Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe

Performance, Geography, Privacy

Angela Vanhaelen, Joseph P. Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135104665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria del periodo medievale e dei primordi dell'età moderna

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Part I

Performative Spatial Practices

1 What's Hamlet to Habermas?

Spatial Literacy, Theatrical Publication and the Publics of the Early Modern Public Stage

Steven Mullaney

Did theater contribute to the formation of an early modern public sphere?

According to Jürgen Habermas, the answer is “no.” Of course, the classic or “bourgeois” public sphere that Habermas imagined in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere¹ was not an early modern phenomenon; according to Habermas, its earliest manifestation was in late seventeenth-century England, well after the early modern period in its customary sense was over. But if we put the same question to Habermas's eighteenth-century public sphere—did theater contribute to it?—the answer would be only slightly different: “very little, and very late.” The public sphere as understood by Habermas was fostered and strengthened by a number of social and cultural and economic developments—the appearance (at long last) of an actually existing bourgeoisie, coffeehouses, lending libraries and a host of new forms of print media that included gazettes, journals, newspapers and, significantly, the early novel. Analogous developments would take place only slightly later in much of the rest of Europe. Theater did not participate in the resulting “bourgeois” public sphere, however, until well into the eighteenth century—not until the drama of Congreve and Beaumarchais. And it was not merely a late arrival. Earlier instantiations of theater, including the amphitheater playhouses of Elizabethan London, were in fact (according to Habermas) among the forces that retarded the emergence of a “bourgeois” public sphere. For Habermas, early modern theater was most retrograde in relation to that emergence. It was entirely contained by the early modern res publica, and it served (in the strong sense of the word) to maintain and promulgate the “representative publicity” of rank and degree that characterized the early modern princely state. State and church together defined and largely controlled most forms and forums of publicness in the early modern period, and it was their hegemony that had to be displaced or weakened or opened out from within before a classic Habermasian public sphere would be possible. The theater of Kyd and Marlowe and Shakespeare was one of the forms of “representative publicity” that would have to be cleared away and replaced by new and radically reformed modes of theatrical performance.

It would easy to dismiss such a view, based as it seems to have been on a fundamental misunderstanding of Elizabethan popular drama and the place it occupied in the social imaginary of its times. In terms of theatrical and performance history, there can be little doubt that Habermas simply had his facts wrong on some important points. For example, he assumed that leading figures of the aristocracy and even monarchs visited performances at the Globe and sat in prominent and framed view of the rest of the audience. Noting that the general populace “had been admitted” to theaters “as far back as the seventeenth century” in certain instances such as the Globe and the Comédie-Française, he argued that the presence of the lower-rank “public” at theatrical performances did not mean that early modern theater had begun to be open to new forms of publicity or conducive to the emergence of any kind of public sphere (38). The populace was present only to serve the “ranks” or aristocracy, who were on view in the gallery for all to see and cheer:

They [the Globe and the Comédie] were all still part of a different type of publicity in which the “ranks” (preserved still as a dysfunctional architectural relic in our theater buildings) paraded themselves, and the people applauded. (38)

Insofar as the Globe is concerned, this is of course a historical fantasy. Neither the monarch nor the aristocracy was on display or applauded at the Globe. The “ranks” had not admitted the public or allowed the people in to admire or applaud them; this playhouse, like all of London's amphitheaters and most of its indoor playing spaces, was open to anyone who could afford admission. Furthermore, the reference to “the ranks” on view in the gallery seems to describe something like a box at the opera: an anachronistic projection of a much later architecture of privilege that would indeed, when it emerged, constitute ostentatious spaces of display. But the “ranks” viewed and admired in the opera house were members of the moneyed and propertied classes, such as the newly risen bourgeoisie, as well as aristocracy and royalty.

Nonetheless, despite such doubtful theatrical history, there is something to be learned from Habermas about theater and publics. A number of contemporary historians, sociologists and social theorists would say similar things about Habermas's relation to their own disciplines,² even if they largely reject his historical account of the emergence of a “bourgeois public sphere” in late seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Europe. Over the past five years, the interdisciplinary team of scholars, graduate research associates and other individuals and institutions that have been involved in “Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Associations in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700” (MaPs) has regularly rediscovered this lesson: forgetting Habermas is hard to do, and not always advisable. In the MaPs project, our endeavor has been to develop alternative—and less teleological—understandings of the ways in which “private people come together to form a public” (Habermas, 25), so that we could examine a variety of different historical periods and diverse cultural and social and political contexts. We have explored the ways in which publics and counterpublics, understood to be always partial and often conflictual forms of association, come into being, and how such associations—heterogeneous, episodic and as much conceptual or virtual as they are actual—contribute to broader social formations.³ When we refer to those broader formations as a “public sphere” or “spheres,” our usage is a register of difference—we mean something quite distinct from Habermas—and an acknowledgement of debt as well. “The public sphere,” as Craig Calhoun has defined it in this, its post-Habermasian sense, “comprises an indefinite number of more or less overlapping publics, some ephemeral, some enduring, and some shaped by struggle against the dominant organization of others.”⁴

Habermas remains especially compelling in his understanding of the dynamic and inherently paradoxical relationships that can develop between the public and the private dimensions of the social.⁵ He understood theater, however, as a cultural form more or less fixed in its publicness and even trapped by what he refers to as “representation” (see especially his discussion on 8–14). For Habermas, theater was an inherently mimetic or reflective or representational phenomenon, in its spatial as well as its social production; it was opposed to the dialectical or dynamic or processual engagement of private people necessary for a public sphere to emerge. Some of these are my terms, but I have derived them from Habermas's own delineation of the ways in which cultural or aesthetic or literary media played a role in the formation of the “bourgeois” public sphere (see 1–56). The first or mimetic mode of publicity, exemplified by theater in general and Elizabethan theater in particular, was a negative force: theater hindered the emergence of a public sphere by enhancing and contributing to the “representative publicity” of the princely res publica. The second or dialectical mode, exemplified by the emergent novel, was a positive force. And yet, as I hope to show, theatrical performance played a more significant role in Habermas's own thinking than his explicit comments might suggest—just as it did in a great many historical civil societies.

My larger goal is to recover a sense of the early modern playhouse as a significant forum for social thought in its own day and age. The plays it produced were rich in information and ideas, but even more importantly, the production or performance of those plays was in itself a kind of social thinking, experiential and affective as well as cognitive, collective as well as individual.⁶ Properly understood, theatrical performance acted as a significant mode of discursive and nondiscursive production in the early modern period: performance was (and is) a form of “publication,” and as such, a potential catalyst for the making of various publics and counterpublics.

***

Early in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas interrupts a dense, abstract and preliminary discussion of the “representative publicity” of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with a subsection entitled “Excursus: The Demise of the Representative Publicness Illustrated by the Case of Wilhelm Meister” (12–14). It is an odd moment for an unnecessary anecdote or digression, the customary meaning of “excursus” (in the German, Excurs [22]), especially one like this: it interrupts a historical overview of the politics of the late medieval and early modern res publica and transports us to a late eighteenth-century novel (1795) by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe. Immediately after this brief explication de texte romantique, we return to the seventeenth century where Habermas continues his interrupted explanation of earlier forms of publicity, chronicling the economic, cultural, political and other developments that would eventually give rise to the “bourgeois” public sphere.

But Goethe is not a digression, even if the literary turn seems odd or out of place at first. Like Freud finding a literary habitation and a name for the Oedipal complex in Sophocles, or Foucault using Cervantes and Velasquez to think his way into The Order of Things, Habermas looks to an aesthetic object for insight into his own sociological and historical hypotheses.⁷ In Habermas's hands, Goethe's novel becomes a bildungsroman for an entire historical episteme, a parable of the public sphere and its relation to different forms of public and popular art. In the novel, Wilhelm Meister rejects the bourgeois world of business and politics for a career as an actor. He joins a company of traveling players, where he hopes to establish himself as a kind of “public person” (in Goethe's phrase) by representing on stage the one class of individuals for whom “seeming” and “being” had always been one and the same: the aristocracy. He eventually rises to the top of his acting troupe, and as a reward is given the role of the prince of all princes, Hamlet the Dane.

For the aristocracy and the society they governed, as Habermas explains via Goethe, authenticity and authority were real “inasmuch as [they were] made present.”

The nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced: “If the nobleman [as Wilhelm writes in a letter to his brother-in-law], merely by his personal carriage, offers all that can be asked of him, the burgher by his personal carriage offers nothing; and can offer nothing. The former has a right to seem; the latter is compelled to be, and what he aims at seeming becomes ludicrous and tasteless. (13)

What the aristocracy made real by representing as such, in its own figure and presence and rites of display, was nothing less than the “representative publicness” of the princely state. It displayed a form of power...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe—Performance, Geography, Privacy
• PART I Performative Spatial Practices
• PART II Spaces Between: Transforming Journeys and Geographies
• PART III The Potential of the Private
• List of Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index