German cultural nationalism and romanticist theatre

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

First off, as Dave Bisaha appropriately brought up on Monday, the notion of affirming a national theatre based in some kind of local tradition was not new in the late 18th century. Rousseau, in his Letter to Msr. D’Alembert arguing against establishing a French theatre in Geneva, had made claims about a primitive folk culture that should be the true basis of a distinctively Swiss culture. John Dryden had argued that English drama had distinctive qualities superior to that of the French, and David Garrick had devoted most of his life to establishing Shakespeare as a great national poet. With the founding of the Comedie Francaise in 1680, the French had laid claim to a great national dramatic and theatrial tradition worth preserving from generation to generation. And we can look back to Lope de Vega in the early 17th century, and his argument for privileging Spanish uso against the claims of neoclassicism as a kind of primordial national theatre project. These were all promotions of local distinctiveness against claims for universal standards of art.

So what was so special about the arguments laid out by Johann von Herder in the 1760s and 1770s that lets Steve Wilmer claim him as the most important inspiration not only for a German national culture and theatre, but for the modern rhetoric of national culture throughout the world?

Herder encouraged German-speaking people to take pride in their own cultural traditions and their native language. Like Rousseau, he urged them to acknowledge the importance of the folk poets of the past. But unlike Rousseau and those who followed him, Herder promoted the notion that everyone in the world naturally belongs to a nation, that every nation is distinct in its culture and traditions, and that every nation should express the volksgeist, the spirit of its own people in its own unique way.

In this way, he broke through some of the basic assumptions that had informed the debate over neoclassicism for the past two centuries. Rather than worry about what the ancients really meant, or who was authorized to break the rules, he started with the assumption that there are no universal standards for art. Everyone should look for what is unique in the pasts of their own peoples, and this will give them distinct traditions to draw on in formulating an art particular to their own people. The ease with which we nowadays talk about American or English or French or German or Chinese culture as distinct things reflected in the practices of all representatives of those cultures owes a lot to this fundamental shift in thinking. As Wilmer points out, there were significant political consequences. A people with distinct cultural traditions, and a distinct national voice, could make a strong argument for having the right and the natural destiny to have the status of a separate nation-state. So we start to see revolutionaries taking an interest in various kinds of cultural expression, including theatre, as a tool for advancing their goals to establish new states. We see subjects of empires attracted to notions of building a national culture—like much of Europe during the Napoleonic wars, the Finnish in relation to Russia, the Irish in relation to England and the Asian and African peoples colonized by Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of invention of tradition is important in this context. Nationalists, of course, would like everybody to think that their claims to distinctiveness are based in reality, that national identity is part of human nature and beyond dispute. The truth is always more ambiguous. The nations of England and France were forged through political and military actions and choices. It took people like John Dryden and David Garrick to promote the notion that there was such a thing as a great dramatic tradition that was distinctively English (rather than being the works of certain people who happened to be English). The disorienting experiences of modernity in the late 18th century with bloody revolutions and huge social uphevals like the industrial revolution made people think about “traditions” with a new kind of nostalgia and to define rigidly practices that had actually been more fluid. To preserve the purity of national origins, nationalists invented traditions that owed nothing to other cultures, conveniently forgetting any kind of complexity that might contradict their distinctiveness.

As Wilmer argues, Herder’s ideas about national culture can be seen in the rhetoric of national theatre projects around Europe and beyond. All these projects show aspects of what John Hutchinson calls cultural nationalism, whose goal is “the moral regeneration of the national community rather than the achievement of an autonomous state.” (64) In Germany, for example, where real political nationhood did not become feasible until the late nineteenth century, cultural nationalism was a significant force building the sense of a national community over the preceding century from the lat 18th century. The goal of such institutions as the German theatres of Hamburg and Munich and Weimar was to build up a national mythology independent from the cultural hegemony of France, England and Italy. As Schiller would put it, “if we had a national stage, we would also become a nation.” (69)

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

Nationalism, Imperialism and 18th Century Theatre

TIMELINES

Rise of the British Empire

1707 Act of Union, a treaty with France and the Netherlands leaves England the dominant colonial power in North America and India. The dominance of the British Empire over its rivals might be dated from here.

1757 Battle of Plassey gives the British East India Company decisive control over India against French and indigenous rivals.

1775 American revolution begins (a setback for the British Empire)

1783 United States of America gains independence

1788 British penal colony founded at Australia

1795-1815 Napoleonic wars envelop Europe and their colonies throughout the world. Britain emerges as the pre-eminent global empire.

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The Industrial Revolution

1721 John Lombe’s water-powered silk mill at Derby, arguably the first modern factory

1780s Steam engines increasingly used to power machines; iron foundry technology advances; patents on textile technologies expire, all leading to mass industrialization

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German Romanticism and Cultural Nationalism

1765-9 A number of wealthy burghers in the free city of Hamburg embarked on the establishment of the first German National Theatre with Lessing as ‘theatre poet’. In this position, he issued the Hamburg Dramaturgie. But there was too little public support, and it closed two years later.

1776 The German Sturm und Drang movement begins with Friedrich Klinger’s play by that name–tumultuous dramas rebelling against political, economic, and artistic tyranny; celebrating ordinary people in natural (even primitive) settings; heroic peasants overthrowing villainous and tyrannical rulers; sensational action, Manichean conflicts of raging elements.

1777 A German court theatre established in Munich with Schiller as writer in residence.

1779 Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, the first German play written in blank verse on the inspiration of Shakespeare

1782 Schiller’s The Robbers establishes plot and character types that would become common with melodrama– damsel in distress, falsely accused hero, ruthless villain with labyrinthine castle.

1784 Schiller’s “The Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution’; Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind


1795 Napoleonic wars commence. The occupation of German territories inspires greater interest in cultural nationalism as a form of resistance

1798 Schiller joins Goethe at the court of Weimar, initiating a period of intense theatrical activity trying to articulate a German national theatre

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NATIONALISM

The United States, coming into existence as it did in the late 18th century, has always been dominated by commercial theaters, popular and bourgeois. For us, the role of the government in the arts has always either been as a censor or as a provider of grants that are usually not as generous as those provided by private corporations. We had a national theater for a very brief period in the 1930s in the form of the Federal Theater Project, a producing theater funded by the US government. Since then, however, we mostly hear about our government being outraged at any taxpayers money being used to support controversial art, and defunding the NEA. The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. serves some small part of the social function of a national theater, but not the basic economic relationship. As a presidential memorial, the Kennedy Center receives a direct, federal appropriation, but these funds can only be used for the operation and maintenance of the building. None of this funding goes toward the Center’s performances or educational activities. Without private donations and ticket sales, the Kennedy Center would stand only as an empty building. The Kennedy Center is also not ideologically committed to an American repertoire. It is just a big venue for theater in the nation’s capitol.

In most of the rest of the world, national governments have taken theater seriously as a way of promoting national culture and national identity. Making English into “the language of Shakespeare.” French as “the language of Racine and Moliere.” Most of the nations of continental Europe have prominent national theater buildings funded by the government. From the consolidation of many European nations in the 19th century to the new independence of colonized nations in the 20th century, governments have funded national theaters to promote national culture. The establishment of the Comedie Francaise in 1680 was a historic move in this direction, a very different initiative than the joint-stock companies of late 16th and early 17th century England, and a very different initiative than the professional Italian commedia troupes. This was, and still is, a state-sponsored theater whose purpose is to maintain a national repertoire of the great works by French playwrights.


IMPERIALISM

In 1600, China may have been the most economically and politically powerful nation on Earth. Biggest, most populous, most politically sophisticated, most technologically advanced, most economically advanced, most literate. In 1800, it might have been a little harder to say. Europe was getting rich on its colonies through much of the world, had taken huge steps towards advancing democracy and capitalism in their own governments, and was in the midst of accelerating scientific and industrial progress. However, much of the world viewed them, and they viewed themselves as just another set of warring powers who appeared to be tearing each other apart in the Napoleonic wars. Even their colonies were mostly limited to port towns and garrisons. By 1900, however, European powers directly governed nearly 90% of the surface of the Earth. In science, industry, economy, politics and culture and the arts, most of the world now sought to emulate Europe.

As Europe conquered the world militarily, politically and economically, it also did so epistemologically and culturally. Despite the reaction against Enlightenment rationalism in the Romantic era, the 19th century saw a new explosion of science that worked hand in hand with colonialism. European naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, accompanied military journeys to the colonies to catalogue and produce knowledge about all of Nature. Materialist political philosophy channeled Christian notions of emancipation from sin into a progressive emancipation from ignorance. Adam Smith, August Comte, Georg Hegel and Karl Marx all saw human societies and nations as progressing according to rational material causes (rather than God’s will or other super-natural forces) that should be shaped by educated and aware people to bring humanity closer to full knowledge and justice. This is the wider socio-cultural context of the "modern" theatre and drama that began with late 18th century Romanticism and eventually gave rise to 19th century Realism.

Keywords and Concepts for Midterm Exam

Renaissance or Early Modernity?

renaissance and neoclassicism
unity of disunities
invention of tradition
Gumbrecht’s 3 definitions of modernity
“a modern man can never look well dressed”
single-point perspective and prosecnium theatres
Sebastiano Serlio

Spanish ‘Golden Age’ Theatre

corrales de comedias
the cazuela
Lope de Vega’s “New Art”
Lope’s appeal to uso (custom)
Spanish comedias vs. tragedy and comedy
The setting of Life is a Dream
The Corpus Christi festival
Calderon de la Barca and the auto sacramental
Sor Juana and the auto contest in Madrid
Zeal and Religion
The Aztec ritual in Divino Narciso

French Neoclassical theatre

Aristotle vs. Horace
The Hotel de Burgogne
Cardinal Richelieu and the French Academy
the three Aristotelian unities
vraisemblance and bienseance
The controversy over Corneille’s Le Cid
Giacomo Torelli and the Palais Cardinal
The Comedie Italienne and Moliere’s company
The controversy over Tartuffe
Moliere’s relationship to Louis XIV
The Comedie Francaise

English Restoration theatre

The Puritan interregnum
Charles II and his time in France
John Dryden’s defense of English drama
Aphra Behn’s female characters
tennis court theatres
Davenant and Killigrew
Dorset Garden and Drury Lane
fops and rakes
the Glorious Revolution
Hobbes and Locke

Keralan Kathakali

the Mahabharata and puranas
The Natyasastra and the Hastalaksanadipika
rasa and bhava
Namboodiri Brahmins and Nayars
‘house and its land’
rasika
The four plays of Kottayam Tampuran
the Kidangoor style and the Kalluvayi style
illakivattam in the role of Sidhika
green and black character types
kalarippayattu and kathakali actor training
mudras and rasabhinava (facial expression)
the Kerala Kalamandalam

Qing Dynasty theatre

kunqu & jingxi
Peony Pavilion
clapper opera
sheng, dan/tan, jing/ching, ch’ou roles
which characters in Qing Ding Pearl correspond to each type?
Confucianism
teahouse theatres
Mei Lanfang
the cultural revolution & Chinese opera


18th Century Europe

The Bank of England
book culture vs. periodical culture
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot
Rousseau’s opposition to a theatre in Geneva
the concept of ‘genius’
domestic middle-class drama
social rank or station vs. character
sentimentalism
“the paradox of the actor”
sense and sensibility
David Garrick and Diderot
David Garrick and Hogarth
The Enlightenment and China
David Garrick in Orphan of China

The birth of the "star" actor: David Garrick (1717-1779)

Garrick had an unsuccessful career as a wine merchant befoe he started acting in 1740 in Ipswich, which was an important stop on the touring circuit outside London. He debuted in London as Rechard III in 1741, and followed this with a string of other major Shakespeare tragic roles. He soon became one of the managers of Drury Lane, and remained in control there until 1776. Over the course of his career, Garrick made several important contributions to the development of English theatre. He promoted Shakespeare, not simply as an important member of the English dramatic repertoire, but as the supreme English poet and proof of England’s cultural superiority. The reputation that Shakespeare still enjoys as the greatest playwright in the world was established at this point by the devotion of England’s greatest actor. In the following two centuries, Shakespeare would become a cornerstone of English education throughout the British empire, making theatre a huge part of English nationalism.

Reciprocally, Garrick used his unrivalled status as an emissary of the English national poet to promote the legitimacy of acting as a profession. You’ll recall that in the Restoration, actors were still considered little more than prostitutes. Garrick became a model of the actor as “the new natural man of reason and moral sensibility. Easy and graceful in motion, with a quick intelligence, he planned his performances meticulously, offering a model of the century’s scientific ideal of the rational soul governing the mechanical body.” As Samuel Johnson put it, “his profession made him rich, and he made his profession respectable.” As ambassador or high priest of Shakespeare and model of the new enlightened man, he became a friend of the powerful in London and lived the life of a gentleman.

The article about Arthur Murphy’s 1759 adaptation of Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine argues that Garrick’s production of the play navigated between an English attraction to Voltaire’s original and interest in the Enlightenment craze for Chinese culture, but appropriated it to a context in which the play could become an argument for English superiority. This is quintessential Garrick.

He also was the first international acting celebrity. Your text associaties this with periodical culture. He was the subject of hundreds of paintings and engravings, including those by Hogarth described in the book. Benjamin Victor, writing in 1761, described his career as “a bright luminary in the theatrical hemisphere… [which] soon after became a star of the first magnitude and was called Garrick.” This is apparently the first recorded use of the word “star” to describe an actor.

He was praised for bringing a new “naturalism” to the theatre, though if we look closely at what this means from our contemporary perspective, we can see how much it was shaped by the conventions of the time. For the ghost scene in Hamlet, he had a special “fright wig” constructed whose hair could be made to stand on end through a hydraulic hand pump. To 18th century audiences, this was more real than reality.

In 1775, a German visitor to London named Lichtenberg saw Garrick’s Hamlet and wrote this description of the ghost scene. He fails to mention the wig, but the rest gives a revealing impression of Garrick’s intense style:

Hamlet has folded his arms under his cloak and pulled his hat down over his eyes; it is a cold night and just twelve o’clock; the theatre is darkened, and the whole audience of some thousand are as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre; even from the farthest end of the playhouse one could hear a pin drop. Suddenly, as Hamlet moves towards the back of the stage slightly to the left and turns his back on the audience, Horatio starts, and saying: ‘Look, my lord, it comes,’ points to the right, where the ghost has already appeared and stands motionless, before anyone is aware of him. At these words Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him; his hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, are stretched out nearly to their full length, with the hands as high as his head, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingers apart; his mouth is open: thus he stands rooted to the spot, with legs apart, but no loss of dignity, supported by his friends, who are better acquainted with the apparition and fear lest he should collapse. His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance the effect.

The European Enlightenment & Middle Class Theatre

18th century European thought is often grouped under the name of the Enlightenment. This was a reaction to all the religious wars that had torn Europe apart throughout the 17th century. A recognition of the power of science to explore the world, and a new faith in the capacity of pure reason and rationality to answer not only scientific, but also political and social issues. There was a new focus on finding truth not in religion but in nature. However, there were ongoing debates that would continue into the nineteenth century about what that nature really was. The diehard rationalists advocated a mechanistic view of a universe that was rigorously logical and could be understood through empirical observation and experiment. Others believed that truth resided within the soul of each human being. This is the Jane Austen dichotomy between sense and sensibility. Both had an impact on thinking about theatre.

In stark contrast to Hobbes, who advocated a benevolent monarchy to elevate humanity from a state of nature which was innately bad (“Life is nasty, brutish and short”), Enlightenment philosophers frequently started from the premise that human nature is innately good, and that both personal and social bonds would thrive if individuals were true to their innate virtues and their moral sentiments, resisting selfishness and exercising benevolence.

Rousseau epitomizes this view when he writes in The Social Contract, “Man is born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains.” The philosophical approach known as romantic individualism stems from this. Be true to yourself and you can’t go wrong. The measure of truth is in our own soul. People are good. It is society that is corrupt. Evil is not innate, but rather a corruption of our good natures that can be reformed. This was a view also promoted by Addison and Steele in periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator. They argue that theatre should be a vehicle for educating the public in these moral sentiments appropriate to a new middle class. These are the roots of what we will later speak of as liberalism—the belief that prosperity and justice are best served by limiting the role of government and all other social institutions and letting people do whatever they want. Of course, the heroes of liberalist thought are the capitalists and industrialists who take advantage of such freedoms to amass huge fortunes.


The new drama, by extension, should abandon the aesthetics of Restoration comedy and French comedy of manners in which fops and rakes ridicule each other with witty repartee for a new kind of middle class drama about the struggles of middle class characters in which the middle class virtues such as thrift, hard work and family loyalty are rewarded and vices that destroy the family or the productivity of society are punished. This is the poetic justice that Rymer hinted at in the Restoration, but which became the moral compass for the new bourgeois drama. The important point to keep in mind here is that these shifts are a response to specific changes in European society. You can’t understand the rise of some of these things that start to look like realist drama outside the context of a middle class, capitalist and increasingly nationalistic society.

Chinese kunqu and jingxi video clips

Here are a handful of videos to give you a better taste of kunqu and jingxi

1) This is a promotional video from one of several productions of the kunqu opera, Peony Pavilion that took place earlier this decade in response to a UNESCO project focussing on the form as a world cultural treasure. There is a narration by UC Berkeley professor Pai Hsien-yung who emphasizes such typical elements of the form as its exquisitely decorated costumes and beautiful poetry. Kunqu is a very high and refined form that translates easily to elite contemporary global touring venues.



2) A scene from Peony Pavilion performed in a more traditional style on a traditional stage. If you find this harder to watch or less interesting than the clip above, think about the fact that the one above has been marketed for Western audiences. What have they done to make it more attractive for us?



3) A scene from a jingxi performance with various jing and wu sheng characters engaged in a battle sequence. As with kathakali, note that it isn't really about the narrative story so much as the performers displaying the essence of the experience of battle. In this sense, think of it more like dance.



4) Another video collage of a jingxi performance on a proscenium stage featuring some of the characteristic acrobatic fight scenes and the ever-popular "monkey" character. This is what all that intense physical training accomplishes!



5) Rare footage of Mei Lanfang at the age of 60 performing the dan role from the jingxi play, Farewell, my Concubine.

Chinese "opera": kunqu & jingxi and their actors

17th century painting of a private stage in Peking where kunqu might have been performed (left) and a mid-19th century Chinese stage showing the clear influence of Western proscenium scenography (right)


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Historical overview

The Sung Dynasty (906-1279) saw the development of institutions and practices crucial to the emergence of a professional, commercial Chinese theater. An emergent middle class built numerous permanent theaters. The nanxi theatrical style, which developed at this time in South China, made extensive use of regional folk music styles and sophisticated typological systems of characterization. But the strongest evidence appears under the Mongol rulers of China in the late 13th and 14th centuries. This Yuan drama was patronized by the court of Kublai Khan, and many of the plays that are performed in all the forms of Chinese theatre were first written during this time. Chinese theatre artists look back on the Yuan drama as the golden age of Chinese playwriting when the most sophisticated and refined (that is, the most courtly) plays were written. These plays are more literary and have a more linear plot structure than most later Chinese opera and concentrate on a single protagonist who is the only singing character (somewhat like the first Greek tragedies which only had one “actor”). However, unlike the Japanese who revere the golden age of Noh or Westerners who revere Shakespeare, Chinese feel free to change these Yuan plays to adapt them to whatever new forms they want. The words of the playwright are not sacred in China.

During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the first century of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1910), Chinese theatre drawing from folk traditions and the Yuan drama developed differently in the different provinces. During the 16th and 17th centuries, a very refined form of Chinese Opera known as Kunqu developed in the Northern cities. Kunqu drew from the literary Yuan dramas, developed refined music and became the Chinese national theatre form. But unlike in Japan where refinement brought Noh greater respect, refinement destroyed Kunqu. Chinese audiences demanded something more exciting.

In 1779 (at a point when Kunqu was practically dead) for the Emperor’s seventieth birthday (and again ten years later for his eightieth birthday) troupes of a more popular, more spectacular form called clapper opera came to Peking from the province of Anhui. They were so successful that many of them remained in Peking and spawned a new school of performance that developed into Jingxi (Peking/Beijing Opera), and influenced the development of similar regional operas all over China.

Chinese opera clearly started in more popular venues even though it first became a sensation in the North as part of a courtly celebration. Performances of Chinese opera were and still are given in the streets as well as in lavish theatre buildings. However, probably the most typical place to see Chinese opera is in a teahouse theatre. Similar to our “dinner theatres,” these are places where people go to drink tea, eat, socialize, gamble, and (up through the nineteenth century) smoke opium. Teahouses varied in how exclusive they were, and could house a wide variety of different kinds of theatre from puppet shows to Chinese opera.

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Acting in Chinese Theatre

As we saw in the extracts from the film, Farewell, my Concubine, training of boys for Chinese opera was similarly rough and rigorous as for kathakali performers in India. Boys in acting schools (who typically came from impoverished backgrounds) were treated as property of their teachers. This could certainly be abusive. At the same time, the life of an actor offered the opportunity for fame and success otherwise unimaginable for poor Chinese children with no education.

As in India, young actors training in China would be selected early for their physical qualities and talent to specialize in specific role types. There are four basic character types in Chinese Opera: sheng (male archetype roles such as old men (lao sheng) and warriors (wu sheng), tan/dan (female characters, played in all-male troupes by men), ching/jing (painted face male characters – often kings or mythological figures) and ch’ou (clown characters)

As in India, Chinese actors portray their characters through a complex system of codified gestures (although Chinese acting gestures are generally symbolic rather than a complete sign language like Indian mudras), movements, styles of walking, styles of speaking and singing, costumes and make-up. The most famous of Chinese acting conventions are the hua lien (painted faces). Although painted faces may be quite simple as for the Dan roles (usually just white make-up with blush highlights), they can be quite elaborate for the ching/jing characters, using symbolic lines and highlights and different symbolic colors to indicate character complexity.

In Qing Ding Pearl, the fisherman's daughter is obviously a dan role, famously played by Mei Lanfang, the most celebrated Chinese actor of the twentieth century. The character is a model of the kind of filial piety expected of daughters towards their fathers in Confucian social philosophy. Her father is a typical lao sheng. His friends, the fighters, are most likely wu sheng. The diabolical magistrate is a jing character, and the comic "boxers" are chou clowns, similar to braggart soldier characters in numerous world theatre traditions.







(Left to right, top to bottom) A lao sheng character, four different jing characters, a "flower dan" (an innocent girl role), a ch'ou clown character