Bourgeois Drama Research Articles

Reflections on some defining aspects of the dramatic monologue

The monologue was often perceived as an obstacle to drama. This „conflict” has been the subject of many reflections, of multiple and successive qualifications, which deal with the problem of the monologue starting with the 18th century. Here we are referring, first of all, to bourgeois drama, romantic drama, or symbolist drama, secondly – to modern drama, and more recently - to the post-dramatic theater, the new drama etc. The definition of the dramatic monologue also seems to obey a recurring pattern of successive oppositions, being approached only through approximations and various confrontations. In other words, it seems easier to say what a monologue isn’t than what it is: it is not a dialogue or a tirade, nor a soliloquy, although we do not know exactly how to distinguish the monologue from the soliloquy, if we stick to the current canons in force. Finally, in order to demonstrate the hybrid character of this problematic discursive form, we will emphasize the presence of the audience and try to highlight its role, which proves to be an essential factor in the process of supporting and hearing a monologue. The article examines the successive oppositions and attempts to determine the current defining aspects of the dramatic monologue.

Особливості української антиколоніальної драматургії ХVIII – першої половини ХІХ ст.

The article deal the general patterns and main trends in the formation and development of dramatic genres as a self-sufficient genre in Ukrainian literature of the XVIII – first half of the XIX century, aimed at highlighting anti-imperial ideas in close connection with the requirements of general literary genre and national traditions. It was found that the anti-colonial national literature found its expression in such genres as historical drama, drama-morality, vaudeville, social-household drama and comedy. «Vladimir» by Feofan Prokopovich, «God’s Mercy ...» by an unknown author, «Resurrection of the Dead» by Georgy Konysky, «Muscovite Magician» by Ivan Kotlyarevsky and «The Simpleton» by Vasyl Gogol, which were the embodiment of baroque and classicist styles with a combination of elements of ancient Greek comedies and tragedies, European medieval mysteries, Ukrainian interludes, miracles, morals and dramas of the Easter cycle, contributed to bringing to the stage the realities of the time and gave them a dynamic anti-colonial embodiment.The harmonious combination of high and low styles by the authors became an innovation of these dramatic works. It was found that the features of Baroque, Classicism, Enlightenment realism, sentimentalism and romanticism, which appeared in the social-household drama “Natalka-Poltavka” by I. Kotlyarevsky, social-household comedies “Yabeda” by V. Kapnist, «Noble elections», «A visitor from the capital, or the commotion in the county town», «Shelmenko – volost clerk», «Clairvoyant», «Shelmenko – batman « by G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko and “Inspector” M. Gogol, were aimed at covering colonial problems in Ukraine after the abolition of the Hetmanate. A feature of these genres was the synthesis of Ukrainian Christmas dramas and social and domestic interludes with European bourgeois drama, which provided an opportunity to raise national drama to the European level. It is investigated that dramatic works of anti-colonial orientation of the XVIII – first half of the XIX century approved deviations from the established traditions of a particular literary genre. Instead, they presented a synthesis of baroque-classicist-educational-romantic aesthetic values that interacted with the folklore traditions of our people.

Identidade transitória

Este artigo procura identificar uma espécie de teoria teatral negativa em textos de Jorge Luis Borges sobre William Shakespeare. Procuraremos demonstrar que, nas reflexões teatrais do escritor argentino, assombradas pela imagem do suicídio, é possível ler uma crítica a diversas noções de identidade, capazes de esboçar traços de uma estética teatral alternativa ao drama burguês.

FIGARO'S CHILDREN

The topic of this guest column is Beaumarchais's endeavor, as a dramatist, to overcome the irreconcilable polarities of high and low, spirit and body, noble and base, tragedy and comedy that are essential to French classical theater by adapting traditional comedy to the less rigid, more pragmatic and optimistic outlook of the Enlightenment and a new middle class and by experimenting with “bourgeois drama,” notably in the third play of the Figaro trilogy. The bourgeois drama—and the trilogy itself, as it moves the same cast of characters from The Barber of Seville through The Marriage of Figaro to The Guilty Mother—is seen as an attempt to bypass not only the conventional opposition of comedy and tragedy but also the even more fundamental polarity of epic and dramatic through the infusion of elements of the new bourgeois novel into works for the theater. Roles and situations in Beaumarchais are not fixed and eternal but evolve in historical time. Figaro himself emerges as a characteristically modern figure, neither noble nor base but mixed, many-sided, energetic, and enterprising, an individual rather than a type, and thus a more realistic representative of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanity than the Scapinos and Frontinos of traditional comedy.

Le Fils naturel (1757), de Diderot, o la espectacularidad de una «condition» jurídico-familiar

Estudio interdisciplinario de «Derecho y Literatura» sobre Le fils naturel con análisis de la categoría dramática y jurídica de «condition». Referencia a la posición jurídica del «hijo natural» en el derecho francés de la época y el Code civil, así como al valor de su espectacularidad escénica en la teoría del drama burgués diderotiano, y posterior excursus jurídico-literario en Honoré Balzac y Alejandro Dumas (hijo).

Case di morti. L’interno domestico come spazio perturbante tra il teatro antico e la drammaturgia di Maeterlinck e Strindberg

The first section of the article demonstrates how through a great part of the XIXth century the prevailing attitude of fantastic on European stages is a spectacular one, aiming at direct effects of marvel or fear on its audience. In this case the dramatic and scenic space works like a boîte à merveilles, a container of well visible supernatural events. Only towards the end of the century, in the plays of some great authors a more refined attitude of fantastic emerges, where the supernatural, besides assuming a strong symbolic value, creeps into the “real world” in a less evident, but more effective and disquieting way. Thus, the second part of the article focuses on the transformation of the emblematic set of the bourgeois drama, the domestic interior, into an uncanny space, which Death besieges from outside or occupies as a secret parasite. This hypothesis is verified through a detailed analysis of dramatic space in The Intruder by Maurice Maeterlinck and in The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg. In the first play a domestic space is made unheimlich by the atmosphere of alarmed wait by which the characters get involved; here, like in other Maeterlinck’s plays, the sounds become a fundamental element of the transformation of space and of its assumption of a fantastic dimension. In Strindberg’s drama a “normal” house acquires sinister characteristics, till it reveals itself, without any resort to conventionally supernatural images, a refuge of living dead and a place where everything is weakened by a sort of vampire haunting.

Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman (review)

Reviewed by: Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman Janie Vanpée Patrick Coleman. Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 249. It is the rare book that brings fresh perspectives on how anger and gratitude shaped the conception of self and sociability in the French eighteenth century and also resonates with our contemporary social and political practices. Patrick Coleman’s book focuses on writers and thinkers of the French Enlightenment, but his erudite readings of their innovative deployment of anger and gratitude in social interactions comment indirectly on how contemporary attitudes toward gratitude, recast today inversely as entitlement, and anger, deployed as political opposition, still determine the way we conceive of ourselves in the political sphere, as the recent 2012 presidential election brought to the fore. Anger and gratitude were not newly discovered emotions in eighteenth-century France. One of the strengths of the book is to ground its inquiry in references to and knowledge of both the classical and the Christian heritage the better to show how Enlightenment thinkers diverged from the established tradition. Coleman identifies two significant developments that changed attitudes toward these two antithetical sentiments. On the one hand, the idea of moral equality, spread through the writings of the philosophes and in the salons, freed anger to be voiced with dignity against both personal injuries and social injustices and allowed gratitude to be expressed beyond the weakening bonds of the patronage system. On the other hand, the rise of the social ideal of governance of human behavior through impersonal laws erased the useful role that anger and [End Page 169] gratitude had played in upholding social cohesion. The book examines the tension between these two changes and their rhetorical expression in the works of Challe, Marivaux, Rousseau, and Diderot. Each of these writers advances the transformative effect of one or both of the two emotions. Bridging the classical era and the beginning of the Enlightenment, Challe’s treatise, Difficultés sur la religion, focuses on the author’s anger in his existential relation to God. In La Vie de Marianne, Marivaux explores how Marianne’s gratitude toward her benefactors inspires the recognition of her independence and moral worth as a human being. Rousseau plays the key role, invoking both sentiments to powerful effect. Anger and gratitude figure prominently in both his personal social encounters and in his works, the fiction as well the discursive texts. From the moment of his inspiration on the way to visit Diderot incarcerated at Vincennes, anger serves the polemics of his attack on injustice and inequality. Rousseau’s anger will have an illocutionary force on his readers, inspiring their gratitude to him and redefining their sense of self in relation to Rousseau the man. His anger and his discomfort at the way gratitude in a relation of patronage weakens personal liberty and identity will lead him to propose the neutral rule of law to govern all ranks in society equally. His works will thus exceed their descriptive value to have a far lasting effect in reshaping personal relations, first between author and reader, and second, extended to other social and political relations. Anger, resentment, and the vicissitudes of gratitude resurge in the polemics between Lui and Moi in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, as each provokes the anger of the other and Lui suggests that Moi should gratefully acknowledge his debt to Lui as an inspiration for Moi’s own genius. By the close of the century, these two sentiments, described and dramatized in the texts of major authors, succeeded in redefining the individual in his relation to the social and political sphere. One can question whether Voltaire or other Enligthtenment writers should have been included. What is clear is that Coleman’s monograph lays the groundwork for exploring bourgeois drama or novels by women, such as Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, where the bourgeois or marginalized individual who expresses anger or gratitude merits respect and the recognition of his or her rights as a social being. Janie Vanpée Smith College Copyright © 2013 L'Esprit Créateur

Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen (review)

Reviewed by: Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen Antje Budde Thomas Keck and Jens Mehrle, eds.Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen [Berlin Dramaturgy: Recorded Conversations of the Academy Working Group Led by Peter Hacks]. Schriftenreihe der Peter-Hacks-Gesellschaft. Berlin: Aurora-Verlag, 2010. 5 volumes. Pp. 2000. €126.00 (Pb). This publication project, based on recorded discussions of a dramatic working group initiated and led by the playwright and poet Peter Hacks between 1972 and 1990 at the East German Academy of the Arts – an assembly of accomplished artists working across disciplines – consists of five volumes of well-annotated and contextualized archival material. The fifth volume provides the reader with a very helpful contextualizing afterword by Jens Mehrle (7–18), as well as the retrospections and critical reflections of some of the participants (19–40, 69–97). Most prominent are hilarious descriptions of the set-ups for the meetings, which provided participants with food and alcoholic drinks. Furthermore, the volume contains a useful index of the names, works, and terminology that appear in volumes one through four, as well as photographic documentation that captures the more atmospheric aspects of the meetings and their theatrical contexts (41–68). Volumes one through four are in chronological order and are thematically organized. All volumes include an extensive apparatus (up to a hundred pages) that provides background information and clarifies historical constellations that affected the strategies for group discussion. The participants were invited by Peter Hacks, and the topics of conversation followed his suggestions and covered a wide range of topics, including Hegel’s dramatic theory, Gustav Freytag’s five-act plays, classical and romantic drama, dramaturgy, the aesthetics and history of socialist realism, and techniques for playwriting. My favourite discussion topic is entitled “Die Entstehung der Fabel aus dem Fassungsvermoegen des Zuschauergehirns” (4: 135–82), which means, “Plot creation evolving from the capacity of spectators’ brains,” and which starts with the well-meant advice to dramatists not to write anything important during the first three minutes of a play because [End Page 584] the spectators are still too busy with themselves, coughing, chatting, and finding comfortable positions in their seats. The archival compendium reads – since women are mainly absent – like an androcentric and patriarchal anatomy of a failing political system that was quite literally imploding between 1972 and 1990, its predictable death ending with the unpredictable unification of the two German Cold-War states and an embrace of neo-liberal capitalism. Also imploding were rigid, classical structures of drama, and that transformation becomes progressively clearer as younger playwrights enter the discussions. This publication project is, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, entitled Berlinische Dramaturgie [Berliner Dramaturgy], which, no doubt, plays with references to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie [Hamburg Dramaturgy]. That association is reinforced by Thomas Mehrle’s afterword, “Arbeit der Poesie” [Labour of Poetry] (5: 7–18), the title playing with a suggestion by Hacks that participants think more about the labour involved in creating skilful poetry than about the inverse –“The Poetry of Labour”– which was the title of another working group at the academy (5: 9). Hacks’s concern with informed skill, historical knowledge, and artistic professionalism is echoed by Mehrle’s choice of an introductory quotation from Dramaturgie, in which Lessing – a highly influential innovator and experimentalist in bourgeois drama and theatre philosophy – complains about playwrights who want to invent the dramatic wheel over and over while ignoring the achievements of their forefathers (5: 7). Hacks was extremely unsatisfied with the state of dramaturgical education in East Germany, which, in his assessment of the situation, had led to a serious deterioration in the professional skills of young playwrights and had contributed to the proliferation of inferior work in the arts sector (5: 15–16). Hence, Hacks insisted on the value of the five-act dramaturgy of classical plays as well as on the value of Gustav Freytag’s dramatic theory and practice, based on this ideal and idealized dramatic form. Hacks was convinced that classical dramaturgy should be studied, particularly by younger playwrights, who seemed to him to be in the unpleasant habit of “reinventing” already discovered and ideal solutions to...

When Storytelling Reframes Adultery: The Dramatics of Pirandello’s ‘La paura’

Pirandello's 'La paura' (1897) represents the unusual case of a short story that was inspired by an existing drama, L'epilogo (1892), and then successively retitled and staged (La morsa, 1910). An example of textual metamorphosis, the novella departs from the theatrical source largely because of its open ending. The narrative's central plot, however, still echoes that of the drama, as they both stress the themes of money, love, family, and morality. In La morsa Pirandello conforms to naturalist conventions in his portrait of Giulia, the protagonist, who becomes ensnared by her husband into admitting her infidelity and is driven to suicide. In 'La paura', on the other hand, the author breaks with contemporary narrative trends, though maintaining the popular leitmotif of the love triangle. The wife waits for her husband's return, dominated by the ambivalent feelings of disillusion and the hope of regaining normalcy. If La morsa conforms to naturalist bourgeois drama and castigates Giulia according to the social conventions of the era, in 'La paura' Pirandello focuses on the protagonist's introspection, portraying the wife as she strives for self-absolution. By changing the novella's title and turning the husband into a 'presence' that is only evoked by the other two characters, Pirandello depicts human feelings and relationships using a new form of storytelling. The recurrent and obsessive use of a 'visual poetics' translates shadows and suspicions into words.

The Ideological and Aesthetic Perspective in Kazantzakis's Dramas: Is it still Valid?

Three plays by Nikos Kazantzakis, selected from several periods of his literary career, are of interest for ideological and aesthetic reasons. His first play , Day Is Breaking (1906), is a realistic bourgeois drama and is judged as rather difficult to stage today because of its ideology, which contemporary life has rendered passé, and also because of its poetical prose, which would sound melodramatic in performance. His tragedies, on the other hand, despite their ostensibly outmoded form, are very fit for twenty-first century theater . Melissa (1937) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1948) demonstrate the contemporary validity of Kazantzakis's message, the former for its use of psychoanalysis and the latter for its political message addressing the nuclear threat. Contemporary performances of Kazantzakis's plays show that they can be very effective in modern "deconstructed" productions enriched with multimedia effects.

Hook to the Chin

Hook to the ChinWithin historical avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, a curious taste and fascination for boxing burst out, and developed later into the claim that art must become more similar to boxing, or to sport in general. This fascination with pugilism in the early stage of its popularity on the continent included such charismatic figures of the Parisian avant-garde as Arthur Cravan, who was Oscar Wilde's nephew, a pretty good boxer and an unpredictable organizer of proto-dada outrages and scandals.After WWI, the zenith of artists' and intellectuals' love for boxing was reached in Weimar Germany. One of the well known examples connecting boxing with art was Bertolt Brecht with his statement that we need more good sport in theatre. His and other German avant-garde artists' admiration for boxing included the German boxing star May Schmeling, who was, at least until he lost his defending championship match against Joe Louis, an icon of the Nazis as well. Quite contrary to some later approaches in philosophy of sport, which compared sport with an elite art institution, Brecht's fascination with boxing took its anti-elitist and anti-institutional capacities as an example for art's renewal.To examine why and how Brecht included boxing in his theatre and his theory of theatre, we have to take into account two pairs of phenomena: sport vs. physical culture, and avant-garde theatre vs. bourgeois drama. At the same time, it is important to notice that sport, as something of Anglo-Saxon origin, and especially boxing, which became popular on the European continent in its American version, were admired by Brecht and by other avant-garde artists for their masculine power and energy. The energy in theatre, however, was needed to disrupt its cheap fictionality and introduce dialectical imagination of Verfremdungseffect (V-effect, or distancing effect). This was "a hook to the chin" of institutionalized art and of collective disciplinary morality of German tradition.

Sardoodledom revisited, or a few trivial remarks about Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (1895)

Nineteenth-century French bourgeois drama exerted a powerful influence on Oscar Wilde's dramatic works. In the first place, the Irish playwright used this convenient formal frame to structure his society comedies. In the second place, he handled it as a critical and subversive tool to question the ideological and social balance of the British Establishment. Finally he moved beyond it to imagine new dramatic forms based on language as sheer dynamics working against and across the boundaries of rational and aesthetic certainties.

On the Hardness of Virtue, or Fetishizing Disinterest in Beaumarchais' Les Deux amis

An exploration of the self-delusional structures in Beaumarchais's bourgeois drama Les Deux amis, that support the iniquities engendered by commerce in mid-eighteenth-century Lyon. At the dawn of capitalistic enterprise, the protagonist of the drame bourgeois suspends knowledge of his own rapaciousness by emphatically cultivating a stance of selfless virtue as he pursues his commercial interests. It is the paradox of the genre that the very attempt to depict the nascent merchant class in France as a salutary alternative to a lazy and selfish nobility reveals the mechanisms of disavowal upon which the businessman's "disinterested" virtues are predicated, and gestures toward the unseemly economic realities from which its heroes avert their eyes.

Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets (review)

BOOK NOTES fables. Book V, entitled "Fabulas extravagantes" (rendered by the translators as "Fanciful Fables of Aesop"), is composed of fables largely derived from the French fabliaux and folkloric sources. Book VI, "The Fables of Remitius" is a translation of 17 fables of Rinuccio d'Arezzo. Book VII, "The Fables of Avianus," contains 27 fables attributed to Avianus who Uved between the second and fifth centuries. Book VIII, "The CoUected Fables ofAlfonso, of Poggio, and of Others," contains 22 fables. The Alfonso of this section is well known to students of Spanish literature as Petrus Alfonsus, the converted Jew from Aragon who, in the twelfth century, penned the Disciplina Clericalis or Scholar's Guide. The Poggio mentioned in this section is Poggio Bracciolini, author of a popular fifteenth-century fable anthology. Thus the Spanish compüer of the Ysopet strove to pubüsh a complete compendium offables considered, directly or indirectly, to be part of the Aesopic tradition as this corpus was known in fifteenth-century Europe. Keller and Keating provide a very lively and readable translation from the Old Spanish. This version in EngUsh will prove useful to scholars of the fable and medieval brief narrative as well as those interested in early book art and woodcuts. The woodcuts from the 1489 edition are very clearly reproduced in this volume and add a delightful dimension to the narratives. This book wül likewise be of interest to both chüdren and adults as an entertaining compendium of stories that have proved to be of timeless appeal. Connie L. Scarborough University of Cincinnati ROMY HEYLEN. Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. ? + 170 pp. The "playwright whose works are performed most often in French theatres is WUUam Shakespeare," writes Romy Heylen (122)—and Hamlet, "the most classic of classic plays," continues its long run, in numerous often radically different avatars (her book includes a useful "Table of Selected Hamlet Productions" in French between 1769 and 1989). But the six versions Heylen studies also serve as demonstrations of a theoretical approach to translation. Arguing against prescriptivenormative , source-text oriented theories of translation, Heylen adopts a socio-cultural, historical descriptive model. Her lucid introduction summarizes the contributions of seven theorists, concluding that translation "should not be seen as a rule-regulated activity"—a question of "good" and "bad"—but as "a decision-making process ... a teleological activity where-by the translator actively intervenes and appropriates the foreign text with a particular objective in mind" (24). Heylen's examination of six staged and variously transformed versions of Hamlet begins with Jean-François Ducis' Hamlet, Tragédie Vol. 19 (1995): 158 THE COMPAKATIST imitée de l'anglois. This version, performed 203 times by the Comédie Française between 1769 and 1851, "naturalized" Shakespeare in "a completely acculturated translation" (41). Ducis observes in alexandrine verse all the tenets of neoclassical taste while introducing elements of contemporary bourgeois drama à la Diderot and Rousseauistic sentiment. In 1847, however, Alexandre Dumas appropriated and reworked a translation ofPaul Meurice, seeking to impose a new version ofthe play that incorporated the Romantic aesthetic and the boulevard techniques of popular melodrama. Subsequent revisions permitted this Hamlet to enter the Comédie Française in 1886, where it played until 1932. The first prose version to be staged in France was La Tragique Histoire d'Hamlet (1889) ofMarcel Schwob and Eugène Morand, which featured Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. This "source text oriented translation" (62) attempted the gageure of a word-for-word scholarly "reclamation" of Hamlet, using archaic French and retaining, where possible, Shakespeare's syntax as well as his exact imagery and vocabulary , sounds, and rhythms. Schwob and Morand thus "historicized" their text but also "naturalized" it at certain points, "coloniz[ing] the past, replacing Shakespeare's 'exotic' allusions with native French ones" (76). In the 1940s André Gide, encouraged by Jean-Louis Barrault, completed his Tragédie d'Hamlet. He sought to "modernize" the play, turning it into a play for the Europe of World War II, so that Barrault (who directed it and played the principal role) saw a Hamlet "torn between doubt and faith," who...

The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power. Scott S. Bryson

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power. Scott S. BrysonMarie-Hélène HuetMarie-Hélène Huet Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 91, Number 4May, 1994 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/392204 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Identity and Ideology: Diderot, Sade, and the Serious Genre

The bourgeois drama of serious was one of the major innovative literary forms of the French Enlightenment, but it has been largely excluded from the canon today. In a study drawing on contemporary and 18th-century literary theory and philosophy, social history and history of the theatre, Hayes presents a reading of the dramas of Diderot and Sade and argues for a new understanding of the genre as a whole. A disparate group as they were, the drame's practitioners share a new approach to personal identity as relational and derived from the workings of the social network - a notion of great ideological shift in the period preceding 1789.

Review. The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power. Bryson, Scott S.

Review. The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power. Bryson, Scott S.

The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power

The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power. By SCOTT S. BRYSON. (Stanford French and Italian Studies, 70). Saratoga, California, Anma Libri, 1991. vii + 125 pp. ESTHER J. EHRMAN ESTHER J. EHRMAN ROYAL HOLLOWAYUNIVERSITY OF LONDON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLVII, Issue 3, July 1993, Pages 331–332, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLVII.3.331 Published: 01 July 1993

Drama, Politics, and the Hero: Coriolanus, Brecht, and Grass

I want to look at Brecht's adaptation and criticism of Shakespeare's Coriolanus^ and at Gunter Grass' creative response to these in his play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising {Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand) ;2 furthermore, I want to raise some questions about the role of the hero in all three plays. Brecht's attitude to the cult of the hero in bourgeois drama is well known: it was his contention that the emphasis on the hero, particularly in Shakespeare, was a large part of what was wrong with current drama both socially and aesthetically. The conventional way of seeing the hero led in his view to an over-romanticizing, an exaggerated stress on audience identification with the hero, and a resulting lack of critical detachment. From a political point of view, this in turn had dangerous affinities with the cult of hero worship and led in the direction of fascism. What I want to suggest by looking at Brecht's version of Coriolanus is that, in addition to more obvious psychological dimensions which Brecht was expressly content to omit, there are important political dimensions of the play which the Brechtian version cannot accommodate and that some of these are illuminated with striking wit and subtlety in Grass' play. Behind my discussion there also lie questions concerning the conflicting claims of adaptation and interpretation of Shakespeare. By the term 'adaptation' I mean the substantial changing of Shakespeare's text, amounting virtually to a new play, which takes place in Brecht's Coriolan, and by 'interpretation' I mean the critical or directorial drawing out of implication, or