Abstract
Plays have always represented a reality that is invisible, whether psychological, biological, metaphysical, or theological. A key problem for the drama since Shakespeare has been to represent or express human interiority on the stage. Understanding what is meant by interiority, however, is also, more generally, a historical problem. The premise of this essay is that a widespread re-imagining of the subject in the early decades of the nineteenth century is fundamental to what we think of today as the modern drama. This period, often characterized as Romantic, sees a re-investment in notions of the spirit and quasi-theological ways of thinking, a new way of imagining the relation of subject to object and the location of truth. In the preface to his Phenomenology of Mind [Ph?nomenologie des Geistes] (1806), Hegel claims that our age is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things ... In like manner the spirit of the time, growing quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world.1 This transition is fundamentally related to changes in the concept of
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