The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner

324 Pages·2006·3.71 MB·English

by  Jane K. Brown

The Persistence of Allegory

The Persistence of Allegory
Drama and Neoclassicism from
Shakespeare to Wagner
JANE K. BROWN
Copyright © 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Jane K., 1943– The persistence of allegory :
drama and neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner / Jane K. Brown.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3966-9
ISBN-10: 0-8122-3966-0
1. European drama—History and criticism. 2. Neoclassicism (Literature)—
Europe. I. Title.
PN1811.B76 2006
2006042173
Frontispiece: Andrea Mantegna, Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue.
© Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, Paris.
For my mothers, Gertrude and Hermione
Gestaltung, Umgestaltung,
Des ewigen Sinnes ewige Unterhaltung.
Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Claude’s Allegories and Literary Neoclassicism
3. Secular Tragedy: Neoclassicism in the Sixteenth Century
4. Allegory and Passion: Latin Dramatic Forms in the Seventeenth Century
5. The Allegorical Idioms of the Illusionist Stage: Spectacle in the Seventeenth
Century
6. Opera and Dance: The Revival of Greek Tragedy
7. The Greek Revival: German Classicism and the Recovery of Spoken Drama
8. Wagner and the Death of Gesamtkunstwerk
Coda: “This Insubstantial Pageant”
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Preface
In today’s climate of culture studies and globalism, some explanation for a book
focused on the forms of the European literary past seems to be in order. The
short answer is that synthesizing our knowledge of the history of drama in
Europe since the Renaissance changes unreflected assumptions into which we all
relapse from our immediate specialties and that are widespread outside the
academy. A more reflected relation to what seems obvious to us and closest to
home might, by alienating our tradition, make it more understandable in the
global context within which our disciplines now aspire to understand it.
The longer answer comes from the circumstances surrounding the genesis of
the book. My training and early career were in German Baroque and eighteenth
century, especially Goethe. When I moved to the English Department at the
University of Colorado in 1979 to keep my family together, I was writing a book
on Faust and found myself teaching Shakespeare. I soon learned that my
German Romantic take on the Renaissance led to equally vehement, but
contradictory, reactions: either that there is no allegory in Shakespeare or that
allegory and Shakespeare’s medieval roots are old hat. As I learned more about
Shakespeare, about Ben Jonson as a writer of masques, and about their Spanish
contemporary, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (also necessary to understand Faust),
I decided my next book would be about allegorical drama—“The Other Drama”
I wanted to call it.
The area has in fact been well studied, but the people who study its different
parts don’t talk much to one another. Despite the establishment of comparative
literature as a discipline more than a generation ago, non-German scholars
interested in Benjamin on allegory do not read German Baroque drama (nor
indeed do most German scholars interested in Benjamin, nor do scholars of
seventeenth-century drama in other European traditions), nor do they read
Calderón, despite Benjamin’s strong emphasis on him, much less the obscurer
eighteenth-century texts, the “Haupt-und Staatsaktionen,” to which he points.
Nor do they read these people next to the great French dramatists or, with rare
exceptions, English dramatists of the century, let alone their great Dutch
contemporary, Joost van den Vondel. In the last decade or so scholars have
become more interested in opera, but opera in the seventeenth and even
eighteenth centuries is, for all practical purposes, an entirely separate field from
drama. I was soon learning all kinds of information that was surprising to
friends, students, and colleagues in adjacent specialties, even when it was
familiar to specialists. And so arose my central thesis: the history of European
drama is a unity, and it is necessary to read it across the boundaries of languages
and subgenres.
In the process I learned there really was no “other drama.” Given the
prejudices of Goethe and his friends, for whom French neoclassicism was the
Antichrist, I had assumed that my “other drama” was allegorical and neoclassical
drama mimetic. Writing this book, I learned that both kinds emerged from the
same primal soup, from Western Europe’s repeated efforts to reinvent itself by
returning to classical antiquity. The last thing I had in mind at the start was to
rewrite the history of neoclassicism, but that is precisely what this book proposes
—that we think of neoclassicism not as a single movement, but as a wave of
interrelated movements that sometimes further and sometimes retard one
another. Now I was really not writing about allegorical drama, but about all
European drama from Shakespeare to Wagner.
To be sure, this is not a comprehensive synthetic history of European drama;
instead I trace the development by its evolving skeleton. I am interested in the
forms that underlie and enable the conventions of European drama. Others might
call the goal structuralist, but I would prefer to think of it as morphological in
Goethe’s sense of the word. The coverage is broad but selective; I have not shied
away from synthesizing information any specialist would know, yet I have tried
to avoid what nonspecialists will already take for granted, such as demonstrating
the structural richness and psychological insight of Shakespeare or Racine. I
have tried instead to introduce the materials from a point of view less obvious to
most readers, and I have often turned to dramatists of great interest who are less
well known, at least in my cultural context, than they deserve. I hope that by