Hamburg Dramaturgy

Essay 2

kgarrett

May 22, 2020

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 5 May 1767[2.1]

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Yet another observation, also concerning the Christian tragedy, might be made with regard to Clorinda’s conversion.[2.2]While we may always wish to be convinced of the direct effects of grace, it can please us but little in the theater, where everything that belongs to the personality of the characters must spring from the most natural causes.[2.3] In the theater we tolerate miracles only in the physical world; in the moral realm, everything has to keep to its proper course, because theater should be the school of the moral world.[2.4] The motives for each decision, for each change in even the most minor thoughts and opinions, must be precisely weighed for consistency with the character as it has already been presented, and they must never provoke more than they could according to the strictest truth. The writer might possess the art of seducing us into overlooking incongruities of this type through beautiful details; but he deceives us only once, and as soon as we have cooled down, we take back the applause he wheedled from us. Applying this to the fourth scene of the third act, we see that Sophronia’s speeches and behavior might indeed have moved Clorinda to compassion, but they are far too ineffectual to have the effect of conversion on a person who is not at all disposed to enthusiasm.[2.5] In Tasso, Clorinda also embraces Christianity, but only in her last hour, only after she has discovered that her parents had embraced this faith: these are subtle, weighty circumstances, through which the impact of a higher power is interwoven into a series of natural events.[2.6] No one has better understood how far one may go with this subject on stage than Voltaire.[2.7] After the sensitive, noble soul of Zamor has been assaulted and shaken to its core by example and pleading, by magnanimity and exhortations, Voltaire allows him more to suppose than actually to believe the truth of the religion whose converts display so much greatness.[2.8] And perhaps Voltaire would have also suppressed this supposition, if something of the sort had not been necessary to assuage his audience.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 In view of the above observations, even Corneille’s Polyeucte is faulty; and since its imitations have all been even worse, we are without doubt still waiting for the first tragedy deserving to be called Christian.[2.9] By that I mean a play in which, for the first time, the Christian interests us as a Christian. – But is such a play even possible? Isn’t the character of the true Christian somehow completely untheatrical? Don’t his most characteristic traits – quiet tranquility and consistent gentleness – somehow conflict with the entire business of tragedy, which seeks to purify passions through passions?[2.10] Doesn’t his expectation of a rewarding happiness in the next life contradict the selfless altruism with which we wish to see all great and good actions on the stage undertaken and performed?

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Until a work of genius incontestably refutes these concerns – for experience has shown us that genius can overcome many difficulties – my advice would be: do not stage any of the Christian tragedies written to date.[2.11] This advice, which is derived from the requirements of art and can deprive us of nothing except very mediocre plays, is none the worse for coming to the aid of those weaker souls who feel I-know-not-what kind of horror when they hear sentiments spoken in the theater that they are only prepared to encounter in a holier place. The theater should offend no one, whoever they may be; and I wish that it also could and would forestall any offenses to anyone.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Cronegk had only managed to get his play to nearly the end of the fourth act. The rest was added by a pen in Vienna; a pen – for the work of a mind is not very evident in it.[2.12] Apparently the wielder of the pen ended the story completely differently than Cronegk planned. Death best solves all complications; thus he allows both Olint and Sophronia to die. In Tasso they both survive, because Clorinda takes up their cause with selfless generosity. But Cronegk had made Clorinda fall in love, and so it was admittedly difficult to guess how he intended to deal with two rivals without calling death to his aid. In a different and even worse tragedy when one of the main characters suddenly died, one member of the audience asked his neighbor: “But what did she die of?” – “Of what? Of the fifth act” answered the other. Truth be told, the fifth act is an evil nasty disease that carries away many a one to whom the first four acts had promised a much longer life.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 But I don’t want to go to any greater lengths with my criticism of the play. As mediocre as it is, it has been exceptionally produced. I am not talking about the external splendor, because this improvement of our theater requires nothing other than money. The arts that require this sort of help have the same level of excellence here as in every other country; it is just that our artists wish to be paid as well as those in every other country.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 One should be satisfied with the production of a play if among four or five people a few have performed excellently and the others well. He who is so offended by a beginner or some substitute in a minor role that he turns up his nose at the whole thing should travel to Utopia and visit the perfect theater there, where even the candlesnuffer is a Garrick.[2.13]

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 [†]Herr Ekhof was Evander; although Evander is in fact Olint’s father, he essentially functions as not much more than a confidant.[2.14] This actor, however, can make what he wants of a role; even in the smallest role we always recognize him as the finest of actors and regret not being able to see him play all of the other roles in addition to his own. One talent completely unique to him is that he knows how to deliver moral adages and sweeping observations, those boring digressions of an awkward writer, with such grace and inner fire that in his mouth the most trivial phrases are imbued with novelty and dignity, the coldest phrases with fire and life.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 The interspersed morals are Cronegk’s strength. Both here and in his Codrus he has expressed quite a few with such a lovely and emphatic brevity that many of his verses deserve to be kept as aphorisms and taken up by the general public as part of the prevailing wisdom in everyday life.[2.15] Unfortunately, he also often tries to peddle colored glass for precious stone and witty antitheses for common sense. Two lines of that kind in the first act had a particular effect on me.[2.16] The first,

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 “Heaven can forgive, but a Priest cannot.”

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 The second,

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 “He who thinks badly of others is himself a villain.”

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 I was struck by a general movement in the parterre and noticed that murmuring through which applause expresses itself when the audience’s attentiveness does not allow it to fully break out. On the one hand, I thought: Wonderful! These people love morality; this audience has a taste for maxims; a Euripides could earn fame on this stage, and Socrates would happily visit it. On the other hand, it also occurred to me how cockeyed, how false, how offensive these supposed maxims were, and I very much wished that disapproval might have had the largest share in that murmuring. There has only been one Athens, there will only ever be one Athens, where even among the rabble moral sentiment was so fine and sensitive that actors and playwrights ran the risk of being driven out of the theater because of corrupt morality! I am well aware that in the drama sentiments must correspond with the assumed character of the person who expresses them; they therefore cannot bear the stamp of absolute truth. It is enough if they are poetically true, if we must admit that this character, in this situation, in this state of passion, could not have judged otherwise. But on the other hand, even this poetic truth must approach the absolute, and a writer must never think so unphilosophically as to imagine that a person could want evil for evil’s sake, that a person could act according to vicious principles, recognize the viciousness of those principles, and even boast about them to himself and others. Such a person is a monster, as hideous as he is uninstructive, and he is nothing but the miserable last resort of an insipid mind who thinks glittering tirades are the highest achievement in tragedy. If Ismenor is a cruel priest, then are all priests Ismenors?[2.17] One must not argue that we are talking about priests of a false religion. No religion in this world has ever been so false that its teachers necessarily had to be fiends. Priests have wreaked havoc in false religions as well as in true ones, not because they were priests, but because they were villains who would have abused the privileges of any social position in the service of their evil inclinations.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 When the stage indulges the expression of such ill-considered judgments against priests, is it any wonder that among them there are some foolish enough to proclaim the stage a high road to hell?[2.18]

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 But I am falling again into criticism of the play, and I wanted to speak of the actors.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0  

• ¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0
• [†] Text in blue indicates passages omitted by Zimmern in her 1890 translation.
• [2.1] Actually published 8 May 1767.
• [2.2] Lessing continues his discussion, from [1], of Johann Friedrich von Cronegk’s Olint und Sophronia; for the plot, see [1.2]. For more on the role of conversion in Lessing’s approach to “Christian tragedy,” see Erickson, “Adapting Christian Tragedy for the Enlightenment Stage: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769).”
• [2.3] Natural causes: for the theological reasoning behind Lessing’s emphasis on the dramaturgical necessity for natural causality, see Nisbet 396–7.
• [2.4] Lessing, on one hand, supported sentimental models of theater whose depictions of “natural” and universal behavior were meant to strengthen morality through a spectator’s innate capacity for compassion. At the same time, however, Lessing had little patience for pedantic moralizing; see, for example, his letter to Nicolai (Letter 509) dated 11 October 1769, in which he condemns “wretched defenders of the theater, who seek with all their might to make it into a school of virtue” (Werke und Briefe 11/1: 629).
• [2.5] Sophronia’s conversion of Clorinda occurs in fact in act 4, scene 4 (rather than in act 3, scene 4); see Cronegk 345–51. Tr. note: on the choice to translate Mitleid as “compassion” see [32.6].
• [2.6] Tasso: Cronegk’s source; see [1.4]. Cronegk omits this detail about Clorinda’s parentage.
• [2.7] Voltaire: pseudonym of French playwright, philosopher, and satirist François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778).
• [2.8] Zamor: “noble savage” who converts to Christianity in Voltaire’s play Alzire, ou les Américains [Alzire; or, The Americans] (1736).
• [2.9] Polyeucte (1642): five-act verse tragedy by French poet and playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–84), widely regarded as the founder of neoclassical tragedy. The titular character, an Armenian lord, converts to Christianity and is martyred.
• [2.10] “purify passions through passions”: first allusion to catharsis, a highly contested Aristotelian term variably defined as “purification,” “purgation,” “cleansing,” or “clarification”; the purpose of tragedy, according to Aristotle. See [32], [74] – [83], and Aristotle, Poetics (Part VI).
• [2.1`] Genius: Lessing did not subscribe to the increasingly popular “cult of genius” of the late eighteenth century. Unlike the later Romantics, he did not consider genius to be generative, but understood it rather as an indication of an individual’s intuitive grasp of the laws of nature. For more on Lessing’s understanding of genius and the authors who may have shaped it, see J. G. Robertson 449–58.
• [2.12] See [1.3].
• [2.13] Until late in the eighteenth century the lighting in German theaters was provided by candles; the Lichtputzer (here translated as “candlesnuffer”) was responsible for maintaining those candles, trimming wicks to prevent them from smoking and extinguishing the flames when it was time for the candles to be changed. On lighting practices in the eighteenth-century German theater, see Maurer-Schmoock, Deutsches Theater im 18. Jahrhundert, 65–75. David Garrick (1717–79): English actor, playwright, and entrepreneur; considered among the greatest dramatic artists of the century.
• [2.14] Konrad Ekhof (1720–78): German actor and theorist, known as “the father of German acting” and “the German Garrick”; a leading member of the Hamburg National Theater company. Ekhof exemplified an emerging, more naturalistic style of German acting that accorded with Lessing’s ideas about the reform of the German theater (see Nisbet 367–69). Lessing uses a variant spelling of his name (Eckhof). In his discussion of the production, Lessing’s criticism focuses mainly on the play’s supporting roles; possibly because principle actress Susanna Mecour (Sophronia) refused Lessing permission to review her performances.
• [2.15] Codrus: see [1.12].
• [2.16] Lines spoken by Clorinda. See Cronegk 292; 293.
• [2.17] Ismenor: see [1.2].
• [2.18] A reference to antitheatrical critics such as the militant Lutheran German theologian Johann Melchior Götze, who in 1770 would deny the possibility of moral theater in his polemic Theologische Untersuchung der Sittlichkeit der heutigen deutschen Schaubühne [Theological Investigation of the Morality of the Contemporary German Theater]; for Lessing’s theological dispute with Götze in 1777–78, see Nisbet 552–70.