The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century

Reviewed by: A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies Bárbara Mujica María M. Delgado and David T. Gies, editors. A History of Theatre in Spain. CAMBRIDGE UP, 2012 (PAPERBACK EDITION 2015). 558 pp. THIS NEW CONTRIBUTION TO HISPANISM by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies is an unconventional literary history. Because it is a compendium of articles by specialists, A History of Theatre in Spain avoids some of the major pitfalls that plague other literary histories. Single-authored chronicles inevitably offer a limited perspective, as no one scholar can be an expert in every aspect or period of a national literature. Even highly qualified experts in one area—say, the Spanish comedia—may be deficient in others, such as the zarzuela or contemporary feminist theater. However, the editors of A History of Theatre in Spain offer an overview of Spanish theater from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century provided by over two dozen eminent scholars of diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, and approaches. The result is a history of Spanish theater that is panoramic, profound, and multifaceted. The editors' insightful Introduction poses some questions usually ignored by scholars. The most basic is: What is Spanish theater? The tendency of critics, historians, and politicians to equate Spain with Madrid or Castile has led scholars to overlook the existence of cultures that have flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in languages other than Spanish, for example, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Navarro-Aragonese. Furthermore, the primacy given to Spain's Golden Age has led scholars to neglect the rich theatrical traditions of Spain's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Theatrical culture is much broader than a selected group of canonical works, argue the editors. Performance techniques, audience tastes, dramatic space, and myriad other elements all come into play. Rather than assigning hegemony to either text or performance-related issues, the editors have sought to view theater in its totality, including script, stage architecture, kinetics, the role of publishers, and paralinguistic material. Although their focus is on peninsular Spain, they have sought to expand our notion of Spanish theater by exploring issues of colonialism and the broad influence of Spain's theater abroad, both in Latin America and Europe. The editors' frankly revisionist approach calls into questions conventional assumptions about what constitutes a national theater and the parameters of Spain's theater. [End Page 135] In "The Challenges of Historiography: The Theatre in Medieval Spain," Ángel Gómez Moreno challenges the long-accepted 1958 statement by Fernando Lázaro Carreter that the history of theater in Medieval Spain is "the history of an absence" (18). For decades it has been assumed that almost no evidence exists of a theatrical tradition between the Auto de los Reyes Magos, composed at the end of the twelfth century, and the plays of Juan del Encina, the first of which appeared in the Cancionero de 1496. However, Gómez Moreno argues that records attesting to payments for scenery and costumes and references to paratheatrical productions do survive. Furthermore, scholars are now recovering some missing theatrical texts or finding references to them in other works. To gain an understanding of the breadth of theatrical activity in medieval Iberia, argues Gómez Moreno, we need to expand our horizons. Gómez Moreno examines the liturgical theater of Toledo and elsewhere, as well as momos and other medieval theatrical forms in Portugal. He concludes, "Modern scholarship has allowed us to perceive, albeit in indirect ways, the existence of a vigorous tradition of performance during the Middle Ages in Spain" (35). The following four chapters examine different aspects of the theater of the Golden Age, impugning some widely held assumptions. In "Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina: Spain's Golden Age Drama and its Legacy," Jonathan Thacker considers Lope de Vega, the most influential playwright of Spain's Golden Age, not only as a creator of plays but also as a theatergoer. Thacker believes that Lope's greatest source of inspiration was his experience as a spectator. By watching plays, he learned what pleased the audience. If Lope rejected the neo-Aristotelian rules that...

Poser, Norman S. <i>The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick</i>.

The history of Italian opera in the eighteenth century is as much the history of theatres, cities and performers as it is the history of composers, genres and works. Its study has benefited from a number of masterful recent inquiries that take a variety of approaches. The present summary views the history of Italian opera in the eighteenth century through the lens of the opera theatre, focusing on genres and their venues, seeking to elucidate categories of opera theatres – within and extending outside of Italy, in places where Italian opera was favoured – and exploring the implications of these varieties for the style of repertory represented by them. By no means a comprehensive overview of the history of all eighteenth-century theatres, nor a survey organized strictly according to cultural centres, composers, genres, or works (although these play integral roles), it highlights specific theatres and works, placing them in the context of the production process. Composers of eighteenth-century opera sought to 'tailor' their arias to an individual singer like a suit of clothes. Applied more broadly, this famous metaphor might be expanded to entire operatic works themselves, allowing us to explain them as whole, integrated entities – they are manifestations of the preferences, status, conditions, background and identities of the patrons and audiences for whom they were produced and the facilities for which they were designed.

‘Theatre history’ is a discipline much practised but severely under-theorized. Astonishingly little has been written about what the theatre historian is to try to do, how it is to be done or why it is worth doing. Collecting evidence about the theatrical past has been done and can be done, but to what end? With what aims and according to what principles? We now work in a postpositivist world and we cannot simply assume that cheery antiquarianism is a thing good in itself. In this essay I want to address both some general questions about the discipline and some very specific ones about the problems and possibilities of working in the long eighteenth century. A great deal of scholarship has been published in this area during the last sixty years. Surveying what has been accomplished since 1945 from the vantage point of 2005, I am struck by how much of it is good, but also by how patchy and limited a lot of it is. Investigating what has been done in such realms as texts, performance records, performers, physical production circumstances, economics, socio-political contexts and audience responses, I find myself forced to admit that theatre history is a badly balkanized field. Scholars have mostly been unadventurous and unimaginative - one could say timid. Singularly poor use has been made of The London Stage and the Biographical Dictionary. Fundamental differences in the practice of theatre history between the late seventeenth century and the later eighteenth century have been little understood and have received almost no comment from either practising theatre historians or theoreticians of historiography. I shall argue that we need to get out of our ruts and make more imaginative use of the evidence available to us. Theatre history is wide open for transformational changes, both within this period and more broadly. Indeed, I shall make the claim that the objects of theatre history need to include kinds of interpretation rarely practised within this discipline.

Archival Relations:Women and Regional Theater in the Kathleen Barker Archive Fiona Ritchie (bio) Keywords Eighteenth century theater history, women's theatre history, Kathleen Barker, archives, women's writing, women's and gender studies For the last few years, I have been working on a study of women and regional theater in Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century.1 The last comprehensive research on provincial theater in this period was undertaken by Sybil Rosenfeld, whose Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 was published over eighty years ago in 1939. A new study of the subject is therefore long overdue, but the topic is so vast that perhaps I am a fool to grapple with it. However, I take inspiration from the late and much-missed theater historian Jane Moody, who was working on this topic when she died in 2011.2 She would have produced a brilliant book on regional theater, and it is a huge loss to academia that she did not get the chance to do so. The focus of my own project on theater outside London in the long eighteenth century is gender. Extensive archival research across Britain and Ireland will allow me to uncover the important contributions made by women to regional performance culture, not just in terms of acting but also with regard to management and other types of off-stage labor. When I began this undertaking, I felt overwhelmed at the scale of the task ahead of me and unsure where to start. So my first port of call was Bristol, my hometown. I reasoned that I at least knew something of the city, its culture, history, and geography that could help me orient myself. This turned out to be a brilliant plan. Bristol, of course, has a rich theatrical history. The present day Old Vic began life as the city's Theatre Royal in the middle of the eighteenth century and is "the longest continuously working theater in the English-speaking world."3 Furthermore, the University of Bristol has rich archival holdings related to performance (both in Bristol and elsewhere) in its Theatre Collection, which was founded in 1951 to serve the first university drama department in the United Kingdom.4 One of their holdings is the Kathleen Barker Archive. Barker lived from 1925 to 1991, and research into theater history was her life's work. The collection is described in detail by Christopher Robinson in a short chapter of a festschrift devoted to Barker, published in 1994: Basically the archive comprises eighty stout arch-files, each one containing between 600 and 800 quarto or A4 sheets, most of them double-sided, on [End Page 131] which virtually everything that ever appeared in print, in newspapers and theater journals, relating to provincial entertainment has been painstakingly reproduced, mainly by a manual typewriter.5 Barker's interests in provincial theater ranged beyond Bristol and beyond the eighteenth century. She was awarded her doctorate by the University of Leicester in 1982 for a thesis entitled "Provincial Entertainment 1840–1870: The Performing Arts in Five Provincial Towns," a study which encompassed performance culture in Nottingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, Brighton, and Bristol. Fifteen folders in the Barker archive contain research undertaken for this project. Barker's hometown remained a key focus of her research, however, and the collection contains material she amassed in writing books on theater in the city, The Theatre Royal Bristol, 1766–1966: Two Centuries of Stage History (1974) and Bristol at Play: Five Centuries of Live Entertainment (1976).6 Robinson makes clear the extent of these resources: "Her authoritative history of the Theatre Royal, Bristol, from 1766 to 1966, is related in 267 pages, but the reference material she assembled covering this period fills twenty-four files, or something in excess of 16,000 pages" (p. 14). Furthermore, Barker's definition of entertainment was capacious. Bristol at Play includes discussion of musical concerts, circus, puppet shows, pantomime, equestrian entertainment, menageries, dioramas, and so on. Her archive is therefore of great use to scholars working across centuries, geographical locations, and types of performance. My work with the Barker archive has primarily been concerned with a specific aspect of Bristol theater...

Researches of Kharkiv’s Theater Culture of the 19th and the first half of the 20th cc.: Problems of Historiography

The expulsion of the notion of literary value from literary theory in late modernity belies the connection between morality and art, morality and beauty, morality and aesthetic judgement that has been formative and transformative of aesthetic theory in the wake of reflexive modernity. In this paper, I would like to trace the formations and transformations wrought in the relations between notions of taste, morality, and aesthetic judgement. And I will attempt to show how literary value is integrally bound up with aesthetic judgement and critique, not only at the inception of the practice of literary criticism in the eighteenth century, but at the point of its expulsion in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion of literary and artistic value, I will argue, coincides with the inclusion of the negation of art in the definition of the modernist work of art itself, which thereby becomes assimilated to philosophical inquiry.

Reading other people's intimate papers-mostly, diaries and letters--has long been a privilege of students of history and literature. In many ways, diaries and letters are similar: both are archived intimate writings of potential historical as well as literary value. Scholars have defined private, or familiar, letters as literary writings and as forms of sociability.' Diaries seem to present more of a difficulty. Many scholars have commented on uncertain situation of diary. To use a recent statement, the diary, as an uncertain uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing, between spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness of crafted text, between selfhood and events, between subjectivity and objectivity, between private and public, constantly disturbs attempts to summarize its characteristics within formalized boundaries.2 (The list of dichotomies can be revised and extended.) On this basis, diary has been both condemned to exclusion from analysis as a specific and privileged for its ability to reveal tension between opposites and to highlight marginality. Yet, over years, scholars have read, and used, diaries as a historical testimony, a literary form, or an autobiographical document. The success of diaries of Samuel Pepys, Marie Bashkirtseff, Anais Nin, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Kuzmin, Witold Gombrowicz, Anne Frank, and Victor Klemperer demonstrate never-ending fascination diaries hold for readers. In these and other capacities diary belongs to overlapping domains of history and literature. What is diary as a mode of writing, or as a genre? (I use word genre in broad, Bakhtinian, sense, not limited to belles lettres: as a complex form that shapes representation of experience into a whole.) There is no consensus about definition.

75 most emphatically not, in spite of what Mr. Gottlieb says, an Englishman. Neil Guthrie Trinity College University of Toronto Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture , ed. Markman Ellis. 4 Volumes. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. Pp. xlix ⫹ 424; xiii ⫹ 429; xii ⫹ 395; xii ⫹ 471. $595. Mr. Ellis has done a magnificent job of collecting, ordering, introducing, and annotating these four volumes; it is one of the few such collections now emerging from presses with the rapidity of openings of neighborhood Starbucks of which one can say with full conviction: this is worth the price. The four volumes are divided by period and type: I. Restoration Satire; II. Eighteenth-Century Satire; III. Drama; and IV. Science and History Writing. Each volume is prefaced by a short but useful Introduction; and the entire collection has a highly informative overview in its ‘‘General Introduction,’’ one of the most cogent and useful discussions of any topic in the eighteenth century that I have read in quite a while. Each separate text (sixty-nine in all) is introduced by several paragraphs establishing the context, offering antecedents and generic considerations, and providing bibliographical details (title pages and illustrations are also in facsimile, along with the texts). Each text is accompanied with an informative set of back notes. Volume IV contains an index to the entire collection. The reproduced pages are crisp and clear, the paper is of high quality. The ‘‘General Introduction’’ is particularly interested in reexamining the prevelant notion (inherited from the nineteenth century) that coffeehouses were institutions of ‘‘new egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation ,’’ a view underpinning the modern notion of public spaces for the free and open discussion among all classes of the ideas that would lead to democratic cultures . Mr. Ellis traces this notion to the American sociologist Hans Speier (1950), and then to Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, trans. into English, 1989). For Speier, the intent was to contrast English and German society, in order to ‘‘retrain’’ postwar Germany in the virtues of democracy; the lack of coffeehouses in Germany, he argued, was a good indication of why it ended up a fascist state. Habermas, on the other hand, found traces of a coffeehouse culture in Germany, and hence a basis for hope that a democratic culture was not totally un-Germanic. For both, the coffeehouse was a public space, but Mr. Ellis notes that Habermas in particular was more interested in the ‘‘idea’’ than in historical accuracy; in fact, he based his view of the coffeehouse culture on the work of Leslie Stephen and George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘‘nostalgic accounts . . . of the civilised values of the reign of Queen Anne.’’ They, in turn, had relied on Thomas Babington Macaulay ’s Whig mythology, which had transformed the ‘‘eighteenth-century coffee -house into a kind of pastoral, a golden age of communicative rationality .’’ Mr. Ellis notes that the texts in his collection show this notion to be inaccurate : ‘‘the coffee-house was equally the home of sedition, sectarian strife, domestic spies, incendiary rhetoric, dissension and discord.’’ In his Introduction to ‘‘Restoration 76 Satire,’’ Mr. Ellis notices the rise of the coffeehouse during the Interregnum, and hence the restored King’s dubiety about the institution. He warns us, however , that the texts he has gathered are of better use as a contribution to the history of ideas than for providing a material history of the coffeehouse. The satires, he observes, are ‘‘almost entirely hostile to the new forms of sociability and manners associated with the coffeehouse ’’; they were written by and large by Tory sympathizers, who found these meeting places filled with ‘‘sedition and anti-court sentiment, and after the rise of party in the late 1670s, with the Whig political interest.’’ Fortunately, perhaps, not all the texts are political—the spirit of Restoration bawdy lives in a piece like the anonymous ‘‘Women’s Petition Against Coffee . Representing to publick consideration the grand inconveniencies accruing to their SEX from the excessive use of that drying, enfeebling LIQUOR. Presented to the Right Honorable the keepers of the liberty of VENUS’’ (1764), in which we learn that ‘‘the continual sipping of this pittiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two...

<i>Simon Dickie</i> Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century<i>Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century</i>. Simon Dickie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. ix+362.

312 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:2 eighteenth-century women represented a range of possible accommodations , suggested reforms, and imagined resistances to patriarchy. Katherine Green Western Kentucky University Geoffrey Sill. The Cure ofthe Passions and the Origins of the English Novel. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ix + 261pp. £40. ISBN 0-521-80805-7. The Cure ofthePassions and the Origins oftheEnglish Novelis filled with interesting information about eighteenth-century culture and the history ofthe novel. The book's thesis links the perennially studied origins ofthe English novel to revolutions in medicine and morals from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In a nutshell, Geoffrey Sill argues tiiat the English novel came about in order to address a crisis in the philosophy of human nature, not only as "product" or passive "response" to the crisis, but as an active force in the field ofculture and the quality ofindividual lives. Accepting Harvey's discovery of the circulation ofblood—itselfrelated to the earlier even more radical natural philosophy and theology ofMichael Servetus, who emerges as the hero ofthe study—eighteenth-century writers such as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Burney create narratives that embrace and enact the idea that the passions, which complexly determine human behaviour, can be "cured" through narrative means. The eighteenth-century novel therefore performs a version of"art therapy" upon the diseased minds ofcharacters, readers, and modern British culture. Reflection redeems mankind; religion and morality can triumph even in a world of modern medicine. The book's thesis will challenge scholars and teachers to rethink their approaches to the eighteenth-century novel, as Sill clearly hopes. Citing Michael McKeon's Origins oftheEnglish Novel, Sill argues that "Questions of truth, questions of virtue, and perhaps especially the question of the passions dominated all fields ofdiscourse through the eighteenth century" (p. 12, emphasis added). The "question of the passions" involves medicine and theology equally, as the book's argument sets out. With the discovery of the circulation ofblood and the real role of the heart in human physiology, the old theory ofthe humours was fully exploded. This opened space for a fuller understanding of the complex interplay between body and mind in any number ofailments. It also led directly to challenges to the nature and even existence of the Holy Trinity. The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novelincludes an analysis spread over several chapters ofthe cultural importance of Servetus, the Spanish theologian and physician. Servetus predated Britain's William Harvey by a century, but this was only known (and became an issue) in the late seventeenth century, when William Wotton REVIEWS313 "resurrected" the "ghost" ofServetus "as the spirit ofmodern learning" (p. 47) in Reflections upon Ancient and Modem Learning, his riposte to Temple's "Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning." Thus Servetus—and the nature of the passions—became a central element in the Batde ofthe Books. It was the work of novelists such as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Burney (the four primarily addressed in the book) to reconcile the modern understanding of human physiology with Christian theology. (Sill points out that although Servetus was burned as a heretic by his sometime correspondentjohn Calvin, he was no atheist; the eighteenth-century novelists were, in a significant sense, catching up with Servetus.) The individual chapters include a curious mix of cultural history and literary criticism. The first chapter, "The Physician of the Mind from Zeno to Arbuthnot," moves back and forth between the history of medicine and Smollett's Humphry Clinker to introduce the "physicians of the mind," who understood the psychological basis for ailments concerning the passions but saw the human being as more complicated than the mechanistic version put forward by Hobbes or Mandeville. Chapter 2 discusses the "ghost" ofServetus. Chapter 3 concerns Alexander Monro (the son, although the father's importance is cited as well) and the eighteenth-century understanding of the nervous system in order to lay the groundwork for sensibility in culture and the novel. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 address Defoe, both his uncategorizable works such as The Consolidator, The Natural History of the Devil, and A fournal of the Plague Year, and what we now consider "novels"—Robinson Crusoe, MollFlanders, and...

Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer, der Geschlechter: als der Aufklarung. Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014. 471 pp. + 12 illustrations.Lessing famously lamented in the 101st Stuck of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Wir haben Schauspieler, aber keine Schauspielkunst. Hochholdinger-Reiterer's extensive inquiry probes the points of intersection among the discursive invention of acting as art, the Neuordnung der Geschlechter (45), and the matrix of social shifts that accompanied these eighteenth-century developments. In conversation with recent works on gender, Anthropologie, and Naturlichkeit by Alexander Kosenina, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and others, the present monograph pursues gender Codierungen und deren Verkorperungen (29) not only in the eighteenth century but also well into the twentieth. The methodological choice to analyze gender, metaphorical father figures, and national identity with minimal psychoanalytical, feminist, or poststructuralist jargon makes the work readable for a large audience. The methodological focus is on the foundational role that gender metaphors play in discourses from theater to national identity politics and academe. As a result of this broad discursive interest, the resources examined are remarkably comprehensive, including philosophical treatises, theater periodicals, letters, and theater histories, as well as analytical references to theories by Koselleck, Habermas, Kantorowicz, and others. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is also explicitly formative in that it guides the examination of the process by which physical practices, such as theater performance, interact with and affect social norms. Tracing cultural Kostumierung and its social implications in the largest sense, the book is a thorough and wellstructured study of das Oszillierende der Geschlechtercodierungen (409) in eighteenth-century theater and culture.Following an establishing theoretical chapter, three chapters address aspects of the gendered history of theater: Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, Vaterfigur en und Storfaktoren, and Nation und Erbe. At the outset, the author parses the ongoing negotiation between masculine-coded national theater reform efforts and feminine-coded illiterarische, korperbetonte, ungeregelte und 'unreine' (275) pre-Enlightenment theater. Hochholdinger-Reiterer demonstrates with extensive examples how the Erfindung of written theories, rules, and theater reviews marks the intellectualization and metaphorical masculinization of acting around 1750. The third chapter focuses on Conrad Ekhof (1720-78), the father of German acting, who through historiographical texts becomes the object of over two centuries of Vater-Kult (152). Hochholdinger-Reiterer even provocatively suggests that, preceding the establishment of a German state, Ekhof serves as a father figure for all artistic and practical aspects of German national identity in the eighteenth century (159). Simultaneously, mid-eighteenth-century actresses are characterized as Storfaktoren who resist reform, and women are excluded from the discursive realms of the theater. In the final third of the eighteenth century, however, interest in the acting body intensifies and a Kultus der Schauspielkunst (221) establishes itself. Hochholdinger-Reiterer posits that, in light of this oscillating masculinization and subsequent feminization of theater, there is a fundamental codependence among the development of the theater of illusion, the rise of realistic-psychological acting, and the naturalization of the two-gender model (275).The fourth and final chapter, Nation und Erbe, examines the implications of these gendered cultural changes for German and Austrian national identity, as well as for the history of theater studies, particularly in twentieth-century Austria. …

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Naples consolidated its reputation as a center of culture, developed during the eighteenth century, with new forms of attractions, spread by the romantic culture. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, during the decades of the Bourbon restoration, the forms of sociability, the attractions and the cultural opportunities for foreign guests - which during the eighteenth century were primarily organized in private circles or amongst the aristocrats - are no longer valid. The new travellers have different expectations and request holidays which guarantee services and freedom of movement. However Naples is governed by a reactionary police establishment. From the 1840’s foreigners began leaving the capital and heading around the Gulf. In Sorrento, the islands of Capri and Ischia they found a more liberal ambient combined with new attractions, sociability and culture.

Reviewed by: Theaterdramaturgien von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart by Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Theaterdramaturgien von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart. Vienna: Böhlau, 2016. 351 pp. The Graz-based theater scholar Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner offers, in her study Theaterdramaturgien von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, an incisive, innovative approach to the history and practice of German-speaking theater from the Enlightenment to the present day with a focus on dramaturgy. Embedded in her project are analyses of major Austrian representatives and their interaction with German and non-German theater practices and personalities. Deutsch-Schreiner begins by examining the changing tasks and missions of the dramaturge as literary advisor to directors and theater companies, script and program designer in charge of programming and scheduling, market researcher, and hands-on consultant. These roles differ from one historical period to another and depend on the inclinations and talents of the individual dramaturges. Deutsch-Schreiner’s project is inclusive and far-reaching. It explores the history of German dramaturgy beginning with a pace-setting essay on Lessing and his theoretical and practical contributions to the development of German-speaking theater. The discussion then proceeds to markedly different dramaturges such as Schiller, Brecht, Heinar Kipphardt, Dieter Sturm, and the Swiss dramaturgy represented by the exile Kurt Hirschfeld. Finally, Deutsch-Schreiner records the entrance of female dramaturges into the traditionally male bastion by examining the work of Stefanie Carp and Nadine Jessen and their impact on contemporary theatrical practice. In the unfolding mosaic, Austrian dramaturgy, represented by Joseph Schreyvogel, Arthur Kahane, and Hermann Beil, figures prominently, both in its own right and as a force influencing and fertilizing German theater. Through their contacts with German and international actors and theorists and their appointments at German and international stages, these Austrian dramaturges transported the stage tradition of Vienna and Salzburg across Europe and, during the Nazi era, across the Atlantic. Deutsch-Schreiner’s approach is inclusive and supranational. She explores German dramaturgy and the genre of drama more generally within the cosmopolitan and increasingly professional context as part of European and Western conventions and aesthetics. She notes that the trajectory of the first theater journal, a model for Lessing’s undertakings, aimed to be international in character and fostered a universal concept of theater (31). Schiller, the first freelance dramaturge, likewise emphasized his cosmopolitism and envisaged [End Page 188] enlightened audiences. Still, Deutsch-Schreiner takes into consideration the dependency of the dramaturge upon local conditions and requirements, e.g. the Weimar stage, and she notes a change in paradigm in the late eighteenth century when the Burgtheater was named the German Nationaltheater. The influential Viennese dramaturge Joseph Schreyvogel perpetuated the Enlightenment tradition with Schiller as his model, but, as Deutsch-Schreiner writes, as a critic and practitioner he also supported Austrian authors such as Grillparzer, whom he discovered and mentored, thus providing new thematic and formal trends. His production of König Ottokars Glück und Ende, Deutsch-Schreiner argues, made Grillparzer’s play the iconic patriotic Austrian drama. The study also discusses the impact of the Austrian censorship laws since Maria Theresia on the history of theater as well as the stifling effect of the normative aesthetics and forms of expression designed to repress liberal ideas. By placing Arthur Kahane, Max Reinhardt’s first dramaturge, in a central position in her study, Deutsch-Schreiner stresses the importance of Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie as an innovative element in the development of theater. Relocating to Berlin, Kahane and Reinhardt played an important role in the cultural interchange between the two capitals and as an integrating force in northern and southern theater life. Deutsch-Schreiner traces these personalities’ activities at a variety of theaters and thematizes Kahane’s interest in American authors such as Eugene O’Neill, jazz, and modern musicals. For Deutsch-Schreiner Kahane’s death on the eve of the Nazi takeover (and the banning of his books) as well as Reinhardt’s death in exile mark the end of a vibrant theatrical culture, which, as she implies, was opportunistically invoked in the postwar era to appropriate Reinhardt’s theater as iconically Austrian. Following a review of...