured to return to the question of how the theatrical frame it-
self is established, in order to be able then to trace the fictional counterpart to
this process. This problem inevitably led me ‘outside of theatre’, that is, out
of the culturally and historically determined conventions of what is consid-
ered to be a ‘proper’ theatrical performance: the enactment of a previously
written text, occurring in a specialized building and markedly, institutionally
detached from its extra-theatrical context. Bearing in mind that play-within-
the-play procedures often rely on a notion of performance encompassing a
broad spectrum of activities, from psychodramas and embodied dreams to
festive occasions to ‘pure’ theatrical ones, my search for the strategies of per-
formative ontological layering turned to the disciplines of theatre anthropol-
ogy and sociology as discussed by Anglo-American anthropologists Erving
Goffman, Victor Turner and Richard Schechner or by Jean Duvignaud in
France.
These scholars sought structural similarities between, on the one hand,
drama and theatrical events and, on the other, features of social life – ritual
representations in preindustrial societies (Turner 12), ancient social dramatiza-
tions or Medieval and Renaissance street festivities (Duvignaud13), contem-
porary political rituals and street performances (Schechner14) or everyday
presentations of self and face-to-face interactions (Goffman 15). Their findings
questioned the sharp distinctions between theatre and life, or, to be more pre-
cise, made these distinctions dependent upon different historical, cultural and
geographical settings, interactional contracts, and even methodological optics.
They also strongly disagreed – Schechner, in particular – with the still firmly
established philological study of dramatic texts, and claimed that it was the
performative event that should constitute the object of study and not the liter-
ary qualities of plays, which were, after all, written to be performed and not
read.
I, by contrast, was still intrigued by playwriting, and tried to go ‘back-
wards’, applying the insights of Turner, Schechner and Goffman concerning

12
From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications,
1982).
13
Les Ombres collectives; sociologie du théâtre, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1973).
14
Performance Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). See also Schechner’s The
Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York and London: Routledge,
1993).
15
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Relations in Public:
Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
290 Lada Cale Feldman

the ways in which theatre and life were mutually informative to the study of
the play-within-the-play procedures. Schechner’s distinctions between drama,
script, theatre and performance, imagined as mutually implicating concentric
circles increasing in size but decreasing in determination, proved useful in
altering the imprecise namings of the play-within-the-play procedures in
various national traditions – play within the play in English, das Spiel im
Spiel in German or le théâtre dans le théâtre in French – imprecise in the
sense of escaping the contradictions often arising in the production of con-
flicting, textual and performative, institutionalised or non-institutionalised
frames of reference. Thus, in Schechner’s terms, my interest in these proce-
dures in playwriting could best be described as an interest in scripts of per-
formances, sometimes presented as if occurring as/in theatre, inserted within
the drama as a virtual performance, and in all the possible internal permuta-
tions of these various textual and performative ontologies, media, and institu-
tions – especially since drama, the smallest circle, is here suggested to create
a frame that surrounds circles conceptually larger than itself – script, theatre,
and performance.
Starting from the already mentioned assumption that performances can
take place even outside of theatre buildings, I searched for textual signals of
what Goffman calls ‘the theatrical frame’,16 the precarious and permeable
border between fictional and non-fictional social interactions, themselves
observable through this sociologist’s insightful methodological lenses of the
theatrical metaphor. Goffman’s theory itself could be called a kind of a thea-
trically inspired mise en abyme social theory, particularly suitable to explain
how the creation of inner fictional frames can result in plays reaching outside
of their textual borders, in implicating, by analogy, empirical audiences, in
both fictionalizing the context of their own reception and de-fictionalising
their own ‘stories’ or ‘possible worlds’.
Only years later, and after having already written my own book, did I read
Dieter Schwanitz, the German proponent of Niklas Luhmann’s system theory
in literary criticism, who, in his Systemtheorie und Literatur (System Theory
and Literature) devoted a chapter to the system theory of drama.17 Schwanitz
dealt with it not only insofar as it could observe drama as a genre, but also in-
sofar as it is, in a way, already contained within the self-observational, self-
referential potential of drama. What he had in mind was the capacity of this
particular ‘literary’ form to apply within its own observation of the world

16
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
17
It took ten years for the Croatian translation to appear, as Teorija sistema i književnost
(Zagreb: Naklada MD, 2000).
 The Context Within 291

precisely the procedures of its repeated, historically contingent and constantly

re-arrangeable differentiation from other social systems, particularly the
structurally homologous system of communication in social interaction.
Schwanitz used Goffman in order to demonstrate how the intentional ontolo-
gical confusions between inner and outer frames in plays within plays serve
precisely the opposite, explicatory cause: the re-affirmation of a continuously
renewing border to the ‘outside’ of the system, a progressive, vertiginous
autopoiesis of drama as a genre, its increasing sophistication in recursively
applying the very differentiating process within what was previously already
socially differentiated as a system of drama.
Fascinating as I found its emphasis on the paradoxical autonomy of drama
as a particularly intriguing artistic genre – paradoxical since it was shown to
draw its historical vigour, after the modernist crisis of representation, precise-
ly from the loss of its capacities to significantly observe the world for the
sake of self-observation – Schwanitz’s analysis still appeared to me to rely
exclusively on the canonical plays of the Western European tradition. Indeed,
he acknowledges as much in the final part of his chapter on drama, where
Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Ionesco are made to discuss drama’s
prospects in the twentieth century. These, it would seem, are both gloomy
and humorous, since Dr Godit (Godot) can promise, paradoxically again, no
other substance than the form itself. One assumption, however, seemed to me
to have been disregarded: the possibility of this tautological spiraling circu-
larity to re-install social, political, ethical and other representative aims of
drama precisely through the mediation of its supreme metadramatic form,
play within the play, in an intermittent, oscillating, double move of both
hetero- and auto-referentiality, which would feed on the remnants of sub-
stance glued to the form undergoing reduplication.
What I thought was missing in his analysis was not only the more differ-
entiated treatment of drama as a genre (in the sense I have tried to explain
above), but also the eventually resulting awareness of the varying ideological
statuses of literature and theatre as social institutions and, even more, of
specific representative cultural texts, treated as such either because they are
considered to be highly relevant to the culture in question and therefore are
respected as archetypal scripts, consecrated identity-texts, or because they are
held to reproduce in miniature not only the dominant features of social in-
teraction, but also the specific ideological and cultural frameworks of that
interaction. To put it another way, self-referentiality does not have to be
treated simply as a tautological game of self-observation with consequences
for the internal autopoiesis of a given system. Instead, it can address the issue
of how particular instances of the system’s autopoiesis of interactional ‘pro-
292 Lada Cale Feldman

grams’ and ‘codes’ not only structurally but also meaningfully and ideologi-
cally contaminate and are contaminated by various contexts, or, as Schwanitz
would put it, environments – die Umwelten – from which drama is said to be
repeatedly differentiated to constitute a separate entity.
Conceiving of the play-within-the-play procedures in the Croatian post-
WWII playwriting as of ways of explicit treatment of relationships between
theatre and the context of its production and reception, I found out that this
strategy not only used the theatrical imagery as the inherited and universally
shared ontological, ethical and epistemological metaphor, but also emphasiz-
ed that theatre is an inherently culturally embedded political institution, me-
tonymic of broader ideological practices, that it is the central inner stage of a
symbolic action, inevitably implicated in specific outer historical re-orderings.
To this purpose, a complex interplay of a spectrum of referential modalities
was used, combining fictional, pseudo-historical and historical references,
anachronisms, auto-references pointing to diverse aspects of the theatrical
process as historically and culturally grounded forms, like the choice of the
text or script, its adaptation for the stage, the strict obeying of its commands
or the granted liberty to improvise, the distribution of the roles, the rehearsals,
the presence or absence of the director, the finality and the repetitive charac-
ter of any performance.
The most striking examples in the context of this discussion, however, are
meta-theatrical procedures that use intertextual references, because they not
only testify to the reliance of the play-within-the-play strategy upon the
aforementioned referential, ontological and contextual doubleness of drama,
but also manifest most incisively the critical function of intercultural fram-
ings to which play-within-the-play devices in Croatian playwriting gave birth.
In contrast to the pre-WWII Croatian drama, which had cosmopolitan ambi-
tions, but, even more significantly, in contrast to the comparable Western Eu-
ropean examples of intertextually informed plays within plays by Stoppard,
Grass, Ionesco or Heiner Müller, that were mentioned earlier, in which al-
ready existent plays (most often Shakespeare’s) or polemically addressed
poetics (Brecht’s, for instance) are quoted, alluded to or represented as be-
longing to the common European archive of cultural memory, the post WWII
Croatian drama treats foreign intertexts primarily as venerable reminders of a
process of cultural alienation which cruelly divides Europe in the productive
center and its receptive periphery.
When these quoted or paraphrased intertexts function as imaginative pre-
servers of moral values, archetypes celebrating Western-European versions
of individualism and humanism, as Shakespeare’s tragedies do in Ivo
Bresan’s (b. 1936) opus (The Performance of Hamlet in the Village of
 The Context Within 293

Mrdusa Donja, 1971; Julius Caesar, 1990), they prove incapable of adap-
tation to the cultural and historical context in which they are to be enacted. In
the first play, it is the context of inherited rural mentality and forcibly inau-
gurated communist collectivism in which Hamlet is put to offer the ‘mirror
up to nature’. Explicitly serving as a pretext for grotesque cultural and ideo-
logical competition between capitalism and socialist progress, having turned
into a challenge made by the local governor to an amateur village-production
about to take place in the fifties in Croatia, the text inevitably needs to be re-
written to suit both the old folklore metric patterns with their vividly expres-
sed crude morality, and the recently established poetical rules of socialist
realism. Julius Caesar, a play that deals with the inception of the post-com-
munist period in Croatia, gathers newly made democratic politicians in the
guise of mediocre professional actors, eager to bury the cult of the Leader for
the sake of their own petty ambitions. Just like Hamlet in the earlier play,
Julius Caesar fails to be performed in the inner frame, but its basic structure
and ‘message’ succeed in being actualized in the outer one – thus proving
that its mythical moral impact has the capacity to perform the revenge on its
own, to overflow cultural and historical differences of the context of its fram-
ed and framing desecration, while at the same time demonstrating the widen-
ing gap between the textual model and its performative copy.
Slobodan Snajder’s (b. 1948) version of Hamlet, entitled Gamllet (1987),
expressively transforms the English title in Russian in order to emphasise the
newly produced intercultural hybridity, as well as to allude to the identifica-
tion of its double protagonist, the fictional avenger, directing the Murder of
Gonzago on the inner stage, and his ‘empirical’ counterpart, Branko Gavella,
belonging to the outer frame, who is directing Hamlet. Combining documen-
tary references and fictional, both textual and performative frames, the play
presents an actually started and failed work by the Croatian director on the
performance of Hamlet during the Second World War. The mirror is now not
only disfigured and literally broken by the destruction going on outside its
borders, but also splits its main agent in two: the young actor intended for the
role of Hamlet is constrained to abandon the realm of imagination, cross the
theatrical frame and take the repugnant sword of action in his hands, while
the director is left to muse on the senselessness of artistic intervention. As op-
posed to this critical reflection on the crudity of local dilemmas, Luko Palje-
tak’s (b. 1943) transposition, entitled Hamlet aftermath (1993), exalts the po-
sition of Croatian culture as the culturally ignored Other: imagining what
happens to Denmark on the arrival of Fortinbras, the playwright suggests a
vision of a morally destitute Europe, which witnesses a growing deliberate
destruction of Hamlet’s legacy in the hands of contemporary political rulers
294 Lada Cale Feldman

of its very maternal cultural context - bureaucrats without any conscience (let
alone one like Claudius’s), indifferent towards the actual recent war devasta-
tion of one of Hamlet’s environmental festive stages, the ramparts of Dubrov-
nik.
But these numinous, constantly radiating classical European texts also
function as, or allude to, the service of art to retrograde ideological doctrines,
as the unquestioned national glory of Goethe’s Faust, and the historically
verified performance of this play in Croatia during the Ustashi regime, do in
Slobodan Snajder’s The Croatian Faust (1985). The doubled performance of
Faust both on the inner stage of the National Theatre and, implicitly, on the
outer stage of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, indicate the base
servility and national treason of the Croatian central theatre and Nazi puppet
state alike, designed so in a ‘literal’ manner, since the legend of Faust indeed,
in its theatrical history, was the script for puppet theatre performances. The
protagonist of the play is the actor Vjekoslav Afric, caught up in the midst of
the hallucinatory hell staged by the new rulers of his theatre: realizing that to
play the part of Faust means to sell his soul as Faust once did, and as his thea-
tre does on the stage of the state-world, he leaves the performance in order to
search for an ethical alternative, but when the new, communist power arrives,
the order of the day remains the same, Faust is to be performed anew.
A comparable, very recent example of such producing of trans-historical
parallels is Boris Senker’s (b. 1947) Gloriana (2004), which constructs a
triply-layered play within the play, with Ferdinand Bruckner’s Elisabeth von
England, a play undergoing the process of rehearsal, occupying the third in-
ternal frame, as if announcing the endlessly repeatable, inevitable decapita-
tion of modern Croatian embodiments of the role of Essex, on and off the
stage, whether those participating in the anti-communist uprising during the
seventies or, by inference, in any other, present or future instances of such
ambitions. Essex reappears in all those who, whether inhabiting theatrical or
extra-theatrical worlds, both fall in love with the fiction of the national glory
– as if it were a fatally appealing, imperial woman-as-actress, a body to be
possessed and manipulated – and who, though humble actors themselves, be-
lieve they are chosen for the role of promising directors, the ones who will
reform either the states or the (theatrical) institutions ruled by such a prin-
ciple of political desire. The parallels of outcome in the third and the second
plane of being dissolves in the first, the outer frame of theatre pure and sim-
ple, exempt of its contextual references, where anonymous Actor, Actress
and Playwright have the last, playful word. Hence, the structure of internal
mirrors does not confirm the mythically determining, anticipatory perspicaci-
ty of the borrowed text: its exemplary historical content was already framed
 The Context Within 295

as fiction by the former author, Bruckner, as it is twice so in the contempo-

rary Croatian version, and therefore can do nothing but signal the congruent
vanity of political and theatrical words, moves and gestures, the hollowness
of their repetitive performance, reaching its absurd, de-substantiated, vanish-
ing point.
The youngest generation of playwrights, engaged in post-dramatic experi-
mentation that would comply with the demands of new theatrical genres such
as, for instance, feminist solo-performance, portray the growing cultural, po-
litical and economic imbalance produced by the globalised world, even if
their meta-dramatic commentary seem only to focus on such abstract issues
as the lost centrality of the Word, dead authors-as-gods, and on anachronistic,
disturbed and confusing relationships between texts and their enactments.18
Archetype Medea: Notes taken during a Performance (2004) by a female
playwright Ivana Sajko (b. 1975) is a strange combination of the self-expli-
cated authorial voice – appearing in the stage directions as it were ‘after the
fact’, in the role of narrator, prompter, co-performer and note-taker – and a
monologue of a protagonist who disclaims her identity as drama-character,
renouncing the features that coagulated on the surface of the name ‘Medea’.
She is actress first and foremost, but without a name ‘of her own’, forced to
perform anew the archetypal role assigned her by the age-old patriarchal
vision of an ever-threatening femininity. At the same time, however, she is
not acting in a de-contextualised secular teatrum mundi in the role of an un-
defined ‘woman’ constructed by the inherited scripts of Western-European
civilization, but in a transitional landscape of Croatian post-communist politi-
cal chaos, where she feels prompted to assume the ultimate responsibility
implied by the prison-house of the Euripides’s text, and to destroy her poster-
ity in a terrorist act that would blow the entire globe, with all its transnational
utopian promises, to pieces.
Far from being just a parallel national chapter in the ever more spiraling
autopoiesis of the artistic system of drama, the post-WWII Croatian play-
within-the-play strategies rely heavily on cultural and historical specificities
of theatrical production and reception, undercutting as if in advance any am-
bition to prove that their aesthetic impact could measure up to universal stan-
dards. In their case, the context within, inhabiting the outer frame of the play-
within-the-play device, reveals itself to be profoundly affecting the possibili-
ty to take pleasure in any play, let alone in its cunning reduplications in the
plays within plays of recursive self-differentiation. The asymmetry at issue
here is not only the one in structural complexity that delineates the theatrical

18
See Hans Thies Lehmann, Postdramsko kazalište (Zagreb: CDU, 2004).
296 Lada Cale Feldman

frame – the asymmetry that, according to Schwanitz, needs to be established

between the inevitably reductive system of drama and its more complex so-
cial background – but also the one in authority and the power to produce uni-
versally valid patterns of meaning, the one that draws a subtle line of division
between the globally pertinent cultural and ideological discourses, and their
local enactments and performances (including, ironically and self-referential-
ly, postcolonial criticism itself).
Maurice Blackman

Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête

Aimé Césaire’s play Une Tempête was written for a company of African actors based in France
and first performed in 1969. The third in a trilogy of political plays about colonialism and black
liberation, it is a radical reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in terms of Black Power poli-
tics of the 1960s. The chapter examines the political reworking of the Shakespeare text and ana-
lyses the complex meanings produced by the play of intertextuality and, more particularly, by the
intercultural framing devices adopted by Césaire. Among other things, it aims to show how the
‘Africanisation’ of Shakespeare’s original can be seen as an act of cultural rehabilitation and
self-liberation, and how Césaire’s appropriation of the text parallels the theme of language as
power expressed in the central relationship of his play.

Background
Aimé Césaire was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1913 into a
poor, lower middle-class family descended from African slaves that were
imported in the seventeenth century to work the sugar plantations. (Slavery
was not abolished in the French colonies until 1848, and the memory of it
would still have been widespread in Césaire’s childhood.) He grew up in a
racially structured colonial society, with the Negro at the bottom of the heap,
the mixed-blood mulattoes and Creoles above them, and the whites at the top.
Alienated from the values of the society around him, Césaire was a bright
student, who devoured books and finally won a scholarship to continue his
studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Arriving in Paris in 1932,
he befriended two Senegalese fellow-students, who were also preparing for
the École Normale, Ousmane Socé and Léopold Senghor, and both of whom
would later become important writers and political figures. It was in Paris
that Césaire discovered African culture and developed his philosophy of
negritude. This was a militant and strongly politicised doctrine founded on an
absolute respect for the cultural values of Black Africa, and denouncing the
capitalist values of both the colonial plantocracy and the coloured Creole
bourgeoisie that supported it. Inspired by Marxist ideas, it supported the
cause of social and political change in the French Antilles and called for soli-
darity with the black proletariat across the world.
298 Maurice Blackman

Césaire began to develop as both a poet and a political writer during his
years in Paris: he published his first article in 1934 and began work on a long
poem-essay, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, which was published in 1938.
He returned to Martinique in 1939 as a fully-fledged professeur de lycée who
would have a profound influence on the generation of students that he taught
there, including Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, the leading militant
black writers of the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1940s Césaire became ac-
tively involved in Martinique politics, and in 1946 was elected as the island’s
representative to the French Assemblée Nationale; he also pursued his career
as a writer, publishing a number of political essays and poems in the 1940s
and 1950s. During all this time he maintained his political activity as a dep-
uty in the French Assemblée Nationale, and by the 1960s he was regarded,
along with Senghor, as one of the leading francophone black activists and
writers. It was during the 1960s that he turned to the theatre and wrote a trio
of political plays – indeed, they can be seen as a kind of trilogy – in which
he explores dramatically the history and the problems of black liberation.
The first of these, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1964), is a study of the
forces that led to the failure of the first black independent state, Haiti. This
was followed in 1965 by Une Saison au Congo, a study of the forces that
brought down Patrice Lumumba and a contemporary black independent state.
Finally, Une Tempête (1969) presents an analysis of the colonial mentality
and its persistence in contemporary black politics. These plays were all
written for a company of black actors directed by Jean-Marie Serreau, a lead-
ing French director of the time. They were first performed in various French
and European festivals and cities, and then in Africa and the French Antilles.
It is interesting to note that, while they achieved some critical success in their
European performances, their real popular success came from their perfor-
mances to non-European audiences. (This is especially true of Une Tempête,
which had only a mediocre success in Paris in 1969, but was well received in
both Africa and the Antilles, where it has been revived a number of times.)

Comparison of The Tempest and Une Tempête

Une Tempête 1 is an appropriation and a rewriting by Césaire of Shake-
speare’s The Tempest. The principal effect of Césaire’s rewriting, to highlight
the problem of colonialism, is achieved by reworking the characters of Cali-
ban and Prospero: Caliban is transformed into a black militant, rebelling
against the authority of a much less benign Prospero, presented as a stubborn

1
All subsequent textual references are to the following edition, Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969). Page numbers will be given in the text after the quotations.
 Intercultural Framing 299

colonial despot. On the surface, the points of reference in the play are clearly
to the situation of 1960s black politics in the United States: thus Ariel repre-
sents the position of the non-violent campaign for civil rights associated with
Martin Luther King, while Caliban represents the more aggressive and mili-
tant position of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers (these links are clearly
referenced in the text). But, at the same time, through this struggle between
master and slave set on a Caribbean island, the play returns to the theme of
colonial slavery in general, and Caribbean slavery in particular. Caliban’s
bitter lines reflect equally the frustrations and anger of the powerless and op-
pressed blacks in the US, and those of the poet-politician struggling against
the French government’s refusal to grant real autonomy to Martinique and its
other former colonies. Césaire’s Caliban is the archetype of the oppressed
slave, deprived of his land and possessions, his dignity, even his name and
identity. Prospero, the arrogant and small-minded coloniser, does not ac-
knowledge in Caliban the slightest ability to take charge of his own life, and
does not recognise any value in the culture, identity, or even the language of
his slave. This point is brought out as soon as Caliban enters and is reproach-
ed by Prospero (I.2):

[Y]ou might at least bless me for having taught you to speak. A barbarian! A wild beast that
I educated, trained, that I dragged up from the level of the animals […]. (p. 25)2

and also in Caliban’s first revolt against his master:

I tell you that from now on I will no longer answer to the name of Caliban. […] It is the
nickname that you endowed me with in your hatred, and each repetition of it is an insult to
me. […] Call me X. That will be better. As if I was the man without a name. More exactly,
the man whose name has been stolen. […] Each time you call me, that will remind me of the
fundamental fact, that you have stolen everything from me, even my identity! (p. 28)

Caliban is thus struggling as much against cultural domination as physical

exploitation. His goal, as he says near the end of the play, is ‘Reprendre mon
île et reconquérir ma liberté’ (To take back my island and reconquer my free-
dom: p. 87): it is the goal of all Césaire’s heroes, who seek to overcome ra-
cial and social alienation and thus liberate themselves from the domination of
others.
If we compare Césaire’s Tempête to Shakespeare’s original, we can
quickly see that he has kept the overall shape of the action, and has even kept
a certain amount of the original dialogue, although Césaire’s play is much

2
All translations are my own.
300 Maurice Blackman

more compact and reduces the original five acts to three. The most obvious
differences are in the characters and the altered ending.
Let us examine first the characters. Césaire gives the following list of
dramatis personae at the beginning of his text:

Characters : Those of Shakespeare.

Two additional precisions:
ARIEL slave, ethnically a mulatto
CALIBAN Negro slave
One additional character:
ESHU Negro devil-god (p. 7)

In fact, although it is not mentioned here, Césaire introduces another addi-

tional character, who is admittedly fairly minor: the priest of the Holy Office,
who appears in a sort of brief flashback evoking Prospero’s summoning be-
fore the Inquisition (I.2: p. 21). He also introduces another unmentioned fig-
ure, the ‘Meneur de jeu’, or, as we might call him, the leader of the role-play.
This figure delivers an important prologue, which will be discussed below.
Césaire’s list of characters draws attention to the thematic reworking of
his adaptation. Instead of an ‘airy spirit’, Ariel becomes a half-caste slave
and, if Caliban was also a slave in Shakespeare’s original, he is neither ‘sav-
age’ nor ‘deformed’ nor a ‘monster’ in Césaire’s play. Finally, to Shake-
speare’s Greco-Roman gods, Césaire adds Eshu, a traditional Black African
divinity who is half-god and half-demon, an important figure in Caribbean
and Brazilian mythology. Césaire’s rewriting thus stresses three important
thematic elements: ethnicity, social condition, and traditional religion. He
also signals that the thematic concerns of the play will turn on the master-
slave relationship and the nature of colonialism.
The prefatory note also contains the following indication –

Atmosphere of psychodrama. The actors enter one after another and each one chooses a
mask to his liking. (p. 7)

– which signals another important difference in Césaire’s adaptation, relating

to the play’s performance aspects. I shall return to this after commenting on
the textual differences.
To sum up, we can say that Une Tempête eliminates much of Shake-
speare’s original detail and condenses the action into three acts; Césaire sup-
presses the original epilogue and adds a prologue delivered by the ‘Meneur
de jeu’. After the added prologue, the first act of Césaire’s version closely
follows Shakespeare’s exposition in his Act I, although it is more succinct.
 Intercultural Framing 301

Césaire’s Act II, however, moves markedly away from the original: his scene
1 has no equivalent in Shakespeare and develops the political message inher-
ent in the relationships between Caliban, Ariel and Prospero. However, his
scene 2 is clearly related to the sequence in Shakespeare in which Gonzalo
discovers the virtues of the island and Prospero teases Antonio, Sebastian and
Alonzo with tables of food that mysteriously appear and disappear (The Tem-
pest, III.3). Césaire’s scene 3 picks up the scene in Shakespeare in which An-
tonio tempts Sebastian to assassinate Alonzo and usurp the throne (The Tem-
pest, II.1). Césaire’s third and final act is a condensation of the action in the
final three acts of The Tempest, which respects the overall order of events but
omits much of the detail. The most striking difference is Césaire’s addition of
a completely new ending, which reverses the reconciliatory conclusion of
The Tempest: instead of freeing Caliban and sailing back to Naples with the
other Europeans, Prospero stays on the island to continue his colonial con-
frontation with Caliban. For Césaire, Prospero and Caliban cannot separate,
their destiny is to remain together:

CALIBAN […] You make me laugh with your ‘mission’, your ‘vocation’! Your vocation
is to aggravate me! And that’s why you will stay, like all those guys who have
settled in the colonies and cannot now live anywhere else. (p. 89)

Their destinies are linked, but their relationship evolves over time and they
become more equal, as is suggested in Prospero’s final speech:

Well, my old friend Caliban, there are only two of us left on this island, only you and me.
You and me! You-me! Me-you! (p. 92)

The implication is that Prospero’s magical powers and colonial authority

gradually ebb away and are finally overcome by the forces of nature and his-
tory: the last word of the play is Caliban’s distant song of liberty.
This drastically changed ending, together with the changes made to Pros-
pero’s character and the textual references to contemporary Black Liberation
politics, fundamentally alter the meaning of the play. After his two earlier
plays treating the problems of black liberation in nineteenth-century Haiti and
twentieth-century Africa, Césaire here turns to the contemporary situation in
the US and ponders the nature of the exploitation of blacks by whites in more
general terms. The psychological and symbolic dimensions of this relation-
ship are brought out both in the adaptation of the allegorical original and in
the choice of the representational mode of the psychodrama. I should add, of
course, that all these dimensions are further underlined in performance by the
fact that the adaptation was written for a company of black actors.
302 Maurice Blackman

The play within the play

As will already be apparent from this rapid presentation of Césaire’s adapta-
tion of The Tempest, the doubling device of play-within-play dramaturgy can
be seen to function on a number of levels of both the text and the perfor-
mance of Une Tempête. I want to try now to enumerate and comment on
these multiple framing or doubling devices before moving on to a more thor-
ough interpretation of them.
Starting from the basic fact of Une Tempête being an adaptation – or
better, an intercultural appropriation – of a prestigious Shakespearean origi-
nal, we need to bear in mind that, on the performance level, what we see on-
stage is constantly framed for us by the representational strategies chosen by
Césaire: the play is performed as a psychodrama or elaborate role-play by a
group of black actors who don masks to perform both white and black char-
acters, masters and slaves. This performance aspect is foregrounded in the
text by the prologue, in which Césaire has the ‘Meneur de jeu’ call for volun-
teers or select players for each role. This outer framing device (reminiscent of
Genet’s use of a similar device in The Blacks) has the effect of turning the
inner play from an allegory into a symbolic drama embodying the perfor-
mance styles of traditional African theatre: this performance style is carried
through Césaire’s text as he introduces elements of black idiolect and of
African music and dance, all of which are designed to bring out the Negro
values embedded in Césaire’s rewriting – the mythical recreation of the
world through music and dance; the expression of essential realities through
images which often have a sexual or animistic basis outside European cultur-
al norms. Shakespeare’s Tempest, of course, contains a few well-known
songs, but Césaire develops and extends the role of music in his adaptation.
He keeps elements of Shakespeare’s original songs for Ariel and some of the
other characters, but in particular he introduces some songs for Caliban (who
has none in Shakespeare): Caliban sings his gods each time he feels threaten-
ed by Prospero, and his songs are a kind of survival tactic – indeed, the last
word of the play is the chorus of Caliban’s song of freedom.
Césaire’s appropriation is thus a political act, both in its content – he
‘Africanises’ Shakespeare’s iconic play and brings out a latent political mes-
sage – and in its performance: the psychodrama will stage a series of dramat-
ic scenes with the aim of liberating the audience (whether black or white)
from its complexes through a consciousness-raising exercise.
On the level of the text itself, The Tempest is one of the best-known
examples of Shakespeare’s playful exploitation of the metaphor of theatrical
illusion, with its complex interplay of theatre within theatre. At the first de-
gree, the play presents a spectacle in which Prospero is one of the characters;
 Intercultural Framing 303

at the second degree, the play presents spectacles of which Prospero is both
the director and one of the performers; and at the third degree, the play con-
tains a masque performed by the gods and arranged by Prospero in honour of
Miranda and Ferdinand. The whole complex system delights in creating the
theatrical illusion and simultaneously reminding the spectator that he or she
is watching the performance of a piece of theatre.
Césaire wholeheartedly embraces the Shakespearean game of theatrical
illusion in his rewriting, and as we have seen, foregrounds it in a particularly
political way in his added prologue. His Prospero, too, is a kind of magus or
alchemist, crossed with a theatrical director whose magical powers can im-
pose illusions on the other characters in the play and create spectacles which
dazzle both us and the characters. Une Tempête recapitulates all of the levels
of the play within the play that are already present in The Tempest – the ini-
tial dramatic spectacle of the tempest itself, called up by Prospero; the trial
imposed on Ferdinand before he can win the hand of Miranda; the magical
illusions and distractions imposed on the other characters; the celebratory
masque (whose decorum is interrupted by the priapic Eshu in Césaire’s ver-
sion) – and even adds a flashback scene to the exposition in Act I in which
we see a priest of the Holy Office summoning Prospero before the Inquisi-
tion. Césaire’s concluding scene is also overtly theatrical, with the passing of
time symbolised by the partial lowering and raising of the curtain, and with
Prospero visibly aging before our eyes.
But the most striking element of the play within the play, as we have
noted above, is the representational strategy of the psychodrama and the
masked black actors: these are a constant reminder to the spectator of the
theatrical illusion created in Une Tempête, presented as the performance of a
performance.

Interpretations
Césaire’s adaptation and extension of the play-within-the-play devices of the
original thus have a primary political function: he refocuses the play’s action
on Caliban’s relations with Prospero, adds some African and Caribbean cul-
tural references to the text, and most importantly, repositions the play in a
new outer frame which foregrounds a specifically African style of perfor-
mance. This deliberate ‘Africanisation’ or ‘negrification’ of an iconic text
from the dominant culture is a political gesture in itself, which can be read as
a post-colonial act of self-liberation through the reconquering of black histo-
ry, in a sort of parallel to Caliban’s effort to reconquer his island from the
European usurper.
304 Maurice Blackman

The outer framing device also represents an act of self-liberation on a per-

sonal level, both through the retelling of the story from the black point of
view, and from the raised consciousness brought about by the analysis of the
colonial relationship expressed in the text. On the one hand, Césaire reveals
the ‘Prospero complex’ 3 – that is, the dilemma of the white coloniser who has
to exert his power and exploit the black, but who at the same time resents the
fact that he is ultimately dependent on the black in order to continue to be the
dominant power. As Prospero says in the final scene (III.5):

Well I hate you too! For you are the one through whom, for the first time, I have come to
doubt myself. […] And now, Caliban, it is me against you! What I have to say to you will be
brief: ten times, a hundred times, I have tried to save you, first of all from yourself. But you
have always responded with rage and venom, like the opossum which hoists itself up on the
rigging of its own tail in order to bite the better the hand that is dragging it out of the dark-
ness of its ignorance! Well, my boy, I will do violence to my normally indulgent nature, and
henceforth to your violence I will respond with violence! (pp. 90-91)

On the other hand, Césaire shows Caliban throwing off the colonised black
mentality which finally accepts the mythical image of itself imposed by white
authority: he refuses Prospero’s mystification and imposition of a cultural
pattern which makes the black an historically inferior being.4 The point is
made in Caliban’s final tirade:

You must understand me, Prospero: for years I have bowed my head, for years I have ac-
cepted, accepted everything : your insults, your ingratitude, and worse, more degrading than
all the rest, your condescension. But now it’s finished! Finished, you hear! Naturally, for the
time being, you are still the stronger one. But I don’t give a damn for your strength, nor for
your dogs, for that matter, nor for your police, nor your other inventions! And you know
why I don’t give a damn? Do you want to know? It’s because I know that I will have you.
Impaled! And on a stake that you yourself have sharpened! Impaled on yourself! Prospero,
you are a great illusionist: you know all about lies. And you have lied to me so much, lied
about the world, lied to me about myself, that you have ended up imposing on me an image
of myself: an underdeveloped man, as you say, an incapable man, that’s how you have
obliged me to see myself, and it is an image that I hate! And it is false! But now I know all
about you, you cancer, and I know myself as well! (pp. 90-91)

On another level, the ‘negrification’ of Shakespeare’s Tempest can be seen as

a direct expression of an important theme in Césaire’s doctrine of negritude –

3
This term was first defined by Octave Mannoni in his Psychologie de la colonization (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1950).
4
See also Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955) and
Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisateur, suivi du portrait du colonisé (Paris: Payot, 1973)
for further analysis of this mentality.
 Intercultural Framing 305

the theme of liberation through cultural expression.5 Césaire believes that a

reaffirmation and adaptation of Negro culture to the modern world, and the
abandonment of a servile imitation of dominant white culture, are necessary
conditions for the full rehabilitation and liberation of the Negro. His intercul-
tural appropriation of an iconic text about the colonisation of the Caribbean
thus represents an act of black cultural rehabilitation that frames the central
theme of self-liberation.
In turn, Césaire’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s text has fascinating par-
allels with the theme of language as power expressed in the central relation-
ship in his play. Prospero’s power comes ultimately from his superior knowl-
edge, his secret books, his control over language. He is the one who named
Caliban, and, as he reminds Caliban in Act I scene 2, who taught him to
speak and who educated him out of his animal-like state. Caliban’s first utter-
ance in the play is ‘Uhuru!’, the Swahili word for ‘freedom’, just as his final
utterance at the end of the play is the word ‘freedom’ itself, and his first act of
defiance is his verbal assault on Prospero when he greets him in Act I scene 2:

Good day. But a good day filled as much as possible with wasps, toads, pustules and shit.
May today hasten by ten years the day when the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth
gorge themselves on your rotting flesh! (p. 24)

This is the beginning of Caliban’s self-liberation, as he rejects the prison of

language and the name imposed on him by Prospero and gives himself the
possibility of expressing himself in his own terms. Although he initially op-
poses Ariel’s politics of patience in Act II scene 1 –

What I want is (He shouts) ‘Freedom now!’ (p. 36)

– Caliban finally renounces violence in his confrontation with Prospero and

instead affirms through song his cultural independence and self-liberation
(III.5: p. 89). On the other hand, Prospero’s power over language gradually
deserts him in his final speech: the stylised process of aging in the final mo-
ments of the play is mirrored in his regressive speech patterns, as he passes
from declamatory blank verse to non-standard idiomatic speech, and finally
to an almost childish babble (III.5: pp. 91-92).
Aimé Césaire’s multi-level exploitation of the possibilities of the play-in-
play device thus gives masterful expression in this text to his political mili-

5
For an analysis of this element of negritude, see Clément Mbom, Le Théâtre d’Aimé Césaire
(Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1979), especially chapter 7, and Albert Owusu-Sarpong, Le Temps
historique dans l’œuvre théâtrale d’Aimé Césaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).
306 Maurice Blackman

tantism and ideological concerns. The very act of appropriating and ‘negrify-
ing’ Shakespeare’s text and refashioning it into a psychodrama of self-libera-
tion from the false consciousness of the colonial mentality and its associated
complexes provides an outer frame, in both formal and thematic terms, to the
drama that unfolds within it, and represents a highly original use of the de-
vice of the play within the play which has both cultural and political ramifi-
cations.
Kyriaki Frantzi

Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth:

Another Night: Medea

A deconstructed theatrical version of the Medea myth was staged by Opera Project’s Australian
director Nigel Kellaway and his collaborating performers under the title Another Night: Medea at
Sydney’s Performance Space in May/June 2003. In the following chapter, which is divided into
three parts, I shall first discuss background information both about Medea performances in gene-
ral and this performance. I shall then try to describe what is particular about Another Night: Me-
dea, and what makes it a multi-dimensional play within an absent but all-present play. Finally, I
shall present a brief argument on its core issue as a multiple resonance of one of the major arche-
types. I shall approach the play from the point of view of a spectator coming to and reflecting on
the performance with her own selected memories. These memories were enriched by material
relating to the performance itself, by my discussions with the director and by the extensive refer-
ences to the many interpretations of the myth of Medea which can be found in Western theatre
bibliography.

1.
Medea was first portrayed in Euripides’s version in ancient Greece, then in
Rome in Seneca’s version; and it was sung in Egypt by Canopus and taken up
by St Augustine in Medieval Europe. Over the last 450 years, beginning in
the mid-sixteenth century and extending into the third millennium, more than
500 adaptations of the myth have been recorded. Though he wrote his version
of the myth to be read rather than enacted onstage, Seneca was responsible
for bringing to light all the horror of the original tale. 1 Throughout the cen-
turies, the character of Medea has become a vehicle for stardom for actresses
in film and theatre, prima donnas, prima ballerinas, singers, musicians and
mime artists – Adelaide Ristori, Sarah Bernhardt, Sybil Thorndike, Judith
Anderson, Maria Callas, Diana Rigg, Fiona Shaw, Melina Merkouri, Alla
Demidova and Isabelle Huppert, to name but a few. Medea appeared in
Etienne Jodelle’s sixteenth-century ballet, Les Argonautes; in the very popu-

1
This is explained by Heiner Müller, excerpts from whose plays are featured in the Sydney
production. See Waterfront Wasteland, Medeamaterial, Landscape with Argonauts, in Hei-
ner Müller, Theatremachine, trans. and ed. by Marc von Henning (London: Faber and Faber,
1995), p. 46.
308 Kyriaki Frantzi

lar eighteenth-century ballet-pantomime, Médée et Jason, by Jean-Georges

Noverre, ‘the father of modern ballet’, and in the twentieth century she was
choreographed in Cave of the Heart by Martha Graham with music by Sam-
uel Barber. In the second half of the twentieth century, Medea’s mythic nar-
rative has been reworked for the cinema screen by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carl
Dreyer/Lars von Trier and Jules Dassin. She has turned up in a diverse range
of plays, operas and novels that includes Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice
and Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma, Christa Wolf’s Medea and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.2 And in 1996, at the University of California, John Fischer turned
the tragedy into a zany, gay Medea: The Musical.3
Different ages and countries emphasise different aspects of Medea’s per-
sona. Starting with Euripides and ending with recent adaptations, she has
been presented as a great performer and dea ex machina; a witch and sorcer-
ess who, with bloody hands and arms, performs her onstage ritual sacrifices
and communes with the dead; as the spirit of the revolution itself; the un-
willing infanticide, or not infanticide; the betrayed and abandoned wife; the
femme fatale; with the rise of women’s suffrage, as the proto-feminist; and,
during the interwar period, as the Asian and Afro-American outsider. In the
second part of the twentieth century, she was portrayed by Jean Anouilh as a
displaced gypsy; by Robinson Jeffers as a victim of the American dream who
loses her husband for a young model; by Heiner Müller as the infanticide and
the earth exacting its terrifying revenge after years of abuse; and, by – respec-
tively – Yukio Ninagawa and Andrei Serban, the latter a production in which
Jason and Medea spoke different languages. In the 1980s and 1990s she ap-
peared in Europe as a feminist; she was wrongly accused of infanticide in
Tony Harrison’s Medea: A Sex-War Opera; and in South Africa she became
Demea, combining questions of gender and ethnicity. She has also been
portrayed in the Turkish Byzantine church of St Sofia in Constantinople by
the Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos, and used to explore Jewish and
Irish oppression and the concept of otherness after the collapse of the Soviet
regime.4

2
See Diane Purkiss, ‘Medea in the English Renaissance’, in Medea in Performance, 1500-
2000, ed. by Edith Hall and others (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 41, 43, 47.
3
Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philo-
sophy and Art, ed. by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000), p. 4. See also Fiona Macintosh, ‘Introduction: The Performer in
Performance’, in Medea in Performance, pp. 3-5.
4
Medea in Performance, pp. 19, 23-27 and 200. See also Theodoros Terzopoulos and the
Attis Theatre: History, Methodology and Comments (Athens: Agra, 2000), pp. 207-08. In
addition, she has been depicted as the founder of the cities Tomoi and Cyrene, and more fre-
quently as a freedom fighter. Generally, she became an ideal vehicle for exploring sexual,
 Another Night: Medea 309

In the Australian production I wish to discuss Medea is the protagonist in

three recognizable versions of her persona in the Western theatre and opera;
she is presented mainly as the outsider, the sorceress, and as the potential
murderess of her rival and as potential infanticide. Even though the director,
Nigel Kellaway, insists that the play is simple and was performed ‘for fun’,5 it
is clearly a more complex show than this implies, and it revisits many of the
adaptations previously mentioned. The production is characteristic of the
work of the Opera Project, an association whose mission is to examine con-
temporary theatrical form and structures, especially those structures concern-
ing our notions of opera. More specifically, the Opera Project views opera
primarily as opus, that is work and process, and its dominant concerns are the
impact of musical form on theatrical articulacy, the relationship between
small opera and ‘Opera’, and the study of the human voice in relation to the
body.6
The Opera Project Inc. was launched in 1997 with The Berlioz – our vam-
pires ourselves; it continued with Kellaway’s solo performance, This Most
Wicked Body, in 1998, the play, Choux Choux Baguette Remembers, in 1998,
The Romantic Trilogy (Berlioz, The Terror of Tosca and Tristan) in 1999, El
Inocente in 2001, and Entertaining Paradise in 2002 (inspired by the material
and structure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Pre-Paradise Sorry Now). Its
most recent production was The Audience and Other Psychopaths, staged in
February 2004. The productions of the Opera Project combine opera, bur-
lesque, multimedia and high-camp farce; they tackle subjects such as the in-
famous English Moors Murders of the mid-1960s, infanticide and neo-
Nazism, as well as the fascism of everyday life.
Nigel Kellaway’s theatrical presence is associated with postmodern per-
formance. In Australia this was not considered apolitical, at least not to the
same extent as in Europe and in USA during the 1980s, when its proponents
were accused of rejecting history and politics for the postmodern pleasures of
surface and form. On the contrary, it was claimed that Australian postmod-
ernism was predominantly a rejection of colonial history by the consciously
political theatres and groups devoted to formal experimentation. Their work
used the heightened self-consciousness provided by post modernity to link

political, ethnical and racial oppression, and the problem of ‘self and other’ encapsulated
within a single theatrical figure. See Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Medea: Essays, pp. 8 and
15.
5
David Williams, ‘Are you gonna kill the kids tonight, honey?’, RealTime 54 (April-May
2003), 39.
6
Another Night: Medea, program notes. This is also based on an informal interview con-
ducted by the author with Nigel Kellaway in December 2004.
310 Kyriaki Frantzi

comment and commentary on the inner working of the performance and the
external world, the societal and often the global environment. They also
aimed to ‘travel in the audience’s mind and this travelling is not being pre-
sented, or laid out on the stage so much’.7

2.
With regard to the play itself and the plays within it, Medea: Another Night
interweaves a number of theatre and musical works, including Heiner Mül-
ler’s three Medea Texts, Despoiled Shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with
Argonauts (1983), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
and, finally, a sixteenth century solo cantata, presented in toto, composed by
Louis-Nicholas Clérambault, Médée (ca.1710; librettist unknown). Eight
artists, mostly musicians, took part, including Regina Heilmann as Medea
and Nigel Kellaway as Jason, and the Indonesian performer and countertenor,
Peretta Anggerek, as a second Medea.
Müller’s trilogy is set in modern times amongst the rubbish of civilization
and war. It is drawn from the writer’s life and his encounters with several dif-
ferent women, and it ends with the voyagers’ extermination and with Medea
cradling the murdered brother. Müller’s Euripidean characters and setting al-
ready transfer the Medea myth from the scene of early Greek colonization to
that of the twentieth century, dramatically illustrating the consequences of
colonization in every period.
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? presents, literally, another long
and horrible night. Apart from vividly depicting the power struggles of a
modern Western couple, played out before two young guests, the play ends in
a way symbolically similar to that of Medea: with the revelation and killing –
by the man this time – of the couple’s imaginary child which, throughout
their childless mariage, has been their intimate and well-kept secret.
This particular play serves as a psychoanalytical tool for the protagonists
in Another Night: Medea. ‘In researching many interpretations of the myth,’
Kellaway has said, ‘we noted that Medea and Jason’s relationship supposedly
lasted ten or more years, the beginning and the ending of which have been
spectacularly chronicled, but nothing has been said regarding their middle
years.’ Consequently, Kellaway and his team ‘draw upon Albee’s play to
sketch this absent middle ground, to articulate the intimate violence of the

7
A. J. Guthrie, ‘Conclusion’, ‘When the Way Out Was In: Avant-Garde Theatre in Australia,
1965-1985’ (PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong, 1996), available at <users.big-
pond.net.au/aguthrie/phdindex.htm>.
 Another Night: Medea 311

long-term relationship and to view the mythic figures of Medea and Jason as
a savagely middle-aged dysfunctional couple’.8
Interestingly enough, this complex play was triggered by a (non-operatic)
musical text, Clérambault’s rarely performed cantata, given here in French
with English subtitles in an operatic way. The cantata treats the story as a
psychologically complex inner monologue that either urges Medea furiously
to hasten vengeance or tenderly inhibits it. Finally, ‘the spell is cast, the cruel
Furies leave their gloomy abode’ and Medea sends the flying demons to lay
waste to the palace with flames of Hell and to kill her rival. The anonymous
librettist of the cantata, ‘perhaps aware of contemporary morality’, does not
show Medea’s infanticide.9
This particular Medea is played and sung by a half-naked, bodybuilding,
tattooed Indonesian countertenor. This is Medea the bisexual, the lover, the
Oriental foreigner and the enchantress, since ‘there is something of the sor-
cerer in the countertenor’s voice’, the director notes, ‘particularly in modern
culture. It has magical powers.’ 10 For Medea to be portrayed by a male per-
former is not new. Medea is a man-made theatrical character. She was con-
ceived as a male (castrato) role in the Italian opera and was performed by
male stars both in nineteenth-century British burlesque and in Ninagawa’s
1980s Japanese production. In the 1990s, in a gay theatrical version in the
USA, the conflict between genders in the myth took on a more extreme am-
biguity, with the character of Medea being played by a man and Jason by a
woman.11 Moreover, Medea as a character has always been the woman who
displays male qualities (sense of autonomy, coldness of feeling, aggression,
ruthlessness) when she decides to define her identity and assert herself. ‘Me-
dea nunc sum,’ she declares, liberated when she kills Creon and Creousa, in
Seneca. And again in Heiner Müller’s text, ‘Oh, I am clever I am Medea It’s
all quiet now The screams of Colchis have died down Nothing left.’
Since Clérambault allows the interpreter to be either male or female, the
narrator of Médée, although slightly disguised in the Opera Project produc-
tion, is clearly shown to be male. He/she functions as an historical ‘double’
or psychological ‘other’ for the more recognizable Müller’s Medea in the

8
See Williams, p. 39.
9
All quotations from Another Night: Medea are from the script used by Opera Project at
Performance Space.
10
Williams, p. 39.
11
Johnston, ‘Introduction’ and Mae Smethurst, ‘The Japanese Presence in Ninagawa’s Me-
dea’, in Medea: Essays, pp. 4-5 and 195. See also Helene P. Foley, ‘Modern Performance
and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy’, available at <http://www.apaclassics.org/Publications/
PresTalks/FOLEY98.html>.
312 Kyriaki Frantzi

play. There is also a third Medea, Martha, and a fourth, Reggie (Heilmann,
the actress), as well as three Jasons in one: Jason, George and Nigel (Kel-
laway). This, as the director explains, is because ‘with the Opera Project we
are celebrating a history of culture; and this comes from our background as
artists of at least twenty-five years’ postmodern practice and theatrical decon-
struction’. Within this framework, Another Night: Medea can be seen as an
interweaving of art history (theatre, opera, music) with personal and actors’
histories. ‘There are three couples involved in the play that deal with the
issue of sharing power in different ways. The relationship between Medea
and Jason has become an obviously unequal one; Martha behaves horribly to
George who has proved a failure; while Reggie and Nigel have established an
ongoing partnership in which power is shared equally.’ 12
The play starts in darkness with the grand piano downstage left and Regi-
na Heilmann / Medea lying centre stage on a golden sofa. The performers in-
troduce themselves and the material they are working with. A black screen
swings up to reveal a trio of harpsichord, baroque violin and viola da gamba,
while upstage a cascade of scarlet drapes descending from the ceiling creates
acting areas on several levels. Above these, Peretta Anggerek, the pierced
bodybuilder singer, appears as the ballerina in the jewellery box; he sings the
cantata dressed in golden silk, revolving awkwardly to the sounds of music.

Jason’s lover, on the shore of Colchis, learns

that a new marriage is the sweetest desire
of her fickle bridegroom.
‘Ye gods’, she cries, ‘to what grief have you
condemned me, if I lose Jason forever!’

12
From interviews conducted by the author with Kellaway in June 2004 and December 2004.
 Another Night: Medea 313

His innocent narrative is repeatedly interrupted by the ‘Games that the

Lovers Play’ on and around the sofa. These are dramatic heroic solos and
dialogues between Jason and Medea from Medeamaterial, bitter jabs from
Martha and George from Albee’s play with the pianist playing the role of
their imaginary son, as well as campy exchanges between Nigel and Regina.

MEDEA The ashes of your kisses on my lips….

JASON Coffee?

The interplay of sung and spoken text works effectively. Brief extracts, just
sentences from Müller’s Landscape are ‘transformed into a visual and aural
duet between Anggerek/Médée singing the cantata on the top level of the
stage with Kellaway/Jason/George standing immediately below him, spitting
out the text in the music pauses’.13 ‘Jason is slain by his boat’, and: ‘The ve-
hicle of colonisation strikes the coloniser dead,’ as Heiner Müller writes. His
trilogy ultimately refers not only to political colonisation, but also to the col-
onization of women’s bodies.

13
Laura Ginters, ‘A virago took my baby!’ RealTime, 55 (June-July 2003), 39.
314 Kyriaki Frantzi

JASON So, may I speak of ME?

I ... Who ... Of whom they are speaking, when they do speak of me,
I, JASON, I, scum of man,
I, scum of a woman
Platitude piled on platitude
I, called by my accidental name I, fear of my accidental name!!!...
Jason?
No!
Nigel!!

Meanwhile, before and during the performance the audience are treated as
guests. They are there to hear, to be asked questions, to serve as silent witnes-
ses, to be entertained or to ‘be gotten’ in the couple’s games.
Soon afterwards, the bodybuilder/(narrator of) Médée, having finished his
song, re-appears downstairs, without his make up and striking eighteenth-
century half-gown, as though a different character. He sings to Medea near
the piano for a while, and ends up sitting with her on the sofa. Is he one of the
children? Is he now one of the guests? Is he the second Medea seducing,
comforting and turning her back on Medea? He is also, like the audience,
used as witness to the fights of the self-obsessed couple.

And there on the sofa, where Medea/Martha nostalgically recalls her son’s
childhood while Nigel/Jason/George plays Schubert’s ‘Fantasia’ on the
 Another Night: Medea 315

piano, it is the bodybuilder guest again who will witness her plan to undo her
rival bringing the disaster on herself.
MEDEA (In front of an imaginary mirror, wearing Glauche’s bride gown)
And now see the whore
She strucks before the mirror
And suddenly the Colchis gold
A forest of knives in her flesh
(She falls down, her clothes on fire.)
She-burns!
Jason!
I’ll go virgin bride in your first night
And it will be all mine
(she falls down and burns)14

At the end the screen descends once more, again cutting the musicians off
from the performers, and Kellaway sends ‘the children’ (the musicians) off to
bed before wandering off himself, leaving Medea on the golden sofa – not a
chariot – promising her that they will meet again another night. The next
night, when they will perform again.
From what I have discussed so far, it is obvious that the play is a contain-
er for multiple plays, one of them being the one that the actors, either as thes-
pians or as real persons, play between themselves. In addition to that, Ano-
ther Night: Medea,
1. by interweaving three versions of the Medea myth, serves as a witness
for the ways it has been transformed in the artistic canon of earlier centu-
ries;
2. brings onstage a dialogue between different styles and performance de-
mands (opera / live music / theatre / cinema subtitles / modern Western
theatre / Baroque music theatre / Greek tragedy / mime), and it comments
on their relationship;
3. launches Medea as the bisexual who, on the one hand, parodies the arti-
ficiality of opera while, on the other, tells a different tale from the one
that has repeatedly been told about her. This Medea has a triple role to
play: the narrator of her story, the bodybuilder guest who flirts with Me-
dea, and finally, one of the children to be devoured. He/she is a cross-
sexual and, like the other protagonists, a cross-cultural and cross-charac-
ter presence in the play, and
4. brings together different languages and cultures (ancient Greek,
French-Indonesian, German, and American), all on an equal basis in an
Australian performance. Or, as Kellaway puts it in the programme, ‘What

14
Heiner Müller, Medea Material, in The Opera Project 2003.
316 Kyriaki Frantzi

are we to present? Ovid? Euripides? Müller? Clérambault? Albee? They

are all profound readings of the myth.’

3.
However, the most striking way in which this performance differs from other
readings of the myth is that it canvasses the position of the theatre as a psy-
choanalytical forum. It does so not only by casting light on the bloody end of
the drama by fleshing out a ten year gap in the original plot of the myth.
There is a constant unmasking and researching of what lies behind the per-
sonae, either of the actors or the characters. Later material is used to analyse
primal material. Signs and symbols of sex and performance practice are re-
negotiated or hint at many different meanings. The audience is called on to
participate in what is or what they consider familiar and to detach themselves
from it. What is cracked in the outside world is also cracked inside. Projec-
tions directed to others ricochet back. Moreover, without questioning Me-
dea’s role as the ultimate protagonist, the play transfers the focus from the
individual to the couple and to shadowy aspects of long-term relationships.
This leads me to suggest that behind the interplay of multiple roles stands not
just the original myth but an archetype, namely that of the couple and their
relationship, which is absent in the actual performance yet ever-present as the
backdrop of the archetypal conflict story being told.
Left alone, Medea in her multiple guises travels through the centuries, not
only as an astounding theatrical character, but also as a representative of the
archetype of the dislocated feminine, which, precisely because of its disloca-
tion and rejection, becomes terrifying and shadowy. There is a long list of
figures representing this archetype in ancient mythology – for example, Kali
in India, Hecate in Greece (for whom Medea was considered a priestess),
Lilith in the Near East, Morgain (who, like Medea, escapes in a chariot) in
Britain, Hel in Scandinavia, Medusa and Circe the seductress (who was con-
sidered Medea’s aunt) again in ancient Greece; it is also referred to as Mother
Holle and the Dark or Terrible Mother.15 Medea, pamfarmakos yinee –
woman of every medicine and poison – according to Pindar,16 an expert in
poisons according to Müller, stands on the dark/negative side of the polarity
of the female/maternal archetype, as described by Erich Neumann with key
words such as siren, gorgon, harpy, witch, snake, dragon, sickness, depres-

15
Demetra George, Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess
(New York: Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 29, 44, 46, 142-43, 219, 175-78.
16
Emily A. McDermott, Euripides’ ‘Medea’: The Incarnation of Disorder (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).
 Another Night: Medea 317

sion and poison.17 These qualities are not always considered bad or wicked
among Orientals. Aware of this, the fifth-century Athenians presented Medea
as an oriental figure that had nothing to do with their own women. As such
she was allowed to kill her children, that is to perform the ultimate act of dis-
order for a woman, to escape triumphant in a golden chariot and, after her
death, to rest married with Achilles in the blessed Elysian Plain where only
privileged souls are allowed to rest.18
The shadowy presence of the archetypal couple which is emphasized in
the background of the performance appears, as a life experience common to
all beings, in different versions in mythology throughout the world. This
couple appears as Lilith and Adam in ancient Sumeria, Zeus and Hera in an-
cient Greece, Tennyo and the Fisherman in ancient Japan, a rich Mexican Hi-
dalgo and La Llorona, the weeping woman, in an old tale of the Aztecs, as
well as Odin and Fricka in Teutonic myth.19 There is always an unfaithful
lover or husband or father in most of the relevant legends; there is friction
and rivalry around the issue of sharing power, or the breaking of a funda-
mental rule which mostly results in a killing either of the children, the rival
woman, the woman herself or – rarely – the man. In the Greek myth, a child
born from this conflict later becomes the one who kills. This was Ares, the
god of war, born from the rage stored in Hera’s body because of Zeus’s
infidelity.
The shadow aspects of the archetypal couple are supposed to emerge dur-
ing the mid-life period and they are described as the erupting of the opposite
sex or anima/animus component in the partners’ consciousness. These com-
ponents are also defined by Jung as eros and as logos.20 What would be con-
sidered functional, or familiar or mutually agreed before, is no longer, and
something different is sought, usually outside through a new quest or another
partner. Medea thus rediscovers her younger self and is forced by circum-
stances beyond her control to reclaim her power and position as an individ-
ual. Jason seeks this renewal through social status and a younger woman. The
conflicts that inevitably arise can be creative or totally destructive. In the case

17
The Great Mother, trans. by Ralph Manheim, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1963), pp. 147-77.
18
See McDermott, and Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Medea: Essays, p. 5.
19
George, pp. 175-78. See also ‘Frigg (Frigg, Frige, Frija, Frigga, Fricka, and Frea)’ in
Hlidskjalf: The Gods of Old Norse Mythology, available at <http://www.islandia.is/
~oldnorse/gods/frigg.htm> and Clarissa Pincola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves:
Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (South Australia: Griffin Paperbacks,
1992), p. 302.
20
Peter O’Connor, Understanding Jung, Understanding Yourself (Ryde, NSW: Methuen Aus-
tralia, 1985).
318 Kyriaki Frantzi

of Medea they led to a terrifying ultimate union, like the one suggested by the
Greek psychoanalyst and translator of ancient tragedy, Giorgos Chimonas:

The origin of eros is barbarian […] Now she goes away deeper and deeper into the darkness
that eros is -eros must have darkness in order to hide the fact that the Other is absent, Me-
dea’s barbarian eros must have had a lot of darkness since Jason was never with her; he is
not now with her, and consequently he never had been. But she was there from the begin-
ning, she never came out from her darkness and her ultimate erotic act towards Jason is to
force him to meet her through his pain for his murdered children […]. Because eros’s aim is
definitely union and its barbarity the use of any means to achieve it.21

However, notwithstanding the fact that it points to all sorts of peculiar meet-
ings and unions, the play that is presented here is Australian, not Greek. It
has no glorious finale (like Albee’s Martha, Medea is still ‘discontent’ at the
end of the play). Without underestimating issues of gender, class, race or po-
litical issues, it gives equal shares to the characters in the story, showing that
they wouldn’t have existed without each other. They both love each other in a
co-dependent way, and they are unable to find a way to extricate themselves.
They are both betrayed and betray others and themselves. They use the chil-
dren and the guests as objects and they kill them. Eventually, they both have
past histories, nightmares and crimes to redeem, thus being equally respon-
sible for the tragedy that will follow.

21
Euripides’ Medea, trans. by Giorgos Chimonas (Athens: Kastanioti, 1989), pp. 12-13.
 V

The Play within the Play as Agency of

Intermedial Transformation
1. The Play within the Play and Opera
Yvonne Noble

John Gay and the Frame Play

John Gay’s burlesque plays The What D’Ye Call It and The Beggar’s Opera demonstrate the
capacity of the frame structure within the comic mode to widen meaning so as to encompass not
merely abundance but mutually exclusive opposites. Furthermore, as comedy endorses fertility
and ongoing creativity, in these plays the frame structure is paralleled in imagination by equally
encompassing language and equally encompassing human bodies. Yet the degree of cultural ef-
ficacy of the artist, his ability to achieve social justice, is determined by the penetrability of the
inner plays and frames.

A pair of dramatic works by the early eighteenth-century playwright John

Gay demonstrates the capacity of the frame structure within the comic mode
to widen meaning so as to encompass not merely abundance but mutually ex-
clusive opposites. Furthermore, as comedy endorses fertility and ongoing
creativity, in these plays the frame structure is paralleled in imagination by
equally encompassing language and equally encompassing human bodies.
The plays are two burlesques, an afterpiece of 1715 entitled The What D’Ye
Call It, and the famous ballad opera of 1728, The Beggar’s Opera.1 Other
essays in this volume explore plays where interest is centered in the layered
experience of the actor, or the character, or the spectator, but here in Gay’s
pieces the interest is centered in the power – or powerlessness – of the artistic
creator to overcome social injustice.
Many readers of this volume will think of The Beggar’s Opera primarily
as the inspiration for Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper – the origin of Macheath,
Jenny Diver, and other characters, the origin of the paralleling, then fusion, of
criminal underworld with governing-class elite, the origin of the lavish inter-
polation of street-song to enhance the spoken drama. In English-speaking
countries, this ‘source’ retains a major place in the theatrical repertoire as

1
The What D’Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (London: Bernard Lintot, [1715]),
printed also in Gay’s Poems on Several Occasions (London: J. Tonson and B. Lintot, 1720);
The Beggar’s Opera (London: John Watts, 1728). The modern scholarly edition of Gay’s
Dramatic Works is by John Fuller, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) and of his Poetry
and Prose by Vinton A. Dearing, with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
322 Yvonne Noble

well as in classroom study of literature. John Gay continues to be recognized

as a significant poet of the first part of the eighteenth century, famous not
only as a playwright but writer of fables, lyrics and ballads, and modern
mock renditions of the verse forms of antiquity. He was a close friend of, and
collaborator with, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot.
Working with the two latter, he is given principal credit for the libretto of
Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea (1718).
Gay lived at a time of perceptible and confusing social change, when
divine-right rule was being supplanted by limited monarchy under parliment,
when feudal aristocratic values were giving way to those of trade, empire,
and consumption, when a new royal dynasty from Hanover, installed to sup-
port these interests, was unsettling the cultural world with new tastes. Gay
was a penniless writer who tried for many years to secure his career in the old
way, by seeking royal patronage: like La Fontaine, for example, he composed
a book of verse Fables (1727) to dedicate to a royal prince. But such gestures
were no longer very effective, as Gay discovered that very year when the list
of appointments for the new court of George II was announced, and he found
that he would be expected to serve as attendant to a two-year-old princess.
This is just the period when it begins to be possible for an author to make a
living by selling to the public. Indeed, the first person in England to do so
was Gay’s close friend Alexander Pope, himself at the same time a fervent
supporter of the aristocratic and monarchical values that were passing away.
The conflicting and unresolved attitudes of these friends to the old and new
aspects of their age caused them to write best in ironic modes. Mock forms
could draw upon the expression of full commitment while through irony dis-
tancing the writer from endorsing that full commitment. The literary riches
this circle produced in this mode include Swift’s mock travel memoir Gul-
liver’s Travels (1726), Pope’s mock epics The Rape of the Lock (1712) and
The Dunciad (1728), Gay’s mock eclogues The Shepherd’s Week (1714), and
his mock georgic Trivia, or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716).
Gay differs from his friends in having a temperament that is essentially com-
ic, rather than satiric – that is, for him affection trumps outrage, delight in the
ordinary trumps insistence on hierarchy and ‘decorum’. For him, therefore,
mock forms in burlesque mode were most congenial and most successful –
The Shepherd’s Week and Trivia are such as poetry, as are The What D’Ye
Call It and The Beggar’s Opera as theatre. It is striking that when the mock
mode is imagined as theatre its duple nature endows it with a frame.
The What D’Ye Call It takes place in the manor-hall of a country squire
who has ordered his steward to create a theatrical entertainment for his
guests, his two neighbouring squires. The cast is to be made up of the serv-
 John Gay and the Frame Play 323

ants and tenants on the squire’s estate. The squires also will have a few lines
as in their life-roles as local magistrates. Because these guests have had no
experience of London theatre, the host wishes that they should be offered all
of its modes, that the one performance should be a comedy, a tragedy, a pas-
toral, an opera, and a farce – hence the title Gay gives the piece. Using rustic
characters, the inner play mainly burlesques famous scenes from the heroic
tragedies of Otway, Dryden, and others in the Restoration repertoire. The
setting is contemporary – Gay is writing near the close of the War of the
Spanish Succession – and the situations arise from the impact of the war on
the common country folk. The characters and their tone spring from The
Shepherd’s Week, a burlesque of Theocritus’s and Virgil’s pastorals written
the previous year, and the theme may also have been suggested by Virgil,
whose shepherds also suffer injustice from the impact of war. Gay stresses,
however, that, wartime or peacetime, it is the social system that oppresses, of
which the conduit to each country worker is the local landowner, who gov-
erns employment and who also administers the law.
The What D’Ye Call It was written by a man still thinking of himself as
part of a circle of wits at the highest seat of influence in the nation – as the
Scriblerus Club, he and Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope had dined once
or twice a week with several of Queen Anne’s highest ministers of state. In
the very year of that play the Queen died, and a new dynasty came in to
Britain from Hanover, overturning their world entirely. The friends fell from
influence and were scattered. Court patronage turned from British culture,
especially English-language literature, to Italian opera, which even before
George I arrived was being written and produced in London by the Hanove-
rian’s court composer, Handel. King George’s new prime minister, Robert
Walpole, seemed financially rapacious and politically corrupt, boorish and
ignoble. He was building himself a vast mansion fitted out with a huge num-
ber of old master paintings (later bought by Catherine the Great as the basis
of the Hermitage collection). Nobody knew where the money had come from
for these expenditures. Opposition writers compared him often to a notorious
criminal of the period, Jonathan Wild, who ran property-seizing criminals of
many kinds in gangs – highwaymen, pickpockets, burglars – who then re-
ceived and disposed of the goods, and who also as a state informer turned in
many of these very individuals, pocketing the cash reward when they were
convicted and hanged. Wild’s practices were discovered; he was caught and
executed in 1725, but Walpole went on and on. The hopes of Gay and his
friends and the Opposition were fixed upon the ensuing reign. But change did
not happen: in 1727 George I died, but somehow Walpole managed to remain
in power. We have already noticed Gay’s disappointment with the civil list.
324 Yvonne Noble

Judging service of a two-year-old as undignified for a man of his age and the
expectation that he might do so as an insult, he refused the offer, gave up his
hopes from the court, and released himself from more than a decade’s sub-
servience and constraint. From this new context sprang The Beggar’s Opera.
This wonderful, highly original work fizzes with the exuberance of Gay’s
release. The hero, Macheath, is an emblem of the poet’s imagination freed.
In its frame of The Beggar’s Opera a playwright, a Beggar – ‘If Poverty
be a Title to Poetry’, he says, ‘I am sure No-body can dispute mine’ – estab-
lishes that he is attempting to find success by following the new trend, by ac-
commodating to the taste of the Hanoverian court. Apart from its having no
recitative, his is ‘an Opera, in all its forms’, he declares, pointing out its
prison scenes, its arias based on similes of ‘The Swallow, the Moth, the Bee,
the Ship, the Flower, &.’, and even its pair of prima donnas like those whose
onstage fisticuffs had enlivened the Haymarket performances the previous
season.2
But, of course, the Beggar has entirely missed the point of his genre, not
only by naturalizing the opera’s antique heroic personages into London fel-
ons, but also by following so carefully the whole panoply of conventions
while entirely overlooking the splendid newly-composed music in dazzling
performance they had been devised to serve. The Beggar’s cast are street
singers – Gay’s are playhouse actors – and the tunes of his ‘airs’ (not ‘arias’)
are reused from the canon of ballads and playhouse tunes everybody English
knew, tunes like ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Chevy Chase’, and ‘Over the Hills and Far
Away’.
As elsewhere, Italian operas in London in the 1720s were written or re-
vised to showcase each season’s company. This would comprise only six or
seven singers. The arias, in standard da capo (a-b-a) form, ideally contrasted
strong emotions to display the voice – the alternating despair and resolve, for
example, of a prisoner or a scorned lover. For libretti, therefore, plots with
tragic trajectories were favoured, as generating the greatest series of dilem-
mas and intense scenes. For decorum the characters had to be of high station
and of heroic character; they were generally drawn from ancient history, the
principal men being generals or rulers, but with the plots firmly concentrating
not on public affairs but on the characters’ private loves and sorrows. Com-
plicated rules concerned the assignment and distribution of arias and gov-
erned when characters must be onstage and offstage. There were five classes

2
Rivalry between Faustina and Cuzzoni and their claques culminated in ‘Catcalls and other
great Indecencies’ and a physical scuffle of some kind between the singers onstage during a
performance of Astianatte on 6 June 1727 (British Journal, no. 246 [10 June 1727]); for a
summary of the entire feud, see The Craftsman, no. 113 (31 August 1728).
 John Gay and the Frame Play 325

of aria (all da capo in structure), and none could follow another of the same
class in immediate succession. The opera was to be performed in three acts.
Every member of the ensemble was to sing at least one aria in each act. No
one was to sing two arias in immediate succession. Each singer was to leave
the scene after performing his or her aria. The most important arias were to
come at the end of Acts I and II. In Acts II and III both the hero and the hero-
ine were to have a separate grand scena, consisting of accompanied recita-
tive, followed by aria d’agilita, the greatest display of the vocalist’s abilities.
Act III would end with a chorus (that is, of the ensemble), perhaps with a
dance. Given these constraints, frequently the librettist would fail to achieve
a plausible plot. The tragic trajectory generating the intense, conflicting emo-
tions favoured for the arias pointed to the death of the principals as its fitting
conclusion. But the convention of the final chorus required that all the singers
survive to form the ensemble. Just before this chorus, therefore, the librettist
would often introduce an unexplained change of heart in the villain-tormen-
ter, who would suddenly pardon those who had been imprisoned and
threatened with death or who would suddenly foster the love-union that had
been thwarted. In literary terms such plotting is absurd – an absurdity often
complained about – but the purpose of such rules can be understood if we
grasp that the evenings were primarily recitals, with each performer retiring
offstage after his or her round of applause.3
Beyond the unconvincing plots and the foreign tongue the most bizarre
aspect of these operas for the English, however, was that the principal male
roles were to be assigned to castrati.4 It was not the high register of the cas-
trato voice itself that was discomfiting – for the English were used to male
altos and countertenors – but the foreignness of these Italian singers, and the
unsettling challenge to norms of sexuality that they embodied. We are fa-
miliar in our time with sexual difference being focused upon as the index of
moral difference; so does the castrato become such an index in England in
the eighteenth century. As Swift writes in 1728 in Intelligencer, No. 3:

An old Gentleman said to me, that many Years ago, when the Practice of an unnatural Vice
grew frequent in London, and many were prosecuted for it, he was sure it would be the Fore-

3
‘Opera’, in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd edn, ed. by H.C. Colles, 5 vols
(New York: Macmillan, 1957); Edward J. Dent, ‘The Operas’, in Handel: A Symposium, ed.
by Gerald Abraham (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 23; Richard A. Streatfield,
‘Handel, Rolli, and Italian Opera in London in the Eighteenth Century’, Musical Quarterly,
3 (1917), 433.
4
On castrati, see Yvonne Noble, ‘Castrati, Balzac, and BartheS/Z’, Comparative Drama, 31
(1997/98), 28-41.
326 Yvonne Noble

runner of Italian Opera’s and Singers; and then we should want nothing but Stabbing, or
Poisoning, to make us perfect Italians.

In both of John Gay’s pieces major figures are as flagrantly sexually embod-
ied as a castrato, but to the opposite degree, emphatically contrasting native
English wholesomeness to ‘outlandish’ sterility. This figure in The Beggar’s
Opera is its polyphiloprogenitive hero, Macheath. It is not his activities as a
highwayman that cast him into prison and imperil his life, but the enmity he
attracts by his private relationships with women (in this way, as in others, his
story follows that of an opera libretto). Though just having eloped with Polly
Peachum, Macheath cannot resist the company of the Covent Garden whores:
‘I love the Sex’, he confides, ‘And a Man who loves Money, might as well be
contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman’ (II.3). He has got the jail-
er’s daughter, Lucy Lockit, pregnant, and he obliquely justifies himself by
singing to the tune of Bonny Dundee (III.Air 16), associating himself not only
with the Jacobite hero after whom the tune is named, but also with a third be-
leaguered Scot. The latter Macheath’s (and Gay’s) London auditors would
know through the verses entitled ‘Jockey’s Escape from Dundee; and the Par-
son’s Daughter whom he had Mow’d’ that they themselves had probably
sung to the tune: ‘Why should I be in prison’, says Jockey,

For I have neither robbed nor stole,

Nor have I done any Injury;
But I have gotten a Fair Maid with Child,
The Minister’s Daughter of bonny Dundee: [. . .]

For she’ll be a Mammy before it is long:

And have a young Lad or Lass of my breed,
I think I have done her a generous deed
Then open the Gates and let me go free, [. . .]

And so bid adieu to bonny Dundee.5

Sprung from the philosophy he has shared with Jockey, four more children of
Macheath’s, with their corresponding four mothers, turn up to say goodbye to
him as he is about to be hanged. At the interface of inner play and frame,
however, this vigorous masculinity is doubled over with the figure of the cas-
trato who in a ‘real’ opera would be embodying the hero’s part. The ghost of

5
Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy; being A Collection of the best Merry Ballads
and Songs, Old and New [ed. by Thomas D’Urfey], 6 vols (London: W. Pearson, for J. Ton-
son, 1719-20), V, 17-19. This is the last of a series of revised editions from 1699; this song
appears in the four editions between 1707 and 1719.
 John Gay and the Frame Play 327

the castrato hovers throughout the whole performance, glinting every time
the opera analogue is reawakened by the interruption of the spoken text by
song – and this is often, for The Beggar’s Opera has sixty-nine airs.
Even more interestingly, in The What D’Ye Call It the embodied sexuality
represents the crux of the plot. Sir Roger’s steward, besides devising the
multi-mode performance his master has ordered, must also solve a personal
problem, for his daughter Kitty has been impregnated by the old man’s heir.
He addresses the matter in his casting: ‘Chear up, daughter, and make Kitty
Carrot the shining part: Squire Thomas is to be in love with you to night,
girlie.’ ‘Ay, I have felt Squire Thomas’s love to my cost’, she replies, adding
in a comic aside, ‘I have little stomach to play, in the condition he hath put
me into.’ The young squire is assigned the role of Thomas Filbert, a country
lad who is being impressed into the army, because a young woman in the
community, Dorcas, who is with child, has accused him of being its father.
Dramatically opposed to the character Dorcas is that of Filbert’s sweetheart,
Kitty Carrot, who exemplifies the modesty, innocence, and piety that Dorcas
lacks. She beseeches the three justices to spare him: ‘Behold how low you
have reduc’d a maid, / Thus to your Worships on my knees I sue’, adding
parenthetically, ‘(A Posture never known but in the pew)’, lines that a good
comic actress can enhance by overlaying the grace of a lithe young girl in
descending with the awkwardness of someone unaccustomed to her new
weight and shape. In performance we are to enjoy the spectacle of the two
figures playing against each other – Dorcas, big-bellied in the inner plot, and
Kitty virginal, yet big-bellied from the frame, emblem at once of purity and
fruitfulness. The embodiment of the duple Kitty ensures that the audience’s
awareness of the frame-world will not recede during the course of the inner
play.
The Filbert-Carrot plot is finally resolved when Dorcas confesses that her
child has actually been fathered by her own (inner-plot) squire. Now Thomas
need no longer go off to war, and he and Kitty can be united, in concord with
the principles of comedy: ‘To wed’, says she; ‘To Bed’, says he, and ‘Exeunt
all the actors’ from Sir Roger’s Hall, as off to the imaginary church they go.
But Sir Roger wants his play to be more complete than a London piece; in his
production he insists upon full representation of the ceremony. Here the play
reaches toward the puritan anxieties concerning the dangers of feigning, that
illusion might harden into unpalatable reality: ‘So comes a reck’ning when
the banquet’s o’er, / The dreadful reck’ning, and men smile no more’, warns
Sir Roger’s steward. It emerges that the local curate has refused to lend his
gown to the countryman cast to play the role of parson, and the curate has
come in person, armed with ‘two and twenty good Reasons against it from
328 Yvonne Noble

the [Church] Fathers’, to explain why. It was for these reasons that Crom-
well’s government had closed the theatres in the previous century and why
Jeremy Collier was continuing to rail against the playhouses in Gay’s time.
Confronted with this challenge to his wishes, Sir Roger reflects that it is he,
after all, who appoints the clergymen in his parish; he exerts his authority and
orders the curate, then, to perform the part himself. The curate agrees to do
so, but in an adjoining chamber; he will not ‘enter into your Worship’s Hall;
for he calleth it a Stage pro tempore’. Sir Roger accedes to this scruple if the
doors remain wide open, and he admires the verisimilitude of the action: ‘the
Ring, i’faith’ and ‘To have and to hold!’ Yet he is enraged to discover that he
has been tricked – that by means of his own vanity and the steward’s wiles
the inner play has been made to intrude into the frame to solve Kitty’s predic-
ament: ‘Married! how married! Can the Marriage of Filbert and Carrot have
any thing to do with my Son?’ ‘But the marriage of Thomas and Katherine
may, Sir Roger’. And it is, as his friend Justice Statute declares, ‘Good in
Law, good in Law’. As they are Thomas and Kitty at both degrees of reality,
the steward’s ingenuity, capitalizing upon the squire’s rapacity, inattention,
and immersion into the inner fiction, has solved his daughter’s predicament,
has made of her, as we used to say, ‘an honest woman’.
In The Beggar’s Opera the dilemma is for Macheath – what Macheath re-
presents – what one might call the comic spirit – vigour, abundance, ampli-
tude – to escape being negated by becoming delimited or confined. His asso-
ciation with Polly Peachum has brought him the enmity of her father, Gay’s
dramatic surrogate for the fence and thief-taker Jonathan Wild I have men-
tioned above. Peachum aims to turn in Macheath, leader of a gang of high-
waymen, to the authorities, who will convict and hang him and who will then
pay Peachum the informer’s fee. As Peachum has remarked to his wife about
another character, ‘[H]e spends his Life among Women, and as soon as his
Money is gone, one or other of the Ladies will hang him for the Reward, and
there’s forty Pound lost to us for-ever’ (I.4). Transformationally, Peachum
wishes to convert Macheath into an inert pile of gold. Polly, and also the
jailer’s daughter, Lucy Lockit, each in turn encircling Macheath with her
arms, want exclusive possession of him as her spouse. The women’s aspira-
tions correspond symbolically to his physical imprisonment at Newgate, and
their embraces to the circling of the hangman’s noose. ‘Where is my dear
Husband?’, says Polly, ‘Was a Rope ever intended for this Neck! – O let me
throw my Arms about it, and throttle thee with love!’ (III.13). ‘Really, Polly’,
Macheath says later in the same scene, ‘whenever you are talking of Mar-
riage, I am thinking of Hanging.’ Polly and he seem to have been through
some sort of clandestine marriage ceremony together, but she cannot be sure
 John Gay and the Frame Play 329

of its validity – the parson may have been bogus, and furthermore, as her par-
ents observe, Macheath may have ‘two or three Wives already’ (I.6). When
Lucy Lockit – in whom Gay revives his earlier play's successful bigbellied
comic role – expresses astonishment when her seducer speaks of himself as
her husband, Macheath explains that he is so ‘In ev’ry respect but the Form
and that, my Dear, may be said over us at any time. – Friends should not
insist upon Ceremonies. From a Man of honour, his Word is as good as his
Bond’ (II.9). ‘Marriage’, for Macheath, encompasses the whole range of rela-
tionships between men and women of consorting age; as long as the status is
not allowed to be restrictive, the term can encompass opposites. So, as Lucy
is wife in all but the form, and corresponds to Dorcas in the inner play of The
What D’Ye Call It, so, I would argue, Polly can be thought of the still-
virginal wife in the form only, corresponding to Kitty Carrot. Speaking to
each privately (and this is true even in the very last lines of the play),
Macheath assures her that she is really his wife. And she is that, truly, ac-
cording to his usage. And this usage is not his alone, for Polly is asked, ‘Do
you think your Mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together,
if ever we had been married?’ by the consort of the character known to us
only as ‘Mrs. Peachum’. But when acknowledging one spouse means deny-
ing another, Macheath refuses to speak:

How happy could I be with either,

Were t’other dear Charmer away!
But while you thus teaze me together,
To neither a Word will I say. (II. Air 17)

When the jailer brings ‘Four women more, Captain, with a child a-piece’,
Macheath exclaims, ‘What – four wives more!’ – and demands that he be
taken off immediately to be hanged. That is, he accedes to extinction, which
must be acknowledged by his persecutors, rather than delimitation. In
Peachum’s world this is the real ending for felons, and in Prime Minister
Robert Walpole’s world – audiences recognised Walpole in Peachum,
Macheath, and several other characters – this is the real ending for gaiety and
generosity of spirit. Macheath’s death is the ending that follows from the
trajectory of plot: ‘To make the Piece perfect’, the Beggar explains, ‘I was
for doing strict poetical Justice – Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other
Personages of the Drama, the Audience must suppose they were all either
hang’d or transported. [. . . This way] the Play […] would have carried a
most excellent Moral’ (III.16).
The comic tone of the burlesque, however, demands that Macheath, like
his counterpart Tom Jones two decades later, not be extinguished. His death
330 Yvonne Noble

would constitute moral denial of the life-gusto the audience has been experi-
encing and sharing with the characters in the overlap of their existential envi-
ronments, as particularly insisted upon in The Beggar’s Opera by the ever-
recurring canon of song. Whereas in The What D’Ye Call It the dilemma lay
in the outer plot, and its solution through the intrusion into it of the inner
play, here the dilemma lies in the inner play and its solution from the intru-
sion in the opposite direction of the frame. In both cases, conventions of
genre provide and enforce the solution. There, a comedy must end with a
marriage; here, the implausible reversals of opera libretti: ‘[T]his is a down-
right deep Tragedy. The Catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an Opera must
end happily’, objects the Player. ‘Your Objection, Sir, is very just; and is
easily remov’d. For you must allow, that in this kind of Drama, ’tis no matter
how absurdly things are brought about. – So – you Rabble there – run and cry
a Reprieve – let the Prisoner be brought back to his Wives in Triumph.’ The
operatic model, set forth in the framing Prologue, and sustained by the sixty-
nine airs interrupting the dialogue and by the hovering spectre of the castrato
twinned with Macheath, erupts not only to save our hero, but to glorify him
in the vivid ending enacted before us in ensemble chorus and dance:

Thus I stand like the Turk, with his Doxies around;

From all Sides their Glances his Passion confound;
For black, brown, and fair, his Inconstancy burns,
And the different Beauties subdue him by turns:
Each calls forth her Charms, to provoke his Desires:
Though willing to all, with but one he retires.
But think of this Maxim, and put off your Sorrow,
The Wretch of To-day, may be happy To-morrow (III. Air 69).

Macheath finds an extra-European model of marriage to celebrate that is able

to accommodate all his claims.
It may seem odd that a playwright progresses from endorsing marriage as
a happy solution to endorsing escape from marriage as another. Gay remain-
ed a bachelor all of his life and, while he is much recorded and remembered
as a favourite companion to both literary and aristocratic friends, hardly a
trace remains to suggest personal romances or liaisons. What we do see clear-
ly is an imagination at work that works best in finding forms that encompass
and reconcile what in general seem to be unyielding opposites. For the stage,
the frame structure enabled him to achieve this, and the marriage at the end
of a comedy is, of course, the understood reconciliation of personal and so-
cial, moral and sexual. In the earlier play the distressed subordinate is Kitty,
her salvation in overcoming the will of the squire who has all the power in
her social system. Her marriage represents the idea of social justice for
 John Gay and the Frame Play 331

abuses of many kinds. An array of these are presented in the entr’acte of The
What D’Ye Call It, where a series of ghosts appear to accuse the three
squire/justices – two countrymen, dead in war, who were impressed by them,
and the lover of one of them who hanged herself at his loss, a woman who
miscarried because she was beaten in punishment for having conceived out-
side marriage, and the embryo she lost. The presentation is comic, but the
theme of social oppression enforced by squires is serious nonetheless.
Though his lowly characters serve to burlesque the lofty protagonists of hero-
ic drama, Gay has sincere affection for them in themselves, that is, for the
country people they represent. The action of the whole inner play sets out the
pains that fall upon such people when grander parties decide upon war, when
justice is decided and meted out by those who have the power, the land, and
the wealth. Class injustice is treated more savagely by Gay in his poem ‘The
Birth of the Squire’, which perhaps recalls social arrangements in the coun-
tryside of Devon where he grew up. It can give great satisfaction for a poor
outsider to be able to find a way to foil such power by wit.
While Kitty in one way represents the socially oppressed, in another way
she represents Gay as an artist. That the creation of a work of art is like
having a baby is a commonplace, of course,6 but with Gay the idea seems so
explicit that it had to be embodied over and over again. The joke – I am sure
it is Gay’s contribution – runs throughout the play he wrote in 1717 with
Pope and Arbuthnot, Three Hours after Marriage, where mockery is made in
terms of this metaphor of the female playwright’s obsession with her writing,
which is paralleled by the haplessness of the old man who has tried to marry
for an heir. While the principles of comedy dictate that age must be thwarted,
that the feisty young woman he has chosen should traduce and discard him,
Gay does give him the baby he wanted (though not of his own begetting) and
ensures that it be brought onstage and put into his arms before our eyes. That
is, despite genre, imagination – wit – finds a way to redeem the senex, who
would normally be excluded and ridiculed, and instead, as the play ends, to
place him centre stage as a symbol of the successful union of opposites.
Similarly, in his poem of 1720, the ‘Epistle to Burlington’, recounting a
journey by horseback to Exeter, Gay takes particular notice of the babies who
have been left to wet-nurse at one of the villages at which he and his men

6
For examples in England from this period of the male brain-womb and writings as children,
see Raymond Stephenson, The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 98-99; Stephenson also studies
images of writing as masculine sexual performance but almost entirely as problematized, in
prostitution or impotence (pp. 139-59). He does not treat John Gay.
332 Yvonne Noble

stop. The poor creatures have been dispatched off into oblivion to protect
their mothers’ reputations:
Here unown’d Infants find their daily Food;
For should the maiden Mother nurse her Son,
’Twould spoil her Match when her good Name is gone. (ll. 40-42)

Characteristically, Gay has sympathy for both sides, and, by playing the
Christian sense of ‘virgin’ to mean ‘sexually unpenetrated’ against the Ro-
man sense ‘unmarried young woman’, he offers his peculiar reconciling fac-
ulty to the women:
Be just, ye Prudes, wipe off the long Arrear;
Be Virgins still in town, but Mothers here. (ll. 45-46)

During the second decade of the eighteenth century, when Three Hours after
Marriage, The What D’Ye Call It, and the poems I have mentioned were
written, Gay was building a successful reputation, and his Poems on Several
Occasions of 1720 brought in good earnings. But he lost the money in the
South Sea Bubble the same year and must have felt uncertain, anxious, and
constrained in the next decade as he grew older without security and with
worries about his health. We have seen how his aspirations were fixed on get-
ting patronage from a court that was actually culturally uncongenial to his
style and tastes. Breaking with this expectation was a breaking from oppres-
sion, and it released his creativity, as the marvelous originality of The Beg-
gar’s Opera proclaims. In terms of his imagination, he had found his creative
masculinity, he was first the first time in his life fully himself – ‘Sometimes I
laugh, I jest, I play, because I am a man’, wrote Pliny the Younger.7 The
character Macheath becomes his symbolic expression of this new untram-
meled artistic imagination. In The What D’Ye Call It art and artifice triumph;
in The Beggar’s Opera art, as Beggar-poet, must yield, but art, as John Gay-
poet, can free the hero to the fullness of life, while at the same time making
something coherent and splendid out of conventions that had seemed absurd.
Still, the evasiveness of burlesque, its ambiguity, liminality, and duality
casts into question what force the happy resolutions can exert upon life out-
side the performance. Gay’s epilogue to The What D’Ye Call It (I quote it in
full), when all is said and done, throws interpretation back onto the audience:

Our Stage Play has a Moral – and no doubt.

You all have Sense enough to find it out.

7
Quoted by Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (London: Picador, 1984), p. 131.
 John Gay and the Frame Play 333

In another epigrammatic couplet of this kind Gay wrote his own epitaph –
Pope and the Duke of Queensberry managed to get it onto his tomb in West-
minster Abbey:8

Life is a jest, and all things show it,

I thought so once; but now I know it.

The layering is ambiguous in precisely the same way as in the frame plays.
Existing in the frame of eternity, does the speaker see the comic vision fulfil-
led, with vitality, abundance, and joy flowing from God, its source and au-
thor? Or does the speaker lie in ashes in his tomb, confirming that our time
on earth is a transient and meaningless diversion? Sir Roger’s entertainment
in The What D’Ye Call It, we may notice, was a Christmastide entertainment,
and we are well aware that at Twelfth Night for a brief instant the world is al-
lowed to be turned upside down and the oppressed are allowed to make the
world as they would wish it to be. The jest – the steward’s, Macheath’s,
Gay’s comedy – is that instant of justice and joy. But its glory is also its brev-
ity. As Umberto Eco points out, carnival is really complicit with the oppres-
sors; it has meaning only in the context of the iron rules that must be ac-
cepted for the rest of the year.9 In this sense Gay’s frames actualize the bar-
rier between the happiness of ‘jest’ in its glory and the unsatisfactory world
to which the audience must return. Gay as Beggar may wish to extirpate
Walpole-as-Macheath, but, as in the frustrated Beggar-playwright’s ending,
the art that can achieve justice lies beyond the frame.

8
When in the 1930s a medieval wall-painting was discovered behind it, the monument was
moved into storage in the triforium and has since been generally inaccessible; photographs
of it are reproduced in Margaret Whinney’s Sculpture in Britain: 1530 to 1830, Pelican His-
tory of Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), pl. 67B, and in M. I. Webb’s Michael
Rysbrack, Sculptor (London: Country Life Limited, 1954), pl. 31.
9
‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’, in Umberto Eco, V.V. Ivanov and Monica Rector,
Carnival!, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 6.
Donald Bewley

Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude

Opera within opera is neither recent nor uncommon. An unusual example is Metastasio’s
L’impresario delle isole Canarie in eighteenth century London. Comedies by this master dra-
matist of opera seria were rare. But in a variety of theatrical forms – as an intermezzo satirising
its companion opera, an ‘afterpiece’ accompanying different plays, or burlesque ‘rehearsal’
framed by an independent satire – L’impresario toured the principal London theatres. First pre-
sented in Italian as composed originally, then in English set successively by two London com-
posers, it served rival poets as a vehicle for satire. It left untouched Metastasio’s London reputa-
tion as worthy poet, dramatist and moral philosopher.

Evolution of operatic comedy

A single work is all we usually expect for an evening at the opera, unless the
company presents Puccini’s triptych or pairs two short operas such as I
pagliacci with Cavalleria rusticana. In opera’s early days, however, more
was commonly expected and provided, one result being that opera expanded
its range and styles.
Opera’s roots were in late Renaissance attempts to reconstruct the drama
of classical Greece. In the earliest operas, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, for instance,
mythic characters performed and sang their familiar tales, while on the same
stage their actions were overseen and discussed by moralising muses. Opera
began to diversify when such serious traditional works were challenged by
iconoclastic strands of comedy. Monteverdi himself recognised that if opera
was to entertain, especially in public theatres, there should be some comic
characters, lowly born servants or peasants, for contrast and humour. They
either interacted with the principals or played out a sub-plot, a contrascena –
bringing a lighter, perhaps raucous, even obscene, element into an otherwise
high-minded drama.1 In time some sub-plots were played independently, be-
tween the acts of the main opera, as interludes or intermezzi, perhaps bur-
lesquing the main drama or providing commentary on it. An evening at the
opera in the eighteenth century often included two or three distinct music

1
See Part IV (‘The Tradition of Comedy’) in David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 281-387.
336 Donald Bewley

dramas, whether contained within a principal opera, or simply sharing the

programme with it, just as in the spoken theatre the main play might have
plot and sub-plot yet still share the evening with an ‘afterpiece’, some acro-
bats or a brief ballet. Eventually comic episodes ceased to be a subsidiary, as
opera within opera. New genres of opera giocosa and opera buffa evolved,
some as a whole evening’s entertainment, some as companion pieces and
context for another opera.

Opera within opera

The tradition of an opera within an opera has not been lost. Today’s opera
repertory includes a few that are regularly presented; others occur occasional-
ly or experimentally. The most frequently performed is Leoncavallo’s popu-
lar verismo opera I pagliacci (1892): its plot tells how a commedia dell’arte
touring company is riven by the Clown’s jealousy of his wife, the soubrette;
his aria ‘Vestii la giubba’ (‘On with the motley’) tells of the paradox of his
comic role and his personal misery. But during the play jealousy proves too
much – ‘No pagliaccio non son’ (‘I’m a clown no more’) – and there on stage
he kills his wife and her lover.2 Having debated in Capriccio the question
whether the priority in opera is in poetry or music, Richard Strauss in Ariad-
ne auf Naxos (composed 1911-12 to a libretto by Hofmannsthal) compared
the virtues of two rival genres of the eighteenth century theatre, opera seria
and commedia dell’arte, by including episodes of each within the framework
of his opera.3
Shakespeare has been the source of many opera libretti. Hamlet and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream each contain a play within a play and their oper-
atic settings yield an opera within an opera. Of more than thirty operatic
Hamlets, it is Thomas’s French version from 1868 that remains in the regular
repertory.4 Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) is the most com-
monly heard and recorded of two dozen operatic settings.5 As we shall see
later, eighteenth century London enjoyed the Pyramus and Thisbe episode,
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a separate ‘afterpiece’ in 1745 by J.F.
Lampe, in a performance ‘burlesquing’ opera.6
In the last two decades of the twentieth century the concept of an opera
within an opera resulted in at least three major works, representative of the

2
Matthew Boyden, Opera: The Rough Guide (London: The Rough Guides / Penguin, 1997),
pp. 327-330; on CD: EMI CMS57 63967.
3
Boyden, pp. 384-386; CD: EMI CM57 64 159-2.
4
Boyden , pp. 259-260; CD: EMI CDS7 54820-2.
5
Boyden, pp. 542-543; CD: LONDON 425 663-2LH2.
6
CD and booklet: HYPERION CDA66759.
 Opera within Opera 337

diversity within the concept. In Berio’s Un re in ascolto (1984), which is per-

haps closer to some analytical themes of recent spoken drama, a theatre pro-
ducer recalls and reflects on dramas that have mattered in his life.7 Judith
Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987, with its composer as librettist)
interposes a Chinese opera in Act 2 within a western version of a Chinese
historical tale.8 In John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), which
was commissioned for the centenary of the Metropolitan Opera, New York,
Marie Antoinette and her court attend Beaumarchais’s third play in his Alma-
viva trilogy but the composer presents that performance as if alternating be-
fore and after the Queen’s execution.9

Metastasio’s L’Impresario delle isole Canarie

From the eighteenth century comes a relatively minor opera comic libretto,
Metastasio’s L’impresario delle isole Canarie, which illustrates how an
opera’s relationship to other opera could change according to its different
theatrical contexts and purposes.10 The poet-librettist Metastasio (1698-1782)
was the dominant librettist of eighteenth century opera seria: his three dozen
poetic dramas11 were set to music about eight hundred times – the composers
including Handel, Haydn, Mozart and many more; and aria texts from his
operas and his other poetry gave rise to hundreds of songs – by Haydn and
Mozart again, Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and many
others.12
Metastasio wrote his earliest operas in Naples in the early 1720s. The sec-
ond of these, the tragedy Didone abbandonata, was originally set to music by
the now little-known Neapolitan composer Sarro; it was re-set throughout the
next century by more than fifty other composers.13 Between the acts of the
original tragedy Metastasio, and his composer, inserted his comic Interlude,
L’impresario delle isole Canarie, satirising current opera.14 It had just two

7
Boyden, p. 508; CD: ORF WWE 200005 (not listed in Boyden).
8
Boyden, pp. 565-566 (no CD listed in Boyden).
9
Boyden, pp. 582-583; Video DGG 072 430-3.
10
Donald Bewley, ‘English disguises for a Metastasian Intermezzo’, Research Chronicle of
the New Zealand Musicological Society, 6, 1999, 21-52, examines in detail the origins and
career of Metastasio’s Interludes, their various London productions; it provides a compara-
tive text of the various London English-language performance editions.
11
Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, ed. by B.Brunelli, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1943).
12
The University of Western Ontario’s Metastasio website <http://metastasio.uwo.ca>
includes a discography based on the present author’s collection <http://publish.uwo.ca/
!metastas/discography/discog1.html>.
13
Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, pp. 1-54.
14
Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, pp. 55-66.
338 Donald Bewley

characters, Nibbio, an over-eager opera impresario (from the Canary Islands,

no less!) recruiting for his theatre (and for himself) Dorinna, a suitably-hesit-
ant but not-unwilling diva. At one point, opera seria’s characteristic device,
the ‘simile aria’, is mocked. Dorinna sings for Nibbio but he complains that
her aria lacks its proper simile and then treats her to his own composition,
with not one but two similes, butterfly and battle-ship:

La farfalla che allo scuro

Va ronzando intorno al muro,
Sai che dice a chi l’intende?
‘Chi una fiaccola m’accende,
Chi mi scotta per pieta?’
Il vascello e la tartana
Fra scirocco e tramontana,
Con le tavole schiodate
Va sbalzando, va sparando,
Cannonate in quantita.
Bum! Bum! Bu! Bu!15

(So the poor Butterfly by Night,

Awak’d by Chance, in Dread Affright,
Lost in its gloomy Flight,
Flutt’ring, flutt’ring,
Inly mutt’ring,
Seems to ask the aid of Light.
Or so some Vessel on the Seas,
Tost by the North or Southern Breeze,
Knowing the wreck that must ensue,
For swift redress
Fires off her Cannons of Distress;
Bum! Bum! Bu! Bu!16 )

L’impresario began life in Naples as a pair of satirical interludes inserted

between the acts of an opera seria about the death of Dido: tragedy and satire
had the same librettist and same composer. Later managements separated
L’impresario from its companion tragedy to fit other programmes; other
composers set it as an independent comedy. It first appeared in England a
dozen years later, in Italian as originally composed, but by now independent
of its companion tragedy (it was never presented jointly with that particular
tragedy in England); it instead shared an evening with another separate inter-
mezzo, as that separate genre of operatic comedy became further established.

15
Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, p. 65.
16
Tutte le Opere di Pietro Metastasio, I, p. 65.
 Opera within Opera 339

Then in an English translation it appeared again as an interlude, but between

the acts of an English opera. That version was then separated from the con-
text of that opera to be performed in the same programme as a Shakespearian
play. Next the same translation was edited with its music re-composed by
another composer to become a ‘rehearsal episode’ in an ‘afterpiece’, one that
satirised and parodied poet Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, his attack on
Grub Street hack writers. Later it was separated off again and presented at
one of London’s entertainment gardens as a burlesque alongside another bur-
lesque. Its final London performance was as a comic episode in an evening of
songs, glees and catches. In these various guises it appeared in six of Lon-
don’s mid-eighteenth century theatres. L‘impresario’s English versions, its
settings by London-based composers and its journeying around London thea-
tres – as ‘interlude’, burlesque, ‘afterpiece’, ‘rehearsal’ inset in a ‘frame’ par-
ody, as concert item and comic turn – took this little known opera into the
whirlpool of a literary controversy, where it served various purposes and en-
tertained its audiences, but achieved no lasting fame.

L’Impresario’s original context

What elements – supportive or contradictory – might have related these two
operas, Didone abbandonata and L’impresario delle isole Canarie (also
known for its characters as Dorinna e Nibbio) when they were first presented
in Naples in 1724? There may be only the fact that they were played together
coincidentally. This was the time of Marcello’s Il teatro a la moda, a popular
satire on Naples’s favourite entertainment and the young poet Metastasio
may simply have set out to amuse the audience between the acts of his trag-
edy. One usually very perceptive English scholar, Vernon Lee imagined more
relationship when she wrote ‘Metastasio had no true comic talent, yet these
interludes are droll enough – caricatures of the very tragedy that they re-
lieve.’ 17 Originally Didone abbandonata was intended both to star and to de-
light the dramatic singer, Maria Bulgarelli, La Romanina, the ‘Little Roman’,
as she was known. But is it she, his Dido, who re-appears (played by another
singer) in Metastasio’s skit? It seems paradoxical that he should target her be-
cause, despite his religious status as Abbé, Metastasio’s friendship with the
singer was such that when the next year La Romanina returned to Rome, Me-
tastasio followed, so that he and his parents and siblings (Rome was also his
birthplace) could share a home with her family. This arrangement continued
until his growing fame led to an invitation in 1730 to Vienna as Imperial

17
Vernon Lee (aka V. Paget), Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, 2nd edn (Chicago:
McClurg, 1908), p. 264.
340 Donald Bewley

Court Poet. Subsequently, although sending her affectionate letters, he never

invited her to join him in Vienna; and a little later she died – the romantics
say suicide or a broken heart – leaving him her fortune, which he declined,
returning it to her husband.18
Was Metastasio naïve enough to imagine that his audience would not link
his skit with the main work, or the flighty soprano Dorinna with the diva
singing Dido? Was it only after performances that he realised these implica-
tions – for the rest of his life the several editions of his works which he scru-
tinised before publication did not include L’impresario? Whatever we be-
lieve, both operas continued on their way, Didone abbandonata to many later
settings (soon without the baggage of L’impresario) while L’impresario de-
veloped its own independence, attracting fresh settings by Albinoni (still ac-
companying Didone in 1725), then separately by Leo (1742) and even Father
G.B. Martini (1744), the famous Bolognese teacher – and, as we shall see, by
Galliard (1741) and Thomas Arne (1745) in London.

L’Impresario in London
It is extraordinary that L’impresario, a work of such minor significance,
should survive for almost two decades; and then appear for three more dec-
ades around the principal London theatres that then existed. Opera – sung in a
foreign language by overpaid singers of doubtful gender, and moreover
competing with English spoken drama for London’s wealthy theatre patrons
– was a regular target for London’s literary derision among many talented
practitioners, especially playwrights, of that abusive art. This skit on opera,
L’impresario, in Italian but more so in English, served well those who prac-
tised gibes, scurrility, mockery, satire, parody, burlesque, those whose liter-
ary ethic was somewhere along the line where ‘satire condemns, burlesque
condones’.
In 1737, L’impresario reached London, with Sarro’s original music but
by now separate from Didone abbandonata in a programme of two such
intermezzi performed at The King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, London’s
eighteenth century home for Italian opera, by a touring Italian company. As
was customary, the booklet printed the texts, the Italian original in which the
opera was sung, side-by-side with a literal English translation entitled The
Master of the Opera: an Interlude. It is not recorded who made that trans-
lation. In 1741 there appeared another English version in which the verses
could be sung, translated by Lewis Theobald, a notable Shakespeare editor

18
Further details in Charles Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio
in which are incorporated Translations of his Principal Letters (London: G.G. and J. Robin-
son, 1796).
 Opera within Opera 341

and hack librettist. It returned to its earlier status of ‘interludes’ between the
acts, but now those of Theobald’s English opera, The Happy Captive, set to
music by the German-born London-based composer Galliard, with whom
Theobald regularly collaborated. The Happy Captive and its Interludes had
three performances at The Little Theatre in the Haymarket. A few nights
later, as was customary, the composer Galliard had a benefit performance for
both works, but at the management’s other theatre, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Then it was the turn of the librettist for a benefit. This was a so-called ‘com-
mand performance’ by the Prince of Wales – thereby publicly indicating his
approval, although he may not have attended – at Drury Lane Theatre. The
Interludes had created considerable amusement, so was requested independ-
ently of The Happy Captive, but it still had Galliard’s music. Instead of their
opera, The Happy Captive, another drama by Theobald, Double Falshood
(sic) was performed, his version of a play Cardenio, a ‘lost’ drama by Shake-
speare and Fletcher which Theobald claimed to have found, (but which was
later lost again).19 Clearly the only common ground between Cardenio and
the separate two-act ‘afterpiece’, now called Capocchio and Dorinna, was its
English author. Theobald had claimed to be the originator of the Capocchio
and Dorinna interludes, with no mention of Metastasio. He was a controver-
sial figure, his editions of Shakespearian text still today command acceptance
and respect, but his criticisms of a rival editor, Alexander Pope, so offended
that magnificently satirical poet that he made Theobald (as ‘Tibbald’) the
main target of his first Dunciad, his bitter poetic attack on ‘Grub Street
hacks’, authors whose pens served whosoever would pay them fees.
In 1745, L’impresario/Capocchio and Dorinna appeared, this time at
Covent Garden Theatre, in an edited form, as an ‘opera in rehearsal’ within a
frame play with songs – one theatre piece physically within another. The
frame was a skilled but gentle parody of Pope’s revised Dunciad and the
whole was called The Temple of Dullness, (the title echoing Pope’s early ‘al-
legorical Poem’, as he called it, The Temple of Fame). Pope had shifted the
target of his later editions of The Dunciad to Colley Cibber, both playwright
(of plays more successful than Pope’s or his Scriblerian colleagues) and thea-
tre manager who had recently been appointed, to Pope’s chagrin, as Poet-
Laureate. This play was Cibber’s reply, somewhat belated (and possibly
written by other hands) because both Pope and Theobald had died the pre-
vious year. As John Lacy, Manager of Drury Lane Theatre wrote in his pre-

19
See the the Appendix on Cardenio and Double Falshood in Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and
the editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
342 Donald Bewley

fatory note to the copy of The Temple of Dullness which he sent to the Lord
Chamberlain for approval and/or censorship:

Mr Pope in his last Dunciad, makes the Goddess of Dullness preside over Italian operas,
from whence her Character is taken. The Allegory of her being in Love with Merit, but
scorn’d and avoided by him, and of his being betrayed by Negligence into the Temple of
Dullness is obvious.
– The Characters of Capochio and Dorinna are a translation from a favourite Italian
Intermezzo, that was written to banter one of their Directors and Singers.
– Merit is supposed a Gentleman of good sense and sound judgement and being intro-
duced, chiefly to give his Opinion of what musical Performances ought to be, does not speak
in a Recitative.
– When the goddess of Dullness finds herself totally slighted and abandoned by Merit,
she is glad to take Puppibello, and declares, that henceforward, she and he will be insepara-
ble.’20

There follows Lacy’s brief summary of the Capochio and Dorinna plot,
which as an opera in rehearsal had its text much pruned, was relocated in
London and adjusted to satirise the London literary and operatic scene, but
was otherwise intended to raise the same laughs about opera as always. Both
frame play and interludes were given new music (and perhaps some text) by
the distinguished English composer of theatre pieces and songs, Thomas
Arne. He incorporated into the frame play some settings of songs which he
had set for Fielding’s play, Miss Lucy in Town, which the singers of his
troupe had performed the previous year in Dublin.21
Pope’s attack, a superbly fluent mixture of arrogance, jealousy and
spleen, had been three-pronged. He railed against the lack of literary integri-
ty, his meaning for ‘Dulness’, among Grub Street hack writers, his ‘Dunces’.
He targeted his main rivals among them, Theobald, then Cibber. It was his
third target, the cult of opera, spoken drama’s rival, introduced in an earlier
Dunciad and elaborated in the final version that prompted The Temple of
Dullness. Pope had written:

Already Opera prepares the way,

The sure fore-runner of her [Dulness’s] gentle sway. 22
[…]
When lo! A Harlot form soft sliding by,
With mincing step, small voice and languid eye;
Foreign her air, her robe’s discordant pride

20
Bewley, p. 39.
21
Brian Boydell, A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700-1760 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
1988), p. 88 n.1, p. 96.
22
The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968) p. 420.
 Opera within Opera 343

In patchwork flutt’ring, and her head aside.

By singing Peers up-held on either hand,
She tripp’d and laugh’d, too pretty much to stand;
Cast on the prostrate Nine a scornful look,
Then thus in quaint Recitative spoke:
O Cara ! Cara ! Silence all that train:
Joy to great Chaos ! Let Division reign
Chromatic tortures shall soon drive them hence,
Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:
One trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,
Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;
To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,
And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore.23

The Temple of Dullness begins with a ‘Symphony’ which does little to dis-
turb the slumbers of the goddess of Dullness and her attendants; but when it
is finished her first words are:

Cease, O ye Trebles, double Basses cease:

unless your Harmony could lull my sorrows:
The drowsy Hum of one invites to sleep
The sprightly Squeak of t’others keeps me awake.24

The tone is set; the audience is to enjoy gentle burlesque, an acceptance of

the roles as Pope would have them, but with amused resignation in place of
venom. When the goddess of Dullness has Merit, induced by Negligence
(Pope’s harlot Opera) to visit her she says:

The Goddess Dullness I, who for thy Love

Would gladly clarify my clouded Brain
And for a smile lose Immortality.
But that can never be, while witless Bards
Presume to write, and in their Garret vile
Translate Italian Operas, for Bread. 25

This is perhaps a touchingly realistic and sympathetic reference to Theobald,

and incidently a gibe at wealthy dilettanti who criticised colleagues in pover-
ty. Merit, as such, personifies Pope and his Scriblerian coterie. Merit rejects
Dullness, who finds consolation with Pupibello, the epitome of the usually
reviled Italian castrato singer. But while Merit, typically an English literary

23
The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 769.
24
Bewley, p. 40.
25
Bewley, p. 41.
344 Donald Bewley

snob, is reading lines from Shakespeare, Negligence appears and he recalls

‘Times misspent with Negligence […] this handmaid has alluring Charms
that often lead me from the path to Honour,’26 a comment probably not lost
on the audience who knew from Cibber’s memoirs, part of his response to
Pope’s attack, the anecdote of his taking the poet, while inebriated, to a con-
venient prostitute and leaving the little man struggling, an exploit that had not
escaped the notice of some scurrilous cartoonists.
There were other more kindly references to the local literary and thea-
trical scene, there were other moments of fun. But ultimately as a response to
the The Dunciad, The Temple of Dullness proved to be a damp squib. This
frame-plus-rehearsal opera-within-an-opera combination served Drury Lane
Theatre as an ‘afterpiece’ several times throughout January 1745, alongside
several different ‘main’ spoken dramas, some by Shakespeare, but not specif-
ically related to any of them. Its theatre career ended before the end of that
first month when challenged at nearby Covent Garden Theatre by another
skit on opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, setting Shakespeare’s skit on spoken
drama from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Arne’s brother-in-law, John
Frederick Lampe. One can only speculate about what theatrical contexts were
in the audience’s minds, prompted by Arne and Lampe: Italian opera seria at
another more-aristocratic theatre, a consciousness of the heritage of Shake-
speare’s plays, the other dramas at other theatres performed that evening –
whatever dramatic or personal context would have helped each member of
the audience to respond to the current performance.
Capocchio and Dorinna, again with Arne’s music but re-edited from
Theobald’s earlier text, re-surfaced in 1768 in Marylebone Gardens, in a pro-
gramme of two short operatic burlesques intended to show-case two of
Arne’s singing pupils. There was no link, except their burlesque form, be-
tween the two works in that programme. In 1770, back at the Little Theatre in
the Haymarket, (by then known as Foote’s after its manager), and in its
Marylebone Gardens form, with Arne’s music, L’impresario/Capocchio and
Dorinna reached its London nadir and end, performed as a comic item at a
concert of glees and catches, while bibulous gentlemen took a break from
their singing.27 Despite this variety of performances around London’s thea-
trical venues, no music for L’impresario by either London composer, Gal-
liard or Arne, has survived, unlike some of the earlier Italian versions. Nor
have the settings of the songs taken from the Fielding play and inserted into

26
Bewley, p. 47.
27
Frederick Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1962). See in particular illustration 36a, Hogarth’s engraving (1732) ‘Chorus of Singers’.
 Opera within Opera 345

the frame play in The Happy Captive, survived. One can only hope that
somewhere, some of this music will re-emerge.

Satirists and Metastasio

There was a persistent flow of derisive and satirical comment in eighteenth
century London about its Italian opera, from Spectator articles by Addison
and Steele28 in the first decades of the century almost to its end. Was
Metastasio subjected to such criticism? There is irony in the fact that The
Happy Captive and The Temple of Dullness, neither of which was attributed
to him, contributed to that derision. Apart from one polemical pamphlet that
named and targeted him,29 the librettist escaped London’s general derision re-
served for its Italian and German singers, impresarios and composers. Metas-
tasio was recognized, in London as elsewhere, as a major European drama-
tist, but as a writer about serious matters, not humour. About thirty of his
opera seria texts had London performances during the eighteenth century,
starting with three by Handel, then by a variety of composers, although for
performance the texts were subjected to quite perverse editing. Most were
performed in Italian except Arne’s Artaxerxes and Rolt’s The Royal Shep-
herd. The original texts circulated in printed collected editions, approved by
the author, and his dramas and other poetry commanded positive respect
among London literati; some were translated and became the source of
spoken dramas.30 Around Dr Johnson were several pro-Metastasians. Arthur
Murphy adapted L’isola disabitata as a play for Drury Lane Theatre (and
Garrick wrote and spoke a Prologue for it). Anna Williams, Johnson’s house-
keeper and protégée, was helped to include a translation (by John Hoole,
another Johnson protégé) of that same L’isola disabitata when she published
her Miscellanies. Hoole’s translations of Metastasio filled five volumes; and
two of them, his Cyrus and his Timanthes (from Demofoonte) reached the
stage as plays not operas. Dr Johnson himself however contributed only some
minor Metastasian verse translation in playful competition with Mrs Thrale
(eventually Mrs Piozzi).
Apart from the Johnson circle there were other enthusiasts. In 1798 Dr
Charles Burney, the major English musicologist of the time, published a

28
The Spectator, ed. by D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), I, pp. 22-23; V, p. 401.
29
Polly Farmer (pseudonym), The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers and her Associa-
tes for Sorcery, Witchcraft and Enchantment at the Assizes held in the Moon for the County
of Gelding before the Rt.Hon. Sir Francis Lash (London: 1778) [British Library 6461e24
(11)].
30
Michael Burden, ‘Metastasio on the London Stage’, in Studies in Music from the University
of Western Ontario (Metastasio at Home and Abroad), No. 16, 1999, 111-134.
346 Donald Bewley

three-volume biography of Metastasio, including translations of numerous

letters and some poetry (but not mentioning L’impresario).31 Metastasio’s
commentary on Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry was translated into English
by an English civil servant, Hastings Elwin, whose enthusiasm for Metastasio
seems to have dated from the late eighteenth century but who published his
translation only in 1838 in Sydney, New South Wales, near the end of his
working life.32 Metastasio was appreciated in England, as he was throughout
Europe, as a guide on religious and moral matters.33 His religious dramas
were edited and published in Chelsea in 1801 by London’s then leading
teacher of Italian, Gaetano Polidori as a guide for youth.34 Within the next
year or two, three of those sacred dramas, Giuseppe riconosciuto (Joseph and
his Brethren), La morte d’Abele (The Death of Abel) and Isacco figura del
Redentore (Abraham) were translated by a distinguished woman of high so-
ciety, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were intended, it seems, not
as oratorio texts for musical setting but to be read and performed at home
among the children of her extended family.35
The eighteenth century ended with Metastasio’s reputation at a peak in
London, although his style of opera seria, in England as elsewhere in Euro-
pe, was rapidly going out of fashion. It is only in recent years, after years of
neglect and disparagement, and when there is renewed interest in hearing
orchestral and vocal sound as it might have been in the eighteenth century,
that there is more care in the scholarly appraisal of eighteenth century opera
and its sources in the dramatic writings of Metastasio and his contemporaries.
This in turn has prompted more precise research into text, its greater domi-
nance in its relationship with the music of opera and some parallels that exist-
ed and still exist between spoken drama and those dramas that eventuate as
opera.

31
Burney, see note 18.
32
Hastings Elwin, Observations on the Poetics of Aristotle by Metastasio rendered into
English with a biographical Notice of the Author (Sydney, NSW: Kemp and Fairfax, 1842).
33
Don Neville, ‘Opera or oratorio? Metastasio’s sacred opere serie’, Early Music xxvi, 4 (No-
vember 1998) [Metastasio, 1698-1782], pp. 596-607.
34
Gaetano Polidori, Cinque drammi sacri – Scelti per uso della gioventu (Chelsea,1801).
35
Her as yet unpublished translations (1801-6?) of three of Metastasio’s sacred dramas, Abra-
ham, The Death of Abel (unfinished) and Joseph and his Brethren can be found, together
with her own plays (until recently thought lost) The Hungarian and The Hebrew Mother, in
The Huntington Library, San Marino K-D 571.
Theresia Birkenhauer

Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic

Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the
Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera, Ariadne auf Naxos

As a play within a play, the opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard
Strauss, is both conventional and deficient. This perspective changes when one considers the dra-
maturgical construct as a performative mode: on stage the ‘play within the play’ may also signify
the ‘image within the image’, and hence a particular form of visuality. The composition of the
mise en abyme enables Hofmannsthal and Strauss, through the reflection of different pictorial
qualities – metaphorical intensification, symbolic references, quotations from art history, icono-
graphical series – to constitute the theatrical space, not as an action space, but as a pictorial
space, a system of wide-ranging relationships, the meaning of which is fulfilled solely in the act
of perception by the spectator. It is not the reflective modes of the interruption, disillusionment
and distancing that are foregrounded here, but processes involving the reflection (i.e. mirroring)
and superimposition of different theatrical pictorial qualities, capable of dissolving rigid symbol-
ic code, of dynamising and transforming canonical cultural attributions.

Using current innovations in theatre as its point of departure, this chapter will
analyse the function of the play within a play in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos
by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. It argues that, if one reads
this dramaturgical construct not in terms of plot, but in terms of staging – that
is, in the performative sense – then another aesthetic potential emerges. Rath-
er than foregrounding the reflexive modes of alienation, disillusionment and
distance, a performative view places the processes of mirroring and super-
imposing different theatrical images into relief.
We are currently witnessing how the new audiovisual media are changing
the pictorial representation of theatre. One rarely experiences theatre perfor-
mances today that do not use live cameras, video screens or mobile imaging.
Virtual bodies are taking over the stage; the laws of gravity, the boundaries of
time and space, are dissolving in favour of digital and acoustic arrangements
that duplicate the scenes the actors play.
I am interested in asking how these new audiovisual techniques of pictori-
al representation have changed the theatre, and, specifically, how these pro-
cesses have changed the spectator. How does breaking up the linear direction
348 Theresia Birkenhauer

of the production, in which old and new pictorial forms mix, overlap, and
confront each other, affect reception of the performance?
In an attempt to answer these questions, let me take an historical step
backwards and engage with a work from the canon of music theatre, Ariadne
auf Naxos, by Hofmannsthal and Strauss. The opera premiered in its first ver-
sion in 1912; the second and significantly revised version was conceived in
1916 – in the middle of World War One. This was a period of upheaval in
media history as well. The possibilities of technical reproduction allowed for
an accessibility of pictures never before experienced. At the same time, film,
too, became a competitor to be reckoned with. Furthermore, I contend that
Ariadne auf Naxos was a response to the disruption of traditional conceptions
of the pictorial image as a result of mass-production. Hofmannsthal and
Strauss conceived of their opera as an aesthetic experiment that sought con-
sciously to inscribe and reflect upon these contemporaneous, radical changes
in the media: a massive flood of pictorial images and decors that threatened
to stifle any kind of original perception.

Revisions of the Myth: Ariadne auf Naxos around 1900

Ariadne auf Naxos is an opera that continues to polarise both viewers and
critics alike. It is considered difficult, and polemical critiques have accom-
panied the work from the outset. Hofmannsthal himself describes his piece as
a ‘most tricky construction’.1 It is this trickiness that I would like to explore
here.
To begin with, the theme itself is odd: why did Hofmannsthal choose
Ariadne auf Naxos in 1911? And why did he write a work with this title that
stands in complete contrast to its tradition within genre history? The Ariadne
myth is, after all, intimately connected with the history of opera. The earliest
known Baroque opera is Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Arianna (1608). And in Eu-
rope during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there may
well have been in excess of a hundred operatic treatments of the myth.2
Moreover, in the history of the myth, the title Ariadne auf Naxos has always
been connected with the emergence of a new genre, the melodrama. It was

1
Letter to Strauss (18 December 1911). Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Briefwechsel, Gesamtausgabe [1952], ed. by Franz and Alice Strauss, rev. by Willi Schuh,
enlarged edition (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1954), p. 129. All translations are my own.
2
See also Silke Köhn, Ariadne auf Naxos. Rezeption und Motivgeschichte von der Antike bis
1600 (Munich: Utz Wissenschaft, 1999) and Paul Nicolai, Der Ariadne-Stoff in der Entwick-
lungsgeschichte der deutschen Oper. Eine musikkritische Betrachtung nebst einer Zusam-
menstellung von sämtlichen musikalischen Ariadne-Werken der Welt (Viersen: J.H. Meyer,
1919).
 Theatrical Transformation and Ariadne auf Naxos 349

Johann Christian Brandes’s extremely popular melodrama, with music by

Georg Benda, first staged in 1775 and thereafter throughout Germany, that
gave rise to countless dramatic and lyrical versions of the legend.3
The actual scandal of the Ariadne myth – the question of why Theseus
abandons the woman who has helped him conquer the Minotaur (discussed
anew from Ovid to Plutarch) – has completely lost importance in Brandes’s
melodrama. Theseus is seen on stage only briefly as he leaves his sleeping
lover. The waking Ariadne is at the centre of this drama as she slowly real-
ises that she has indeed been abandoned. In radically shifting moods from
disappointment to angst, from fury to lament, from blind trust to deep de-
spair, she experiences the entire gamut of human emotions, until she finally
jumps from a cliff and plunges into the sea. This ending is not a part of the
original myth: in most versions, the mourning Ariadne is redeemed by Dio-
nysus and becomes his wife.
Herder, who in 1802 wrote an Ariadne-Libera as well, expresses his scep-
ticism about this new genre: ‘To hear nothing but the sorrows of an abandon-
ed woman, to see someone in such complete despair that she must finally
jump to her death from a cliff – is this a drama? It’s a melodrama.’ 4 What
Herder criticises – that an empathetic audience, through the dramatic perfor-
mance of an actress, experiences nothing but the lamentations of the heroine
– determined the very success of this form. In a type of ‘melodramatic primal
scene’, the heroine, entirely overpowered by her sense of abandonment,
showcases primarily this: a theatre of affect.5
The absence from the drama of Ariadne’s redeemer, the god Dionysus, is
precisely what characterises the modernity of this melodramatic form. As
such, it deals with a decidedly unheroic and profane experience: the awaken-
ing of the female protagonist from her illusion of love and her ensuing des-
peration, which assumes the quality of a theatrical spectacle in the actress’s
performance. This spectacle is now put centre stage, replacing the baroque
apotheosis of the divine couple.
Hofmannsthal seems to revoke this very corrective from his theatrical
representation of the myth. While he entitles his libretto Ariadne auf Naxos,
like Brandes’s melodrama, he nonetheless reinscribes the second part of the
myth: instead of ending with the melodramatic death of the heroine, the new
opera concludes like the old one, with the allegory of Ariadne’s redemption

3
Ariadne auf Naxos. Ein Duodrama mit Musick (Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1777).
4
Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Ariadne-Libera. Ein Melodram’, in Herders Sämmtliche Werke, ed.
by Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913), XXVIII (1884), pp. 309-10.
5
See Hermann Kappelhoff, Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater
der Empfindsamkeit (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2004).
350 Theresia Birkenhauer

through Bacchus (i.e. Dionysus). This is all the more surprising since the
melodramatic form became especially popular in musical theatre around the
turn of the century, when the lyrical potential of the abandoned woman found
renewed melodramatic expression – for example, in Schönberg’s Erwartung
(1906).
In the twentieth century, on the other hand, the divine couple, Dionysus
and Ariadne, was discussed in rather smug or anecdotal terms. André Gide,
for instance, offers the following rationalization: ‘The island was Naxos. One
says that some time after we (i.e. Theseus and the returning Greeks) left her
there, Dionysus came looking for her and married her, which could mean that
she found comfort in wine’.6 Nietzsche is an exception: he gives us a new but
in no way derogatory interpretation of the Ariadne-Dionysus relationship.
Once abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne, no longer humbled into a heroic nega-
tion of life, reaffirms her own self and finds in Dionysus a sparring partner in
hedonistic philosophizing.7 But Hofmannsthal does not adopt Nietzsche’s
reading. What motivated him to make his revision?

The Poetic Experiment

One answer lies in its scenic conception: its theatrical experiment with form.
While Hofmannsthal places the second half of the myth in the centre of the
opera – Theseus only appears in Ariadne’s dreams and memory – he nonethe-
less places the opera Ariadne auf Naxos itself in a type of doubled refraction:
on the one hand, as a play within a play, as theatre within theatre, and on the
other, as intersected by the actions of a troupe of masked players.
The play within a play was already a part of the opera in its initial drafts.
Hofmannsthal primarily wanted to give the work a ‘frame of his own invent-
ion’;8 then he conceived a reworking of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhom-
me, in which the opera Ariadne auf Naxos would replace Molière’s Turkish
ceremony as a ‘divertissement’, and in which characters from opera seria
(serious opera) appear alongside commedia dell’arte characters. This con-
ception of connecting play and opera, which enjoyed only moderate success

6
André Gide, ‘Theseus [1946]’, in Gesammelte Werke. ed. by Raimund Theis and others, 12
vols (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1989-2000), IV: Erzählende Werke, ed. by Peter
Schnyder, trans. by Ernst Robert Curtius (1997), p. 296.
7
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Mystère d’Ariane selon Nietzsche’, in Critique et clinique (Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1993), pp. 126-34. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Dionysos-Dithyramben’, in
Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari,
15 vols (Munich: Deutscher Tschenbuch Verlag; Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter,
1988), VI, pp. 397-401.
8
Letter to Strauss (13 February 1913), in Briefwechsel, p. 184.
 Theatrical Transformation and Ariadne auf Naxos 351

in 1912 under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Stuttgart, was revised due to
difficulties experienced in the stage production. The Molière framework fell
away and Hofmannsthal composed a ‘frame of his own invention’, in which
he expanded an open costume scene of the first version into a prologue. This
version, which premiered in Vienna in 1916, is the one usually performed
today.
In the revised version, Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain is replaced by an
anonymous patron – ‘the richest man in Vienna’ – who has assigned a young
composer the task of creating an opera seria, Ariadne auf Naxos, for an
evening social. At the last minute, however, through a master of ceremonies,
he orders the players to ‘serve’, as he says, the heroic opera and a dance mas-
querade simultaneously. The action within this new frame emphasizes the
social realm of art much more poignantly: the arbitrary will that the master of
the house displays is less an example of bourgeois taste than of the power
that money exercises over art. The forced conflation of the serious and the
comic leads to a disrespectful view of the exalted tradition of opera, for ex-
ample, when Zerbinetta summarizes the opera in the prologue: ‘The play
goes like this: a princess is jilted by her groom and her next suitor hasn’t yet
arrived. The stage portrays a desert island.’ 9
Are we dealing here with a travesty of the serious genre? This is certainly
possible, considering the tradition of the Italian commedia, especially the tradi-
tion of literary comedy.10 And so it came to be that Ariadne auf Naxos has often
been performed in this way, that is, as a blending of high and low art.
Or perhaps we are dealing here with a parody of the myth itself? Around
1900, the couple Ariadne and Dionysus was often the butt of satire. Franz
Blei chose such a construction in 1909, using the commedia dell’arte figures
for his ‘humorous opera’, Scaramuccia auf Naxos. There the impoverished
theatre director of the impromptu comics travels to Naxos in order to engage
the scandal-ridden Ariadne as a star. But he arrives too late. Dionysus has
beaten him to it: Ariadne, far from becoming the spectacle of extreme des-
peration, rediscovers the passion of love in the arms of an older Dionysus.11

9
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos, Oper in einem Aufzuge nebst einem
Vorspiel’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Rudolf Hirsch and others (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer,
1975-), XXIV: Operndichtungen 2, ed. by Manfred Hoppe (1985), p. 22.
10
See Philippe Monnier, Venise au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1907), espe-
cially chapter 8, which deals with the parodic tradition of the commedia erudita. Hofmanns-
thal was reading Monnier whilst working on Ariadne.
11
‘Scaramuccia auf Naxos. Eine heitere Oper [1909]’, in Vermischte Schriften, 6 vols (Munich
& Leipzig: Georg Müller, 1911), IV, p. 345.
352 Theresia Birkenhauer

Hofmannsthal and Strauss, however, had more in mind with their ex-
perimental form than just connecting two genres by way of parodically mir-
roring the serious through the comic. The simultaneity of opera seria and
opera buffa, prescribed by the patron in order to relax the sternness of the
tragedy and enliven the stage design, manifests itself for the audience, in
every staging, as a mirrored reflection of a different kind.

Mirrorings
The part of the opera that we see shows us nothing of the mixture announced
in the prologue. There is neither the chaotic confusion, nor the comic inver-
sion, nor the improvised montage of serious opera and commedia dell’arte;
rather, we find their suspended synchronicity. This has been repeatedly criti-
cized as an aesthetic simplification: the social bite of the prologue finds no
continuation in the second part and is drowned out by operatic bliss.12 That
the frame narrative of the new version is never closed thus seems seriously
inconsistent and has prompted the invention of many a closure in order to
remedy the apparent problem.
This perspective changes if we view the dramaturgic construction of the
theatre within the theatre in terms of its actual staging, as performative mode.
The play within a play always already implies an ‘image within an image’
and, with it, a certain type of visualization. In fact, the connection between
the prologue and the opera section is not grounded in the action. Rather than
a collision between heroic opera and commedia dell’arte, the audience wit-
nesses a theatre of well-defined contrast; that is, a theatre which presents a
suspended simultaneity of figures, styles, and forms. The transformative
power of theatre resides precisely in the discontinuity between prologue and
opera.
The plot of the opera is simple: Ariadne is at the centre of the action,
while three nymphs, with an air alternately of indifference and involvement,
expound on Ariadne’s mourning. Vis-à-vis this group we have the commedia
troupe, which performs its art in vain. Harlequin sings a song of consolation;
all four men perform a dance routine, finally Zerbinetta sings an aria about
infidelity and love – but all to no avail. Only Dionysus is capable of liber-
ating Ariadne from her grief and mourning. What this narrative simplicity
enables is the development of a performative simultaneity as poetic and thea-
trical principle. The scenic action – extremely meagre, as Strauss himself re-

12
See Volker Klotz, ‘Soziale Komik bei Hofmannsthal/Strauss: Zum Rosenkavalier mit Stich-
worten zur Ariadne’, in Hofmannsthal und das Theater, ed. by Wolfram Mauser, Hofmanns-
thal-Forschungen (Vienna: Karl M. Halosar, 1981), VI, pp. 65-80.
 Theatrical Transformation and Ariadne auf Naxos 353

peatedly criticized – is no more than a foil for the presentation (mise en

scène) of symbolic, mythical, and histrionic relationships. The stage is not
constituted as a space for representational action, but as a pictorial space – a
structure of multivalent relationships, whose meaning is realized solely in the
perception of the spectators.
Seen from this perspective, the function of the prologue in the new ver-
sion of 1916 becomes understandable. It does not serve the prologue’s con-
ventional purpose of preparing the way for an understanding of the story of
the mythological opera, nor is it a replacement for the old frame narrative. It
functions much more as its own frame, explicitly displaying the pictorial
character of the scenic action and defining the representational mode of the
stage as a space for pictorial allegory. This happens by way of the composi-
tion, whereby two levels manifest themselves here as well. The prologue,
with its backstage scenario of the two unequal acting groups preparing for
their appearance in the house of the richest man in Vienna, allows for the
exhibition of a dramatic microcosm of social, aesthetic, and existential con-
trasts. This is a scherzo about dependence, power and desire to show off, op-
portunism and competition, for the representatives of both high and low art.
We are shown a contrast of generations, of mentalities, of conceptions of love
between, as well as across, social groups; we are shown rigorous rivalries on
the one side, light-hearted peer pressure on the other, enthusiasm and con-
formity, economic scheming, and exalted ideologies of art.
The prologue, placed as such before the opera, produces the viewpoint
necessary for the spectator’s perception of the opera section: an awareness of
the reflective mode of representation, namely of mirroring, of ironic disjunc-
tions and correspondences. In this sense, the play within a play does not func-
tion as a framing narrative; its principal function is to produce a specific
vision for the spectator – the perception of the stage as a space for the pre-
sentation of pictorial forms.

Opening the Theatrical Space: the Stage as Pictorial Realm

The staging of mirror reflections and superimpositions manifests itself es-
pecially at the level of different pictorial qualities and forms: metaphorical
condensation, symbolic allusions, references to art history, iconographic se-
quences, and allegorical word images. In the juxtaposition of these various
pictorial forms the stage itself is transformed into a performative model; in it,
historically distinguishable forms of representing myth are combined into a
synchronic theatrical image.
A few examples will illustrate this. From the beginning, Hofmannsthal
ties the opposition between tragic and comic theatre to cultural-historical
354 Theresia Birkenhauer

stratifications. With Ariadne auf Naxos, Greek myth and antiquity are seen
through the lens of Molière’s era – Ariadne appears in hoop skirts – as well
as through that of the Gründerjahre (Germany’s industrial boom era follow-
ing the foundation of the Wilhelminian Empire 1871-73) by way of the
plaster ornaments characterizing that age.13 With the commedia dell’arte, we
see both Gozzi’s Venice and the world of Callot’s engravings, and at the
same time, the theatrical experimentations of Craig and Reinhardt at the turn
of the century. By the superimposition of different historical projections –
both of antiquity and of the commedia dell’arte – these different pictorial
levels become mutually transparent. Clear symbolic contours dissolve, alle-
gorical signifiers become dynamic. Hence, the play-within-a-play construc-
tion does not serve to represent dramatic action as a doubling of the theatre
on stage; it serves much more as a theatrical form layering different historical
media images of myth and of theatre.
The composition of the scenic space amplifies and supplements these
symbolic references. Hofmannsthal’s ‘construction’ works with the visuality
of the stage:14 his libretto is always a scenic – and that means especially a
visual – design. The dramaturgical plans include numerous sketches and
stage directions. They are a constituent element of the composition and not at
all the expression of a dilettantish theatre lover. As Hofmannsthal relates to
Strauss regarding their division of labour, ‘Everything scenic, including the
artistic and stylistic elements, the dances, etc. is my duty’.15 Many of the
stage directions refer to iconographic traditions. The chorus of the three
nymphs, for example, alludes to the threesome figuration of feminine figures
whose iconic tradition reaches from Botticelli’s Three Graces to the dance
figures of the Wiesenthal sisters, and continues further still. The sleeping
Ariadne alludes to an image that begins with the Vatican’s Ariadne and
reaches to de Chirico’s Ariadne, from the pre-Raphaelite de Morgan’s Ariad-
ne in Naxos to Henri Moore’s Reclining Figure, thereby constituting a picture
type all its own.
Other stage directions implicate metaphorical condensation. Ariadne’s
cave alludes to the topos of mourning-turned-to-stone that especially Ovid
connects with her. At the same time Hofmannsthal, who places the cave

13
Hofmannsthal in a letter to Strauss (23 July 1911): ‘Ariadne, von Theseus verlassen, vom
Bacchus getröstet, kurz Ariadne auf Naxos, das ist wie Amor und Psyche etwas, das jeder
vor sich sieht, und wäre es auch als gipserne Ofenfigur’ (‘Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus,
consoled by Bacchus, that is like Amor and Psyche something that everyone can see every-
where, if only as a plaster of Paris statue on the mantelpiece’), in Briefwechsel, p. 120.
14
Letter to Strauss (13 February 1913), in Briefwechsel, p. 184.
15
Letter to Strauss (25 May 1911), in Briefwechsel, p. 105.
 Theatrical Transformation and Ariadne auf Naxos 355

centre stage in a sketch, alludes to the structural composition of Böcklin’s

Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead). The verbal image of the desert island is thus
transported into an art historical context, which – no differently from the
caves, and the canopy that takes up Ariadne and Dionysus at the end – serves
as an interior space, an inner landscape. The list of referenced pictures and
iconographies can be continued: the image of the star into which Ariadne is
transformed in the song of Bacchus, for instance, alludes to a famous motif
from baroque painting: Bacchus’s and Ariadne’s triumphal march.16
All of these pictorial layers are gleaned from the theatre and from the
plastic arts. Hofmannsthal makes clear that the theatrical space is one of
spectres, a confrontation with past generations. These references are, howev-
er, always represented as such, as cultural and art historical correspondences
from the iconographical tradition of the myth. This accentuates their pictorial
and set-like quality, never intended as credible symbols. The stage becomes a
landscape of art and the theatre a space in which historically determined
transformations of myth meet simultaneously. These different projections are
held together through a perspective that Hofmannsthal invokes as his model:
‘In Poussin’s style’,17 as the stage direction states. This does not refer to a
specific theme of Poussin’s, but to the composition of his paintings. As in
Poussin’s antique landscapes, the theatrical stage should open up a perspec-
tive that ‘presents’ – in the sense of literally ‘making present’ for the audi-
ence – the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous and incongruous.18

Superimpositions
On this theatrical stage the worlds of the two genres meet. And just as the
personages of the heroic opera – Dionysus and four women (Ariadne with the
three nymphs) – are symmetrically counterbalanced by the actors of the com-
media – Zerbinetta and four men – so too do their worlds, identities, and feel-
ings mirror one another in ways that call into question their firm alliances.
For the spectator, this involves becoming aware of correspondences and ref-
erences that contradict conventional attributions; for example, when Harle-
quin is deeply touched by the grieving Ariadne and the mythological figure,
turned to plaster, suddenly gains life through the performance of the actress;
or when Zerbinetta, in her aria of consolation for Ariadne, becomes so emo-
tionally involved in the raging fluctuations of her own life that finally she
herself needs consolation. This multivalent structure of correspondences –

16
See, for example, Jacopo Tintoretto’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1576/77).
17
Hofmannsthal, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’, p. 109.
18
On Poussin and Hofmannsthal, see Ursula Renner, ‘Die Zauberschrift der Bilder’: Bildende
Kunst in Hofmannsthals Texten (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), pp. 468-69.
356 Theresia Birkenhauer

Hofmannsthal’s recourse to allegorical images – has been viewed predomi-

nantly in terms of an intellectually saturated nineteenth century and its his-
torical love of the arts, a collection of references steeped in tradition that se-
cure a guaranteed meaning and immunize the work against a dreaded nihil-
ism. However, this view overlooks the changing modes of aesthetic percep-
tion that unfold within the work.
In contrast to the Poussin model, the spectator’s gaze no longer melds into
a harmonious whole, but superimposes different projections, from the trivial
to the sublime, onto the myth. The stage no longer falls into line with the
allegorical space of Baroque opera, but is clearly transformed into one of
modernity. A holistic interpretation of the myth gives way to a reading of its
superimposed historical variants. This binds Hofmannsthal to the concept of
theatre as form, that is, to a theatre in which the spectator’s own production
of meaning becomes central. In contrast to the pictorial space of Baroque
theatre, that of modernity cannot be re-translated. The referenced pictures,
mirrorings and superimpositions can no longer be read in terms of their coded
mythological meanings. Hofmannsthal’s construction is aimed at spectators
who are capable of weaning themselves from definite referential meanings,
from the notion of an original, immutable sense, and who are instead called
upon to discover the multiplicity of symbolic allusions and hence their in-
stability. The audience is thus called upon to discover unexpected corres-
pondences and surprising similarities. As such, the performative mode
implies as well a transformation of the spectator who re-enacts the realm of
his or her own cultural portraits. What Hofmannsthal says summarily about
the theatre of Reinhardt: ‘He has changed the act of listening’ and has used
all the histrionic methods of expression ‘in order to dissolve (aufheben) the
usual relationship between spectator and actor’ 19 – can be applied just as well
to the type of theatre that Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss conceived with
Ariadne auf Naxos.
The reception of this theatre remains difficult to this very day. When Hof-
mannsthal speaks of the ‘playfully artistic conception’ of the opera Ariadne,
while at the same time of ‘its unpopular and aristocratic nature’,20 he does so
because of its challenges for the spectator. This type of theatre relies on a
spectator whose attention is not focused on a dramatic plot but on the ‘alter-

19
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Vorrede’, in Reinhardt und seine Bühne: Bilder von der Arbeit
des Deutschen Theaters, ed. by Ernst Stern and Heinz Herald (Berlin: Dr. Eysler, 1920), pp.
5-6.
20
Letter to Strauss (4 March 1913), in Briefwechsel, p. 187.
 Theatrical Transformation and Ariadne auf Naxos 357

nating play of effects,’ 21 the symbolic allusions and allegorical references, the
layers and mirror reflections of the pictorial forms of the myth. This spectator
is no longer simply impressed; his or her posture is that of a reader who
stands analytically vis-à-vis the pictorial material. The play-within-a-play
construction has the function of producing precisely this type of expectation
on the part of the spectator.
Even today the pictorial qualities of the theatre continue to change.
Doublings, mirror reflections, superimpositions, and projections have become
common terms for technical procedures. However, the images are thereby
robbed of their pictorial quality; they are inserted as swiftly readable signs for
conveying information. Hofmannsthal’s theatre counters such static picture
codes. His theatre places its trust in the imaginative potential of the spectator
to place these images in correspondences with one another and thus to make
them move. It probes different possibilities of an aesthetic awareness that is
capable of responding to the simultaneity of unbounded cultural and histori-
cal experiences.

21
Hofmannsthal insists vehemently on the part of the spectator: ‘Damit ein Theaterstück zu
seiner letzten, vollständigsten Wirkung komme, muß der Dichter dem Regisseur freien
Raum lassen, der Regisseur dem Schauspieler, der Schauspieler aber dem Zuschauer: In des-
sen Gemüt erst darf sich das Wechselspiel der Wirkungen vollenden’ (‘In order for a theatre
play to reach ist utmost, most complete effect, the poet has to give free space to the director,
the director to the actor, and the actor to the spectator. The alternating play of effects can
only reach fulfillment in the spectator’s mind’). Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Max Reinhardt’,
in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols (Frankfurt/Main:
Fischer, 1979-), Reden und Aufsätze II, 1914-1924 (1979), p. 316.
2. The Play within the Play and Film
Erika Greber

Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play.

The Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in
Eugene Onegin

A structural and imagological critique of recent film and classical opera adaptations of Eugene
Onegin shows that this ironic double-layered novel is misrepresented in the supposedly typical
Russian psychological realism. But a congenial adaptation should use illusion-breaking cinema-
tography. The intermedial comparison is used for a kind of ‘media analysis in reverse’: a look at
the literary text with regard to its potential for performance. The cinematic point of view reveals
that the novel is full of theatre/opera motifs and stage scenes and, more general, that its discourse
is shaped by meta-theatical qualities. Pushkin’s self-reflexive novel with its permanent shifts
between ‘life’ and ‘literature’ is well suited to be staged in the mode of Shakespeare in Love. To
be added is the garrulous narrator-author in an off-off-stage position, as if sitting in the box and
watching the performances, talking to other spectators, himself stepping on stage. Arguably the
opera-house idea offers a new type of the play within the play and an option for the cinematic
adaptation of a novel with a self-conscious narrator.

I.
The formula of the play within the play, when borrowed from theatre and
applied to narrative epic, seems to shift its meaning from the specific ‘theatre
play’ to a more general notion of ‘play’, which is to say playfulness and
ludism. Yet in the case of Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, the theatrical con-
cept of play is still valid to a certain extent because this type of narrative
ludism can be conceived of as having a special relation to the performing
arts. Thus in approaching a novel from the perspective of theatrical perfor-
mance, I will not be dealing with the normal narrative forms of reduplication
known as mise en abyme, but rather with a meta-reflexive narration that
emerges from an interaction between drama and novel; i.e., with certain types
of metare-flexivity that can be produced by linking both discourses. The
common point of reference will be film: film as a medium and genre, with
subgenres such as the dramatic film and the narrative film – and two films in
362 Erika Greber

particular, namely the new British adaptation of Eugene Onegin 1 and the
American production Shakespeare in Love.2 In commenting on the movies, I
wish to use the transmedial perspective to develop a new methodological
approach – a kind of ‘media analysis in reverse’: not to examine the film
from a literary point of view, but to look at the novel from a cinematic point
of view. This means uncovering its audiovisual and theatrical aspects as well
as its meta-dramatic potential.

2.
Movie adaptations always depart significantly from the original and therefore
tend to be disappointing for those who know the original text. But bashing
the ‘literary film’ in that way would be all too easy. The point in question
should not be one of literal faithfulness to an original but rather one of
respecting its poetics. On such a basis, one should judge the merits of the film
medium by its own standards. In this respect the Onegin film is quite de-
manding, and some reviewers even found it too ‘arty’.3 However, its artful-
ness is of another kind, one that does not correspond to the poetics of play.
This deviation was all the more noticeable as the Onegin film happened to
come out shortly after Shakespeare in Love – an incidental but very instruc-
tive parallel.
In both films, the title role is played by one of the famous Fiennes broth-
ers, and seeing Joseph Fiennes acting as Romeo and Shakespeare made one
hope for a similar double role for Ralph Fiennes as Onegin and Pushkin. But
in the Onegin film there was no trace of the double-layered structure of the
original text. For a hypothetical comparison, one should imagine an adapta-
tion of Tristram Shandy in which the self-conscious garrulous narrator were
missing – something that could no longer be called Sternian in any real sense.
The same applies to Pushkin’s work whose adaptation is very non-Push-
kinian. Yet the other film has a distinct Shakespearean touch. If only Pushkin
had been half as well recreated as Shakespeare was created.
The crucial point in both cases relates to the idea of play within the play.
While Shakespeare in Love is a witty artificial compilation of Shakespearean

1
Onegin. Directed by Martha Fiennes. Written by Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui. Mu-
sic by Magnus Fiennes. With Ralph Fiennes, Liv Tyler, Martin Donoyan, Lena Headey,
Toby Stephens. Great Britain 1999.
2
Shakespeare in Love. Directed by John Madden. Written by Marc Norman and Tom Stop-
pard. Music by Stephen Warbeck. With Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush.
USA 1998.
3
Jeffrey Gantz, ‘Onegin (Review)’, Boston Phoenix, April 3, 2000 <http://weeklywire. com/
ww/04-03-00/boston_movies_clips.html>; Nicholas Dawson, ‘Onegin (Review)’, IOFILM:
FILM: REVIEW <http://www.iofilm.co.uk/fm/o/onegin_1999.shtml>.
 Pushkin in Love 363

material into a quintessential metafictional play within the play, the Onegin
film lacks the metafictional dimension. Whereas for Shakespeare this meant
overstating the idea, for Pushkin this meant understating and underexposing
it.
The main device for the Shakespeare film was the added meta-theatrical
frame and resulting redoublement.4 Yet Pushkin’s work could have been
transposed into film even without artificial additions, since the text already is
a metapoetic narrative on just that topic: ‘Pushkin in Love’. To be specific:
The fictional Pushkin – a poet-novelist and friend of Onegin – is in love with
his Muse, an allegory that turns into flesh and is eventually transformed into
the heroine Tatyana. Throughout the novel there are permanent shifts be-
tween the two worlds, between ‘life’ and ‘literature’. By leaving out this
ludic oscillation, the film downgrades the original. No wonder everyone won-
ders why the author of such a seemingly conventional piece5 should be a
national poet and why the Russians adore this work and know its lines by
heart. However, as soon as you restore the metapoetic level, you get the
genuine pleasure of the work – even in translation, as evident in the last
stanza of the first chapter:

I’ve drawn a plan and a projection,

the hero’s name decided too.
Meanwhile my novel’s opening section
is finished, and I’ve looked it through
meticulously; in my fiction
there’s far too much of contradiction,
but I refuse to chop or change.
The censor’s tribute, I’ll arrange;

4
The play-within-the-play structure resembles the technique used for turning Don Quijote
into the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha (1965) and the eponymous musical film
(1972) where the novelistic plot is performed in a prison when Miguel Cervantes and his fel-
low prisoners await a hearing with the Spanish Inquisition. Surprisingly, Man of La Mancha
is not mentioned at all in Robert Stam’s study on reflexive narrative and cinematic tech-
niques; he uses the novel Don Quijote solely as a reference for narrative self-reflection. Cf.
Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature. From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). In chapter 3, Stam discusses the inadequacy
of cinematic adaptations of three self-conscious novels: Fielding’s Tom Jones (by Tony
Richardson), Nabokov’s Lolita (by Stanley Kubrick), and John Fowles’ The French Lieuten-
ant’s Woman (by Karel Reisz).
5
‘The danger with western audiences may be that they will wonder what all the Russian fuss
is about, finding the story of love spurned and love lost melodramatic and predictable, and
the wit only occasionally approaching the level sustained in recent film adaptations of Jane
Austen.’ (Julian Graffy, ‘Onegin (Review)’, Sight and Sound, December 1999 issue <http://
www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/reviews/details.php?id=273>).
364 Erika Greber

I’ll feed the journalists for dinner

fruits of my labour and my ink...
So now be off to Neva’s brink,
you newborn work, and like a winner
earn for me the rewards of fame –
misunderstanding, noise, and blame! (1.60)6

Quotes from Pushkin’s novel are presented here in various translations, all
versified and rhymed like the original ‘Onegin stanza’.7 For each quoted
stanza, the best imitation is chosen from among three translators: the famous
classical 1977 translation by Charles Johnston,8 the bright new 1995 trans-
lation by James E. Falen,9 and the interesting 1999 recreation by Douglas
Hofstadter, a scholar visibly in love with Pushkin.10

3.
Both films are of quite different status and different style. Though Shake-
speare in Love is not a genuine ‘literary film’, it provides an insightful con-
trast to the Pushkin adaptation. The drama film can highlight the conditions
of a screenplay and film that has to be derived from a narrative text.
Shakespeare in Love is structured throughout by the idea of the play
within the play, with multiple level shifts, and with all those scenes of mis-
taken identity, transvestitism and ambivalence well known from Elizabethan
theatre. The internal play (namely Romeo and Juliet) is produced step-by-
step in every sense; we see it being written, rehearsed and staged – a kind of
meta-theatrical cinema resembling the pattern that has come to be called ‘The
Making of …’. Whereas documentary ‘making-of’ films normally present a
fragmented series of backstage scenes, here they are combined to form a per-
fect illusionist story. The act of loving and the act of writing become mutual

6
Canto and stanza numbers are indicated in brackets, refererring to any possible Onegin edi-
tion. The quoted translation is by Charles Johnston; cf. note 8.
7
For a discussion of the combinatory rhyme scheme of this specific sonnet stanza, cf. Erika
Greber, ‘Reconceptualizing the Sonnet from a Postmodern Perspective’ (in print for Poetics
Today).
8
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. by Charles Johnston (London: Penguin, 1979).
9
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. by James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford World’s Clas-
sics, 1998).
10
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. by Douglas R. Hofstadter (New York: Basic
Books, 2000). Cf. Hofstadter’s introduction to the translation – finished in Pushkin’s own
cabinet on the 200th anniversary of his birth – and his great book on the art of translation
(among others, on translating sonnets and Onegin): Le Ton beau de Marot. In Praise of the
Music of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1997). For a discussion of the translation’s
quality, cf. Adrian Wanner, ‘Review of Douglas Hofstadter’s Translation of Eugene One-
gin’, Comparative Literature Studies, 37 (2000), 83-86.
 Pushkin in Love 365

metaphors (the making of ~ making love). The catch to this double-edged

production is that play and reality may switch at any time. This is even
emphasised in the script by special stage commentaries. This calculated am-
bivalence is best demonstrated by the rehearsal phase of the famous balcony
scene. The role of Juliet is (in accordance with Elizabethan practice) played
by a young boy, while Romeo is here played by a woman pretending to be a
man, namely Lady Viola. At the same time, in private ‘real’ life, Viola is
conducting a secret love affair with the young author Will Shakespeare. (The
couple is played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes.)

INT. DE LESSEPSES’ HOUSE. VIOLA’S BEDROOM. EVENING.

Will and Viola. Viola dressed as Thomas. He has a present for her – a neatly written manus-
cript of his play, on sheets folded to octavo size.

WILL. The play. All written out for you. I had the clerk at Bridewell do it, he has a good
fist for lettering.
She wants to accept the present with joy, but something in his mood restrains her.
WILL. (Cont’d). There’s a new scene …
He turns the pages and shows her.
VIOLA. Will you read it for me?
WILL (he knows it).
‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.
It was the nightingale and not the lark
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree.
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.’
VIOLA (reading).
‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’
The words of the scene become Will’s and Viola’s, their way of saying the fare-
wells they cannot utter.
WILL. ‘Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I.
It is some meteor that the sun exhales
To be to thee this night a torchbearer …’

INT. THE ROSE THEATRE. BACKSTAGE. DAY.

But the scene is continuing with Viola dressed as ‘Thomas.’

Somewhere behind and up above the stage, in a deserted corner among rigging, bits of
scenery, etc., they speak the lines and we hardly know ourselves whether it is rehearsal or
366 Erika Greber

lovemaking. But after a few moments it is definitely lovemaking. Their clothes start coming
away, their words interrupted by kisses.11

Another comment in the screenplay refers to a scene during the première

where the lovers’ words fit both play and life:

We cannot tell whether this is the play or their life. The audience, and the rest of the world,
might as well not exist. Will turns from her and begins to descend from the ‘balcony.’12

The shifting play is emphasised by smooth transitions between onstage and

offstage and backstage. What is even more important is the ambiguity that is
imparted to Shakespeare’s original verse lines (sometimes intensifying the
erotic, sometimes the literary aspect).
In comparison, the Onegin film lacks such metafictional wit. But rather
than demonstrate its conventional side (e.g., the kitschy duel), I wish to em-
phasise a certain deconstructive play which sets this British film apart from
mainstream Hollywood cinema: e.g., its interesting musical score and the de-
liberate slowness and coldness which create a certain narrative distance. The
acknowledged highlights of both the film and the novel are the two letter
scenes. The letters are the only passages where the film uses rhyme and metre
(overall the film’s language is prose, dismissing the complex Onegin stanza).
In terms of media aesthetics, the two letter scenes are even the best film se-
quences. This results from temporal dissociation by parallel montage: the let-
ters are already being delivered while Tatyana or Onegin are still writing.
And the contents are revealed only much later, during Onegin’s belated nos-
talgic reminiscence about Tatyana’s love, with her imaginary voice reading
the letter aloud. Such nonrealistic dissociations and refractions correspond to
the original poetics of nonlinearity and digression. However, here they serve
to produce psychological illusion instead of ironic remoteness. This is espe-
cially true for Tatyana’s letter scene with its specifically Russian undertones.
(Tatyana is played by Liv Tyler; Onegin by Ralph Fiennes.)
What image is being constructed here? Nothing could be further from
Pushkin’s text than an attitude of empathic sentimentality. And yet this para-
digm has come to determine virtually all Onegin adaptations. The duplicity of
Romantic irony is scaled down to an intimate psycho-drama.
In addition, this style is deemed ‘genuinely Russian’. The movie makes
no attempt to explicitly problematise Russianness itself, as is the case in the

11
Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay (London: Faber and
Faber, 1999), p. 115.
12
Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, p. 140.
 Pushkin in Love 367

novel. There, the Russian aristocracy speaks French and the narrator ironises
foreign cultural influence and his own foreign and loan vocabulary. Onegin is
a Byronic dandy with an English spleen, Lensky is a German idealist, and
Tatyana idolises French novels; though upholding Russian folk tradition, she
can't write Russian herself, so the narrator has to translate her letter for the
reader. In contrast, the monolingual Tatyana of the film doesn’t display any
multicultural refractions, and there is no trace of heteroglossia (in the Bakh-
tinian sense),13 no sense of Russia’s cultural ambivalence and irresolute self-
positioning between East and West. A film production that leaves out pre-
cisely these aspects ignorantly fosters idyllisation and mythologisation.

4.
In view of the contrasting representation of the two classics in present-day
cinema, one may ask: How can a film adaptation (Pushkin’s case) be more
remote from its model than a mere invention (Shakespeare’s case)? In part,
this is due to differing production concepts. The screenplay for Shakespeare
in Love was written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, a playwright well
known for his witty postmodern reworking of Shakespearean plays. The ex-
pert consultant for the film production was Stephen Greenblatt, the renowned
Renaissance and Shakespeare specialist. As for Onegin, its production team
(scriptwriters Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui) did not have comparably
close ties to Pushkin criticism and Russian Studies. But the difference lies not
only in professional literary knowledge; it has much to do with the differing
cultural contexts and with images. In an English context, Shakespeare natu-
rally fares much better than Pushkin, who has to be adapted as well as trans-
lated, not just linguistically but also culturally – something that raises doubly
complicated intermedial and intercultural questions.
Thus another explanation for the distortion of Pushkin’s work must be
sought in the international image of Russian literature, which is almost ex-
clusively associated with realism and not with meta-literary play. Therefore
in a movie that is supposed to represent a genuine Russian classic, there is no
place for the sparkling irony and the wit of Pushkin’s narrator. Indeed, all
adaptations of Pushkin’s verse novel for foreign audiences – in opera, ballet,
television, and cinema14 – have turned the multilayered romantic text into a

13
The only bilingual passage, the episode with the French teacher, has a merely comical
function.
14
This is especially true for foreign-language productions, but also for the Russian libretto and
those opera stagings which stick to the opera’s simple plot structure. In some instances, the
rearrangement of stage productions for TV or video tape has more sophistication. Further-
more, the video medium established at least a simple heterodiegetic plane by retaining the
368 Erika Greber

plain realistic melodrama of unfulfilled love topped off by a dashing duel.

Pushkin is, as it were, recast in a Tolstoyan or Chekhovian mold and smooth-
ed down into a popular, familiar Russian style.15 Thus in the performing arts
and visual media and on an international scale, Pushkin’s masterpiece is
consistently misrepresented; the Russian national poet’s image is strangely
distorted into something like a pale forerunner and not-yet-true master of the
Russian soul. This explains the inevitable ambivalence of all the Onegin
adaptations.
On the whole, the Onegin film was praised for its soulful and beautiful
representation of nineteenth-century Russian society. Some film critics found
it insufficiently psychological,16 while more informed reviewers have a faint
idea that the audience might deliberately be left without ‘enough information
to psychologize why [the characters act as they act]’.17 In either case, the
yardstick is psychological realism – something totally inadequate to a work
like Eugene Onegin, which epitomises Romantic irony.18
The problematic preference of Realism over Romanticism also holds true
for the Russians themselves and their national literary historiography, which
in a way mirrors the international image. Because Russia entered world lit-
erature by way of Realism, the realistic paradigm has come to dominance
within Russia as well. This has strongly affected the Onegin representations
in popular media, beginning with Tchaikovsky’s great opera (1878). Thus it
was a Russian who first reduced the work to mere plot.19 Yet the Russians do

narrator’s voice. Research about the history of Onegin stagings and their filmed versions is
still lacking. There is only one German article on intermedia comparison: Rainer Grübel,
‘Mediale Transformationen des Erzählens. Tat’janas Liebesbrief in Puschkins Versroman
Evgenij Onegin, Petr Čajkovskijs gleichnamiger Oper und Martha Fiennes’ Verfilmung’, in
Analysieren als Deuten. Wolf Schmid zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Lazar Fleishman, Christine
Gölz, and Aage A. Hansen-Löve (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2004), pp. 631-64.
15
As one film critic remarks, there is an ‘abundance of lampoon-ready Russian-lit signifiers: a
horse-carriage rumbling across snowy tundra, a fatal duel on a misty morning.’ (Dennis
Lim, ‘Fiennes and Hawke Get the Cold Shoulder’, Village Voice, (1999), Dec. 22-28).
16
‘While we can identify the causes and symptoms, we can’t identify with the subjects.’
(Abbie Bernstein, ‘Beautifully Crafted, yet Cold. Onegin rates B-’, ifmagazine, 12 (2000)
2/4).
17
Nick Davis, ‘Onegin (Review)’, Nick Davis’ Movie Archives <http://www.people.cornell.
edu/pages/ nkd4/onegin.html>.
18
Monika Greenleaf, ‘The Sense of Not Ending: Romantic Irony in Eugene Onegin’, in her
Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1994), pp. 205-286.
19
A recent study on Tchaikovsky’s opera argues that there are nevertheless subtle musical
ways of echoing Romantic irony, cf. Jennifer Butler, Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century Rus-
sian Literature and Opera (Ph. Diss. University of New South Wales, Australia, 2004).
 Pushkin in Love 369

have the original, while outside of Russia, Tchaikovsky’s opera has come to
substitute for the novel. And now, in the era of cinema and DVD, the Onegin
film will no doubt reinforce that pattern.
Proceeding from such a structural and conceptual critique of common
Pushkin adaptations, I want to argue that rather than modeling Eugene One-
gin on supposedly typical Russian psychological realism, something that is
essentially post-Pushkinian and entirely alien to the poetics of Romantic iro-
ny, one should shape it in the tradition of English satire and mock-heroic ep-
ic, in the spirit of Sterne and Byron, who (not without reason) were Pushkin’s
own intertextual sources.20 As an ideal team for devising a congenial screen-
play, one could think of Douglas Hofstadter and Vikram Seth, who are well
versed in the Onegin stanza and in the deconstructive techniques of Romantic
irony.21
Interestingly enough, Pushkin himself anticipated the selective reception
of his multifaceted text, as evidenced in his self-ironic comment where he ad-
dresses the reader in one of the last stanzas of the novel:

Whatever, reader, your reaction,

And whether you be foe or friend,
I hope we part in satisfaction...
As comrades now. Whatever end
You may have sought in these reflections –
Tumultuous, fond recollections,
Relief from labours for a time,
Live images, or wit in rhyme,
Or maybe merely faulty grammar –
God grant that in my careless art,
For fun, for dreaming, for the heart...
For raising journalistic clamour,
You've found at least a crumb or two.
And so let’s part, farewell to you! (8.49)22

Most likely, Pushkin would have enjoyed the Onegin film – he did not con-
demn one-sided appropriations and expressed tolerance for all kinds of biased
responses. However, this ironic tolerance in effect undermines itself, for the

20
Viktor Shklovskij, ‘Evgeny Onegin (Pushkin and Sterne)’ [1923], in Twentieth Century Rus-
sian Literary Criticism, ed. by Victor Erlich (New Haven 1975), pp. 63-80; Monika Green-
leaf, ‘Pushkin’s Byronic Apprenticeship: A Problem in Cultural Syncretism’, Russian Re-
view, 53 (1994), 382-98.
21
While Hofstadter translated Onegin (cf. note 10), Seth recreated it in a novel of his own
written in Onegin stanzas (The Golden Gate, New York: Vintage International, 1986).
22
Translation by James E. Falen (cf. note 9), with minor changes.
370 Erika Greber

very words that allow for such freedom are necessarily absent from plot-cen-
tered, free adaptations of the ironic original. The question therefore is how to
preserve the original double mode with its meta-level of the ironic garrulous
narrator.

5.
In the 1920s, the Russian Formalists suggested a system of so-called ‘re-
sounding surtitles’: lines of the poem in Pushkin’s handwriting should appear
briefly on screen while being simultaneously spoken by a narrator.23 Howev-
er, this would have looked too stiff, quite contrary to Pushkin’s style; further-
more, because the media of script and performance are categorically different
there was no possibility of playing with boundaries and boundary transgres-
sions. This leads to the conclusion that full metafictional ambivalence could
be better achieved by transposing both narrative levels into the same medium,
that is, an audiovisual performance. As in the verbal narrative, this makes a
flexible change of levels possible.
As a consequence, one should make use of play-within-a-play structures.
I want to suggest that an effective – and at the same time more ‘true’! – cine-
matic transposition of Eugene Onegin should rely on theatrical mise en scène
and meta-theatre. And here is where Shakespeare comes into play again, both
his own theatre work as well as the fictionalised film theatre. The meta-litera-
ry/meta-theatrical quality of Shakespeare in Love is a suitable exemplar of an
adequate contemporary representation of the venerable classics in a popular
medium. And when it comes to stage productions of Eugene Onegin (be it
opera, theatre, or cinema), one has to look back to Shakespearean theatre –
not least because it was the source of innovation for Pushkin the playwright.
During his eight years of work on Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote his best
dramas: Boris Godunov (1825/1831) and the four ‘Little Tragedies’ The Cov-
etous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, and The Feast During the
Plague (1830), with their characteristic mixture of the comic and the tragic
and their subtle use of mise en abyme constructions.24
A look at the novel from a stage perspective, against the background of
Elizabethan theatre and modern theatre film, reveals that Pushkin’s verse

23
Osip Brik and O. Leonidov, ‘Kėkranizatsii Evgenija Onegina’ [1937], Kinovedčeskie zapis-
ki, No. 42 (1999), 246-51 and 251-54. Cf. also Roman Jakobson’s comment on cinematic-
visual aspects: ‘Marginal Notes on Eugene Onegin’ [1937], in Selected Writings (The Ha-
gue: Mouton, 1979) V, pp. 287-93.
24
Cf. Erika Greber, ‘Dramatische Miniaturen. Rhetorik der Kürze in Puschkins Kleinen
Tragödien’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,
73 (1999), 611-42.
 Pushkin in Love 371

novel is more than just an epic narrative; indeed, it displays basic theatrical
qualities. This pertains to theme and plot as well as to structure and verbal
form, so that both narrative levels are interlaced, as is the case in play-within-
a-play figurations.
The first chapter is already full of theatre motifs and stage scenes: Onegin
regularly attends opera and ballet and his friend, the narrator-writer, is an ad-
mirer of ballerinas. The world of the stage is presented as ‘volshebnyj kraj’,
an ‘enchanted land’. This is always a double show, as not only the actors and
dancers but also the audience are showing themselves off (cf. especially
stanza 1.17). Theatre affects life and life is wholly theatrical. This applies not
only to the actual theatre settings, but also to everyday life. Identity and char-
acter are something that is stylised and staged. Onegin’s dandyism is quite
literally a self-fashioning, as is told in the delightful sequence of ‘fashion
stanzas’ (1.23-25) ending with the narrator’s self-reflexive comment on fash-
ion vocabulary (1.26) – a presentation that exposes the mechanisms of self-
construction as verbal and performative. The theatrical character of the entire
narrative is underlined by the frequent motif of the latest visual technology,
the lorgnette and the opera glass.
The plot’s theatricality is reinforced by the verbal discourse: the epic is
replete with concepts of showing, looking, viewing, and staging. The narrator
uses visual and kinetic terms, presenting the events and his comments very
concretely to a participating reader. An unusually frequent word is vot (look,
look here). The narrator pretends to move together with the reader through
the theatre world:

But let’s abandon idle chatter

And hasten rather to forestall
Our hero’s headlong, dashing clatter
In hired coach towards the ball. (1.27, lines 1-4)
[...]
But look, Onegin’s at the gateway;
He’s past the porter, up the stair,
Through marble entry rushes straightway,
Then runs his fingers through his hair,
And steps inside. The crush increases [...] (1.28, lines 1-5) 25

As this quotation and numerous other passages demonstrate, the narration is

often a ‘showing’ in the material sense of visual demonstration to a voyeur’s
eye – a fact that allows for investing the classic narratological term (cf.

25
Translation by James E. Falen (cf. note 9).
372 Erika Greber

Lubbock’s showing/telling opposition) with a media-related technological

(‘media-technological’) meaning.
In the last canto, this sort of ostentation appears in a kind of allegoric
meta-reflexive configuration: the narrator-novelist watches his Muse watch-
ing a social gathering (8.6-8). It is with her gaze, later on with anonymous
gazes, that the reader virtually ‘sees’ how the party guests look at each other,
how Onegin emerges in the picture, how the hostess appears, how Onegin
looks at her through his lorgnette and suddenly recognises Tatyana.
Elsewhere, the narrator asks the reader to ‘eavesdrop’ on his talk with the
hero (3.4). His entire narrative is so concrete, corporeal, scenic and plastic
that it virtually suggests an audiovisual realisation on stage. The narrator is a
real person (in fact, the main character!), the friend of Onegin, the preserver
of Lensky’s literary legacy, and the translator of Tatyana; at the very begin-
ning of the novel, he even shakes hands with the reader. Hence in a film ver-
sion he should not be reduced to a voice or to script, but must be a personage
in a full role – sometimes on the same story level as the others (intra-/ homo-
diegetic), sometimes on a higher narrative level (extra-/heterodiegetic).
To cut a long argument short, one could transpose the novel into a film
scenario in an opera house or theatre hall, where the narrator sits in the box
and watches the performances, sometimes gossiping with other theatregoers,
sometimes addressing the real moviegoer by speaking directly to the camera,
sometimes stepping on stage himself. Within such a design, there are flexible
possibilities for the narrator to switch between hetero- and homodiegetic po-
sitions, just as in the novel. Technical means like opera glass and lorgnette
could be used to regulate narratorial focalisation. Altogether, this scenario
guarantees both narrative distance and performative involvement.

6.
A theoretical résumé of the play-within-the-play figuration (or rather figura-
tions) reveals that none of the standard formulas would be applicable. Nor-
mally there is a stable relationship and reliable distinction between the
interior play and the exterior playing. In the modern self-reflexive type (such
as in Shakespeare in Love), these distinctions become fluid for a moment
before they are stabilised again, whereby phases of deliberate ambiguity are
created. In both types, the characters belong to the fictional world, be it first
or second level (onstage or offstage). But a narrator may be outside both
worlds, out-side both fictions, and this is why for Eugene Onegin one needs
still another, additional ontological sphere (off-off-stage, so to speak) where
complex meta-fictional operations may take place. This is why I suggest the
scenario of an opera house where the narrator-actor can sometimes merely
 Pushkin in Love 373

accompany the stage action, talking to his partner, the reader/viewer. Of

course, the recipient him-/herself 26 can’t be shown in the film but is always
extradiegetic. However, there already exist new ideas for realizing such
positions in audio-visual media, ranging from the direct look to the camera
(as used in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain,
2001) or the radi-cally ‘dialogic’ camera of the Eremitage film by Alexander
Sokurov (Russian Arch, 2003) to the device of ego-shooters in virtual
adventure games.
In effect, the opera-house scenario 27 establishes a new type of play-
within-a-play figuration with expanded artistic communication. Thus the
opera-house idea is an option for the cinematic adaptation of a novel with a
self-conscious narrator addressing an audience. And it can even, as I have
argued in the case of Eugene Onegin, be in perfect accord with a novelistic
pretext whose narration is characterised by theatricality and performativity.
Another option emerges with a cinema scenario: the narrator as cinema-
goer, watching movies – films which he authored and films in which he is
starring. This scenario would allow for witty meta-cinematic sequences. But
probably the division between the levels would on the whole be too strict
because of the media difference (live presence vs. prefabricated film); unless,
of course, one decides for a radical solution and presents the whole thing as
‘The Making of Eugene Onegin’.
In this cinematographic context, it is noteworthy that the earliest form of
metacinema with metalepsis (strange loop) was created in Russia: Long be-
fore Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, the Russian avant-garde poet,
playwright, script writer, film actor and film director Vladimir Mayakovsky
had a woman descend from a stage poster into life (in the short film with the
punning title Captivated by Film / Zakovannaja fil’moj, 1918). The essential
point here is that the media are being reflected by a foregrounding of devices
– for example, by the demonstrative use of a white tablecloth as a kind of
screen (pictorial space, photo poster) with the ballerina posing before it. The
illusion, in other words, is presented as artful construction. Such clear self-
consciousness on the part of Mayakovsky may well have its roots in Pushkin.
It is certainly no coincidence that the original prologue to Eugene Onegin,
namely the highly amusing metapoetic poem Conversation between Poet and
Bookseller, found its counterpart in Mayakovksky’s equally witty metapoetic
Conversation between Poet and Tax Inspector. (Incidentally, the actor who

26
In the novel, the reader’s gender is clearly male.
27
The above use of the expression ‘opera house’ doesn’t mean that the plot must necessarily
be staged in opera form, but indicates the type of building and communicative relations; the
word ‘theatre’ would be too inspecific.
374 Erika Greber

played the ballerina was Lilya Brik, the wife of the formalist scholar who
would later work on the above-mentioned film script for Eugene Onegin).
The intense self-consciousness of the Russian avant-garde and their early use
of metalepsis may well be related to the fact that Russia’s best loved literary
work is a self-conscious metafiction. This brief digression on avant-garde
cinema highlights the problem of illusion, the basic issue of the concluding
section.

7.
The play within the play, as it has been realised in metafictional films up to
now, relies on mimetic illusion in both spheres. Each action level is consist-
ent in itself (according to recent metafiction theory: ‘primary and secondary
illusion’ 28): the real world and the world of naturalistic theatre, with the in-
tersection of life and play being realistically motivated by the loving couple
as theatre actors. Illusion-breaking effects are minimised or incorporated in-
sofar as the ingenuity lies precisely in the amazing correspondence between
the two levels. Depending on whether the trick must deceive the internal au-
dience or the external cinema audience, one finds different degrees of illusion
in various films, from Shakespeare in Love to Man of La Mancha and The
French Lieutenant’s Woman or The Purple Rose of Cairo.
In contrast to such tamed illusion, where duplicity and theatrical stage-
ability is based on the motif of concrete role-acting, Pushkin’s case belongs
to the paradigm of Romantic irony and is thus fundamentally non- or anti-
illusive. A short cogent example: The duel is not melodramatic at all (as it is
presented in all the adaptations), but the narrator narrates and comments on it
in a defamiliarising way. This passage might be congenially filmed as a
threefold funeral (of the same person!) in changing styles with different fu-
neral ceremonies or by showing one photo album with alternative biographies
of the same person.
Pushkin’s narrator and reader can freely move within the various worlds.
The shifts between frames (metalepses) are not a consequence of theatrical
role-play, but of the play of imagination and reminiscence. Thus there may
arise quite capricious metaleptic jumps and strange loops (among them the
probably most ingenious metalepsis of world literature29). This constitutes a

28
Werner Wolf, ‘Illusion and Illusion Breaking in Twentieth-Century Fiction’, in Aesthetic Il-
lusion. Theoretical and Historical Approaches, ed. by Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape
(Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 284-97.
29
The double-voiced presentation of Lensky’s last elegy (stanzas 6.21-6.22, beginning only at
the third line): the character’s poem is converted into the narrator’s discourse – the Onegin
stanza – and is thus made to posthumously rhyme with another’s rhymes from an alien die-
 Pushkin in Love 375

major difference between a dramatic and an epic film, and it is most visible
in the contrast between naturalist poetics and non-illusionist poetics. In Euge-
ne Onegin, these jumps must be visible, in accordance with the spirit of Ro-
mantic irony: as construction, as defamiliarisation, as a twinkle of imagina-
tion, as aporia.
The idea of metalepsis and strange loop, when understood as a scenic-
theatrical and meta-dramatic mode, makes some peculiar passages in Push-
kin’s novel suddenly understandable and stageable. Here we get right to the
scenario of ‘Pushkin in Love’. The most important aspect is the figure of the
Muse: she first appears in the classical allegorical function, but in the end this
rhetorical figure is transformed into a concrete character of flesh and blood;
the invoked Muse becomes the author’s beloved and somehow also – rather
illogically – metamorphoses into the heroine Tatyana. This obscure trans-
formative figuration attains theatrical palpability through the model of meta-
lepsis. The series of seven subsequent stanzas begins with the parodic invoca-
tion of the Muse (which comes only in the 7th canto instead of at the novel’s
beginning):

I praise a youthful friend and cousin.

I sing his life, full many a quirk,
And pray that to my drawn-out work,
You’ll render, epic muse, your blessing.
A trusty staff you’ve tendered me:
May I not blunder aimlessly.
Enough: no longer’s duty pressing!
To classic style I’ve tipped my hat.
Though late, my foreword’s done: that’s that! (7.55, line 6-14)30

Of course, Pushkin alludes here to the mock-heroic invocations familiar

from Sterne, Wieland,31 and Byron. In the next canto, the mythological Muse
enters real life, an exciting love life with the young author; and in the afore-
mentioned party scene, she somehow seems to coincide with the heroine Tat-
yana. This innovative sequence of invocation–evocation–embodiment–trans-
formation creates a kind of realised metaphor by means of performance. It is
a figuration of deliberate ambivalence derived from Romantic irony. The cin-

gesis. Cf. Erika Greber, ‘A. S. Puschkin: Evgenij Onegin’, in Der russische Roman, ed. by
Bodo Zelinsky (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2006), pp. 1-26.
30
Translation by Douglas Hofstadter (cf. note 10), original italics.
31
On the Russian reception of Wieland, cf. K. Günther, ‘Wieland und Rußland. Die Wieland-
Rezeption in Rußland’, Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 13 (1968), 496-511 and 695-712; Gerda
Warning, Die Funktion des Erzählers in Wielands ‘Oberon’ und Puschkins ‘Ruslan und
Ludmila’ (Diss. University of Basel, 1975).
376 Erika Greber

ematographic production might be sketched as follows: we see an antique

statue of the Muse on a high pedestal, the author at her feet recites Virgil’s
canonic invocation ‘Arma virumque cano’ with an ironic gesture; the Muse
descends, shows him her modern backside, then goes off with him to literary
cafés where they have a rousing good time. Fragmentary evocations would
do, and the story of ‘Pushkin in Love’ would, like its pretext, be cut off at the
most suspenseful moment.
To sum up, the poetics of Eugene Onegin calls for totally different de-
vices than have been used to date. In particular, it displays a greater variety of
metaleptic shifts, including ‘impossible’ strange loops. Instead of smooth
narrative cinema with a one-sided plot, an illusion-breaking, double-sided
brand of cinematography would be most suitable for a truly congenial Onegin
film. In terms of film technique, the tricks and devices of cartoon films and
the latest digital techniques (such as morphing) correspond to the old literary
devices of Romantic irony.
Alessandro Abbate

The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen: Multi-
Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

Two of the most controversial films produced during the last decade of the twentieth century, a
time of huge revival of Shakespeare on screen, are Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet and
Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet. Both directors present a Shakespeare for the young gener-
ation, adopting a mise-en-scène abundant in references to pop culture and mass media and play-
ing with various intertextual practices of postmodernism. Although radically different in style,
the two films share a similar intention to incorporate different layers of representation, so that the
Shakespearean device of the play within the play becomes the film, the rock video, the advertise-
ment, the television news within the film, and, more generally, the screen within the screen.

Almereyda reads Hamlet as a contemporary tragedy of technological and

media-driven solipsism, in which ‘life has become a matter of negotiation
between essence and simulation; where reality and façade, being and per-
forming, have blurred into one; and where human relationships have become
a disembodied dial-up network.’1
Hamlet is a young filmmaker addicted to video technology. It is not sur-
prise, therefore, that The Mousetrap, the thing wherein he will catch the con-
science of the king, becomes a film within the film. The way in which Ham-
let prepares his video exemplifies the state of solitude and isolation in which
he lives, one related to the vanishing of embodied persons: alone in his room,
surrounded by monitors, speakers, and a variety of electronic recording de-
vices, Hamlet sits silently editing, mesmerized by the flickering lights on the
various screens. As one reviewer has put it, Almereyda’s hero ‘is not a col-
laborative artist and has no such love of community projects.’2 Shakespeare’s
hero has an authentic passion for the theatre, one he enjoys sharing with the
strolling players who come to Elsinore. Indeed, the players, it seems, are the

1
Alessandro Abbate, ‘”To Be or Inter-Be”: Almereyda’s end-of-millennium Hamlet’, Lit-
erature/Film Quarterly, 32 (2004), 82-89 (p. 82).
2
Jaime N. Christley, ‘Hamlet (2000) and Hamlet (1996)’, Film Written Magazine, 11 June 2000
<http://www.filmwritten.org/reviews/2000/hamlet96_hamlet00.htm> (accessed 24 June 2001).
378 Alessandro Abbate

only human beings Hamlet trusts, the only ones he considers worthy of
respect. There is none of this in the film: Shakespeare’s players become no
more than video files and film clips to be assembled on Hamlet’s PC. Tech-
nological progress has made live performance obsolete, and these ‘abstract
and brief chronicles of the time’ are merely downloaded into a hard-drive
memory.3
The shift from theatrical ‘in person’ to cinematic ‘by a camera’ perfor-
mance illustrates Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the mechanical reproduc-
ibility of art.4 As John Storey argues, the loss of the aura ‘opens to a plurality
of reinterpretation; freeing [cultural text or practice] to be used in other con-
texts, for other purposes.’ 5 In Almereyda’s film, when Hamlet edits his non-
aural version of The Mousetrap as a multimedia short film, John Gielgud
appears on the monitor, playing the Prince in the graveyard scene [Figure 1].

Figure 1. John Gielgud on the screen.

The image of Gielgud is not only a decontextualized sign of ironic self-refer-

ential, inter- and hyper-textuality (as we have one filmic Hamlet looking at
another one); Gielgud’s performance also alludes to the pulverization of Ben-
jamin’s aural authenticity, authority and distance into seemingly unrelated
excerpts – something typical of postmodern linguistic collation. This is the
language Almereyda’s Hamlet uses in The Mousetrap, as it is one of ‘the
rigorously non-fictive languages of video’.6 It is an all-recycling, anti-linear,
non-representational syntax of the kind that Fredric Jameson discusses in his
essay ‘Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text’,
and which he understands as paradigmatic of the postmodern dismissal of

3
Hamlet, II. 2. 545-46, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by W.J. Craig
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 884. Further quotations from Shakespeare’s
plays are from this edition.
4
See ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by
Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1970), pp. 211-44.
5
An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1993), p. 108.
6
Fredric Jameson, ‘Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text’, in
The Linguistic of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. by Derek
Attridge and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 206.
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 379

any narrative and interpretative consistency. In order to substantiate his point,

Jameson analyses a 1979 Chicago School of Art video production, called
AlienNATION (by Edward Rankus, John Manning and Barbara Latham),

[a] furiously thick collage which […] includes science fiction footage […], reproduction of
classical paintings, a woman lying down under hypnosis, ultra-modern hotel lobbies with
escalators moving busily, close-ups of children’s building blocks, Beethoven sonatas, flying
saucers over the Chicago skyline, advertisements for 1950s kitchens and much more.7

The assimilatory and recombining frenzy of AlienNATION matches perfectly

the chaotic composition and pace of The Mousetrap, which consists of com-
puter-generated animations of blossoming and withering flowers, extracts
from silent, historical and porn movies, shots of happy family life from 1950s
education programs, various television and film clips, and other colour and
black-and-white multimedia material (and the score is Tchaikovsky’s 1888
symphonic poem, Hamlet) [Figure 2].

Figure 2. Postmodernism and the video-text: clips from The Mousetrap.

Interestingly, when Jameson eventually retracts his thesis about the purely
chaotic nature of the video-text by identifying a factual message in it, a crime

7
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 165.
380 Alessandro Abbate

emerges as the oblique connotation of AlienNATION’s mosaic: the 1978 mur-

der of a San Francisco city supervisor is the ‘real meaning’ hidden in a flow
of disconnected and masked clues. As he concludes, ‘Here, then, at last the
referent is disclosed; the brute fact, the historical event, the real toad in this
particular imaginary garden.’ 8 Similarly, in The Mousetrap, moving through
this ‘imaginary garden’, we finally reach the real orchard where Old Hamlet
was assassinated by his brother, and the toad is the serpent that ‘now wears
his crown’ (Hamlet, I. 5. 40).
The screening scene in the private theatre of the Hotel Elsinore also rein-
forces this situation of Hamlet’s by-technology detachment and isolation. The
accusatory revelation is not realized by means of a process of ‘co-presence’,9
so evident in the original play. This is not just the result of the move from
theatre to cinema, from bodies to shadows – that is to say, of the fact that The
Mousetrap is no longer a pièce de théâtre, but an art-house video clip. It is
also the symptom of an introversion produced by the monopoly of technolo-
gy-based communications. Almereyda’s Hamlet attends the screening of his
(silent) film in silence, without making any comment, without inciting re-
sponses or prompting the suspicions of Claudius and Gertrude. As the young
man uses his editing suite to filter the immediacy of reality, so the young
auteur seems to have deliberately chosen not to intervene ‘live’ in his crea-
tion. The word, the communication in loco, abdicates in favour of the silent
image, and the real space of interaction is replaced by the virtual site of a
QuickTime file. Moreover, if it is the case, in Shakespeare’ play, that ‘Ham-
let is subject to external forces at work in his life, which is to say that he does
not control the creation of himself as a person within the play,’ 10 it is note-
worthy that in Almereyda’s film this condition of lack of autonomy extends
to the video language of its protagonist. The credits of The Mousetrap are in
fact identical in every detail to those Almereyda uses for his film, so that
Hamlet’s cinematic production appears as a replica from the very outset
[Figure 3]. The name ‘Hamlet’ – in bold white lettering on a red background
– travels from the status of subject of the framing representation to being
author of the framed one, according to a recycling process that invests the
film within the film with a self-referential allusion to the limits of post-
modern creativity.

8
‘Reading without Interpretation’, p. 220.
9
David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring everyday life (Buckingham: Open University
Press, 2001), p. 15.
10
Lucy Potter, ‘Ophelia Centre Stage’, in Extensions: Essays in English Studies from Shake-
speare to the Spice Girls, ed. by Sue Hosking and Dianne Schwerdt (Kent Town: Wakefield
Press, 1999), p. 28.
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 381

Figure 3. The opening credits of The Mousetrap.

The Mousetrap is a silent movie. For Hamlet, silence is not only the final an-
swer to his existential dilemmas: it is also an emblem of his intertextual prac-
tice. He inserts in his film shots of flowers which resemble those in the video
clip of the song ‘Enjoy the Silence’ by British pop band, Depeche Mode, a
video which, coincidentally, has a strong Hamletic subtext. It shows a young
prince wandering from place to place and carrying a deck-chair with him, an
odd throne on which he sometimes sits, looking at the ‘infinite space’ before
him [Figure 4].

Figure 4. A young prince in Enjoy the Silence (Dir. Anton Corbijn. Mute/Warner. 1990).
382 Alessandro Abbate

‘Enjoy[ing] the Silence’ is also an appropriate description of the relationship

between Hamlet and Ophelia. He is a film student, she an amateur photogra-
pher. Their love originated in a shared fascination with reproduced images,
and their affinity is based upon the rejection of words as a vehicle of commu-
nication and knowledge. These two young lovers, who have replaced dia-
logue with photographic development and digital post-production, barely use
words when communicating with one another. Ophelia uses a drawing when
she wants to make an appointment with Hamlet. They both make love to each
other’s photographs, for which no words are needed. When Hamlet goes to
Ophelia’s flat, not to fake an antic disposition, but in search of some relief
from his true depression, they silently embrace each other. They ‘enjoy the
silence’ and the intimacy of the dark room, translating into action the lyrics
of the chorus of Depeche Mode’s song: ‘All I ever wanted, all I ever needed
is here, in my arms. Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm.’ 11

2.
Romeo + Juliet has often been dismissed as ‘MTV Shakespeare’. Dan Hul-
bert, for example, argues that Luhrmann ‘may indeed have the worst idea of
all time. The idea is to move Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play from Verona,
Italy, to “Verona Beach”, a city suggesting contemporary Miami […] with a
noisy bombardment of rock music and fashion statements.”12 As a matter of
fact, rock music and fashion not only make Romeo + Juliet’s intertextuality
worth considering, but also account for much of the film’s success in target-
ing a young audience. Claire Danes, Luhrmann’s Juliet, was given the Best
Female Performance at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards. Moreover, the film
was nominated for such awards as Best Male Performance (Leonardo DiCa-
prio), Best Movie, Best Movie Song (‘Crush’, by Garbage), Best OnScreen
Duo and Best Kiss! The film soundtrack features songs by such famous rock
bands as Garbage, The Cardigans, Radiohead and The Wannadies; soon af-
ter being commercially released, it became a blockbuster hit, and went multi-
platinum.
The aural association with the MTV culture is matched by an equally pal-
pable visual one. With its fragmented montage, extreme camera angles and
frenetic camerawork – for example, ‘out-of-control’ close-ups or ‘super ma-

11
Violator. Sire/Reprise. 1990. CD 26081-1.
12
‘Beware: Bard’s Armed, Dangerous’, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 1 November 1996,
p. 14. Similarly, Jay Carr writes that ‘Shakespeare goes out the window pretty quickly in
Baz Luhrmann’s new updating, and MTV comes in the door’ in ‘Modern “Romeo” Murders
Shakespeare’, Boston Globe, 1 November 1996, p. 22. See also Gary Taylor, ‘Wherefore Art
Thou, Will?’, Guardian, 24 April 1999, ‘Saturday Review’, p. 4
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 383

cro slam’ zooms –, Luhrmann’s film articulates its narrative according to the
syntax of the music video clip. As a pervasive semiotic reference targeting a
specific audience, MTV can be understood in terms of Umberto Eco’s ‘inter-
textual archetype’. Without necessitating any ‘universal’ quality, this arche-
type works ‘as a topos or standard situation that manages to be particularly
appealing to a given cultural area or a historical period.’13 In Romeo + Juliet,
it is a privileged meaning-maker for members of the X-generation at the end
of the millennium, the perfect interlocutor for the film’s hyperkinetic and top-
of-the-pops discourse.
Stephen Buhler notes that ‘the visual assault of religious icons that per-
vades the film is drawn from Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”.’ 14 The similarities
between rock video and film are numerous, and they relate not only to the
profusion of holy icons. There is a clear relationship between the shots of
Madonna against a background of burning crosses in the video and the shots
of Romeo against a background of neon crosses in the film; Madonna reaches
for a dagger (the weapon in Shakespeare’s play, and every other film adapta-
tion, with which Juliet kills herself), in the same way as Luhrmann’s Juliet
reaches for Romeo’s gun; the police cars and spotlight on the presumed black
criminal in the video match the police cars and helicopter’s spotlight as Cap-
tain Prince’s corps chase Romeo when he comes rushing back from Mantua;
there is a gospel choir, with Afro-American children, in both the video and
the film [Figure 5]. Moreover, both mises en scène adopt a similar medium-
within-a-medium strategy: Luhrmann’s film is presented as a television pro-
gram, while Madonna’s video finally turns into a theatre production, with a
red curtain falling on the stage.

13
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986), pp. 200-01.
14
Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2002), p. 91.
384 Alessandro Abbate

Figure 5. Like a Prayer (Dir. Mary Lambert. Warner. 1989) on the left and Romeo + Juliet
on the right.
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 385

Juliet wears an angel costume at the party thrown by her father [Figure 6].
The literal visual presentation of Juliet as a ‘bright angel’ (Romeo and Juliet,
II. 2. 26) is another example of Luhrmann’s pop-culture-oriented film lexi-
con. Claire Danes featured in the 1995 video Just Like Anyone by the Ameri-
can rock band, Soul Asylum, playing a deformed teenager who finally under-
goes an ‘angelic’ metamorphosis and flies away from her school prom on
wings.

Figure 6. Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet (left) and in Just Like Anyone (Dir. P. J. Hogan.
Spidercom/Columbia. 1995) (right).

In Buhler’s words, ‘The video, in turn, had capitalized on Danes’s appear-

ances as Angela Chase in the recently cancelled television series, My So-Cal-
led Life. Luhrmann trumps all the previous appropriations, absorbing them all
into the hypertext of his Romeo + Juliet.’ 15 In Just Like Anyone, the sense of
estrangement of the hump-backed girl from her malicious schoolmates cor-
responds with Juliet’s being ‘apart from the decadent opulence of the Capulet
mansion’ and the corrupt milieu in which she lives.16
Luhrmann introduces Lady Capulet in a way that reminds us of Chanel’s
1990 advertising campaign for the perfume Egoiste [Figure 7].

15
Shakespeare in the Cinema, p. 92.
16
Robert Kole, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 15 (1997), 32-34 (p. 34).
386 Alessandro Abbate

Figure 7. Egoiste (Dir. Jean-Paul Goude. Chanel. 1990) on the left and Romeo + Juliet on
the right.

The commercial and the film make identical use of close-ups, long shots, lo-
cation and fast motion. Both have an orchestral score: in Romeo + Juliet, it is
the First Movement, Allegro con brio, from Mozart’s 1773 Symphony no. 25
in G Minor, whereas, remarkably, the Chanel advertisement uses the First
Movement, ‘The Montagues and Capulets’, from Prokofiev’s 1936 Romeo
and Juliet, Suite no. 2, Op. 64.17 As the Chanel models cry ‘Egoiste!’ to some
off-screen male character, so Lady Capulet hysterically calls out her daugh-
ter’s name to Juliet, who is in the sheltering water of her bathtub.18 It is also
worth noting that the Chanel video is, in its turn, derivative, having been in-
spired by one of the American photographer Ormond Gigli’s most famous
works, Girls in Windows (1960).
The polysemy inherent in this parodic mise en scène relates to both the
figure of Lady Capulet and the film itself. It establishes a sense of glamorous
futility that characterizes Luhrmann’s treatment of Juliet’s mother, hinting at
what James B. Twitchell calls ‘Adcult’, a ‘culture […] carried on through the
boom-box and strobe lights of commercialism’.19 At the same time, the aes-

17
I am grateful to Frank Zipfel (University of Mainz), for calling my attention to the music
used in the advertisement.
18
Interestingly, Max Stirner writes, ‘Now, if in an individual the egoistic impulse has not force
enough, he complies and makes a marriage which suits the claims of the family, takes a rank
which harmonizes with its position, etc.; in short, he “does honor to the family.” If, on the
contrary, the egoistic blood flows fierily enough in his veins, he prefers to become a “crimi-
nal’ against the family and to throw off its laws. […] It happens so with Juliet in “Romeo
and Juliet”.’ See The Ego and His Own (New York: Tucker, 1907), pp. 289-90.
19
Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1996), p. 1.
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 387

thetic appropriation from advertisement to film resonates with the ‘flatness or

depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’, which
Fredric Jameson considers to be the prime postmodern state of the art.20 This
representative combination extends to a wider hyper-diegetic cinematic dis-
course. In Romeo + Juliet, Shakespeare’s text is used for advertising slogans
and in the neon-lit signs of Verona Beach’s night clubs, fragmenting into
pseudo-texts disseminated throughout the film, which intermingle cultural
authority and ephemeral consumerism. ‘Such stuff as dreams are made on’
(Tempest, IV. 1. 156-57) becomes the motto used to publicize a drink called
‘Prospero’; ‘Shoot forth thunder’ (2 Henry VI, IV. 1. 104) is used for a bullets
advertisement; King Edward IV’s ‘Add more fuel to your fire’ (3 Henry VI,
V. 4. 70) is the slogan of a gas company; the motto of the ‘Capulet Industry’
is ‘Experience is by industry achieved’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. 3. 22)
[Figure 8]. Luhrmann reminds us that ‘advertising is what we know, what we
share, what we believe in. It is who we are. It is us.’ 21 also, advertising is
Shakespeare’s poetry.

Figure 8. ‘Adcult’ in Verona Beach

3.
The intertextual mise-en-scène in Hamlet and Romeo + Juliet is invested
with social criticism. Both Manhattan and Verona Beach, worlds saturated
with media and engulfed in a self-perpetuating regime of appearances, are

20
‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53-92 (p.
60). It is interesting to note that, late in 2003, Baz Luhrmann directed Nicole Kidman in the
new advertisement for Chanel No. 5, and that his set recreated the red staircase scene from
the film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Dir. Howard Hawks. 20th Century Fox. 1953), thus
turning the strategy of an advertisement-within-the-film into a film-within-the-advertise-
ment.
21
Twitchell, p. 4.
388 Alessandro Abbate

‘Societies of Spectacle’. As Guy Debord claims, ‘The spectacle is not a col-

lection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is me-
diated by images.’ 22 A mechanism of mediation is essential to both Almerey-
da’s and Luhrmann’s multi-textual narratives: as Stephen Heath has argued,
narrative does not refer only to the story, but also to the process of telling that
makes the story intelligible to an audience.23
There are many examples in which Almereyda uses a screen-within-the-
screen strategy in order to highlight some of the play’s essential motifs, with
a view to being relevant to hi-tech end-of-millennium society [Figure 9].

Figure 9. Hamlet: the screens within the screen.

Hamlet gets the idea to test Claudius’ guilt not from the Player’s touching de-
monstration-piece, but from a film on television, Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of
Eden, and particularly from a scene in which James Dean is arguing with his
father. As Hamlet sits staring at digital footage of Ophelia on his palm moni-
tor, from the TV set in his room, Thich Nhat Hanh, a celebrated Buddhist
teacher-monk, philosophizes on the monadic life, the life of social disconnec-
tion in which Hamlet is engulfed: ‘We have the word “to be”, but what I pro-

22
The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994), p. 12.
23
See Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981).
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 389

pose is the word “to inter-be”. Because it’s not possible to be alone, to be by
yourself. You need other people in order to be.’ 24
Kenneth J. Gergen claims that ‘under postmodern conditions, persons
exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction.’25 In Almerey-
da’s film, Hamlet performs this process of self-revision as cinematic mon-
tage. Alone in his hotel suite, he stares at himself on a TV screen, as he holds
a gun to his head and utters the opening line of the ‘To be or not to be’ mono-
logue. He lets the tape run, then stops it, rewinds it, and starts again. His edit-
ing skill enables the real Hamlet to manoeuvre the loop image of his video
duplicate, so that the original metaphysical dilemma becomes a question of
authorial choice. Video and computer technology provide Hamlet with a dis-
embodying faculty that gives him the illusion of a manipulative and demiur-
gic power. He can actually see the ‘too too solid flesh’ (Hamlet I. 2. 129)
melting into the ethereal dimension of the monitor, as he is ‘running and re-
running footage of his dead father and mother together, reliving moments of
a happy family life that are now gone.’ 26
In Almereyda’s film, the traditional windy platform high on the battle-
ments has been replaced by a hi-tech surveillance desk. Standing in the lobby
of the Hotel Elsinore, Horatio, Marcella and Bernardo notice the dead king’s
silhouette flickering on the screen – ‘the figure exits one monitor – then en-
ters another, fluttering in the video haze.’ 27 Through the black-and-white low
resolution of a closed-circuit television monitor we also see part of the fish-
monger scene, when Polonius tries to understand the reason for Hamlet’s
melancholic state; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death sentence ap-
pears on the screen of Hamlet’s Mac laptop, as he is flying to England on a
jumbo. The monitors in the Blockbuster store where Hamlet delivers the ‘To
be or not to be’ soliloquy show clips from the 1996 film, The Crow: City of
Angels (Dir. Tim Pope. Bad Bird/Miramax). As Courtney Lehmann notes,

Like Hamlet’s own status as a ‘sequel’ to his father, this sequel to The Crow (Alex Proyas
1994) relentlessly invokes the father-film which, significantly, is not only about revenge but
also about the capacity of postmodern technology to restore a dead actor to virtual life.28

24
Michael Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A screenplay adaptation (London: Fa-
ber, 2000), p. 37.
25
The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic, 1991), p. 7.
26
Abbate, p. 84.
27
Almereyda, p. 6.
28
Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2002), p. 97.
390 Alessandro Abbate

Here, therefore, the screen within the screen addresses both Hamlet’s existen-
tial dilemma about life and death and his obsession with digital footage of his
dead father.
Luhrmann’s diegetic use of media cross-references entails an osmotic mo-
dality that not only affects the filmic narrative, but also refers to the socio-
cultural scenario where the events take place. The world of Verona Beach is
one in which ‘the television set appears in every conceivable environment,
and television events come to saturate the texture of everyday experience.’ 29
A portable TV set appears on the beach of Sycamore Grove, among carousels
and snack bars, with two Latin American women watching an afternoon news
update. Benvolio and Romeo pass by: the former looks at himself – at his hy-
pertextual video image – holding a gun in the middle of a shooting, and the
latter learns about the recent brawl via television replica [Figure 10]. In this
way, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy undergoes the disruption of a mediated tell-
ing, as the social import of juvenile criminality fades in the spectacular vacu-
um of the video haze.

Figure 10. Romeo + Juliet: Television ubiquity and the video-self.

Importantly, a screen within the screen that links Luhrmann’s and Almereyda’s
films is the framing screen of a television news broadcast. In both Romeo + Juliet
and Hamlet the tragedy is irrevocably banalized by presentation of the epilogue
as a bulletin [Figure 11]. The young lovers’ deaths result in neither peace nor in
consolation. As James Loehlin argues: ‘They become merely another lurid im-
age for a media-besotted culture, body-bagged victims in a grainy news vi-
deo, as the film returns to the newscast framework of the opening.’ 30 Luhr-

29
David Morley, ‘Television: Not so much a visual medium, more a visible object’, in Visual
Culture, ed. by Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 183.
30
‘”These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare’, in
Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (New
York: St Martin’s, 2000), p. 130.
 The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen 391

mann imagines his film as a long and detailed television news story. Similar-
ly, Almereyda has Robert MacNeil, a ‘real’ anchorman from the American
PBS Jim Lehrer NewsHour, closing the film by delivering some of the First
Player’s lines and Fortinbras’ words commenting on the final havoc. In Ro-
meo + Juliet, ‘the chronicle dimension deletes from the modern world any
possible glimmer of heroic dignity.’ 31 Likewise, Almereyda himself has sta-
ted that ‘transposing Fortinbras’s lines to another corporate mouthpiece, a
newscaster, [makes] Hamlet’s replacement more cruelly anonymous.’32

Figure 11. Framing bulletins: Romeo + Juliet (left) and Hamlet (right).

31
Guido Bulla, ‘”Un qualcosa di simile alla morte”: Romeo + Giulietta di William
Shakespeare di Baz Luhrmann’, in Shakespeare al cinema, ed. by Isabella Imperiali (Roma:
Bulzoni, 2000), p. 181.
32
Hamlet: A screenplay adaptation, p. 143.
Ken Woodgate

‘Gotta Dance’ (in the Dark): Lars von Trier’s Critique of the
Musical Genre

This chapter investigates Lars von Trier’s critique of the musical in his film Dancer in the Dark
(2000) both through various aspects of the outer musical itself and through the obvious refer-
ences to the classic Broadway/Hollywood musicals 42nd Street and The Sound of Music. Particu-
larly important is the cross-cultural perspective: the outer musical presents a European’s view of
America which is counterposed to an Americanised view of Europe. The outer musical serves to
discredit the inner ones, and hence the film argues against the musical genre. Nevertheless, a
metacritical reading of the film will identify the limits of von Trier’s dismissive critique.

Of all genres of performance, the musical must be the most self-referential.

Putting on a show is, along with falling in love, the musical’s favorite theme.
Actors who spontaneously burst into song gain some kind of credibility if
they are seen to be mounting their own song-and-dance show. But the ease
with which the musical mirrors itself might well be seen, from a rationalistic
point of view, as a form of theatrical narcissism, or even syllogism. Does the
classic musical say anything, apart from the fact that it is fun to sing and
dance? And given that the vast majority of people in the modern industrial-
ised world choose to avoid public performances of dancing and absolutely all
performances of singing, it could easily be argued that the musical’s promise
of fun is simply an illusion of an illusion, an indulgent celebration of theatri-
cal posturing.
It is strange, to say the least, for a realist director to make a film with song
and dance numbers in it. But this is precisely what Lars von Trier did in his
film Dancer in the Dark (2000). Along with Thomas Vinterberg, von Trier
co-wrote Dogme 95, that controversial manifesto calling for a return to rigor-
ous realism in filmmaking:

To DOGME 95 the movie is not illusion! Today a technological storm is raging of which the
result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can
394 Ken Woodgate

wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are
everything the movie can hide behind. 1

Dogme 95 can be seen as a recent manifestation of the anti-Hollywood, anti-

illusionist tendencies that previously occurred in such movements as Russian
Constructivism, Italian Neorealism and the French nouvelle vague. The most
obvious hallmarks of Dogme films are a disregard for continuity editing, the
avoidance, as much as possible, of post-synchronised sound (point 2 of
Dogme’s ‘Vow of Chastity’), and the extensive use of the hand-held camera
(point 3), which results in a highly characteristic swish-pan movement from
frame to frame.
Given that the musical has never been and can never be successfully or
seriously integrated into a realist program, von Trier’s approach implies from
the outset a critical compromise between two quite distinct generically deter-
mined codes. Von Trier has never actually called Dancer in the Dark a
Dogme film; indeed, he stated in 1998 that he had moved on from the stric-
tures of the program.2 Nevertheless, the hallmarks previously mentioned are
abundantly evident in Dancer in the Dark.
The film is set in semi-rural Washington State in 1964, and Selma, a
Czech immigrant, works in a metal-stamping factory, trying to support her-
self and her son Eugene. Together they live in a small bungalow at the back
of a property belonging to the local policeman Bill and his spendthrift wife
Linda. Selma has an hereditary eye problem and is slowly going blind. She is
trying to save enough money to enable her son to undergo an operation that
will make sure that he does suffer the same fate as she. In the free time that is
left to her, Selma goes to the cinema to watch musicals and participates in the
local amateur theatrical group’s production of The Sound of Music, in which
she has been given role of Maria.
One evening, Bill reveals to Selma that he is in desperate financial trouble
and unable to support his wife’s lifestyle. Selma also reveals a secret: she is
stashing away her money for her son’s operation. Bill takes the money some
time later, and tells his wife that Selma has been making advances in his di-

1
Dogme 95: The Official Dogme 95 Website at <http://www.dogme95.dk/> (accessed 18 July
2006).
2
‘The manifesto itself was without any value, but it states a couple of limitations which can
be useful to work from. I have always thought that the most important rule was that picture
and sound should be recorded simultaneously. It excludes manipulation – you cannot cheat
afterwards in the editing room. I am still using it as a principle when shooting.’ Jørn Rossing
Jensen, ‘Dogme Is Dead! Long Live Song and Dance!’, in Lars von Trier: Interviews, ed. by
Jan Lumholdt (Jackson: U. P. of Mississippi, 2003), p. 130.
 Lars von Trier’s Critique of the Musical Genre 395

rection. Selma is asked to leave the bungalow. When she discovers that the
money is stolen, she goes and confronts the policeman. The ensuing conver-
sation reveals how hopeless the situation is for both of them. Bill takes out a
gun, but in a scuffle Selma wounds him. He pleads for her to kill him, which
she does. She is apprehended, tried and, after an abortive appeal, hanged.
The film can be seen as a criticism of American culture from a European
point of view. Here we see a country with practically no social security. De-
cent people can lose the roof over their head because of financial problems,
and others must save all their money to afford medical procedures. Von Trier
also criticises the American tradition of virulent anti-communism: Selma
came to America from Czechoslovakia because the country is medically
more advanced, not because she is some kind of political refugee. Her lack of
political awareness leads to her being branded a communist at her trial. And,
finally, Lars von Trier takes the US to task for its stance on capital punish-
ment.
On the level of genre, as well, we see a European critique of America.
Although the mounting of a musical is one of the significant plotlines of the
film, and although the film contains original song and dance numbers, its
story does not really conform to that of the classic musical. While musicals
generally have plots that belong to modern genres, primarily romantic come-
dy, but also melodrama, von Trier’s story belongs to the pre-modern genre of
the tragedy. Von Trier has discussed the story in terms of opera,3 an old-
world form of performance that easily embraces the tragic. Our heroine Sel-
ma clearly has one fatal flaw: she is too good-hearted, or, to use von Trier’s
own term, golden-hearted.4 Her single act of trusting the policeman results in
her downfall, and all aspects of Selma’s world conspire to hasten her demise.
Nevertheless, despite the tragic and operatic nature of the story, the film
has the outer trappings of a musical. So, what is Lars von Trier saying about
this genre? There are three levels to this line of inquiry: there is Selma’s story
with its musical sections; there is the musical in the musical, in the form of
snippets from the screening of 42nd Street in the local cinema and of rehears-
als for the amateur production of The Sound of Music, and there is the signif-
icance of these two classic musicals themselves.
First, let us examine the significance of the songs in Selma’s story.
Throughout the film, Selma imagines her world transformed into one of the

3
Elayne Taylor, ‘Dancing in Denmark’, Creative Screenwriting , 8. 1 (2001), p. 35.
4
Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves (1996) and Idioterne (The Idiots, 1998) form what
von Trier calls his ‘Golden Heart Trilogy’. The term refers to the heroism and compassion
displayed by the central female characters in these films.
396 Ken Woodgate

musical. This invariably occurs at times when Selma is experiencing stress

and tension. The first time this happens is in the factory. The sound of the
machinery becomes more rhythmical, the actions of the workers more
smooth and nimble, and suddenly the whole factory is singing and dancing.
In classic musical tradition, the world becomes harmonised through the ad-
dition of song and dance: the scene becomes more colourful, hand-held cam-
erawork gives way to fixed camera shots. The scenario conforms entirely to
the dictates of the genre, even if it contains certain elements of Dogme real-
ism, such as the idiosyncratic music and vocals of Björk and a certain disre-
gard for perfect co-ordination. What is lacking in choreography is made up
for in cinematographic excess, as von Trier uses 100 video cameras to shoot
these song and dance numbers.5
What does not conform to the dictates of the genre is what happens after
the numbers, indeed, as a consequence of these numbers. At the end of the
factory scene, Selma is rudely awakened from her fantasy by the malfunc-
tioning stamping machine. The consequence of her lack of attention is an in-
dustrial accident that will cost her her job. It is not so much the negative out-
come that makes this song so different from those in other musicals – there
are many musicals that end unhappily – as the way it fits into the film’s die-
gesis. In a normal musical, the filmic world is enhanced through singing and
dancing. What we see may be conceived of as a transformation or idealisa-
tion of the world, but it is nevertheless an extension of that world. In fact, the
world of the musical is a world that is always on the brink of bursting into
song and dance, on the brink of transfiguration into something larger than life.
Selma’s musical numbers start off the same way, with the filmic world grad-
ually becoming a musical one. The conclusion, however, is different. The
transfigured world is suddenly interrupted by the world of mundane reality.
Rather than being contiguous, the two realms are antagonistic. The numbers
cannot be read as part of the film’s diegesis, but as figments of Selma’s im-
agination. They are daydreams that impose on real time and have real conse-
quences.
The other musical numbers follow the same structure: if they do not al-
ways advance the plot’s tragic end, they do nothing to prevent it. Selma
dreams of a musical number on a goods train, and is almost run over by one.
Not only does she narrowly avoid losing her life, it is at this point that her po-
tential boyfriend realises that she is going blind.
In each case, Selma imagines these song and dance numbers when her life
becomes particularly difficult. They are thus escape mechanisms that make

5
Stig Björkman, ‘Juggling in the Dark’, Sight and Sound, 9. 12 (1999), p. 8.
 Lars von Trier’s Critique of the Musical Genre 397

her life seem more bearable. But, in conformity with the dictates of tragedy,
there is no escape, and hence Selma’s daydreams are to be seen as manifes-
tations of false consciousness. This is most pointedly expressed in the court-
room scene, where Selma imagines herself being serenaded by a certain
Adrich Novy, a Czech screen idol from Selma’s youth. Novy reassuringly
sings, ‘I’ll always catch you when you fall.’ She is sentenced to death by
hanging, and no-one catches her when she falls.
Selma herself is conscious of the antagonism between the world of the
musical and the reality of her life in America. Early on in the film she con-
fesses her love of musicals to Bill, and explains to him how she extends the
pleasure of the fantasy:

SELMA But isn’t it annoying when they do the last song in the films, though?
BILL Why?
SELMA Because, you just know when it goes really big and the camera goes
Like … out of the roof, and you just know it’s going to end. I hate that, I really
hate that. I used to cheat on that when I was a little girl back in Czechoslovakia.
I would leave the cinema just after the next-to-last song and … the film would
just go on for ever.

Selma’s tactic involves a denial of reality on a number of levels apart from a

simple immersion in the musical’s diegesis. To leave the film just after the
penultimate song denies the reality that all films, all stories, must come to an
end. But it also implies that Selma knows where the last and next-to-last
songs occur in the film. In other words, Selma knows the film’s ending – she
has probably already seen it – and chooses to feign ignorance. The same issue
is raised at the end of the film, when, in the form of a title across the screen, a
quote from one of Selma’s own songs is inserted over the scene where Selma
has just been hanged:

They say it’s the last song,

They don’t know us, you see
It’s only the last song
If we let it be.

The quote conveys a sentiment of the heroic and the infinite, as if Selma’s
soul goes singing on. But, in terms of the film’s realist techniques and argu-
ments, this moment of transcendence rings hollow. The audience has just
viewed Selma singing her last song, and its finality has been underscored
even more vividly by the activation of the gallows mid-line.
The quote also sits uneasily with regard to one of the featured musicals
within the musical, namely 42nd Street (dir. Bacon, 1933). Generally con-
sidered the paradigmatic backstage musical, the film portrays the trials and
398 Ken Woodgate

tribulations of a theatrical company trying to put on a show. After the female

lead breaks her ankle, the understudy steps into the breach, performs on
opening night and hence becomes a star. Peculiar to this musical is the fact
that the plot is presented with only incidental music: all the production num-
bers are reserved for the performance at the end. Thus, to leave before the
final song might be construed in this case to mean leaving before the film has
even proved itself to be a musical.
The short scenes featuring 42nd Street highlight the discrepancy between
Selma’s illusions and the reality around her. Because of her poor eyesight,
her friend Cathy explains what is happening on screen, only to be hushed and
rebuked by another audience member. The feeling of elation that Selma re-
peatedly professes is certainly not shared by all viewers. Moreover, it is not
clear whether Selma is truly able to engage with what is presented on the
screen or whether she is merely entertaining her own illusions.
Even more crucial to von Trier’s critique of the musical are the rehearsals
of The Sound of Music (Rogers & Hammerstein, 1959; dir. Wise, 1965). The
film opens with one such rehearsal, with Selma singing ‘My Favorite Things’
and Cathy supplying the objects referred to in the song by way of illustration.
‘My Favorite Things’ is a catalogue song, one of the set pieces of the musical
genre. Catalogue songs can never be illustrated realistically with props and
gestures: there are simply too many objects involved. ‘My Favorite Things’
covers eighteen different items in a song with a total of sixteen lines. Need-
less to say, the performance dissolves into chaos, but one wonders why any
theatrical director would choose to use such a mode of illustration in a pro-
duction. The whole scene looks ridiculous, and while it does provide a little
humour, it doesn’t really fit in with any of the genres with which the film se-
riously engages. It is a moment of absurdity which is closer to slapstick com-
edy than anything else.
It might well be argued that von Trier is highlighting the absurdity of the
musical genre itself, yet he is creating a paper tiger in doing so, as musicals
never look like this. A similar use of absurd humour comes a little later in the
film, when Selma is learning her lines:

SELMA You keep reading.

GENE So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehn, adieu, adieu, adieu, to yieu and
yieu and yieu.
SELMA To yieu and yieu … What does that mean? Yieu?
GENE It’s your dumb musical. It’s German.
SELMA Do you think?

Von Trier is highlighting what must be one of the weaker rhymes in the
history of musical comedy, but it is hardly representative. Also, the reactions
 Lars von Trier’s Critique of the Musical Genre 399

of Selma and her son are a little too ingenuous. They can pronounce auf
Wiedersehn reasonably accurately and recognise it as German, and they can
pronounce adieu, but do not recognise it as French, yet their ear for pronun-
ciation does not allow them to make the connection between yieu and you.
Von Trier has scrambled levels of linguistic and cultural competence in a
rather unconvincing manner.
All these cheap shots aside, the amateur production of The Sound of Mu-
sic serves a more serious function within the plot, as the theatrical group is
seen as the place where deception resides. Towards the end of the initial re-
hearsal scene, the director exclaims, ‘Everybody’s doing a great job’, which
is clearly not the case. Other members of the group have their misgivings
about Selma’s abilities, but these are never dealt with openly. Cathy helps
Selma conceal her sight impairment by stepping into the breach whenever
there is a problem on stage. When Selma’s eyesight becomes too weak for
her to perform at all, she herself engages in deception, telling the director that
she does not want to continue because her heart is not in it. By leaving the
role to the understudy, Selma is adhering to the plot of 42nd Street, though the
outcome radically inverts that musical’s optimism. For when Selma revisits
the theatre after having killed Bill, she is distracted and placated by the group
members while the director calls the police. The sanctuary and consolation
that Selma has sought in the theatre proves illusory, as police storm the build-
ing and haul her away.
So what significance is to be attached to the selection of the Sound of Mu-
sic as the primary musical within the musical? The Sound of Music is itself a
strange hybrid of a musical in that it starts off as a typical romantic comedy
revolving around a novice falling for a widowed Navy admiral in the late
1930s. Basing a musical on marrying off a nun may be in rather dubious taste,
but not quite as much as the second half of the piece, which revolves around
the German annexation of Austria and the newly-founded family’s escape
from the Nazis over the alps to Switzerland. This is strange, as the family’s
home is in Salzburg, near the border of Germany, not Switzerland. The film
is also of questionable historical accuracy and political correctness. Despite
much post-war propaganda, it is quite clear that Austria was not the first vic-
tim of Nazi Germany, but rather embraced the Anschluss with enthusiasm.
The fact that the admiral should style himself von Trapp, thus illegally main-
taining an aristocratic title, indicates a pro-imperial, anti-republican stance.
Nevertheless, these problems are glossed over as the hero, his seven children
and Maria are painted as purely good and politically correct, and the Nazi
takeover a completely unjustified violation. As Gerald Mast says,
400 Ken Woodgate

The use of singing as a political, not just a spiritual, metaphor is nonsense: if the Nazis
would only sing, the film implies, if they would hear and make the sound of music as the
Trapps do, they would cease to be Nazis. Bob Fosse’s 1972 film of Cabaret answered the
chimera with the revelation that the Nazis did sing; political values can be defined, not by
whether people sing, but by what and why they sing.6

It is perhaps because of all these inaccuracies that The Sound of Music has
found little resonance in Europe, and absolutely none in Austria, where
Sound of Music tours cater almost exclusively for English-speaking tourists.
This is despite the fact that many good Broadway and Hollywood musicals
have enjoyed success in German-speaking countries, e.g. My Fair Lady (Ler-
ner & Loewe, 1956; dir. Cukor, 1964).
Above all, this is an American view of Europe and European history,
which is why von Trier incorporates it into his musical. Von Trier takes his
revenge on the commodification of the European by giving a European cri-
tique of America. Whereas The Sound of Music chose to revive a sorry epi-
sode of European history a good decade after the issue had disappeared,
Dancer in the Dark presents, within an historical framework, issues that per-
tain to America to this very day. And on an aesthetic level, the film also re-
sponds antagonistically to the precedent established by The Sound of Music.
For although aficionados of the musical may be divided about its thematic
quality, The Sound of Music has the most magnificent cinematography, for
which it took out an Academy Award. The Sound of Music is a cinematogra-
pher’s musical. Von Trier responds not only by infusing his film with the
messiness of Dogme realism, he even refuses to shoot on location, preferring
to make the whole film in the Swedish countryside and Danish interiors.7
On all levels, von Trier sets up a dialectic between musical and non-
musical worlds, between theatre and reality. This is the typical strategy of the
play-in-play structure – a way of reflecting critically on matters of fictionality
and reality, of the constructed nature of the dramatic work and the mediated
nature of its relationship to the world outside. But this is not the strategy of
the musical. For the classic musical, whatever its obsession with constantly
reflecting itself as a song and dance performance within song and dance per-
formance, is distinguished from other self-referential artefacts by the general
absence of a critical moment. Classic Hollywood musicals do not, ultimately,
encourage the audience to reflect on the artificiality of performance and the
non-reality of what is presented, nor do they problematise the difficult situa-

6
Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock: Overlook,
1987), p. 218.
7
Gavin Smith, ‘Dance in the Dark’, in Lars Von Trier: Interviews, p. 146.
 Lars von Trier’s Critique of the Musical Genre 401

tions that the characters must go through. Rather they seek to make audience
identification with the performers as seamless as possible, while providing
reassurance that no matter how tough things get, everything will end happily.

Both the Hollywood musical and modernist cinema use dual worlds to mirror within the film
the relationship of the spectator to the film. Multiple diegesis in this sense parallels the use
of the internal audience. Yet, as with the use of the distancing techniques [...] the musical
and Godard are worlds apart in their goals. In a Godard film, multiple diegesis may call at-
tention to the discrepancy between fiction and reality, or fiction and history. In the Holly-
wood musical, heterogeneous levels are created so that they may be homogenized in the end
through the union of the romantic couple. In the Hollywood musical, different levels are rec-
ognized in order that difference may be overcome, dual levels synthesized back into one.8

Jane Feuer sees the homogenising moment of the Hollywood musical as re-
siding in its thematics, which are intentionally aimed at popularity or, in her
own phrase, ‘folk relations’.9 Audience identification smooths over the gaps
between the inner play and the outer play. Such thematics may indeed aid in
the process, but I believe that the main thrust of the musical’s homogenising
gesture lies elsewhere. The classic musical is primarily a set of song and
dance numbers and only secondarily a play. Mast correctly observes that ‘the
numbers could survive without the script and do – as record albums, popular
songs, and excerpts in compilation films. The script could not and does not
survive without the numbers.’ 10 The musical’s impetus, therefore, does not lie
in the discursive unfolding of a plot, but in the presentation of non-discursive,
ecstatic states produced by the effect of music upon actors. Thus, the musical
within the musical is a conflation of the ecstatic moment rather than juxtapo-
sition of discursive levels. Homogenation must occur, because the presenta-
tion is essentially beyond discourse.
This is the point that Lars von Trier fails to grasp – or render – in his film.
Dancer in the Dark is a critique of the musical – a discursive act applied to a
genre that celebrates the non-discursive. His social, political and historical
arguments have validity, but his arguments about the musical do not. Singing
and dancing may not effect change the material world, but the question is: is
the human being only justified through effecting change? Most of us have at
one time or another felt the joy of rhythm and music, be it simply through
listening, through vocalisation, or through rhythmical movement. These ac-
tivities have no direct bearing on the material world, but they make us feel
happy, or at least better. And this feeling is not simply some vague impres-

8
The Hollywood Musical, 2nd edn (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993), p. 68.
9
Feuer, p. 49.
10
Mast, p. 2.
402 Ken Woodgate

sion, but a set of physiological and psychological changes that have been ob-
served in countless scientific investigations. By dismissing the musical as an
undesirable delusion, by punishing his characters for indulging in singing and
dancing, von Trier is denying human beings one of their fundamental sources
of joy, one of their fundamental ways of living in the world.
3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction
Tim Mehigan

The Game of the Narrative: Kleist’s Fiction from a Game-

Theoretical Perspective

In recent times, the theory of games has received application in many areas of economics and
some areas of the political and social sciences. It has shown itself to be a useful tool in modelling
outcomes that assume a level of rational motivation among actors in a variable context of contin-
gency. The aim of this chapter is to reveal the utility of game theory for a special class of literary
works. These will be literary texts, such as the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, which, renouncing
the omniscience of the author as a structuring device up front, model outcomes according to an
underlying ‘game situation’. In these texts rationality does not suffice on its own to ensure an
optimal outcome for participants in the non-cooperative games Kleist discusses. Rather, a mixed
strategy of rational and non-rational behaviour is called for in navigating towards the ‘Nash equi-
librium’ event in the story, that is, that outcome by which the story’s main players achieve maxi-
mal pay-offs for their behavioural choices in the game. Heinrich von Kleist can be seen as an
early game theorist avant la lettre. His stories are cast against the background of late eighteenth
century Enlightenment. At the same time they go beyond the simple predictive rationalism of
much of the Enlightenment tradition, arguing for a more sophisticated understand-ing of human
behaviour in a context of openness and radical contingency – an awareness that marks Kleist as
one of the most important thinkers of the immediate post-Kantian period at the beginning of
modernity.

Game theory may properly be considered an invention of the twentieth centu-

ry. It cannot usefully be separated from statistical analysis and probability
theory, which arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with
the industrialization of the European societies whose study they aimed to pro-
mote. Game theory, therefore, takes its place alongside other theories of
behaviour and society that are pre-eminently modern, if the defining attribute
of modernity is taken to be contingency, as the German sociologist Niklas
Luhmann and others have argued.1 Contingency, according to Luhmann, is
anything that is ‘neither necessary nor impossible’,2 that is, anything that is
governed by the idea that an outcome could always be other than it is. Con-
tingent views about self and society can be traced back to the paradigm shift

1
See Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. by William Whobrey (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 44ff.
2
Observations on Modernity, p. 45.
406 Tim Mehigan

in human understanding suddenly felt across a range of areas of human think-

ing and endeavour at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. The older paradigm that lost relevance in what Luhmann calls
‘old European’ society was conditioned by essentialist views based on an
assumption about the coincidence of thought and being in the world. Such a
coincidence had long given grounds for views of a religious nature that as-
sumed a divine presence in the world. Although the coming of contingent un-
derstanding which displaced these views has a long genesis in European
thinking, it does not significantly predate the sixteenth century, and is closely
associated with the important eighteenth-century thinkers, the Scottish scep-
tic David Hume and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant, acording
to his own testimony, indeed, was awakened from a ‘dogmatic slumber’ as a
result of Hume’s critique of rational precepts.3 Another similarly awakened,
although not by Hume in the first instance,4 was the writer Heinrich von
Kleist, who also went through a conceptual shift of a significant dimension in
his early twenties after a protracted encounter with the philosophy of Kant.5
While it is not my purpose here to reconstruct in detail those epistemolog-
ical aspects of game theory which are consonant with the rise of contingent
awareness, I do mean to suggest the importance of the underlying paradigm
shift that accompanies it and that has been popularly dated from 1800,6 if
only because it impacted heavily on the thinking of Kleist, one of the first
game theorists avant la lettre of the modern age,7 and perhaps the first of
modern literature. A second aim of this chapter is to suggest the utility of
game theory for the study of literature – a utility that, surprisingly, has rarely
been remarked upon.

3
As Kant said in the preface to the Prolegomena, ‘Ich gestehe frei: die Erinnerung des David
Hume war eben dasjenige, was mir vor vielen Jahren zuerst den dogmatischen Schlummer
unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen auf dem Felde der spekulativen Philosophie eine
andere Richtung gab.’ Kants Werke: Akademie-Textausgabe, 9 vols (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1968), IV, p. 260.
4
Although certainly indirectly, as I have argued in ‘“Betwixt a false reason and none at all”:
Kleist, Kant, Hume, and the “Thing in Itself”’, in A Companion to the Works of Kleist, ed.
by Bernd Fischer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 165-88.
5
For a discussion of Kleist’s ‘Kant crisis’ and the views it has elicited in the critical literature,
see my ‘Kleist, Kant und die Aufklärung’, in Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung, ed. by
Tim Mehigan (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), pp. 3-21.
6
Cf., among others, Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme, 1800-1900 (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 1985).
7
Ken Binmore’s application of game theory to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and other con-
tractual theorists such as Rousseau, however, suggest that game theory is also encountered
in the thinking of early political theorists of the modern age. Cf. Binmore’s Game Theory
and the Social Contract (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
 The Game of the Narrative 407

1
In recent times, the theory of games has received application in many areas of
economics, and some areas of the political and social sciences. It has proved
to be a useful tool in modelling outcomes that assume a level of rational mo-
tivation among actors in a variable context of contingency. For this reason,
the scenarios that game theory models are not objectively true or essentially
real, although they arise from assumptions about real, living actors. Rather,
they aim to predict the likely future behaviour of such actors under the limit-
ed conditions that hold for a given ‘game situation’. This game situation is
necessarily formal and abstract in nature, although it is easily applied to ‘live’
contexts in which it is operative. These might have to do with stock-market
speculation, gambling, voter behaviour or even procreation. At least as far as
the latter is concerned, the statistical fact that males and females are encoun-
tered in roughly equal preponderance over the earth’s surface has been inter-
preted as a strategic response to a set of biological and environmental factors
within the game situation of life itself. In this case, human beings are the
players and nature is the underlying rationality that constrains them and in-
forms their actions (the idea that nature is rationally directed was established
in Western thinking during the Enlightenment). The great leap forward en-
tailed in the thinking of Darwin, therefore, was to shift the focus of analysis
in biology away from actors and subjects toward a new understanding of en-
vironment consonant with game-theoretical assumptions.8
A game can be defined as any situation in which participants are bound to
one another in a context of strategic interdependence.9 Under such circum-
stances, the behaviour of one participant or player depends on decisions or
moves made by the other players. These moves are accompanied by rewards
or pay-offs; the pay-offs are part of the game and define its structure. A pay-
off is a condition of the game that helps manage the risk that the game, by its
very nature, brings with it. One might say, therefore, that the pay-off attenu-
ates contingent risk without ever being able to do away with it altogether.
Despite the pay-offs, or, indeed, because of them, psychological uncertainty
remains a given of the game situation. Uncertainty attaches above all to a
lack of knowledge about the moves of other players. The promise of game
theory is that the aspect of risk arising from the behaviour of players in a sit-
uation of strategic interdependence can be measured or mathematically quan-

8
Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufakis discuss the theory of natural selection in the
context of game theory. See their Game Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge,
1995), pp. 228, 230.
9
Mary Ann Dimand and Robert W. Dimand, A History of Game Theory, Vol 1: From the Be-
ginnings to 1945 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 2.
408 Tim Mehigan

tified at each stage of the game, thus making it possible for all players to
commit to action based on an understanding of how the game is played. Such
understanding is predicated on a certain level of rational motivation in the
structure of the game. The rational motivation of players is defined as the ten-
dency of individual players to act in their own enlightened self-interest10 or to
favour the assumption of what has been called ‘common knowledge rationali-
ty’.11 Since the moves of participants in the game can be expressed as mathe-
matical quantities, game theory in the social sciences is closely allied to, if
not identical with, rational choice theory.12
The main aspects of a game situation are revealed in the prisoners’ dilem-
ma, a classic illustration of game theory first discussed by the Rand 13 Cor-
poration scientists Merrill Ford and Melvin Dresher in 1950.14 Like many
games, the entire set of conditions governing the playing of the game is made
clear to the players in advance of playing the game. For this reason the pris-
oners’ dilemma is referred to as a game of complete information. The game
proceeds as follows: two suspects are arrested and charged with a crime (it
doesn’t matter what crime). The police do not have sufficient evidence to
convict the suspects, unless at least one of them confesses. The police take
the suspects to separate cells and explain what consequences will follow the
actions that they take. If neither confesses to the crime, then both will be con-
victed of a minor offence and sentenced to one month in jail. If both confess
then both will be sent to jail for six months. If one confesses but the other
does not, then the confessor will be released immediately, but the other will
be sentenced to nine months in jail – six for the crime, three for obstructing
the course of justice. A bi-matrix table is used to represent the strategies out-
lined in this game (see figure below).

10
The assumption that actors act out of ‘enlightened self-interest’ is basic to game theory. See,
for example, Binmore, p. 17.
11
This is a term used by Hargreaves Heap and Varoufakis, p. 23.
12
As Behnegar points out, rational choice theory represents ‘the continuation of the tendency
of modern social science following modern natural science to understand complex wholes in
light of their simple elements’. Cf. Nasser Behnegar, Leo Strauß, Max Weber and the Scien-
tific Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 24.
13
As Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis explain, ‘Rand’ stands for ‘r[esearch] and
d[evelopment]’, p. 50.
14
Cf. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the
Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), pp. 8-9. As Poundstone argues, Ford
and Dresher’s work was strongly influenced by Neumann and Morgenstern, who had pub-
lished their Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1944) six years earlier.
 The Game of the Narrative 409

MUM FINK
-1, -1 -9, 0
PLAYER 1 PLAYER 2
MUM FINK
0, -9 -6, -6

Two strategies are available to each player: confess (or fink); not confess
(or remain mum). Thus, if prisoner 1 chooses mum and prisoner 2 chooses
fink, then prisoner 1 receives the pay-off -9 (representing nine months in jail)
and prisoner 2 receives the pay-off 0 (representing immediate release). If,
however, both decide to remain mum, then their pay-off is twice -1 (standing
for one month in jail for both prisoners).
Clearly, not all choices lead to optimal outcomes in the game. If, for ex-
ample, one prisoner decides to play fink, then the other would prefer to play
fink and so be in jail for six months (to remain mum would incur a pay-off of
nine months). Similarly, if one prisoner plays mum, then the other would pre-
fer to play fink and so be released immediately. Despite this overall strategic
uncertainty, there is a best response possible in a given game. This response
arises from a rational selection where none of the players will regret their
choices.15 Such a response would be strategically stable or self-enforcing, and
can be called a Nash equilibrium, after its discoverer, the American John
Nash, who later shared in the award of a Nobel Prize for his achievement.16
As Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis point out, ‘Nash strategies are the only
rationalisable ones which, if implemented, confirm the expectations on which
they were based’.17 In the prisoners’ dilemma, the Nash equilibrium would be
represented by the -1,-1 outcome, representing the decision of both prisoners
to remain mum about the crime. To reiterate

As long as […] conventions suggest to all parties what their role is to be [i.e. how they
should play the game], and as long as parties obey conventions in their own self-interest as
defined by the payoffs given by the game model, then conventional behaviour should be a
Nash equilibrium. And analysing the situation using the notion of a Nash equilibrium will
give an outer bound to the set of possibly ‘stable’ conventions.18

15
Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, p. 50.
16
The Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, discusses aspects of Nash’s life, including his con-
tribution to game theory.
17
Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, p. 53.
18
David M. Kreps, Game Theory and Economic Modelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p.
35.
410 Tim Mehigan

When players obey conventions in order to maximize the benefits for all
players, the game is referred to as a co-operative game and is governed by
co-operative game theory. In this case the unit of analysis is usually the group.
When the individual player is concerned with doing as well as possible for
her- or himself within the rules and possibilities provided for in the game,
and when such individual behaviour constitutes the basic unit of analysis, the
game is said to be governed by non-co-operative game theory.19 When the
participants in the prisoners’ dilemma play the game non-co-operatively and
do not disclose their choices to the other participant, no Nash equilibrium
will necessarily result from the game. In this case, the risk element in the
game rises and the pay-offs – and these can be of a negative nature – rise
along with it.

2
Kleist’s stories have usually been seen as a fascinatingly opaque, even sug-
gestively malevolent, portrayal of an internal world that has entirely lost its
rational underpinnings.20 They therefore give evidence of the failure of En-
lightenment values to sustain positions presupposing the self-evidence of rea-
son, that is, the coincidence of reason and being in the world. While there
may be some truth to such views, they imply or even openly state that Kleist
abandoned the project of reason at the centre of the Enlightenment,21 and that,
accordingly, rational positions no longer have any currency in the world.
Such views would move Kleist in the direction of other views of his day,
such as those espoused by the German Romantics, who were equally rational-
ly sceptical in outlook, if not openly hostile to the Enlightenment project of
reason. What I would prefer to suggest is that rationality remains an impor-
tant constitutive element overall in Kleist’s works, but it has been transferred
from the level of individuals, who no longer absolutely command it, to the
overall game situation itself. Accordingly, the ‘critical deficit’ in the second-
ary literature on Kleist appears to be a general failure to define and account
for the particular type of bounded rationality that, importantly, is still encoun-

19
Kreps, p. 11.
20
Denys Dyer’s discussion of Kleist’s stories is but one of many approaches that highlight the
irrationality of the world Kleist portrays. See Dyer, The Stories of Kleist (London: Duck-
worth, 1977), pp. 151-69.
21
Bernd Fischer speaks of the ‘Skepsis an der Ratio’ that has long dominated readings of
Kleist in the secondary literature. See Fischer, Ironische Metaphysik: Die Erzählungen
Heinrich von Kleists (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1988), p. 13.
 The Game of the Narrative 411

tered in Kleist’s imaginative world.22 This critical deficit is in part made good
in a set of contributions gathered together in a recent publication under the
title of Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung. In the opinion of many of the
contributors to that volume of research, Kleist, while by no means a rational-
ist, appears to be anything but a committed anti-rationalist either 23 – a point
which I believe is made obvious by the application of game theory to his
work.
Early research demonstrated conclusively that the narrative model for
Kleist’s stories is an unerhörte Begebenheit24 – an unheard-of, unanticipated,
unprecedented, and even shocking event of a nature such as that which Goe-
the considered elemental to the form of the novella.25 This event erupts upon
the settled world of human understanding in the stories and precipitates a new
quality of strategic interdependence for the story’s participants. The unheard-
of event might be a ‘move’ of nature, as is the case with the earthquake in
Das Erdbeben in Chili, or some form of intervention of a person who turns
out to be a player, as in the example of the Junker Wenzel von Tronka in the
story Michael Kohlhaas, who suddenly erects a tollgate (Schlagbaum) on his
property and without warning levies a punitive tax on all those, including the
trader Kohlhaas, who pass across his territory. What is important for the
game-theoretical perspective is that the unheard-of event in each of the
stories establishes a heightened level of risk for participants, and accordingly
changes their behaviour. In fact, the unheard-of event both creates the game
situation and recasts each story as a non-cooperative game of incomplete in-
formation, where each participant must negotiate her or his moves without
any certainty about the motivation of other participants. Indeed, Kleist goes
to great lengths to undermine the strategic links between participants that
would otherwise lead to co-operative alliances among participants or, con-
ceivably, to a Nash equilibrium, the stable outcome of the game situation.
Despite such preponderant instability, the game itself retains a rational

22
For this reason, approaches such as that of Fischer, p. 160, emphasizing the insoluble nature
of the dilemmas that Kleist’s stories discuss, fail to give a complete account of Kleist’s
critique of rational understanding.
23
Cf. especially the contributions of Hans-Jochen Marquardt, ‘Heinrich von Kleist-die Geburt
der Moderne aus dem Geiste “neuer Aufklärung’”, and David Roberts, ‘Kleists Kritik der
Urteilskraft: Zum Erhabenen in Das Erdbeben in Chili”, in Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Tim
Mehigan.
24
Cf. Denys Dyer, pp. 150.
25
Johann Peter Eckermann: Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by
Fritz Bergemann (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1981 [1955]), I, pp. 207-8.
412 Tim Mehigan

appearance, since there are still pay-offs for behaviour at every stage of the
game and a rational outcome is still provided for in the structure of the game.

3
In Die Verlobung in St Domingo, a story based on actual historical events of
1803-4, civil war has broken out between the French colonisers of the Carib-
bean island of Santo Domingo and the island’s indigenous inhabitants. As a
result of an uprising that has seen the appropriation of farms and territory and
a slaughter of whites by blacks, a force of 30,000 black troops, under the
command of the renegade Frenchman General Dessalines, is rapidly moving
across the island in order to storm the capital, Port au Prince, the last bastion
of French power on the island. The small party of Gustav von der Ried, an
officer in the French army, who is Swiss by birth, must reach the capital be-
fore the arrival of General Dessalines’s troops in order to effect an escape
from the island. Gustav, the leader of the party, leaves his twelve compatriots
by a wooded pond at nightfall and makes for a nearby house, where he at-
tempts to secure food and overnight lodgings for his party. What Gustav
doesn’t know is that the house he happens upon belongs to the black man
Congo Hoango, a former slave of the French plantation owner Guillaume de
Villeneuve, who treacherously slew de Villeneuve after hostilities began, de-
spite several acts of kindness shown to him by the benevolent plantation
owner over many years. In the meantime, Congo Hoango has forcibly taken
over the plantation and dedicated his life to the murder of all colonizers still
left on the island. He has made the mulatto Babekan his concubine, and also
taken in her daughter Toni, a mestiza, who, having been fathered by a
Frenchman in Paris, is lighter-skinned. The game, the context of which is
shaped by the murder of the plantation owner, the story’s unheard-of event,
involves Gustav and his party on one side, and Congo Hoango, Babekan and
Toni on the other. Survival is the pay-off at every stage of this cutthroat game
of non-cooperation.26 The optimal strategy of one side is the killing, or at
least neutralization, of the other, since this will guarantee the survival of one
party. However, as we shall see, such neutralization would not be the Nash
equilibrium position in the game.

26
Bebekan alludes to survival as a pay-off in the following way: ‘Beim Himmel, diese deine
Erklärung rettet ihm für heute das Leben!’ (‘By heavens, your just saying that has saved him
his life for today!’) See Heinrich von Kleist: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut
Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1983), II, 178 (hereafter cited in the text as, for example,
simply II, 178), and for the translation Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O- and other
Stories, Translated and with an Introduction by Martin Greenberg. Preface by Thomas Mann
(New York: Criterion Books, 1960), p. 212 (hereafter cited in the text as, for example,
Greenberg, 212).
 The Game of the Narrative 413

Two absences are apparent at the start of the game and condition its struc-
ture: Congo Hoango is away on a mission in support of the cause of General
Dessalines, leaving Babekan (whose name means ‘fortress’) and her daughter
Toni alone in the house; Gustav’s party is holed up in their hideaway in the
forest by the pond, thus leaving Gustav as the vanguard and lone promoter of
the Swiss party’s cause. Since neither side, by virtue of these absences, is
able to exert dominance over the other, the game must be played on the as-
sumption of dissimulation, very much like a game of poker. This point is
made by Babekan at the outset, who indicates the need for ‘List und [der]
ganze[n] Inbegriff jener Künste, die die Notwehr dem Schwachen in die
Hände gibt’ (‘by every trick and skill that self-preservation teaches the weak’)
(V, 165 and Greenberg, 199) It should be noted, in passing, that this state-
ment about the importance of dissimulation is, in the context of the story,
itself a dissimulation. The first consequence of this strategy of dissimulation
is that neither side knows the real motivation of the other, nor, indeed, the
true identity of the third player, the mestiza Toni, who starts the game on the
black side. Since Toni has an African mother and a French father, she is at
once black and white. She so becomes the crucial player in the game, whose
choices can tip the balance of the game in favour of one side or the other. In
fact, the game may be understood as a struggle to establish a durable alliance
with this third player, whose ultimate allegiance becomes the real focus of
the game.
Interest in the allegiance of the third player is heightened still further by
the question of racial identity. Since identity is linked to the moves the play-
ers make in the game, perceptions about racial origin assume importance for
the players in assessing the strategy of the game. Indeed, for many interpret-
ers of the story, like Susanne Zantop, these perceptions are what the story is
really about. 27 Certainly, they help account for the story’s startlingly modern
appearance. From the perspective of the African, the European is imperialis-
tic and destructive of natural values in a way that no act of kindness can
make up for. Congo Hoango’s murder of the plantation owner de Villeneuve
is consonant with this idea. Black, therefore, must always oppose the moves
of white in the game situation. From the reverse perspective, the African is
heathen and treacherously dismissive of the humanistic values of tolerance
and compassion at the heart of European civilization. Since tolerance is indi-
cated in this position, we can only say that white does not directly oppose the
moves of black, unless black is treacherous, in which case white must then

27
See her essay ‘Changing Color: Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St Domingo and the Discourses of
Miscegenation’, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Bernd Fischer
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 191-208.
414 Tim Mehigan

oppose black. Such is the case in the story related by Gustav about the young
negress who, through dissimulation, infected a white planter, her former
owner, with yellow fever. Gustav renders this perspective clear when doubts
about Toni’s allegiance are raised at a critical moment in the story:

Die Rache des Himmels, meinte er, indem er sich mit einem leidenschaftlichen Ausdruck
erhob, würde dadurch entwaffnet: die Engel selbst, dadurch empört, stellten sich auf Seiten
derer, die Unrecht hätten, und nähmen, zur Aufrechterhaltung menschlicher und göttlicher
Ordnung, ihre Sache!
(Heaven’s vengeance, he said, rising from the table with a passionate expression, would be
disarmed by such a deed: the angels themselves in their outrage would side with the unright-
eous and, to uphold the human and divine order, plead their cause.) (V, 171 and Greenberg,
204)

Such passages represented a problem for early research on Kleist, since they
were understood literally and enlisted in support of an essentialist account of
humanistic values28 or, alternatively, the Christian morality on which they
were allegedly based.29 Later scholarship understood them as contributions to
a complicated dialogue about the Enlightenment and historicized them.30
They are, however, completely subsumable under neither category. Rather,
such passages are part of a discussion about contingency that has rendered all
values precisely that – values or strategic positions to be taken up in a game
situation where even the angels themselves can ‘take sides’.
Die Verlobung in St Domingo can therefore be understood as a game with
a bimatrix structure in which neutralization of the opponent is the preferred
outcome of one side; survival is the pay-off at each stage of the game. The
game reveals an underlying contingency in the sense that the critical player,
Toni, is both white and black and so without any predictable or necessary al-

28
Among the many early adherents of this approach, Günter Blöcker’s may be considered re-
presentative. See his Heinrich von Kleist oder das absolute Ich (Berlin: Argon, 1960).
29
Such is the nature of Gerhard Fricke’s existentialist approach, first published in 1929, which
was highly influential for later Kleist scholarship. See his Gefühl und Schicksal bei Heinrich
von Kleist (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963).
30
Fischer’s analysis, in Ironische Metaphysik, p. 12, is a good example of such approaches:
‘Kleists Erzählungen [können] durchaus historisch als Auseinandersetzung mit dem herr-
schenden Paradigma seiner Zeit (das vielleicht immer noch am treffendsten mit dem epocha-
len Schlagwort Idealismus gefaßt wird) begriffen werden, dessen Grenzen er im ironischen
Experiment aufzuzeigen vermag, ohne sie freilich […] grundsätzlich überschreiten zu kön-
nen.’ (‘Kleist’s stories could well be understood historically as a challenge to the ruling par-
adigm of his time [which we might identify perhaps most accurately with the epochal term,
Idealismus] by showing off its limits in an ironic experiment without, however, being able to
transcend them [...] in principle.’).
 The Game of the Narrative 415

legiance.31Allegiance, in her case, is pledged ‘decisionistically’, in response

to the overall game situation. That Toni is the uncommitted third participant
in the game does not gainsay the bimatrix structure of the game. Elsewhere,
moves of such a third participant are normally ascribed in game theory to the
position of ‘nature’. Since Toni’s true allegiance is a question of a decision
not finally knowable to the other participants, the two sides of the bimatrix,
those occupied by Gustav and Babekan, have no choice but to ‘trust’ or ‘dis-
trust’ Toni. Whether they trust or exercise mistrust at a particular stage of the
game will determine the moves they make in the game; however, only trust
can ensure that the game proceeds to the next stage, and only mistrust can
end it. Accordingly, the game moves ahead in a bifurcated pattern in which
trust, the ‘1’ position in the game, continues the game, and mistrust, the ‘0’
position, might at any stage end it. This is made clear at the end of the game
when Toni declares, ‘Du hättest mir nicht mißtrauen sollen!’ (‘You shouldn’t
have mistrusted me!’) (V, 193 and Greenberg, 227). The only way that
Toni’s decision, and, perhaps, her underlying motivation, can be known, is by
way of ‘backwards induction’, that is, through a process of reasoning which
assesses her choices from the end of the game back to its beginning.32 It is
only by backwards induction, too, that any final assessment can be made
about the level of rationality in the game. This, then, is Kleist’s ultimate coup:
rational motivation is no longer an a priori question, based on a complete
knowledge of the game situation before the fact of human experience, but can
only be established a posteriori in the light of actual moves undertaken by
players in the game. It is in this undoing of Kant’s Copernican project of
reason – a project predicated on the idea that rational judgements can be
made on the basis of assumptions that precede the fact of human experience –
that we find Kleist’s true answer to Kant. Kleist’s answer to Kant involves
relativization of the claims of cognitive reason to provide an a priori guide
for human behaviour, and moves other aspects of the humanist project, such
as those factors that underpin contingent agreements, to the forefront.33

31
Toni is only half as black as her mulatto mother Babekan. This has significance for Herbert
Uerlings, who has argued that the lightness of Toni’s skin means that her blush can be decoded by
the male as a cipher of sexual desire. Cf. Herbert Uerlings, Poetiken der Interkulturalität. Haiti bei
Kleist, Seghers, Müller, Buch und Fichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), p. 43.
32
Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, pp. 80-85, offer a useful discussion of ‘backwards induction’.
33
It is, above all, Kleist’s interest in the principle of agreement that suggests the importance of
Rousseau in his thinking. For a discussion of Kleist’s reception of Rousseau, see Oskar Rit-
ter von Xylander, Heinrich von Kleist und J. J. Rousseau (Berlin: Ebering, 1937) and Chris-
tian Moser, Verfehlte Gefühle: Wissen-Darstellen-Begehren bei Kleist und Rousseau (Würz-
burg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993). For a discussion of the motif of the contract in
416 Tim Mehigan

The game of trust at the heart of Die Verlobung in St Domingo moves

ahead in distinct stages. The first stage begins with Gustav’s arrival at the
house and his reception by Babekan and Toni, and extends to the point of his
first close contact with Toni. In this part of the story, the rules of the game
are described, including the game’s reliance on dissimulation. That there are
no durable values that can serve the players as a guide to action is suggested
in the difficulty of assessing origins: Toni is of mixed race, Babekan is a mu-
latto with a Cuban father (and therefore not unambiguously African); even
Gustav himself, although white, is Swiss and as such not clearly in opposition
to the moves of black. The game unfolds in response to assumptions that the
players make about these origins, and what the origins ultimately stand for. 34
The second stage in the game is introduced by a substory related by Gus-
tav, which is as a subgame expressing a Nash equilibrium.35 Since the equi-
librium it specifies represents a best reply to the players of that subgame, it
can also be termed a subgame perfect (Nash) equilibrium.36 In this subgame,
Gustav’s former lover, Mariane Congreve, saved Gustav from the guillotine
during events accompanying the French Revolution by denying knowledge of
Gustav under duress. This move in the subgame of trust had the highest pos-
sible positive pay-off for Gustav, since it ensured his survival, and the highest
possible negative pay-off for Mariane, since she thereby succumbed to the
guillotine. (If it can be assumed that Mariane’s playing fink would have led
to the death of both Gustav, as the exposed traitor of the revolutionary cause,
and Mariane, as his accomplice, then Mariane’s denial of Gustav, which
saves his life, was also one of two Nash equilibrium outcomes of the game –
the other being Gustav’s death as a result of playing fink.) This subgame has
instructional value for Toni since it exactly mirrors her position in the main
trust game – a game that, similarly, must also be played on the basis of the
dissimulated identity of one player. The direct effect of this interpolated sub-
game is that it precipitates a decisive move of Toni, who subsequently makes
love to Gustav and so indicates her trust of him. An act of trust, therefore,

Kleist, see my Text as Contract: The Nature and Function of Narrative Discourse in the
Erzählungen of Heinrich von Kleist (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1988).
34
The fact that the names ‘Gustav’ and ‘August’ constitute two sides of the one identity as
well as being near anagrams of each other (in the same manner as Nicolo is an anagram of
Colino for Piachi’s wife in Der Findling) underscores how the story is manifestly a game of
identity for Toni as well.
35
A subgame is a subset of an extensive game that starts from a ‘node’ in the game and feeds
information back into it a player’s ‘information partition’. On this see Hargreaves-Heap and
Varoufakis, pp. 82-83.
36
Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, p. 83.
 The Game of the Narrative 417

moves the game to the next stage, and has the direct pay-off of survival for
all participants.
At this next stage of the game a new story is related, also by Gustav. It
introduces a second subgame that sets up a counter position to the story about
Mariane Congreve. The story tells of the slave girl, who lures her former
slave owner into a trap, where the decision to trust through an act of love, or,
better, lovemaking, has the highest possible negative pay-off for the one who
trusts, namely his death as a result of infection with yellow fever. Here, trust
does not lead to a perfect Nash equilibrium outcome. This position could
only have been reached as a result of a decision not to trust. This second sub-
game of complete information therefore relativizes the information of the
first subgame, and adds an implicit level of risk to moves that assume trust
without the factor of dissimulation.
Toni’s next move in the game must take account of the sudden return of
Congo Hoango and the suspicions of her mother, who now suspects that Toni
has had intimate contact with Gustav. (Babekan, it should be noted, has not
been a recipient of the information about dissimulated motives in the second
subgame about the slave girl.) These events mean that she must practise a de-
cisive act of dissimulation that both allays these suspicions in one direction,
and in the other promotes the survival of Gustav, whom it is now clear she
truly loves. She achieves this by tying up Gustav while he sleeps in his room,
thus giving the appearance of collusion with the moves of black, while at the
same time rushing out to meet Gustav’s party in the forest, intercepting a note
issued by Babekan that would have lured the party into a trap. This enables
Gustav’s party to arrive with stealth, overcome Hoango and Babekan, quell
the resistance of Hoango’s encampment at the house and liberate Gustav.
What it fails to forestall, however, is Gustav’s next move, which follows the
logic not of the first subgame of trust, but of the second, on the presumption
that Toni has treacherously betrayed him and ultimately proved to be a col-
luder on the black side. This move, which sees him murder Toni before he is
in possession of complete information about her motives, is a decision irrevo-
cably to mistrust that ends the game, and, in a postscript or coda to the game,
ends his own life as well.

4
What, then, is to be said about Die Verlobung in St Domingo after this appli-
cation of game-theoretical assumptions to the story? And beyond the example
of Kleist, what might be the utility of game theory for literary analysis?
The most obvious thing that arises from viewing the story from the per-
spective of game theory relates to its overriding context of contingency. The
418 Tim Mehigan

story is revealed not only as a non-essentialist account of a contingent world,

but also as a world that has nevertheless not abandoned rationality in any
sceptical turn from it. Rather, the rationality we observe in the story is em-
bedded in the highly symmetrical nature of its game structure; it is not pre-
eminently encountered in the motivation of the figures, who, under certain
circumstances, indeed, must favour strategies of non-rational behaviour in
seeking to maximize their pay-offs in the game. To this extent, therefore, a
game-theoretical approach helps us evaluate, and perhaps see the purpose of,
the disparity between form and content long held to be characteristic of
Kleist’s fiction. The critic Hermann Davidts is but one of many commenta-
tors who was struck by the highly organized, formalistic nature of Kleist’s
narratives on the one hand, and their subject matter on the other, where con-
fusion, tragic misunderstandings and quirks of fate reign supreme.37 In fact,
one of the insights to be drawn from this reading of Die Verlobung in St Do-
mingo is the difficulty that attends action in the world, precisely because the
rational construction of events by the characters on a formal level of thought
is unable to brook the complex content of the world which such thought ad-
dresses. Kleist thereby relativizes the Enlightenment project of reason, which
had insisted that the world could be known through the operation of a type of
predictive cognitive schematism. Kleist does not conclude that rational action
is impossible in the world. He does, however, draw attention to the issue of
complexity and to the means by which it can be brokered beyond reversion to
a transparent rationalism. This is underscored in the denouement of Die
Verlobung, where the rationally minded European Gustav is unable to com-
prehend the strategies of the Afro-European Toni, though she never failed to
have Gustav’s best interests at heart. Kleist’s point is to underscore the im-
portance of following mixed strategies of both a rational and non-rational na-
ture. While Nash equilibrium outcomes draw on the enlightened self-interest
of players and require a ‘common knowledge rationality’ to sustain them,
Kleist’s narratives also ‘load the dice’ against responses founded on a simple
predictive rationality alone. His stories thus point to the value of more nu-
anced, longer term strategies in effecting equilibrium outcomes in the game
situation.
More generally, the application of game theory in literary analysis would
appear to be justified for a certain class of texts. These would be texts that
evince a self-evident play structure in broad consonance with postmodern
notions of textuality. At the same time, they would be texts in which the play

37
See Hermann Davidts, Die novellistische Kunst Heinrichs von Kleist (Hildesheim: Gersten-
berg, 1973).
 The Game of the Narrative 419

structure of the narration stabilizes around a formal set of indicators con-

stituting a clearly marked off ‘semantic field’ within the text. In this class of
texts (of which, indeed, all Kleist’s stories might be cited as an example) the
semantic field, which is characterized by an attenuated or bounded rationality,
is summoned into view by what Goethe noted in reference to the short story
as the narrative’s unerhörte Begebenheit. This ‘unheard-of event’ precipitates
or retrospectively structures the game situation of the story. The game situa-
tion, in turn, is no longer conditioned by aesthetic considerations otherwise
constitutive of imaginative writing, but is determined by contextual consider-
ations ultimately linked to a practical or ethical content in the story (in game
theoretical terms, the problem of how to achieve an optimal pay-off for all
participants in the game). In a context of overriding contingency – the contin-
gency of the situation of modernity – it is this movement from aesthetics to
ethics, from play to game, which provides new goals for literary analysis.
Alexander Honold

French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and

Symbolic Acting in Gottfried Keller’s Prose Fiction

The chapter analyzes the phenomena of narrated play in Gottfried Keller’s prose on at least two
different levels of textual ‘playing’. First, the given play and its manifest representation, and sec-
ondly, the interaction between the represented characters and their textual actors. In contrast to
dramatic versions of a play within a play, which often constitute a logical paradox, the narrated
play is an effect between different genres, and therefore it doesn’t allude to a logical binarism but
rather to an aesthetical embedding. Playing games is a second-degree acting conscious of itself, a
kind of acting as-if. Somehow it corresponds to mimesis, but with an ironical consensus regard-
ing the rules. We know that in Greek tragedy mimesis emerged from the ritual sphere of agon
and sacrifice. Playing games signifies acting as-if within the great game of reality, when the rules
are accepted and the stage is defined. To differentiate between playing and behaving seriously is
just a matter of definition; one always needs to consider the actual level of stage and perspective.
‘Playing’ is a highly ambiguous concept. For ‘playing’ does not only mean ‘acting’ but also –
and especially in its origin – it means ‘playing a game’. Playing games almost everywhere be-
longs to a dimension that involves an antagonistic structure, like a ‘he or me’-showdown.
Keller’s Prose is full of such situations of antagonism. If theatre can be a model of literature as
symbolic practice, playing games probably is the very master-type for the antagonistic mode of
action that makes the drama. To combine both dimensions, one could say: Playing is a mode of
symbolic acting that helps to express social relations or to determine them.

1. Narrated Acting
Gottfried Keller was not a great playwright, but he is well known for his po-
etry and especially for his narrative fiction – two long novels and a series of
stories and novellas. In Keller’s oeuvre, there is one finished play called
Therese and a fragmentary project entitled Mythenstein, which (if finished)
would have been a combination of music, theatre and a celebration of nation-
al history in the style of Richard Wagner. Both of these efforts failed, and it
seems that Keller himself was more interested in popular spectacle and in
staging live theatre than in the literary techniques of dramatic mise en scène.
Nevertheless, plays and theatre do have an important impact on the edu-
cation of the protagonist in Keller’s great novel, Der grüne Heinrich. In
many ways, young Heinrich represents the childhood and youth of the author
himself. Like his author, the novel’s protagonist is deeply impressed by theat-
rical experiences connected with two major works of the Weimar classical
422 Alexander Honold

period, namely Faust and Wilhelm Tell. Goethe’s Faust – or, more precisely,
the actress of the Gretchen-scene – marks the first moments of sexual awak-
ening in the protagonist’s adolescence; some years later a public staging of
Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell echoes this initiation with the beginning of Heinrich’s
shy love affair with Anna, also introducing the dimensions of national allego-
ry and popular enactment of a collective memory. In Keller’s novel, both of
these plays are are performed on an elementary level by passionate dilettanti
and not presented as the untouchable climax of high culture. The inhabitants
of a Swiss town, mostly dignitaries and persons of outstanding merit, proudly
perform as the dramatis personae of Wilhelm Tell, a play they have known
almost by heart since their school days. They enjoy their own acting and have
no reason to conceal their pleasure. Theatre in Grüner Heinrich is far from
any professional ambition of illusionism, and what we have is a kind of nar-
rated acting that self-reflexively points to its own characteristic of being on
stage at every moment of its performance. One could call this ‘epic theatre’,
perhaps even in the Brechtian sense. In Keller’s prose, epic theatre describes
a narrative discourse about what it means to play a role and about what it
means to act as a protagonist.
It would be worth analyzing more exhaustively all the phenomena of nar-
rated play in their semiotic and poetic aspects, provided that the author in
question manages to connect at least two different levels of textual ‘playing’:
the given play and its manifest representation, and the interaction between
characters and their textual actors. One also should not neglect the perfor-
mative qualities of the act of narration, which can be considered a mise en
scène of fictional protagonists acting as ‘real actors’ of fictional protagonists,
and so on. In short, what I like to suggest here is that narratives about play-
acting have a structural tendency to be self-reflexive; their textual play opens
an inner space of redoubling references that can be identified as the well-
known effect of mise en abyme. Differing from dramatic versions of the play
within a play, which often constitute a logical paradox, the narrated play is
an effect between different genres, and therefore it alludes to aesthetic em-
beddings and not to logical binarism. Since we have a framed performance,
similar to the architecture of the stage itself, we are able to observe it as a re-
presentation on its two levels of plot and performance, which coincide on a
third level, that of performance as a plot itself, as a subject of narration.
In recent decades, theatre has become a metaphor for different forms of
cultural representation and for symbolic acting in general. Inspired by the
‘performative turn’ in literary scholarship, some helpful articulations of the
relations between narrative and dramatic discourse have been made in Ger-
many. I mention only the two volumes of Szenographien and Inszenierte
 Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting 423

Welt, edited by Gerhard Neumann, Ethel Matala de Mazza and others.1 The
contributors of these two volumes focus on Theatralität (theatricality) as a
concept of literature and criticism. As various case studies demonstrate, con-
cepts taken from the performing arts can be usefully applied to narrative. As
the different genres reflect parallels and affinities, comparison also empha-
sizes differences. In prose, the most important performance is telling a story,
and therefore language itself in its articulated linearity represents a basic
mode of acting. A narrator’s voice is a special effect that does not translate
easily into stage presentation. However, the narrated plot and its protagonists
do constitute a play that is more or less transferable into a dramatic mode.
And finally, within the narrated action there can be found, to some extent,
brief inserts of second-degree acting, small reservoirs of playing in the full
sense of the word. For ‘playing’ does not only mean ‘acting’ but also – espe-
cially in its origin – it means ‘playing a game’. If theatre can be a model of
literature as symbolic practice, playing games probably is the very masterty-
pe for the antagonistic mode of action that makes drama.

2. Agonistic Situations
Playing games almost universally belongs to antagonisms, to a decisive struc-
ture as in a ‘he or me’ showdown. There is no third solution between win or
lose, victory or defeat, success or catastrophe. Keller’s prose is full of such
situations of antagonism. In the novel Der Grüne Heinrich we have two or
three quite similar constellations in which the protagonist, as a ten- or twelve-
year-old schoolboy, tries to compete with friends and rivals who are much
stronger and cleverer than he is, and who belong to families much wealthier
than his. As Heinrich lives alone with his mother, a widow who tries hard to
maintain her family’s former standard of living with her limited revenue, the
young boy very often gets the impression of not being able to compete with
others in terms of social prestige and economic power. In the sequence of
these agonistic situations, Heinrich is always condemned to play the under-
dog’s part, and the only thing that saves him from being defeated is his fanta-
sy.

In der Tat muß ich auf diese Kinderzeit meinen Hang und ein gewisses Geschick zurück-
führen, an die Vorkommnisse des Lebens erfundene Schicksale und verwickelte Geschich-

1
See Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann, Caroline
Pross and Gerald Wildgruber (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), and Inszenierte Welt. Theatralität
als Argument literarischer Texte, ed. by Ethel Matala de Mazza and Clemens Pornschlegel
(Freiburg: Rombach, 2003).
424 Alexander Honold

ten anzuknüpfen, und so im Fluge heitere und traurige Romane zu entwerfen, deren Mittel-
punkt ich selbst oder die mir Nahestehenden ware.
(Indeed I must trace back to my childhood a tendency of mine and a degree of skill to tie to-
gether events of my life with certain invented fates and other complicated stories, thus de-
veloping in a flight of fancy either cheerful or sad novels with myself or those close to me at
the very centre.) (GH, 122).2

As the situation sometimes requires transcending the poverty of his daily life,
Heinrich’s little stories emerge spontaneously. When necessary (and it often
is), the ‘grüner Heinrich’ isn’t quite so green; he can tell blatant lies and
adorn them so convincingly that despite adverse circumstances and diverse
disadvantages, in many cases it is he who scores the point. Once a few older
pupils are punished only because of Heinrich’s completely false allegations:
‘Noch nie hatte man in der Schule eine solche Beredsamkeit an mir bemerkt,
wie bei dieser Erzählung’ (‘Never had I been noted in school for such elo-
quence as when I told this story’) (GH, 125). While the others are blamed and
punished, he survives the affair as an innocent victim.
But rivals always meet twice. A few years later, the whole class invades a
teacher’s private rooms just to terrify him; an investigation exposes Heinrich
as solely responsible and he is dismissed from school. A little and nasty vic-
tory in the first scene is echoed by a bitter and definite punishment in the sec-
ond one, and this combination seems to be decisive in his future as a young
artist and social dropout. It is his own imagination that takes him beyond the
rules of his comrades, and again it is imagination that helps him withstand the
shock of losing his place in school. Both times, techniques of playing are in-
troduced on different levels. In order to rival his older or wealthier comrades,
Heinrich has to pretend to be something different than he is; he is playing a
role, and he is playing a game as well.
Playing games is second-degree acting conscious of itself, a kind of act-
ing as-if. Somehow it corresponds to mimesis, but with ironical consent to
rules. We know that in Greek tragedy mimesis emerged from the ritual
sphere of agon and sacrifice. Playing games signifies acting as-if within the
great game of reality, when the rules are accepted and the stage is defined.
Anyhow, to differentiate between playing and behaving seriously is just a
matter of definition; one always needs to consider the actual level of stage
and perspective. ‘Playing’ is a highly ambiguous concept, and that is the first
reason for its attractiveness. But at this point in my argument, it is not suffi-

2
I am quoting from the novel’s first version in the following edition: Gottfried Keller, Der
grüne Heinrich [Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2], ed. by Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser
(Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985). This edition cited in the text as GH
followed by page number. Translations by Gerhard Fischer.
 Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting 425

cient to exploit that ambiguity. I will say a few words about the theoretical
status of games and playing.

3. Modes of Playing
Modern thinking about the status of playing in anthropology starts with the
Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga and his famous book Homo ludens
(1939).3 Huizinga introduced and established an understanding of playing
that refers to Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education; that means, for
Huizinga, the human sphere of playing belongs to the presupposed existence
of an autonomous realm of art. In contrast, the French sociologist Roger
Caillois established an anthropological approach to the practices of playing.4
With Caillois, four principal dimensions of play can be delineated, and only
one of them – the concept of mimicry – derives from the artistic sphere of
mimesis, while the others have much more to do with our colloquial under-
standing of playing a game. What kind of games do we play? Most of them
are competitive, and most of them conclude with a decisive victory or defeat
that can be achieved by chance or struggle or a combination of both. Caillois
first analyzes all sorts of competition, of duel and fight, referring them to the
Greek category of agon (which means rivalry). These consist of symmetrical
relations between opponents or antagonists that can be solved by different
sorts of competition. As a second element, these competitive games can also
include a random system that Caillois terms hasard (coincidence). On that
field, decisions are made by chance. The only rule of the game here is the statis-
tical calculation of probability, such as in games of dice, in playing cards, or all
kinds of lotteries. Finally, Caillois distinguishes another kind of games that are
non-symmetrical and affect primarily the self – one could call them ‘vertigo’
games (vertige), games in which the body is exposed to high-pressure sensations,
to drugs, or to velocity. But what seems most important to me in the context of
this chapter are those games which connect one of these agonistic forms of play-
ing a game with playing in the dramatic sense of playing a role, identified with
the notions of mimesis or mimicry.

4. Substitutive Acting
To combine both dimensions, one could say that playing is a mode of sym-
bolic acting that helps express or determine social relations. To illustrate this
point, let me return to my observations about narrated play in Keller’s prose.
As I mentioned earlier, in Keller’s Grüner Heinrich the protagonist and his

3
Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel (Reinbek: Rowohlt,
1994).
4
Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
426 Alexander Honold

girlfriend Anna fall in love with a little help from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, as
they have to use the words of love Schiller prescribes for his protagonists
Bertha and Rudenz. Of course it is Heinrich who has arranged the whole
scene, while Anna doesn’t know the play very well and stands completely
surprised and embarrassed when it comes to performing the decisive scene.

Anna fragte, was denn das wäre mit der Jagdszene […], und während mein Brauner und ihr
Schimmel behaglich sich beschnupperten, ich aber wie auf Kohlen saß, las sie, das Buch auf
dem rechten Knie haltend, aufmerksam die Szene, wo Rudenz und Bertha ihr schönes Bünd-
nis schließen, von Anfang bis zu Ende, mehr und mehr errötend. Die Schlinge kam nun an
den Tag, welche ich ihr so harmlos gelegt.
(Anna asked what it was about this hunting scene […], and while our horses were tenderly
sniffing each other, I was like sitting on hot coals as she, the book on her right knee, atten-
tively read the scene in which Rudenz and Bertha conclude their happy union, from begin-
ing to end, blushing more and more. Thus the trap came to light that I had so harmlessly set
for her.) (GH, 425).

When Anna realizes that they have to perform a love scene, she refuses to
continue the play – and shows thereby that she understands the message very
well. Leaving behind Schiller’s play, Heinrich and Anna learn to act and to
feel being in love; they learn to be conscientious actors. But when the play is
over, the magic is gone. There always has to be a kind of alibi or pretext that
‘authorizes’ them to overcome their shyness and fear. To be precise, their
problem is not psychology but communication. Literature offers to them a
language of love that serves as a platform for their encounter. If the question
for the couple is how to produce emotions with words, the answer can be to
adopt and adapt literature for their own purpose; but very soon the point is
reached where playing a role isn’t enough for Heinrich and Anna, and they
understand that it is time for them to act without quotation marks. It is the
narration itself that opens an alternative playground when switching the focus
from the two persons to their horses, tenderly sniffing each other.
When acting comes to a dead end, changing the playground or refining
the rules of the game can be the solution. The horses enact what can neither
be said nor done by Anna and Heinrich. The animals introduce a parallel play
to the main plot, a drama in nuce that anticipates and accelerates relations
between Heinrich and Anna. In this sense of a play within the play, we could
now discuss similar scenes in other novels, for example the famous horse
races in Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, or in Zola’s Nana. Both scenes are symp-
tomatic and decisive for their plots, and both of them serve as an explicit in-
terpretation of the hidden conflicts and love affairs between the main pro-
tagonists. In these two cases, the horserace is clearly a substitute for decisions
that cannot be made otherwise.
 Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting 427

5. Kitchen Games
In his Grüner Heinrich, Keller also arranges such a model of symbolic acting
when Heinrich and Anna are together for the very first time. Their love affair
starts in the kitchen, where the housework has to be done. There is a large
pile of French beans between them on the table, and now the game is to di-
minish it from both sides without touching each other’s hands; desire and ta-
boo converge:

Anna hatte eine mächtige Wanne voll grüner Bohnen der Schwänzchen und Fäden zu entle-
digen und an lange Fäden zu reihen, um sie zum Dörren vorzubereiten. […] wir setzten uns
einander gegenüber, bis zur Mittagsstunde arbeitend und von unseren gegenseitigen Lebens-
läufen, Eltern und Familien erzählend.
(Anna had to prepare a sizeable tub full of green beans, to remove their little tails and
threads and to string them up on long lines in preparation for drying. […] we sat facing each
other, working until lunchtime and telling of our mutual lives, our parents and families.)
(GH 291)

While the day passes, the supply of French beans doesn’t come to an end, and
they are still sitting in the kitchen late in the evening, accompanied by an old
wife called Katharine serving as a housekeeper.

So saßen wir bis um ein Uhr um den grünen Bohnenberg herum und trugen ihn allmählig ab,
indem jedes einen tiefen Schacht vor sich hineingrub und die Alte den ganzen Vorrat ihrer
Sagen und Schwänke heraufbeschwor und uns beide, die wir wach und munter blieben, […]
so lachen machte, daß uns die Tränen über die Wangen liefen.
(Thus we were sitting around the mountain of green beans which was slowly being levelled,
until one o’clock in the morning, each one of us digging a deep shaft into the beans while
the old woman conjured up her whole treasure trove of old tales and funny stories, keeping
us alert and awake […] and making us laugh until tears were running down our cheeks.)
(GH 291)

Katherine, the old woman, entertains the couple with her fairy tales and pop-
ular wisdom; she performs the classical function of a matchmaker, as the
continuation shows. While the two adolescents are sitting at the table quite
innocently, their hands come closer and closer. They only can find out what
the beans could mean to them by digging in, again and again.

Anna, welche mir gegenüber saß, baute ihren Hohlweg in die Bohnen hinein mit vieler
Kunst, eine Bohne nach der andern herausnehmend, und grub unvermerkt einen unterir-
dischen Stollen, so daß plötzlich ihr kleines Händchen in meiner Höhle zutage trat, […] und
von meinen Bohnen wegschleppte in die grauliche Finsternis hinein.
(Anna, sitting opposite me, was burrowing into the mountain of beans with great artfulness,
plucking out one bean after another, until all of a sudden she had managed to complete a
428 Alexander Honold

subterranean tunnel out of which her little hand emerged into my cave […] and began to
spirit away my supply of beans into the horrible darkness.) (GH 291)

Anna starts playing seriously. What separates her from Heinrich and what
connects her to him is one and the same thing. Labour turns into love, into
the labour of love, and realistic and symbolic dimensions of the game with
the French beans mutually interpret each other:

Katherine belehrte mich, daß Anna der Sitte gemäß verpflichtet sei, mich zu küssen, wenn
ich ihre Finger erwischen könne, jedoch dürfe der Berg darüber nicht zusammenfallen, und
ich legte mich deshalb auf die Lauer.
(Katherine advised me that custom required of Anna to give me a kiss if I could get hold of
her fingers without the mountain collapsing, and I thus took up position to lie in wait for her
hand.) (GH 291)

It is a game on different levels that we are witnessing here. In Roger

Caillois’ terms, the scene is agonistic because it leads to a question of win or
lose. If Heinrich manages to catch her fingers, Anna has to pay the price.
Thus it is competition that serves as an alibi for the first kiss, while the
children’s game of hide-and-seek promotes and pushes the erotic tension be-
tween them. But in the very centre, the game also has aspects of mimicry and
mimesis because both of the players are alluding to roles from another game,
that of territorial warfare. Anna is the thief or invader, and Heinrich the de-
fender. And so their given gender-positions playfully cross each other. She
represents aggression, while he shows control. They pretend to be involved in
agonistic rivalry, but what they are hoping for is a win-win resolution called
love. Nevertheless the author is good enough not to step into a simple ro-
mance; although Heinrich later will get the kiss that he deserves, their love
fails when the game is over. Judging by the experiences that Heinrich will
have to pass through in the rest of the novel, there is no such win-win si-
tuation, at least not for him. In its economic dimension, life is just a given
amount of French beans, and it can simply be cooked and eaten.
As a kind of side dish to this episode, Keller describes a parallel scene in
his novella Pankraz der Schmoller (Pankraz the Sulker). The text tells the
story of a poor household with two children struggling for their daily suste-
nance because there isn’t enough food on the table. While the French beans
metaphorically allude to the roles of aggressor and defender, in Pankraz der
Schmoller we have serious warfare complete with troops and trenches based
on the playground of a bowl with mashed potatoes. The tasty food symbol-
izes both the agon itself and the winner’s prize, as I will demonstrate with a
longer quotation.
 Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting 429

Die Mutter kochte nämlich jeden Mittag einen dicken Kartoffelbrei, über welchen sie eine
fette Milch oder eine Brühe von schöner brauner Butter goß. Diesen Kartoffelbrei aßen sie
Alle zusammen aus der Schüssel mit ihren Blechlöffeln, indem Jeder vor sich eine Vertie-
fung in das feste Kartoffelgebirge hinein grub. Das Söhnlein, welches bei aller Seltsamkeit
in Eßangelegenheiten einen strengen Sinn für militärische Regelmäßigkeit beurkundete und
streng darauf hielt, daß Jeder nicht mehr noch weniger nahm, als was ihm zukomme, sah
stets darauf, daß die Milch oder die gelbe Butter, welche am Rande der Schüssel umherfloß,
gleichmäßig in die abgeteilten Gruben laufe; das Schwesterchen hingegen, welches viel
harmloser war, suchte, sobald ihre Quellen versiegt waren, durch allerhand künstliche
Stollen und Abzugsgräben die wohlschmeckenden Bächlein auf ihre Seite zu leiten, und wie
sehr sich auch der Bruder dem widersetzte und eben so künstliche Dämme aufbaute und
überall verstopfte, wo sich ein verdächtiges Loch zeigen wollte, so wußte sie doch immer
wieder eine geheime Ader des Breies zu eröffnen oder langte kurzweg im offenen Friedens-
bruch mit ihrem Löffel und mit lachenden Augen in des Bruders gefüllte Grube. Alsdann
warf er den Löffel weg, lamentierte und schmollte, bis die gute Mutter die Schüssel zur Seite
neigte und ihre eigene Brühe voll in das Labyrinth der Kanäle und Dämme ihrer Kinder
strömen ließ.
(Every day for lunch mother would cook a thick mash of potatoes, and she would pour some
fat milk or a broth of nice brown butter over it. They would all eat this potato mash with
their tin spoons out of a common dish, with everyone digging a little hollow into their side
of the firm mountain of mashed potatoes. The little son, despite some peculiarity in matters
of food, had a strong sense of military orderliness and strictly saw to it that no one took
more or less than was their due, and he made sure that the milk or the yellow butter floating
around the edge of the dish would run fairly into the individually excavated spaces; the little
sister, on the other hand, much less designing, would try, as soon as her source had dried up,
to direct the tasty little stream her way by constructing all sorts of artificial drains and
ditches; and as much as her brother tried to resist and responded by equally building dams or
plugging suspicious looking holes, she always found a way to open a secret vein of the mash
or she would simply, in an open violation of the peace and with a laughing eye, dip her
spoon into her brother’s well-filled quarry. Whereupon he would throw away his spoon,
lamenting and sulking, until the good mother would tilt the dish to one side so that her own
broth could run into the labyrinth of her children’s canals and dams.)5

This is a key scene for the whole novella, showing how Pankraz starts to
be a Schmoller (sulker) and a spoilsport. Why is this war-game of family-life
much more aggressive than the love-game between Heinrich and Anna? Fol-
lowing Keller’s narration, the gender antagonism is most dramatic between
brother and sister because their weapons are so unequal. The boy is commit-
ted to the rules of discipline and economic justice, while the girl acts sponta-
neously and without any bad intentions. She plays her game smiling, with
irony and grace. Because Pankraz cannot use his physical power to attain his
interests, his only way out is to be easily offended and to sulk. This daily
trouble with the mashed potatoes reaches a point when the game stops and

5
Gottfried Keller, Pankraz der Schmoller. Die Leute von Seldwyla [Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 4],
ed. by Thomas Böning (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989).
430 Alexander Honold

plunges into desperate consequences. Young Pankraz packs his few belong-
ings and leaves home for a dozen years, travelling around the world as a sol-
dier and adventurer. We have already seen that kind of desperate conse-
quence in Der grüne Heinrich when the protagonist is forced to leave school,
home and family. Sometimes it can take an entire lifetime to heal a wrong
decision made during a silly children’s game. All these games have dramatic
effects; that is what we learn by reading Gottfried Keller. The play within the
play? In the case of Keller’s French beans and mashed potatoes, it’s just a
play on the plate.
Ulrike Garde

Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal

Colony’ and Barrie Kosky’s Interpretation for the Melbourne
International Arts Festival

In his theatrical production The Lost Breath Barrie Kosky establishes a close connection to Franz
Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’. The main focus of this chapter is on the playful approach towards
the staging of unstable meanings which the two texts have in common. The analysis applies Jac-
ques Derrida’s concept of différance to the texts and focuses on the apparatus in order to reveal
theatricality as the dynamic pattern that underlies their making and re-making of meaning. It is
uncovered which elements of play and différance are inherent in Kafka’s text and how Kosky
transfers them to the stage. Ultimately, the performance serves as an illustration of how Kafka’s
‘playing’ with meaning and the corresponding theatricality of making meaning can be success-
fully transported to the stage.

In 2003, Barrie Kosky staged The Lost Breath (Der Verlorne Atem) as part of
the Melbourne International Arts Festival. This multi-framed and multi-layer-
ed performance combined three stories by Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’
(In der Strafkolonie), ‘Metamorphosis’ (Die Verwandlung) and ‘A Hunger
Artist’ (Ein Hungerkünstler) with the dramatisation of aspects of the life of
Harry Houdini and a performance of Schumann’s song cycle, ‘Dichterliebe’.
It was the first part of this performance which aroused particular interest both
in Australian critics and their colleagues who had seen the initial season of
the show at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna.1
An analysis of Kafka’s text and Kosky’s performance will demonstrate
that Kosky’s project was largely successful because of its emphasis on ‘play’
and because it used and developed elements of ‘play’ already present in Kaf-
ka’s text. Accordingly, the following analysis will fall into two parts, the first

1
Cf., for example, Helen Thomson, Age, 16 October 2003; Thuy On, Australian, 16 October
2003 and, in Germany, Wolfgang Kralicek, Theater heute (May 2003). Kosky has been co-
artistic director of the Schauspielhaus since 2001.
432 Ulrike Garde

focussing on ‘In the Penal Colony’,2 examining which elements of ‘play’ are
present in Kafka’s story, and the second on The Lost Breath, 3 analysing
which of these elements Kosky has used and developed for the first part of
his performance. Against the background of the great number of interpreta-
tions which have already been proposed for Kafka’s work and the endeavour
to tease out the emphasis on ‘play’ in this particular analysis, the interpreta-
tion will be necessarily provisional and restricted, ‘in recognition of the inter-
ventionist and theoretically endless nature of the discourse [on Kafka’s and
Kosky’s texts], the place of contexts and the provisional aspect of all find-
ings’.4
As far as ‘play’ is concerned, the analysis will take into account a broad
range of its meanings. Definitions in dictionaries refer to a ‘dramatic compo-
sition or piece’ while emphasising the aspects of creativity, freedom and fun.5
Accordingly, Brian Edwards, in his Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction,
distinguishes between ‘play’ and ‘game’, defing the latter as ‘finite and rule-
governed’.6 The etymology of the German word Spiel also stresses the as-
sociation with dance and movement,7 while the etymology of the French jeu
points to the play with words. 8 When applying the concept of ‘play’ to
Kafka’s and Kosky’s texts, these German and French etymological connota-
tions relate to Derrida’s concept of différance. In their own ways, the first
parts of The Penal Colony and The Lost Breath presuppose and explore a
notion of language and meaning in which the signifier and the signified no

2
For Kafka’s text, see ‘In der Strafkolonie’, in Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. by Wolf Kittler,
Hans-Gerd Koch and G. Neumann (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994), pp. 203-48. All German
quotations are from this edition. The English translations referred to in this chapter are by
Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories (New
York: Shocken Books, 1995), pp. 191-227, and by Ian Johnston, to be found at <http://www.
mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.hm> (accessed 7 January 2005). These transla-
tions will be referred to hereafter simply as ‘Muir’ and ‘Johnston’. Unless otherwise ac-
knowledged, all other translations are my own.
3
In what follows the short titles The Penal Colony and The Lost Breath will be used.
4
Brian Edwards, Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction (New York: Garland, 1998), p.
XII.
5
Macquarie Dictionary, ed. by A. Delbridge and others (North Ryde, N.S.W: Macquarie Li-
brary, 2003), pp. 1462-63.
6
Edwards, p. 12.
7
Duden. Etymologie. Herkunftswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, ed. by Günter Drosdowski
(Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1989), p. 690.
8
In the sense of ‘badinage’, ‘plaisanterie’. This etymology can be traced back to the twelfth
century. The meaning of ‘mouvement’ dates from 1677. See Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire
alphabétique et analogique, ed. by A. Rey and J. Rey-Devove (Paris: Le Robert, 2000), p.
1374.
 Playing with the Apparatus 433

longer form an indivisible unit leading to a stable meaning.9 Instead, the mak-
ing of meaning in these texts is deferred and continuously deconstructed by
that which differs, or, in Derrida’s words, ‘[t]he one is only the other deferred,
the one differing from the other’.10 This process of making meaning creates a
space between signifiers and signifieds which leaves room for movement and
play. This would be aptly expressed by the German word Spielraum, which
alludes to the concepts of scope, margin and free activity.11
In Derrida’s own writings, this movement often takes the shape of an el-
lipse, in which he puts an initial definition of a concept sous rature (under
erasure),12 only to return to it later on in order to re-create one of its mean-
ings. 13 The following analysis will show that similar movements in the
staging of meaning can be found both in The Penal Colony and in The Lost
Breath. At the same time, both texts explore the instability and dynamics of
staging meaning as a Spielraum, in particular with reference to the object at
the centre of their attention, the apparatus. They use the space available for a
‘playful’ approach to creating and re-creating meaning involving the reader
and spectator in this process. Meaning is forever in flux 14 and its mise en
scène is as ephemeral as a theatre performance. Accordingly Gerhard Neu-
mann refers to ‘[t]heatricality […] as a praxis of making meaning’ and de-
fines it as ‘a dynamic pattern inherent to language’.15 Here, three aspects of
‘play’ in Kafka’s and Kosky’s text come together, that is ‘play’ as a creative

9
See Derrida’s analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theories in De la Grammatolo-
gie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), p. 47.
10
Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester 1982), pp. 19-20.
11
Derrida himself speaks repeatedly of the ‘jeu de la différance’ (‘the play of différance’), e.g.
in ‘Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse’, in Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 14.
12
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides this translation, defining it as follows: ‘Since the word
is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.’ See Derrida, Of
Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Translator’s introduc-
tion, p. XIV.
13
Cf. Derrida’s description in ‘The Original Discussion of Différance (1968)’, in Derrida and
Différance, ed. by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1988), pp. 83-95 (p. 85).
14
For Derrida’s comments on trying to ‘leave’ ‘closure’ and his description of différance as
marking a ‘generative activity’, ‘movement’ and ‘creativity’, see ‘The Original Discussion’,
p. 85.
15
‘Theatralität [...] als eine Praxis der Bedeutungsproduktion [...], die als ein dynamisches
Muster der Sprache selbst innewohnt’, in Szenographien: Theatralität als Kategorie der
Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann and others (Freiburg: Rombach, 2000), p.
13.
434 Ulrike Garde

approach towards ephemeral stagings of meaning, with the underlying move-

ments of these mises en scène resembling différance.16
As a result, the reader’s active role in staging meaning is emphasised. As
Edwards remarks, ‘To observe is to be involved, in activity, discourse and
change, in the play of the world’.17 If this general definition of ‘play’ is used
as a ‘model for reading practice’,18 it invites a critical analysis which focuses
on the movements and patterns that are part of the overall mise en scène of
and ‘play’ with meanings.19 In line with these considerations, the following
analysis will show how ‘play’ in various forms is characteristic both of The
Penal Colony and of The Lost Breath and how a ‘play’ with meaning in the
sense of différance involves theatricality in the processes of making meaning
in Kafka’s and Kosky’s texts.
Here, it is important to note that Kosky bases Part I of his performance
only on the first third of The Penal Colony.20 By largely ignoring the execu-
tion, which illustrates the function of the apparatus,21 Kosky concentrates on
the theoretical explanations of the apparatus in the first part of Kafka’s story.
Consequently, the apparatus is at the centre of the ‘play’ with différance and
of the making of meaning in both texts under consideration. As a result, both
Kafka’s and Kosky’s initial mises en scène of what this apparatus could sig-
nify lead to a ‘play’ with readers and audiences who are trying to make
‘sense’ out of shifts and delays in meaning.
Although Derrida links deferral and difference intrinsically in the above
definition of différance, it is worthwhile to consider the two aspects separate-

16
Edwards, p. 17, goes even further and calls ‘play’ an ‘attitude of mind, a perspective on life
or on being in the world, together with actions manifesting this attitude. It affirms freedom
and possibility against restriction, resignation and closure, thus blurring distinctions between
observation and participation, and between spectators and collaborators.’
17
Edwards continues, p.17: ‘It is to participate in what Derrida describes as the Nietzschean
affirmation’ and he quotes Derrida as follows: ‘[t]he joyous affirmation of a world of signs
without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation’,
from Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 292.
18
Edwards, p. 17.
19
Neumann, p. 13, points to ‘inszenatorischen Antriebs- und Bewegungsmuster[n]’ (patterns
of directorial drive and movement) in literary texts. While Edwards does not make this con-
nection explicitly, his choice of vocabulary seems to suggest it.
20
‘In der Strafkolonie’, pp. 203-20. The critical literature, however, concentrates largely on the
execution itself.
21
In this context, it is noteworthy that even in the later parts of The Penal Colony the meaning
of the apparatus only becomes clear on a superficial level. Its possible metaphorical mean-
ings have been much debated. For an attempt to summarize the various interpretations, see
Axel Hecker, An der Rändern des Lesbaren. Dekonstruktive Lektüren zu Franz Kafka: ‘Die
Verwandlung’, ‘In der Strafkolonie’ und ‘Das Urteil’ (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1998), pp.
115-18.
 Playing with the Apparatus 435

ly in order to allow for a clear structure in the following analysis. Therefore,

elements of deferral will be considered first.
When Kafka makes the officer in The Penal Colony say ‘Und nun beginnt
das Spiel’ (And now the play begins) 22 on the twelfth page of his story, this is
misleading as far as the writing and reception processes are concerned; from
the very beginning, Kafka has been ‘playing’ with his readers’ expectations
and efforts to make meaning of the apparatus. At the same time, the fact that
this self-reflexive remark appears late in the text is characteristic of the de-
lays with which bits and pieces of meaning are provided in the text. For this
purpose, it is useful to analyse the first paragraphs of The Penal Colony in
detail, as they set a pattern for what follows.
Thus, the very first sentence, ‘Es ist ein eigentümlicher Apparat’ (It is a
remarkable, peculiar apparatus), 23 contains a gesture of showing, 24 which
seems to involve the start of a definition for the object at the centre of atten-
tion. However, the explanation stops here and the narrator deviates from the
central topic. Instead of providing more information on the apparatus, the of-
ficer’s explanation is interrupted after this introductory sentence and he pro-
ceeds to cast the most important roles for the theatre of meaning to come.
One main role is that of the officer, who directs the performances, as the text
states that he has the knowledge and expertise that enable him to give an
‘overview’ 25 of the nature and the function of the apparatus. Together with
the explorer, the reader is attributed the role of the audience. Consequently,
the reader’s initial curiosity regarding what makes the apparatus so
‘eigentümlich’ (peculiar, particular, remarkable and, possibly, fascinating) is
not immediately satisfied.
It is only in the next paragraph that the flow of the text seems to be redi-
rected towards the apparatus, but, once again, the promised information is not
provided. The reader learns about neither its make-up nor its function. In
order to find out part of this information, he needs to persist for another three
pages. This is despite the metalinguistic comments in the second paragraph
which seem to prepare the reader for the information to be delivered immedi-
ately. For example, when the officer states ‘Ready now!’, the Apparat is not
exactly parat or ready for description until four pages later and the first

22
Kafka, p. 215; my translation. Muir’s translation, p. 200, which reads ‘And then the
performance begins’, seems unsatisfactory because it concentrates only on the performative
aspect of the execution.
23
Kafka, p. 203. Muir’s translation, p. 191, is ‘remarkable’ , Johnston’s ‘peculiar’.
24
In the sense of Brecht’s Gestus des Zeigens.
25
The German original uses ‘überblickte’ in this context (p. 203), which expresses the notion
of control, while stressing the connotation with the metaphor of seeing.
436 Ulrike Garde

attempt to stage an execution follows another thirteen pages later.26 Simi-

larly, the officer’s invitation ‘Now just have a look at this machine’ 27 is not
followed by an explanation of its function but by a description of possible
malfunctions. In fact, each time the officer uses a metalinguistic introduction
to his ‘explanation/s’ 28 of the apparatus, the actual information about it gets
deferred only to return to it later. In The Penal Colony, the metalinguistic re-
marks could be interpreted as being sous rature,29 they are valid in the sense
that explanations are eventually going to follow, but they are crossed out at
the same time because the text which follows negates them by providing dif-
ferent information from what is expected.30 This results in what Hans-Thies
Lehmann has called ‘the figure of determination in a circle’.31 As far as The
Penal Colony is concerned, the circle keeps coming back to the same object,
each time seemingly with the aim of providing information which then slips
away again. Any attempt on part of the reader to construct ‘definite’ and
reliable meaning keeps being deconstructed.
Fittingly, Kafka makes his narrator introduce the metaphor of breakdowns
or Störungen. Failing to provide yet again the expected information, the
officer warns the explorer about possible breakdowns of the apparatus: ‘Of
course, breakdowns do happen. I really hope none will occur today, but we
must be prepared for it. […] But if any breakdowns do occur, they’ll only be
very minor, and we’ll deal with them right away’.32 After the negations and
relativisations in this explanation, it can be taken for granted that breakdowns
will happen when the machine eventually performs the task of execution.
As far as the story’s structure is concerned, it has been shown that these
breakdowns and the circular figure are far from minor in importance. Kafka
illustrates their significance once again when his text finally provides some
information about the make-up of the apparatus in the next paragraph. Once

26
Muir, p. 192. Kafka’s orginal German, p. 204, reads ‘Jetzt ist alles fertig!’ The actual des-
cription starts on p. 207, the execution on p. 220.
27
Muir, p. 192. Kafka, p. 204, says, ‘Nun sehen Sie aber diesen Apparat.’
28
Variations of the original German ‘Erklärung/en’ and ‘erklären’ pervade this part of the text,
occurring fourteen times in those first seventeen pages.
29
In The Penal Colony, the metalinguistic remarks establish patterns of play rather then serve
a hermeneutic-philosophical function.
30
James Rolleston observes a ‘consistency with which Kafka pursues his aim of infusing each
element with its own negation in order to achieve greater intensity’, Kafka’s Narrative Thea-
ter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), p. 99.
31
‘Der buchstäbliche Körper. Zur Selbstinszenierung der Literatur bei Franz Kakfa’, in Der
junge Kafka, ed. by Gerhard Kunz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 213-41 (p. 219).
As explained earlier, one could also refer to the ellipse in this context.
32
Johnston, p. 205. Here, Johnston’s translation as ‘breakdown’ is more appropriate than
Muir’s ‘go wrong’.
 Playing with the Apparatus 437

again, he employs a metalinguistic comment: ‘“But”, the officer interrupted

himself, “I am rambling on, and here stands his [the Commandant’s] appa-
ratus before us. It consists, as you see, of three parts” […].’33 At the end of
this explanation, when the make-up of the apparatus has eventually been ex-
plained, the explorer, and with him the reader, is nevertheless still waiting to
find out about the precise purpose of the apparatus. Until then, the officer
‘rambles on’ about all sorts of topics which, although thematically related to
the apparatus, interrupt any straight line of explanation. In this respect, they
resemble the condemned man’s chains which suggest vertical and horizontal
connections. There is, in Johnston’s translation, ‘a heavy chain to which were
connected the small chains [...] which were also linked to each other by con-
necting chains.’ 34
As a result of this ‘play’ with meaning and différance, the reader would
have learnt not to take any information given in the text at face value. For a
reader who is mainly interested in a straight storyline, these breakdowns in
‘distinctions between observation and participation’ 35 and the very active role
in making meaning out of the text might be irritating; other readers, such as
Kosky, would relish in those performances, delays and ‘plays’ with meaning
and reader expectations.36
At this stage of the analysis, it is appropriate to abandon the artificial dis-
tinction between deferral and difference. The above metaphor of the chains
already illustrates, in line with the definition of différance, that the deferral of
meaning is continuously linked to shifts in meaning. And it is mainly adjec-
tives that prove to be ‘untrustworthy’ to a reader in search of clear definitions,
as already indicated in the above analysis of ‘minor’ breakdowns. Similarly,
the story’s very first sentence contains the adjective eigentümlich (peculiar,
remarkable),37 which creates the reader’s interest in the apparatus. Yet, not
only are its particular characteristics revealed at a much later stage, but also
the next mention of the apparatus seems to negate its initial characterisation.
The second paragraph states that the explorer, for example, ‘did not much
care about’ 38 it and then describes the maintenance work, ‘tasks that might

33
Muir, p. 193. Cf. Kafka’s original, p. 206, which reads, ‘Aber’, unterbrach sich der Offizier,
‘ich schwätze, und sein Apparat steht hier vor uns. Er besteht, wie Sie sehen, aus drei
Teilen’.
34
Kafka, p. 203.
35
Cf. Edwards, p. 17.
36
The analysis will show that this kind of ‘play’ is emphasised in the first part of Kosky’s
production.
37
Kafka, p. 203. For Johnston’s and Muir’s translations, see note 24 above.
38
Muir, p. 191. Kafka, p. 204, reads, ‘Der Reisende hatte wenig Sinn für den Apparat’.
438 Ulrike Garde

well have been left to a mechanic’.39 At this point, the apparatus is reduced to
the technical aspects of a simple machine.40 Again, there is another slip in
meaning in the following paragraph, where the machine is praised again, this
time as an accomplished invention.41
The adjectives’ destabilising role in these mises en scène of meaning is
particularly obvious in the first sentence, where two out of the three adjec-
tives are qualified by an adverb and a modal particle, which reduce their
power to provide a definite characterisation; thus the officer’s gaze contains a
‘certain’ admiration and he is ‘of course’ (Johnston) or ‘after all’ (Muir, p.
191) familiar with the apparatus. This translation of ‘mit einem gewisser-
maßen bewundernden Blick’ and ‘den ihm doch wohlbekannten Apparat’ 42
fails to reflect the flexibility in meaning of the German original. This is be-
cause ‘gewissermaßen’ contains the idea of ‘quasi’, ‘seemingly’, ‘one could
call it that way’. The particle ‘doch’ could be interpreted in the sense of
‘wohl doch’, thus meaning ‘supposedly’, ‘one would assume’. These modifi-
cations convey yet again the idea of ‘as if’ and of staging meaning. It is
reinforced by verbs, particularly in the first paragraph, which sets up a scene
of pretending. Thus, ‘the explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of po-
liteness the Commandant’s invitation’43 and ‘the condemned man looked so
like a submissive dog that one might have thought he could be left to run
free’.44 As a result, the readers are made to feel insecure as far as the ‘true’
setting of the initial situation is concerned. In this context, the phonetic close-
ness of apparare and apārēre (appear) is important. It conveys that there is
no ultimate ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ to be revealed in Kafka’s story: everything that
appears to be ‘true’ or ‘real’ is only so for the duration of its mise en scène.45
Kafka’s use of adjectives and verbs at the beginning of The Penal Colony
is indicative of the important role of theatricality in the first third of the text.
To some extent, this can be compared to what Gerald Wildgruber has called

39
Muir, p. 192. Kafka, p. 204, reads, ‘Arbeiten, die man eigentlich einem Maschinisten hätte
überlassen können’.
40
Whenever the emphasis is on the mechanical aspect of the apparatus, Kafka uses the term
‘Maschine’. See, e.g., pp. 204 & 220.
41
See Kafka, p. 205; Muir, p. 193.
42
Kafka, p. 205.
43
Muir, p. 191. Kafka, p. 203, reads, ‘Der Reisende schien nur aus Höflichkeit der Einladung
des Kommandanten gefolgt zu sein.’
44
The emphases are mine. The original, pp. 203-04, reads, ‘Übrigens sah der Angeklagt so
hündisch ergeben aus, daß es den Anschein hatte, als könnte man ihn frei auf den Abhängen
herumlaufen lassen und müsse bei Beginn der Exekution nur pfeifen, damit er käme.’
45
Neumann, p. 12, describes the ‘performativer Gestus’ which is inherent to theatricality as
‘impliziter Habitus des Denkens, Sprechens, Schreibens und Phantasierens’.
 Playing with the Apparatus 439

‘The scene breaking into the thinking and the text’ with reference to Mallarmé,46
because ‘the model of the theatre and of the scene’ pervades Kafka’s writing
in The Penal Colony. As the analysis of différance has indicated, Kafka does
not aim at the mimetic description of a penal colony, but at an overall mise en
scène which stages a scene called ‘the penal colony’. The gesture of showing
turns the officer’s explanation of the apparatus into a performance, and the
entire first scene, which prepares the set for the execution, resembles that of a
theatre production. As stated, the officer and the explorer are in the main
roles, with the officer representing the protagonist as far as the action is con-
cerned.47 The supporting roles are attributed to the soldier and to the con-
demned man, with the latter merely serving the purpose of illustrating how
the apparatus operates. The reader is led to assume that the execution will be
at the centre of the dramatic action. This interpretation is encouraged through
the use of vocabulary which can be interpreted in the context of an artistic
performance: the explorer has accepted an ‘invitation’, he is going to watch
and ‘witness’ this process, and the reader is informed about the waning gen-
eral ‘interest in this execution’ in the colony.48 In the past, the execution has
taken twelve hours, thus respecting the unity of time. The natural setting of
the scene reminds the reader of the original Greek theatre. The apparatus, in
turn, could be considered as a performative unit itself, a ‘play within a play’,
consisting of three parts, the ‘Bed’, the ‘Designer’ and the ‘Harrow’.49
Yet, before it comes to the execution, the apparatus takes centre stage,
both in the first third of Kafka’s text and in Part 1 of Kosky’s production. In-
terpretations have stressed the wide range of possible interpretations for the
apparatus. To take up a few, it could be associated with the war machinery at
the time, ‘similar apparatus in hospitals’,50 milling, bureaucracy, torture, ma-
chines Kafka encountered at work51 and writing machines.52 What is most

46
‘Von der Vorstellung des Theaters zur Theorie des Textes’, in Szenographien, pp. 113-44 (p.
124). Although Kafka’s texts have inspired numerous performances on the stage, they are
not dramas in draft form and Kafka has never written directly for the theatre.
47
Interpretations of the two characters which do not rely on this formal criterion either favour
the officer or the explorer, e.g. Clayton Koelb, Kafka’s Rhetoric:The Passion of Reading
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
48
Muir, p. 191.
49
Muir, p. 193. Kafka, p. 206, writes, ‘das Bett’, ‘der Zeichner’, ‘die Egge’. The bed where the
execution is taking place could thus be considered as a stage on stage.
50
Muir, p. 196. Kafka, p. 209, writes, ‘ähnliche Apparate in Heilanstalten’.
51
Cf. ‘Apparate’ in Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka, In der Strafkolonie. Eine Geschichte aus
dem Jahre 1914. Mit Quellen, Abbildungen und Materialien aus der Chronik der Arbeiter-
Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, 1975), pp. 69-77.
52
Koelb, pp. 66-77. For a summary of overall interpretations of The Penal Colony, see Hecker,
pp. 115-18.
440 Ulrike Garde

important for the present analysis, though, is the connection with art which is
established in the text along with its immediate link to punishment from the
beginning. For instance, in the second paragraph, the German sentence ‘Der
Reisende hatte wenig Sinn für den Apparat’ (The traveller had little apprecia-
tion for the apparatus) 53 could be associated with a lack of appreciation of its
artistic dimension. Similarly, other nouns could be interpreted as artistic met-
aphors, such as ‘devoted admirer’54 and ‘the Commandant’s work’ (with a
clearer association in the German: ‘sein Werk ist’).55 Although the basic cruel
and violent purpose of the apparatus is never denied, an uneasy association
with Artaud’s Théâtre de la cruauté cannot be dismissed.56 The dis-‘play’ of
the apparatus as artistic continues the ‘play’ on and performance of meaning
with a particular emphasis on the aspect of ‘seeing’.57 However, this kind of
‘seeing’ does not result in comprehensive understanding and insight; depend-
ing on the context, it stresses either the transitory positioning ‘as if’ or the
glimpse.58
The flipside of ‘seeing’ is ‘showing’, which characterises the text as the
gesture of showing. This is also a critical feature in Part I of The Lost Breath,
because it allows Kosky to take over and elaborate on the aspects of ‘play’,
différance and theatricality already present in Kafka’s story. When transfer-
ring this gesture from the prose text to the stage, Kosky reinforced the role of
the officer as the guide who explains the apparatus. For this purpose, he
turned him into a Gaukler, called Rudolf Kafani, who made the theatrical as-
pect of ‘staging’ meaning explicit. Kafani presented the apparatus to his audi-
ence in a monologue inspired by the first part of The Penal Colony. In this
monologue, he included a range of elements of ‘play’, which invite a close
analysis.
First, Kosky’s production was clearly based on intertexuality which is
reminiscent of Derrida’s concept of interweaving texts, such as in Mallarmé’s

53
Kafka, p. 204. ‘The explorer did not much care about the apparatus’ (Muir, p. 191) and ‘The
Traveler had little interest in the apparatus’ (Johnston) do not render this connotation.
54
Muir, p. 192. Kafka, p. 204, writes ‘Anhänger’.
55
Muir, p. 193. Kafka, p. 206.
56
Once again, the word ‘Sinn’ is important here, but even more the actual description of how
the body experiences the message rather than analysing it intellectually. This, in turn, entails
an element of shock on the part of the explorer and the reader.
57
Cf. my earlier analysis of the metaphor.
58
Unlike in the etymology of theasthai, here seeing is not immediately linked to understanding.
For the loss of this immediate connection, see also Neumann, ‘Einleitung’, in Szenographien,
pp. 20-22. If interpreted as above, seeing does not imply that there is ‘no refuge from an all-
seeing eye of public attention’, Mark M. Anderson, “[...] nicht mit großen Tönen gesagt”:
On Theater and the Theatrical in Kafka’, Germanic Review, 78.3 (Summer 2003), 169.
 Playing with the Apparatus 441

work.59 Kafka’s story already alludes to a net of chains with ‘communicating

links’.60 Kosky developed this image further, made it resonate with the work
of escapologist Harry Houdini and visualized it as ropes. The performance
started with Kafani being tied to a box by several ropes until he managed to
free himself. The idea of interweaving influences also applied to the character
of Kafani. Played by Yehuda Almagor, Kafani thus represented ‘a mysterious
vaudeville performer who appears to be a mutant hybrid of Harry Houdini,
[…] Franz Kafka’ 61 and his characters.
On a formal level, The Lost Breath maintained a certain degree of close-
ness to Kafka’s prose because its first part consisted of no spoken words
other than Kafani’s monologue, addressed to the audience. Like Kafka’s text,
Kosky’s production contained a mediating system of communication;62 how-
ever, the Gaukler’s explanations turned out to be even less reliable as far as
‘true’ information was concerned than the officer’s explanations in Kafka’s
text. Thus, the analysis has shown that Kafka’s text is characterised by a lin-
ear movement which consists of a series of ‘determinations in a circle’. For
example, the officer starts an explanation of the apparatus with positive con-
notations, only for the explanation to be interrupted. Later in the text, the
attention returns to the apparatus; this time, however, with seemingly nega-
tive undertones. Kafani, on the other hand, resembles a juggler of words and
meanings who succeeds in keeping several meanings in the air, e.g. a mix of
possible associations with a travelling sideshow. At the same time, the next
possible meaning, e.g. that of an execution machine comes into ‘play’. In this
context, the German etymology of Spielmann and its association with dance
also comes to mind.63
The playful handling of a multiplicity of meanings corresponds also to
Almagor’s general concept of an actor whom he considers ‘a very delicate
version of a Jahrmarkt magician’, but ‘instead of pulling every time a new
rabbit out of the hat, we [the actors] put a new mask on our face, or change
the ‘frame’, or introduce a new thought into the scene, change the perspective,
change the score, surprise our audience and keep them always active in think-
ing and playing with us. [...] wanted to play with ‘playing’ to unmask the

59
Describing the ‘traces’ in Mallarmé’s texts, Derrida states: ‘This interweaving, this textile is
the text produced only in transformation of another text’, ‘Semiology and Grammatology:
Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Positions, p. 26.
60
Muir, p. 191. Here, Muir’s translation is more obvious.
61
Melbourne production program notes.
62
See Wildgruber, ‘Die Instanz der Szene im Denken der Sprache’, in Szenographien, p. 38.
63
Duden: Etymologie, p. 690: ‘Spielmann’ originally referred to Schautänzer und Gaukler’.
442 Ulrike Garde

illusion’.64 In this kind of performance, the focus is clearly on the ‘play’ with
meaning, emphasising the ‘fun’ and creativity of ‘play’.
Apart from the special role and skills involved in playing the central role
of Kafani’s character, the successful ‘playing’ with possible meanings of the
apparatus relied on it being represented by a suitable prop. Kosky avoided the
problem of how best to re-produce ‘the infamous apparatus’65 by using a
huge box which dominated the performance space throughout the evening. Its
multiple functions served as an indicator of the evening’s leitmotiv of meta-
morphosis, wrapping and unwrapping, disappearing and escaping.66 In keep-
ing with the metamorphosis of the characters, the box grew in size during the
evening. During the first part of The Lost Breath, it was at the centre of the
explanations which developed the concept of différance on stage. The fol-
lowing description will illustrate that the box facilitated the experience of
différance because it was extremely versatile despite it looking deceptively
simple.
Initially, Kafani presented the box as an object of curiosity, a kind of trav-
elling sideshow, which ultimately revealed, as one of its possible meanings,
the execution apparatus from The Penal Colony. In the beginning, his inten-
tion was clearly to win his audience’s trust with the help of three elements,
which were unfamiliar to the audience, but familiar to him.67 These consisted
of the development of the performance to come, of the box’s functions and of
the elements of foreign languages he was going to use. He thus established
himself as the compère of the evening, guiding spectators into the perfor-
mance. Kafani then embarked on a series of addresses to the audience which
alternated between serious, playful and provocative tones. In these addresses,
he ‘played’ with his audience’s expectations of the box and juggled its possi-
ble meanings. Once again, ‘[t]he one is only the other deferred, the one dif-
fering from the other’,68 but this time it is happening on stage.
This ‘play’ with différance was reinforced by the use of foreign lan-
guages.69 Its effects are best illustrated by Kafani’s use of unfamiliar German

64
Yeluda Almagor, personal communication, 6 February 2004.
65
Shawn-Marie Garrett, ‘The Kafka Theater of New York’, Germanic Review, 78.3 (Summer
2003), 250-60. Garrett refers to JoAnne Akalaitis’s 2001 production of The Penal Colony,
with music by Philip Glass, as a ‘pocket opera’. See also Garrett’s appendix, ‘Kafka – A
Selected Production History’, pp. 257-60.
66
Melbourne production program notes.
67
In this context, it would be worthwhile to take up Ulrike Landfester’s suggestion to embark
on another analysis which focuses on the Kafani as a ‘fool’.
68
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, pp. 19-20.
69
The implications of not understanding a foreign language is alluded to in The Penal Colony,
p. 207, when the officer speaks French which – certainly, as the text has it – was understood
neither by the soldier nor the condemned man. Cf., Muir, p. 194.
 Playing with the Apparatus 443

words. When explaining his box to the audience he used the word apparatus
and maintained this term from then on. 70 This applied also to the word
Filzstumpf (lump of felt, felt stopper or gag of felt),71 which denotes a small
but important part of the torture mechanism inside the apparatus and, pre-
sumably, inside the box. However, whilst Apparat would be easily under-
stood and remembered by English-speaking audiences, this does not apply to
Filzstumpf. Nevertheless, Kafani kept using both terms exclusively in Ger-
man, initially with additional explanations in English. The effect was twofold.
First, with respect to the content, Kafani nourished a curiosity towards the
function of the Apparat, whose mises en scène of meaning only shifted to-
wards that of an execution machine at a later stage, by using an unfamiliar
term. Secondly, the seemingly gratuitous ‘playing’ with a more complicated
German word affected the making of meaning and the actor-audience rela-
tionship. Instead of trusting Kafani’s guidance, the audience was surprised
and confused when he started to tease them, using the German technical term
Filzstumpf and elements of Hebrew without further explanation followed by
the provocative question ‘You understand?’. With the change in Kafani’s ap-
proach and the partial replacement of their mother tongue, the strategies of
attributing meaning to this production had been removed for a large number
of spectators.
Unlike Kafka’s readers, who would have the opportunity to reread the
story when they want to reorientate themselves in the ‘play’ of meaning and
différance, Kosky’s audience could not resort to this due to the ephemeral
nature of the theatre performance. Furthermore, Kosky had removed the char-
acter of the explorer and his mediated impressions, thus addressing the spec-
tators as exclusive recipients of the explanations. As a result, audience mem-
bers could only rely on their spontaneous conclusions as individuals based on
the explanations provided on stage. This direct form of address, together with
the challenging use of foreign languages, could result in the audience feeling
more exposed to the ‘play’ with recipients’ expectations than the readers of
Kafka’s text.
In the end, Kafani reinforced the experience of shifting and displacing
meaning by erasing the audience’s positive expectations of the box. Yet,

70
While it is not clear how much Kafka enjoyed the ‘fun’ aspect of ‘play’, a hint of it can be
felt in he onomatopoeia of ‘Apparat’. Lehmann, p. 217, points to Kafka’s diaries to empha-
sise how important the phonetic make-up of words was to Kafka, stressing ‘in welchem
Ausmaß er Laute las schmerzhaft und lustvoll als körperliche Wirklichkeit empfand’ (to
which extent he felt sounds as almost painful or pleasurable, as corporeal reality). The em-
phasis on the phonetic structure of ‘Apparat’ could be clearly felt in Kosky’s production.
71
This is the only element which Kosky has taken from the last two thirds of Kafka’s text.
444 Ulrike Garde

when he revealed it as a possible instrument of execution, this did not result

in a binary opposition between Apparat as an exciting sideshow and as an in-
strument of execution; the shift of meaning did not replace the first meaning
by the second; instead, it put the first one sous rature.72 At this point, Kafani
disappeared into the box himself.73
However, the shifts in the ‘play’ of meaning did not stop here. In the sec-
ond part of The Lost Breath, the audience could hear Kafani groaning inside
the box, having presumably undergone the metamorphosis described in Meta-
morphosis, while his family members outside attempted to deal with the hor-
rifying transformation through song and dance until they transformed them-
selves ‘into a tap-dance group, eventually disappearing into the box’.74 Part 3
was inspired by A Fasting Artist and saw all of the characters in the box. The
box was now open on one side and doubled up the already existing prosceni-
um arch. The box thus also serves as an apparatus of différance which meta-
morphoses and ‘plays’ with the identities of the dramatis personae. Conse-
quently, the entire production continued the ‘play’ with meaning that was so
central to its first part. On the one hand, its emphasis was on the deferral of
the possible final meaning and purpose of the box, on the ‘not yet’, which is
so important in The Penal Colony.75 On the other hand, it stressed the wealth
of possible meanings; as Almagor expressed it, this performance was about
‘playing, unmasking myself again and again and again, until nobody knows
anymore where the real person is and what is the real frame [...] to relate to
[sic]’. This continuous construction and deconstruction of meaning as far as
Kafani and the box were concerned was not dissimilar to Derrida’s freeplay,
which he defined as ‘a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite
ensemble’.76
At the same time, other meanings of ‘playing’ also contributed to the
wealth of playful elements in Kosky’s production. In Part 1, some of this
‘playing’ was not only unpredictable for the audience members but also to
some degree to Kosky and Almagor. For example, at the very beginning of

72
In this respect, ‘sous rature’ corresponds to the Spivak’s definition in Of Grammatology,
‘Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible’,
Introduction, p. xiv.
73
Helen Thomson speaks of the audience’s ‘shock’ at this moment, Age, 16 October 2003.
74
Melbourne production program notes.
75
To a certain extent, this deferral may be compared to ‘the discourse of the law [in Vor dem
Gesetz]’ which says ‘not yet’ indefinitely; see Derrida, ‘Devant la Loi’, in Kafka and the
Contemporary Critical Performance, ed. by Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987), p. 141.
76
Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences’, in A Postmodern
Reader, ed. by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutchon (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993), p. 236.
 Playing with the Apparatus 445

the performance, Kafani deflected any possible negative feelings which could
have resulted from Kosky, Melbourne’s enfant terrible,77 returning to Aus-
tralia as an ‘expat’ 78 with his new production. For this purpose, he turned to
Kosky, who was accompanying the performance on the piano, and introduced
him as the ‘boy who had come back home to visit his family’, half talking to
Kosky, half addressing the audience. Kosky and Almagor adapted this hu-
morous bridging of possible intercultural tensions specifically to Melbourne
and Viennese audiences and left themselves plenty of room for spontaneous
adjustments through improvisations.79 This ‘playing’ not only emphasised the
elements of creativity and fun in the production; the playful belittling and
teasing of Kosky, together with Kafani’s elevated position on stage and his
breaking through the frame of the proscenium arch, also challenged authori-
ties.80 It short, Kosky’s and Almagor’s attitude towards ‘play’ could be com-
pared to Edwards’s definition of ‘play’ described at the outset. It is ‘an atti-
tude of mind, a perspective on life or on being in the world, together with
actions manifesting this attitude. It affirms freedom and possibility against
restriction, resignation and closure, thus blurring distinctions between obser-
vation and participation, and between spectators and collaborators’.81
In summary, Kosky’s production was imbued with ‘play’. Unlike many
directors before him, he did not try to reproduce the constellation of possible
dramatis personae and the potentially dramatic conflict only to illustrate ‘the
commonplace that dramatic adaptations of Kafka rarely “work”’.82 Nor did

77
Cf. the ABC-TV’s Sunday Profile, 22 September 2002: ‘This week on Sunday Profile we
spoke to the enfant terrible of Australian theatre, Barrie Kosky, who’s now working in
Vienna.’ at <http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s681844.htm> (accessed 5 January
2005).
81
For instance, in the Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 2003, David Davis examines why
‘the feelings of Australians toward their own diaspora are rarely positive’. For other sources,
one only needs to look at articles commenting on visits by Robert Hughes, Helen Garner and
other famous ‘expats’.
79
According to Yehuda Almagor, in a personal communication of 6 February 2004, in Vienna,
for instance, they challenged stereotypes of Australia as a vast landscape without much cul-
ture and Viennese self-perceptions as a highly cultured metropolis by turning Kosky into
‘the little Australian who had come from the desert to the big capital of the Western world’.
80
For Helen Thomson, Age, 16 October 2003, Kafani ‘skilfully and energetically “works” his
audience into complicity with his jokes, including some at the expense of Kosky himself.’
81
Edwards, p. 17.
82
Garrett, p. 252. Kosky wrote in his program notes, ‘The Lost Breath is not a biographical or
a documentary show. Nor is it an attempt to present Kafka’s stories on the stage. This is im-
possible. It is, rather, an attempt to weave and metamorphose echoes and dreams about Hou-
dini and Kafka. Not to understand them. But to try and understand us.’ Wolfgang Kralicek
praised Kosky’s production in Vienna as ‘um die Ecke gedacht’ (thinking around corners),
Theater heute, May 2003.
446 Ulrike Garde

he simply transfer to the stage the movement of ‘play’ which is already in-
herent in Kafka’s text. Instead, his production was successful because he con-
tinued to explore various aspects of ‘play’, making différance and freeplay
part of an all-encompassing attitude of ‘play’, which includes the challenge
of authority, creativity and fun. Kosky’s and Almagor’s work thus illustrates
how the ‘playing’ with meaning and the theatricality of making meaning can
be realized in the theatre itself. Here, the ‘play within the play’ has turned
into a ‘play with playing’.
Notes on Contributors
Alessandro Abbate (Ph.D. University of New South Wales 2005) is
currently guest lecturer in Film Studies at the University of
New South Wales. His research interests include Shakespeare
on film, media sociology and cultural studies. He also works as
an independent filmmaker and has published two books of fic-
tion.
Yifen T. Beus received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from India-
na University and is currently associate professor of Interna-
tional Cultural Studies at Brigham Young University Hawaii.
Her research interests include irony and self-reflexivity in liter-
ature and film, postcolonial studies, and Romanticism.
Donald Bewley is London-born and was educated in history, education
and psychology at the universities of Oxford, Dublin, Edin-
burgh and Pavia. A teacher of educational theory and history,
Emeritus Professor Don Bewley has been a researcher and
practitioner in Asia-Pacific development education. His life-
long interest in opera has been focussed since his retirement on
the Italian poet-librettist Metastasio and that writer’s reception
in eighteenth century London.
Theresia Birkenhauer, a scholar in theatre studies and a dramaturg,
was professor for ‘New German Literature with Drama as
Major Subject’ at the University of Hamburg. Monographs:
Legende und Dichtung. Der Tod des Philosophen und Hölder-
lins Empedokles (Berlin 1996); Zeitlichkeiten – Zur Realität
der Künste, (ed. with A. Storr, Berlin 1998); Schauplatz der
Sprache – Das Theater als Ort der Literatur (Berlin 2005).
Essays (among others) on Beckett, Tschechov, Hofmannsthal,
Hölderlin, Lasker-Schüler, Heiner Müller, and on dramaturgy
of the opera and the theatre.
Maurice Blackman is head of the Department of French at the Univer-
sity of New South Wales. His main interests are nineteenth and
twentieth century French poetry and theatre, Francophone poe-
try and the theatre of the Caribbean. His doctoral thesis was in
the field of comparative literature, and this early interest reap-
pears in his paper on intercultural appropriation in a play by the
Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire.
448 The Play within the Play

Zahava Caspi is senior lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Litera-

ture of Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. She is
editor of Mikan. Journal for Literary Studies and a member of
the editorial board of BGU Review. Her most recent book pub-
lication is Those who Sit in the Dark – The Dramatic World of
Hanoch Levin: Subject, Author, Audience (Jerusalem 2005).
Lada Cale Feldman is professor at the Department for Comparative
Literature, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her areas of interest
include drama theory, theatre and literary anthropology, gender
studies. She co-edited Fear, Death and Resistance, an Ethno-
graphy of War: Croatia 1991-1992, and is the author of four
books: Ivo Bresan’s Theatre (1989), The Play Within the Play
in Croatian Drama (1997), Eurydices Turns (2001; Petar
Brecic Award, 2002), and Femina ludens (2005).
Gerhard Fischer is head of German Studies at the University of New
South Wales and convenor of the Sydney German Studies
Symposia. Research interests in modern German literature and
drama/theatre (Grips. Geschichte eines modernen Theaters,
1966-2000; Munich 2002), World War I (Enemy Aliens. In-
ternment and the Homefront Conflict in Australia, 1914-1920;
St. Lucia 1989), migration studies and multiculturalism. Arti-
cles on modern German literature and theatre, editor of vol-
umes of essays on Walter Benjamin, Hans Magnus Enzensber-
ger, Heiner Müller, Erich Kästner, on ‘multicultural identities’
(with John Docker) and ‘German literature since 1989’ (with
David Roberts: Schreiben nach der Wende. Ein Jahrzehnt
deutscher Literatur, 1989-1999; Tübingen 2001).
Kyriaki Frantzi, Modern Greek Studies, University of New South
Wales. BA (in Archaeology) Athens, MA (in Mediterranean
and Arabic studies) Athens, Ph.D. (in History of Education)
Ioannina, Greece. Her research interests include gender issues
in ancient myth and modern science; theatre and performance;
the teaching of Modern Greek as a foreign language.
Ulrike Garde is lecturer in the Department of European Languages at
Macquarie University. She has researched extensively Austral-
ian-German cross-cultural relationships, with a focus on Aus-
tralian productions of German drama, its reception and the
underlying question of creating cultural identities in cross-cul-
tural contexts. Her monograph Finding an Australian voice.
Australian production and reception of Austrian, German and
 Notes on Contributors 449

Swiss drama is forthcoming. She has collaborated with the

Goethe Institute on the Webpage Playbill. German Theatre in
Australia.
John Golder is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of
Media, Film & Theatre, University of New South Wales. His
principal research interests are theatre architecture and stage
practice in pre-Revolutionary France. He has written on Shake-
speare in performance, especially on the stages of France and
Australia, and has translated plays by Molière, Lesage, Pierre
de Marivaux, Victor Hugo and Georges Feydeau. He edits
Platform Papers, a series of quarterly essays on the performing
arts, for Currency House, Sydney.
Erika Greber is professor of literary theory and criticism and compa-
rative literature, University of Munich. Ph.D. in Russian litera-
ture and literary theory, University of Constance. Co-editor of
the journal Poetica (since 2001); co-editor of the book series
‘Münchener Komparatistische Studien’ (since 2004). Member
of the Munich research group ‘Anfänge/Beginnings’ (since
2006). Recent books: Textile Texte (On Word Weaving and
Combinatorics; 2002); Manier – Manieren – Manierismen, ed.
with Bettine Menke (2003), and Intermedium Literatur, ed.
with Roger Lüdeke (2004).
Bernhard Greiner is professor of German literature at the University
of Tübingen; from 2000-2002 he was the inaugural Walter
Benjamin Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Recent publications: Die Komödie: eine theatralische Sendung.
Grundlagen und Interpretationen, second, rev. and enlarged
edition (Tübingen 2006); Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen.
Experimente zum Fall der Kunst (Tübingen 2000); Beschnei-
dung des Herzens. Konstellationen deutsch-jüdischer Literatur
(München 2004). As editor: Arche Noah. Die Idee der Kultur
im deutsch-jüdischen Diskurs (Freiburg 2002); Placeless Topo-
graphies. Jewish Perspectives on the Literature of Exile (Tü-
bingen 2003); ‘Schillers Natur: Leben, Denken und literari-
sches Schaffen’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunst-
wissenschaft, Special Volume, No. 6 (Hamburg 2005).
Birgit Haas is lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter. From
1999-2004, she was a DAAD-Lecturer at the Universities of
Keele und Bristol (GB). She completed her doctorate on Geor-
ge Tabori in 1998 at the University of Heidelberg. Major pub-
450 The Play within the Play

lications include: Das Theater des George Tabori (2000); Mod-

ern German Political Drama (2003); Wendetheater – Theater
der Wende (2004); Das Theater von Dea Loher (2006). As
editor: Macht – Performanz, Performativität und Polittheater
seit 1990 (2005).
Herbert Herzmann was born in Vienna. He studied German and his-
tory and received his doctoral degree from the University of
Salzburg in 1973. From 1975 to 2005 he was a senior lecturer
in German at University College Dublin, Ireland. His publica-
tions include Tradition und Subversion. Das Volksstück und
das epische Theater (Tübingen 1997) and ‘Mit Menschenseelen
spiele ich’. Theater an der Grenze von Spiel und Wirklichkeit
(Tübingen 2006).
Alexander Honold, born in 1962 in Valdivia/Chile, is professor of
German at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He received
his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin. Among his publi-
cations are books on Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil
and Thomas Bernhard.
Manfred Jurgensen is Emeritus Professor of German at the University
of Queensland and an award-winning novelist and poet. An
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow since 1972, he has published
extensively in the area of modern German literature. He held
visiting professorships at the universities of Hanover, Berlin,
Basel, Cologne, Witwatersrand/Johannesburg and Florida and
has been editor of the international series ‘German-Australian
Studies’ since 1990. Jurgensen is currently completing a study
on death in German literature, ‘The Most Fabulous Thing in
the World’.
Gad Kaynar is associate professor at the Theatre Department, Tel
Aviv University, head of the directing section and director of
the University Theatre. Numerous articles on Jewish, Israeli,
German and Scandinavian theatre, dramaturgy, performance
analysis, theatrical rhetoric and reception theory. His book The
Reality Convention in Hebrew Theatre is due to appear in
2006. As editor: Revolution and Institutionalization in the The-
atre (Tel Aviv 2000), and Bertolt Brecht: Performance and
Philosophy (Tel Aviv 2005). He is also a drama translator, ac-
tor, director and dramaturg.
Ulrike Landfester, born in 1962, studied German, English and medie-
val literature at the Universities of Freiburg and Munich where
 Notes on Contributors 451

she finished her dissertation on The poetical function of cloth-

ing in Goethe’s early works in 1993 (publ. 1995) and her habil-
itation thesis on Bettine von Arnim’s political writings in 1998
(publ. 2000). After visiting professorships at the universities of
Frankfurt/Main, Vienna and Constance, she is now professor
for German language and literature at the University of St.
Gallen/Switzerland.
Shimon Levy is professor of theatre at Tel Aviv University. He has
published on modern drama, on Samuel Beckett and on He-
brew drama. He has written The Bible as Theatre and The Is-
raeli Theatre Canon (2002), and numerous articles in Hebrew,
English and German. Levy has been a theatre critic and dra-
maturg, and he has translated over 140 plays into Hebrew. He
has directed plays for theater and radio. Presently he also
serves as Advisor in the Ministry of Culture.
Tim Mehigan, formerly at the University of Melbourne, is foundation
professor and chair of the Department of Languages and
Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has pub-
lished widely on Robert Musil and Heinrich von Kleist. His
most recent publications include Robert Musil (2001), The
Critical Response to Musil’s ‘Man without Qualities’ (2003)
and, as co-editor, New Directions in German Studies: A Con-
text of Interdisciplinarity (2005). He is the current president of
the German Studies Association of Australia and a Fellow of
the Australian Academy of Humanities.
Yvonne Noble is a scholar of eighteenth-century studies, centered in
English literature. Besides John Gay, her current interests are
in honeybee imagery, Anne Finch Countess of Winchilsea, and
the anthologist Elizabeth Cooper. She has taught at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania and New York University and has been
tenured at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German at Monash University,
Melbourne. Recent publications include Canetti’s Counter-Im-
age of Society. Crowds, Power, Transformation (with Johann
Arnason; Camden House, 2004) and Dialectic of Romanticism.
A Critique of Modernism (with Peter Murphy; Continuum,
2004), essays on Peter Handke, on 1968 and on transforma-
tions of the literary institution in New History of German Liter-
ature (Harvard UP 2004). He is currently working on the theo-
ry and history of the total work of art in European Modernism.
452 The Play within the Play

Klaus R. Scherpe is professor of modern German literature and cultur-

al/media studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. Recent book
publications include Stadt. Krieg. Fremde. Literatur und Kultur
nach den Katastrophen (2002), How German Is It? Ironic Re-
plays in Literature (2005) and Kontinent Kafka (ed. with Elisa-
beth Wagner, 2006).
Helmut J. Schneider is professor of German at the University of Bonn.
Previous positions at the University of California, Irvine (1983-
1990) and Davis (1990-1993). Various guest professorships,
e.g. at Stanford University, University of Virginia, Ohio State
University, Beheshti University, Teheran (2003), Harvard Uni-
versity (2004/5). Publications on the history of pastoral and the
German idyll; landscape and utopia; image and text; German
and American reception of the holocaust; German literature of
the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, especially on Lessing,
Kleist, and Goethe; body paradigms in the classical age and
modernism; drama and theatre.
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones teaches in the School of Modern Language
Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has
published on the works of twentieth-century French and Fran-
cophone writers, including Blanchot, Camus, Carrier, Cocteau
and Kofman.
Christian Sinn, born 1962. Studies in philosophy and German litera-
ture at the University of Constance (Ph.D. 2001; Habilitation
2002). Visiting professor in Iassi (Romania 2003) and Prague
(2005). Currently professor at the University of Erfurt.
Barnard Turner has taught at the National University of Singapore
since 1989, and is associate professor in the Department of
English Language and Literature, where he teaches modernist
English and European literature and theatre; he is also con-
venor of the European Studies programme. He has published
on different aspects of these areas, including several articles on
Heiner Müller and some half dozen on D.H. Lawrence. His
book on the contemporary American West as metaphor, Cul-
tural Tropes of the Contemporary American West, appeared in
2005.
Ken Woodgate, born 1962, studied German and French at Melbourne,
Monash, Karlsruhe and Bamberg. He wrote his doctoral thesis
on The Fantastic in the Works of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Frankfurt,
1999). Employed as a lecturer in German and Film Studies at
 Notes on Contributors 453

the University of Newcastle (Australia), 1999-2006. He has

written numerous articles on German Romanticism, Wende-
literatur and the cinematic representation of German Reunifi-
cation.
Frank Zipfel, born 1963 in Luxembourg. Studies in comparative liter-
ature, German literature, philosophy, theology in Rome,
Munich and Mainz. 1994-2005 assistant professor, since 2005
Akademischer Rat at the Institute for General and Comparative
Literature of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Pub-
lications include: Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur
Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Litera-
turwissenschaft. (Berlin 2001); Was sollen Komparatisten le-
sen? (with Dieter Lamping, Berlin 2005), as well as articles on
literary theory, narratology, libretto, Goethe, Rilke, Hofmanns-
thal.
Index of Names
Abramson, Glenda 174, 175
Albee, Edward 310, 313
Albinoni, Tomaso 340
Allen, Woody 23, 373
Almereyda, Michael 377–378, 380,
388–391
Alon, Azaria 155
Alon, Yigal 153
Aloni, Nissim 147, 167, 177–182,
189, 192, 195–196
Alterman, Nathan 147
Andreyev, Leonid 116
Anouilh, Jean 308
Anski, Shlomo 169, 171
Arbuthnot, John 322, 331
Aristophanes xiii, 158
Aristotle 48, 215, 346
Arne, Thomas 340, 342, 344
Artaud, Antonin 37, 45, 47, 49, 55,
260, 273, 277, 440
Avneri, Uri 156
Balzac, Guez de 85, 86
Barba, Eugenio 118
Baro, Balthasar 77, 78, 86
Bataille, Georges 49, 54
Beaumont, Francis 115, 116, 120
Beck, Julian 120
Beckerman, Bernard 280
Beckett, Samuel 118, 148, 159, 164
Beethoven, Ludwig van 41, 229
Begovic, Milan 286
Ben Shaul, Moshe 155
Benda, Georg 349
Benjamin, Walter 28, 30, 33, 275–
276, 280, 378
Berio, Luciano 337
Bhabha, Homi K. 30
Bidermann, Jacob 61–66, 68–75
Billington, Michael 122
Blei, Franz 351
Blin, Roger 50
Blok, Alexander 115
Bloom, Harold 3, 7, 114, 124
Boccaccio, Giovanni 20
Böcklin, Arnold 355
Borges, Jorge Luis 36
Bosse, Abraham 83–85
Botticelli, Sandro 354
Brandes, Johann Christian 349
Brecht, Bertolt xiii, 22, 123, 124,
158, 249, 252–258, 260, 261
273, 276–278, 280, 321
Brentano, Clemens 134, 135
Bresan, Ivo 292
Britten, Benjamin 336
Brod, Max 36
Brown, G. Spencer 39
Bruce, Lenny 158
Bruckner, Ferdinand 294–295
Brustein, Robert 49
Büchner, Georg 237, 238, 246–247,
249–251, 258, 261
Buhler, Stephen 383, 385
Burney, Charles 345
Byron, Lord George Gordon 18,
369, 375
Caillois, Roger 425, 428
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 37, 38,
40, 43, 83, 221–225, 227, 230
Callot, Jacques 354
Castiglione, Baldassarre 4
Césaire, Aimé 297–305
Chekhov, Anton 101, 102, 104, 105
Chimonas, Giorgos 318
Chirico, Giorgio De 354
Christie, Agatha 115
456 The Play within the Play

Cibber, Colley 341, 342 Feuer, Jane 401

Clérambault, Louis-Nicholas 310 Fichte, Hubert 29, 35
Conrad, Joseph 27, 28, 33 Fischer, John 308
Corigliano, John 337 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 119
Corneille, Pierre 47, 77, 78, 81–83, Ford, John 124–126
85, 88, 92, 98, 213, 215–216 Ford, Merrill 408
Couton, Georges 88 Foreman, Richard 273
Coveney, Michael 122 Forestier, Georges 77, 216, 217
Craig, Gordon 354 Fosse, Bob 400
Crow, Joan 79 Foucault, Michel xiii, 25
Culler, Jonathan 24 Frisch, Max 101–110, 249, 270
Da Ponte, Lorenzo 229, 230 Fry, Northrop 238
Dallenbach, Lucien 191 Galliard, John Ernest 340, 341, 344
Dassin, Jules 308 Gavras, Costa 154, 158
Davidts, Hermann 418 Gay, John 321–323, 326, 328–333
Dayan, Moshe 150, 153, 154 Geertz, Clifford 28
De Marinis, Marco 287 Gelbart, Steven 155
Deierkauf-Holsboer, Wilma 90 Genet, Jean 27, 28–29, 30, 35, 36,
Delaney, Paul 115 47–51, 53–56, 58, 288, 302
Derrida, Jacques 37, 47, 48, 49, Gide, André 121, 350
431–434, 440, 444 Gigli, Ormond 386
Diderot, Denis 19 Gilliam, Terry 16, 23, 24
Donatus, Aelius 64 Glissant, Édouard 298
Dort, Bernard 49 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 41
Dresher, Melvin 408 Godard, Jean-Luc 401
Dreyer, Carl 308 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang xvi, 7,
Drzic, Marin 285, 286 41, 42, 45, 205, 237, 238, 246,
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 37, 40, 43, 247, 294, 411, 419, 422
44, 249 Goetz, Rainald 267–273, 278, 280
Duvignaud, Jean 289 Goffman, Erving 113, 118, 120,
Eban, Abba 150 172, 289-291
Eco, Umberto 333, 383 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 64,
Edwards, Brian 432, 434 134
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 277 Gougenot, N. (Le Sieur de) 77–81,
Esslin, Martin 49 83, 85–87, 90–92, 94, 97
Ettedgui, Peter 367 Gozzi, Carlo 354
Euripides, 64, 307, 308 Graham, Martha 308
Fanon, Frantz 298 Grass, Günther 249, 288, 292
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 277, 309 Greenblatt, Stephen 28, 367
Fellini, Federico 23 Grosz, George 158
 Index of Names 457

Grotius, Hugo 69 Kandinsky, Wassily 123

Gruber, William E. 116 Kant, Immanuel 406, 415
Grünberg, Arnon 185 Kellaway, Nigel 307, 309, 310, 312
Gryphius, Andreas 62 Keller, Gottfried xvi, 43, 421–423,
Guarini, G.B. 64 425, 428–430
Guri, Haim 155 King, Martin Luther 299
Ha’Meagel, Choni 185 Kleist, Heinrich von 237, 238, 246,
Habermas, Jürgen 258, 259 405–406, 410–411, 415, 417–
Händel, Georg Friedrich 322, 323, 419
Handke, Peter 119 König, Rosemarie 228–229
Hardison Londré, Felicia 115 Kosky, Barrie 431–434, 439– 446
Hargreaves-Heap, Shaun 409 Krauss, Karl 159
Harrison, Tony 308 Krleza, Miroslav 286
Herder, Johann Gottfried 349 Kruger, Barbara 267
Herzog, Chaim 156 Kyd, Thomas 204, 206, 288
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von xv, 40– La Fontaine, Jean de 322
44, 61, 217–220, 230, 336, 347– Lacan, Jacques 49
357 Lacy, John 341, 342
Hofstadter, Douglas 364, 369 Lampe, John Frederick 336, 344
Holbein, Hans 121 Lancaster, H.C. 93
Honecker, Erich 261 Lanham, Richard 7
Hornby, Richard 197, 268, 273 Latham, Barbara 379
Huizinga, Johan 425 Lautenschläger, Karl 18
Hulbert, Dan 382 Lee, Vernon 339
Hume, David 406 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 436
Humperdinck, Engelbert 42 Leo, Leonardo 340
Hutcheon, Linda 286 Leoncavallo, Ruggero 336
Huyssen, Andreas 272, 279 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 237–
Idle, Eric 23 241, 243–247
Ignatieff, Michael 367 Levin, Hanoch 145–146, 148, 150,
Ionesco, Eugène 114, 179, 288, 154–164, 167, 177, 189, 192,
291, 292 196–199
James, Henry 75, 115 Li, Hsing-tao 252
Jameson, Fredric 378, 379, 387 Lipsius, Justus 70
Jeffers, Robinson 308 Loehlin, James 390
Jenkins, Anthony 118 Lohenstein, Daniel Caspar von 62
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 373 Loyola, Ignatius 73
Jung, Ursula 287 Luhmann, Niklas 290, 405–506
Kafka, Franz 28, 30–31, 36, 431, Luhrmann, Baz 377, 382–383, 385,
434–436, 438–443, 445, 446 387–390
458 The Play within the Play

Lyotard, Jean-François 130 Nash, John 409, 411, 413

Machiavelli, Niccolò 5 Nathan, Moshe 178
Magritte, René 122 Nelson, Robert 288
Malcolm X, 299 Nestroy, Johannes xv
Malina, Judith 120 Neumann, Erich 316
Mallarmé, Stéphane 439, 440 Neumann, Gerhard 423, 433
Mann, William 229 Niessen, Nikolaus von 229
Manning, John 379 Nietzsche, Friedrich 350
Marcuse, Herbert 158 Ninagawa, Yukio 308, 311
Markus, Yoel 155 Nordenskjold, Erland 31
Martini, Father G.B. 340 Norman, Marc 367
Masens, Jacob 73 Noverre, Jean-Georges 308
Massinger, Philip 205– 208, 220 O’Toole, John 168, 184
Mast, Gerald 400 Ofrat, Gideon 173, 177
Matala de Mazza, Ethel 423 Opitz, Martin 64
Matmor, Yoram 173–176 Oren, Moshe 155
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 373 Orwell, George 27, 28, 33–35
Mayer, Hans 29 Ossowski, Leonie 263
McHale, Brian 135 Ostermaier, 267, 268, 273–280
Megson, Chris 183 Ovid, 70–71, 206, 355
Meir, Golda 150 Pahlen, Kurt 227–230
Metastasio, Pietro 335, 337, 339– Paljetak, Luko 293
341, 345–346 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 29, 308
Mittelpunkt, Hillel 148 Pavis, Patrice 197
Mitterer, Felix 221, 222 Peter, John 122
Molière, 48, 77, 96, 286, 350, 351 Petrarca, Francesco 20
Monteverdi, Claudio 335, 348 Pindar, 316
Moore, Henri 354 Pinter, Harold 174
Morgan, Evelyn de 354 Pirandello, Luigi 15, 103, 115, 176,
Morley, Sheridan 123 286, 288
Morris, Meaghan 272 Piscator, Erwin 158
Morrison, Toni 308 Plautus, 65
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 41, 42, Pontanus, Jacob 62
221, 224, 226–230, 386 Pope, Alexander 322, 323, 331–
Mudrooroo, 262, 263–264 333, 339,
Müller, Heiner xv, 123, 134, 249, Poussin, Nicolas 355, 356
260–265, 292, 308, 310, 311, 313 Preston, Thomas 211
Mundi, Josef 147–148, 185 Prigogine, Ilya 225
Musset, Alfred de 15, 18 Prokofiev, Sergei 386
Nancy, Jean-Luc 30, 33 Puccini, Giacomo 335
 Index of Names
Pufendorf, Samuel von 69
Pushkin, Alexander xvi, 361–364,
366–371, 373–376
Rabin, Yitzhak 196
Rankus, Edward 379
Rapp, Uri 187
Reinhardt, Max 42, 221, 351, 354
Reuss, Leo 221
Rosenthal, Rubik 155
Rouch, Jean 27, 32
Sajko, Ivana 295
Shaphira, Amos 155
Sarro, Domenico 337, 340
Sartre, Jean-Paul 49
Scaliger, J.C. 64
Schechner, Richard 116, 289, 290
Schiller, Friedrich 27, 28–30, 35,
41, 45, 222, 245, 268, 422, 426
Schlegel, Friedrich 15–21, 23–25
Schlueter, June M. 115
Schmeling, Manfred 288
Schmitt, Carl 237, 238, 242–245
Schnitzler, Arthur 135, 137–138,
141, 221, 225, 230, 231, 234,
249
Schönberg, Arnold 350
Schwanitz, Dieter 290–292, 296
Scott, James C. 27, 28, 34
Scudéry, Georges de 77–81, 83–87,
89–93, 94, 96
Seghers, Anna 260
Segre, Cesare 287
Seneca, 307, 311
Senghor, Léopold 297, 298
Senker, Boris 294
Serban, Andrei 308
Serreau, Jean-Marie 298
Seth, Vikram 369
Shabtai, Ya’akov 147–148
459
Shakespeare, William xiv, xv, 15,
24, 38, 41, 83, 91, 129, 133,
152, 204, 209, 220, 237, 242,
285, 288, 292, 297, 298, 302,
304, 306, 336, 344, 366, 367,
370, 377, 380, 383, 387, 390
Shamir, Moshe 189, 191
Shapira, Amos 155
Shaw, George Bernard 291
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 18
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 121
Simon, Neil 152
Snajder, Slobodan 293, 294
Soarez, Cyprian 73
Sobol, Joshua 176
Socé, Ousmane 297
Sokurov, Alexander 373
Sophocles, 178
Sterne, Laurence 19, 369, 375
Stoppard, Tom 113–116, 118–120,
122–124, 127, 288, 292, 367
Storey, John 378
Strauss, Botho 129–131, 138, 141–
142
Strauss, Johann 225
Strauss, Richard xv, 41, 217, 336,
347, 348, 352, 354, 356
Strindberg, August 119
Suvin, Darko 252, 254
Swift, Jonathan 159, 322, 323, 325
Syron, Brian 264
Taussig, Michael 27, 28, 31
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 368, 379
Terence 65
Terzopoulos, Theodoros 308
Theobald, Lewis 340, 341, 342
Thomas, Ambroise 336
Tieck, Ludwig 15, 16, 21–22, 134,
137
460 The Play within the Play

Tolstoi, Léo 426 Wagner, Richard 64, 229, 421

Trier, Lars von 308, 393–395, 398– Walpole, Robert 323, 329
402 Watt, Stephen 280
Turner, Victor 32, 289 Weber, Max 33
Twitchell, James B. 386 Weir, Judith 337
Ubersfeld, Anne 287 Weiss, Peter 134, 148, 249, 257–
Vakhtangov, Yevgeney 169–172 260
Van Eyck, Jan 121, 122 Whitaker, Thomas R. 122
Varoufakis, Yanis 409 Wieland, Christoph Martin 375
Vega, Lope de 64 Wild, Jonathan 323
Velázquez, Diego 16, 21, 121 Wolf, Christa 308
Vermeer, Johannes 121 Yehoshua, A.B. 147
Virgil, 323, 376 Zantop, Susanne 413
Vojnovic, Ivo 286 Zinman, Toby 123
Vollmüller, Karl 42 Zola, Émile 426