The Intervention of Philology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays

Abstract

Newman, Jane O. The Intervention of Phiology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 228 pp. $45.00 hardcover. This study, grounded in current approaches to early modern literature but also heavily influenced by the methodologies of comparative literature, including an international context for German texts and a deep investment in post-modern theory (with special emphasis on gender, alterity, and race), will undoubtedly be reviewed in other venues from a comparativist perspective. In this context, however, I will focus on assessing the contributions the book makes to scholarship about literature. Lohenstein's four Trauerspiele on subjects from Roman history (Sophonisbe, Epicharis, Agrippina, and Cleopatra) continue to confuse, distress, and fascinate those who read them, and Newman's book helps make the case that they deserve their position in the canon of important literary works in German. It also constitutes a significant of the texts that will be particularly fruitful for scholars, students, and lovers of literature returning to the plays after initial readings. Newman, in this densely written book, takes on some of the most difficult texts written in the language, difficult in part because they are, as she puts it, artifacts of the bizarre, full of salacious scenes of seduction, incest, cross-dressing, and torture, of grisly scenes of murder and mayhem, of disturbing scenes of matricide, dissection, and suicide. Lohenstein's dramas are also difficult because they are themselves densely written and because, as she notes, the more closely and slowly one reads them, the less certain one becomes of the meaning. Following Walter Benjamin's observation that such bizarre and confounding texts of the seventeenth century require the intervention of philology, which she defines following Roman Jakobson as slow reading, she applies what I suppose might be termed a post-modern philological approach to the plays. In this task she is assisted by the plays themselves, which contain an extensive polyhistorical endnote apparatus, with all sorts of pertinent as well as seemingly arcane references to works on Roman history and North African travelogues, which Newman appropriately refers to as the basement or the margins of the plays and treats as a source of clues about their meanings. She also brings in the geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century, includingthe relationship between Silesia and the Holy Roman Empire and the role of women as rulers and regents in the small Silesian duchies. The book's primary contribution to the study of seventeenth century literature and to Lohenstein studies consists in the bold nature of the questions Newman asks about the disturbing contents of the plays and in the slow reading approach to finding some of the answers. She rejects the reductive interpretations of the past, including my own in my dissertation-based book of 1976, and destabilizes the texts in ways that conform to the texts themselves in order to find new possibilities for understanding. Her findings in the subtexts from the basement and margins are in some cases breathtakingly exciting, in most cases helpful in deepening and extending the potential for explication of some of the most opaque passages in German-language literature. …