'Grammatik' der Schauspielkunst

Abstract

In the period of Weimar Classicism Goethe did not only write a number of plays which to the present day have retained their place in the canon of 'classical' literature forming part of the heritage of the 'educated' classes. From 1797 to 1817 he was director of the Court Theatre in Weimar where he figured as both a drama theoretician and a man of the theatre in an eminently practical sense. The close interactions between drama production, theory, stage practice and the 'aesthetic education' of actors and actresses gave rise to his »Rules for Actors«, a fully organized system of theatrical signs squarely in the tradition of idealist thought and designated by Goethe explicitly as a 'grammar'. The present volume sets out to retrace this semiological process (i.e. the formation of a theatrical language) 'archeologically' and point up its specific historicity. Of central moment are the question of different contemporary definitions of 'man' and 'woman' and their transformation into the semiotic system of Weimar Classicism. From the perspective of gender studies and deconstructive feminism the study essays a revision of existing historiographic approaches to Goethe's theatre and at the same time proposes a new methodological approach to research in the history of theatre.