Persistence of Folly

The Origin of German Dramatic Literature

Joel B. Lande

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501727139
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Joel B. Lande's Persistence of Folly challenges the accepted account of the origins of German theater by focusing on the misunderstood figure of the fool, whose spontaneous and impish jest captivated audiences, critics, and playwrights from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century. Lande radically expands the scope of literary historical inquiry, showing that the fool was not a distraction from attempts to establish a serious dramatic tradition in the German language. Instead, the fool was both a fixture on the stage and a nearly ubiquitous theme in an array of literary critical, governmental, moral-philosophical, and medical discourses, figuring centrally in broad-based efforts to assign laughter a proper time, place, and proportion in society.

Persistence of Folly reveals the fool as a cornerstone of the dynamic process that culminated in the works of Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist. By reorienting the history of German theater, Lande's work conclusively shows that the highpoint of German literature around 1800 did not eliminate irreverent jest in the name of serious drama, but instead developed highly refined techniques for integrating the comic tradition of the stage fool.

Part I

The Fool at Play

Comic Practice and the Strolling Players

Stultorum plena sunt omnia.

The world is full of fools.

—The fool in an adaptation of Andreas Gryphius’s Papinianus, and Cicero

1

Birth of a Comic Form

German theater—and, in particular, its early modern ancestor—is not especially well known for its sense of humor. But the lack of acclaim is not for lack of evidence: beginning around 1600, comic elements reigned supreme on the stage. In fact, during the period before German-speaking towns could espouse a local theater building, no single factor ensured a leavened atmosphere with the same effectiveness and frequency as did the stage fool. A verbal and gestural wild-card figure, the fool dazzled audiences with song and dance, and used rude jokes to provoke their laughter. He was more protean and less rooted in a specific social context than the court fools that still today in the twenty-first century occupy a vivid place in our cultural imagination. At the same time, the stage fool shared with his royal cousin a strong penchant for the irreverent and salacious. While the court fool belonged, in general, to a structured social-political environment, the German stage fool flourished on the makeshift stages lacking for luster that first began to sprout up, through an improbable turn of events, across the German countryside around 1600. His unlikely appearance raises the question, Whence did he come? His long-lasting presence, meanwhile, presses the related query, What provided for his success? In order to trace the beginnings of the German stage fool and account for his centrality to the flourishing dramatic and theatrical culture that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we must look at a little-known process of transfer that brought English players and their plays to the German-speaking lands. However some caution is necessary in approaching these plays—their language, their integrity, their form—for they testify to a process of transmission quite different from what ordinarily falls under the category of “literary tradition.”

It may seem strange to imagine traveling English players as the decisive point of departure for a genealogy of German drama. After all, the beginning marked out by the sudden appearance of English-speaking players around 1600 was anything but a glorious one. The traveling groups of players numbered fewer than ten and scarcely more than twenty, and they spent long stretches of time on the road in search of a paying audience. Despite their tireless efforts, they seem to have rarely emerged from a pitifully impecunious existence. The itinerant and often penurious lifestyle of troupes means that material evidence of their concrete situation is rather scant. Moreover, the fool’s lifeblood was the live unfolding of a stage performance, especially spontaneous gesture and improvised expression. A historical reconstruction thus cannot rely on the highly educated authors of the seventeenth century, among whose writings very few traces of the fool can be detected. And the English traveling players traced a different path than the commedia dell’arte troupes, whose improvisatory scenarios were enjoyed by the political elite and within courtly contexts as early as 1568.¹ The fool of English extraction, by contrast, first gained a foothold, around 1600, in a milieu without lofty artistic ambitions, which made liberal use of translations or loose adaptations from preexisting playtexts. Wherever he appeared, the fool delighted with a unique blend of immediate recognizability and humorous surprise. From his first appearance, the fool was, in a word, a hit.

Although the historical record leaves no doubt as to the overwhelming success of this impertinent jokester, the cause of that success is less easy to identify. In contrast to a genre such as tragedy, we cannot chalk up his long and widespread career to the imprimatur of aesthetic experts or the rigors of humanistic training. Reverence for traditional poetic forms was nowhere to be found in those settings where the fool beguiled audiences. Moreover, dictates such as (good) taste and novelty did not provide direction for the popular stage of the seventeenth century, and traveling players did not feel the sway of rhetorical and aesthetic dictates. In general, early modern German playtexts seldom circulated in authoritative editions (the sort a modern reader might expect), and they almost never commanded fidelity from actors.² While the early seventeenth century did see a movement aspiring to establish German as a language for the making of poetry, such efforts took place in elite scholarly venues far removed from the traveling troupes that first brought the fool into existence.³ Indeed, the fool gained traction in a world far less concerned with poetic authors or texts than with just giving audiences a gripping show.

So what led theatrical troupes to put the fool front and center? At first glance, it is hard to understand what could make even the most malleable figure appealing enough that his presence in play after play would be a source of enthusiasm and amusement rather than a bore. Here we stumble on a second, equally puzzling question: What gives license to speak of a fool or the fool, of a single conventionalized figure? It seems obvious that it would not make much sense to treat every stage appearance as unique and different. But by virtue of what? To return to the previous grammatical contrast: What makes any individual fool an instance of the fool? These are all questions clustered around what one might call the reproduction of a theatrical form. The biological ring of the term reproduction need not be cause for concern; at issue here is a distinctive way of interacting on the stage, from the words chosen to how the fool speaks them, from his position within the cast of characters to the attitude he assumes toward them.

Instead of proceeding on the basis of historical generalization, it is worth considering a text first published during the latter half of the eighteenth century, but that properly belongs among the materials at the center of part 1 of this study. The play, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, discloses decisive features of the fool’s stage activity, and its analysis can provide methodological orientation for the following chapters. The example is particularly revealing because of its high degree of conventionality, something that a modern reader can easily skip over in sheer excitement of discovering a version, albeit radically altered, of perhaps the best-known play in the English language.

The surviving German adaptation of Hamlet, it bears emphasizing, is an acting script, not a dramatic text in the ordinary sense of the word. While the German-language play overlaps on a schematic level, a few times even up to the level of a whole scene, with the Shakespearean play, it would be a mistake to treat the adaptation as a translation. But the difference between the Hamlet adaptation and a dramatic text extends beyond the difference visible today on the printed page. Rather, the acting script is of a different categorical order than that of a dramatic text; it is even tempting to say, in more traditional philosophical jargon, that the two are different kinds of material substance. But the terminology is not as important as the recognition that the division between these two types or classes (acting script/dramatic text) does not just depend on surface characteristics like formal or verbal organization, but also on how the acting script or dramatic text ordinarily gets used. For the purpose of marking out extreme poles, we might think of a dramatic text as a kind of poetic composition defined by its fixity: it has been uniquely written and edited and, by and large, can be attributed to an author. An acting script, meanwhile, carries on its existence in the more open-ended, presentist world of theatrical performance. It can be expanded and contracted, modified and recast. Furthermore, its relationship to authorship is more nebulous and prone to variation from performance to performance and context to context. This chapter and the three that follow focus attention primarily on acting scripts; dramatic texts come into view in part 2.

The distinction, even if rough-and-ready, helps make sense of the mechanisms that allowed the German Hamlet to endure, such that copies can now be found in university libraries and on the Internet.⁴ It also helps to make sense of the fact that the survival of the adaptation is due to unplanned and uncontrolled circumstances of appropriation and transformation, not the willful bequeathing of a work by a great author to an unversed audience. The version that survives today is based on a printed edition from 1778, itself based on a manuscript from around 1710.⁵ The acting script bears the sort of two-part title typical of seventeenth-century German plays: Tragedy of Fratricide Punished, or Prince Hamlet of Denmark. The modified title testifies to a long period of circulation among traveling players who certainly did not treat any particular script they came across as authoritative or as commanding fidelity. In fact, something like the surviving adaptation had probably been used by actors in Germany since the early decades of the seventeenth century, even though no version seems to have found its way between bound covers until much later. It is crucial to keep in mind that when Hamlet first appeared in the German-speaking world, the theatrical culture where it found a home did not even identify plays with authors, nor did it feel the need to search for or treat one version as original and final. The proper name of the Bard, in other words, only became an identifying marker for the Hamlet adaptation long after the play first began its career on the German stage. While in the first half of the seventeenth century authorship was becoming increasingly important to English publishing practices, in no small part due to the popularity of Shakespeare himself, the very same period the German-speaking theatrical world showed little concern for original authorship and, in general, allowed for free tinkering with every part of the play, from plot construction to title, to fit the needs and desires of actors.⁶

The liberties taken with the Shakespearean play shine through most forcefully in the latitude afforded a figure utterly alien to the original: a court jester by the name of Phantasmo.⁷ Of course, English theater in Shakespeare’s own time had a sparkling tradition of fools and clowns, and no one exploited the available conventions with the same acuity as did Shakespeare.⁸ Without question, a figure like Phantasmo would have been unthinkable without the influence English actors had in the first half of the seventeenth century in the German lands. That being said, this figure is far removed from what one might expect from the fools and clowns that inhabited the Elizabethan comic imagination. This difference, the following discussion will show, supports the claim that the German stage fool was a distinct theatrical form.

The divergence between adaptation and original asserts itself from the start and remains consistent throughout. In the version performed by German traveling players an introductory prologue mixes Christian and pagan themes, as four chthonic spirits of classical Greece set up a moralizing frame for the modern tragedy of Danish aristocracy. And then, in its main body, the play includes the court jester Phantasmo who, with relentless barbs, solidifies the initial impression that the German adaptation is far from Shakespeare’s universe. By any estimation, the play possesses highly unusual internal heterogeneity: while the prologue announces a story of providential justice, the ensuing tragedy puts a figure front and cen...