Transforming Tragedy, Identity, and Community

Lilla Crisafulli, Tilottama Rajan, Diego Saglia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317982548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The volume explores the interrelated topics of transnational identity in all its ambiguity and complexity, and the new ways of imagining community or Gemeinschaft (as distinct from society or Gesellschaft)) that this broader climate made possible in the Romantic period. The period crystallized, even if it did not inaugurate, an unprecedented interest in travel and exploration, as well as in the dissemination of the knowledge thus acquired through print media and learned societies. This dissemination expanded but also unmoored both epistemic and national boundaries. It thus led to what Antoine Berman in his study of translation tellingly calls "the experience of the foreign, " as a zone of differences between and within selves, of which translation was the material expression and symptom. As several essays in the collection suggest, it is this mental travel that distinguishes the Romantic probing of transitional zones from that of earlier periods when travel and exploration were more purely under the sign of trade and commerce and thus of appropriation and colonization. The renegotiation of national and cultural boundaries also raises the question of what kinds of community are possible in this environment. A group of essays therefore explores the period's alternative communities, and the ways in which it tested the limits of the very concept of community. Finally, the volume also explores the interrelationship between notions of identity and community by turning to Romantic theatre. Concentrating on the stage as monitor and mirror of contemporary ideological developments, a dedicated section of this book looks at the evolution of the tragic in European Romanticisms and how its inherent conflicts became vehicles for contrasting representations of individual and communal identities.

This book was published as a special issue of European Romantic Review

Introduction: the survival of tragedy in European Romanticisms

Diego Saglia

Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy

The “Romantic movement” is frequently indicated as the cultural phase in which the writing of proper tragedy becomes impossible. In fact, European literatures of the Romantic period see no actual “death” of tragedy but rather present an astonishing array of multiple and simultaneous reinventions of this time-honored genre and of its attendant tragic mode. This Introduction surveys a variety of theoretical and dramaturgic engagements with tragedy and the tragic in European literatures between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in order to identify their “survival” within networks of cultural exchange, discourses of national culture, and the development of new hybrid forms of drama and theater.

In mid-1790s Rome, a French gentleman addresses the assembled company in a crowded literary salon and, with the self-sufficiency of a representative of the dominant European culture of the century, declares: “There is no more comedy in Italy than tragedy; in that area too we are the first. The only genre which really belongs to Italy is the harlequinade” (Staël, Corinne, Italy 113).¹ Spoken by the overbearingly nationalistic Comte d’Erfeuil in Madame de Staël’s 1807 cross-cultural novel, these statements point out the crucial relevance of theater for the identification and propagation of the achievements of national genius. Indeed, the Count’s provocative words inevitably spark off a debate in which the incomparable improvisatrice, aided by the Prince Castel-Forte and other champions of Italian culture, defends the glories of Italian drama and especially tragedy, the most prestigious genre in neoclassical poetics, capable of determining the greatness of individual playwrights and entire dramatic traditions. A complex debate ensues in which Vittorio Alfieri’s output is amply discussed. Yet, eventually, Corinne is forced to admit that “We [the Italians] are too modest a nation, I might even say almost too humble, to venture to have our own tragedies, derived from our own history, or at least characteristic of our own feelings” (Corinne, Italy 118).²

Reworking some of the author’s observations about Italy’s lack of tragedy in De la littérature (1800), Corinne’s words emphasize some of the crucial issues at stake in turn-of-the-century debates on tragedy. She clarifies that the genre is no longer uniquely assessed on the basis of its reverence for classical (and international) precedents, but rather is now valued in so far as it is expressive of a national heritage and reflects a national character and its manifestations in history. Her assertions thus inter-weave a combination of neoclassical and Romantic concerns in keeping with that process of aesthetic concurrence and admixture which, as Marilyn Butler indicates in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (180–3), lies at the heart of Romantic-period literary discourse. From a broader perspective, moreover, the scene in Corinne’s salon conjures up the picture of a dialectic space of intellectual and creative exchange in which national traditions are simultaneously set up and delimited, compared and redrawn. The international arena of the literary salon, that ancien régime institution that crosses over into the early nineteenth century and beyond, defines European Romanticism as a field of intercultural contacts placed between different aesthetics and varying forms of creative and critical interaction. Seen in this perspective, Romantic-period theories and practices of tragedy continue to develop and expand eighteenth-century debates about the relevance, prestige, and aesthetic requirements of a dramatic and theatrical form that, on the strength of neoclassical poetics and its Aristotelian precedents, is at the epicentre of Western generic systems.

The most internationally influential of neoclassical treatises of poetics and one of the most rigidly prescriptive, Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art poétique (1674) addresses drama, and tragedy in particular, in its third canto, where the theorist warns his readers with epigrammatic incisiveness that “the Stage demands exact reason” (“[L]a Scene demande une exacte raison”) and “It must respect the strict norms of decorum” (“L’etroite bienséance y veut estre gardée” 172). Yet, if theorists continued to refine and reformulate the laws of literature and drama, in actual fact dramatic and theatrical practice presented a rather different picture. A sizeable number of tragedies were performed and many more published, although the staged plays were rarely runaway successes. Eighteenth-century tragedy was indeed the object of a “combination of cultural fascination and literary failure,” as Susan Staves has described it (88). The century saw a frantic search for the tragic (comparable with an equally frantic quest for epic) and especially for a “regular tragedy” that would be fully compliant with Aristotelian requirements. As the Comte d’Erfeuil makes clear, national traditions prided themselves on their tragic achievements, and the genre was undeniably a staple feature in literary and cultural systems and the yardstick for serious drama. Nonetheless, during most of the century, and especially in its last years, tragedy was evidently evolving in a variety of different directions. As Jeffrey Cox has usefully pointed out, in Britain “the romantic era sees an explosion of experiments with the shape of tragedy” (“Tragic Drama” 422). However, much the same may be said of other contemporary Continental traditions that, as W. D. Howarth has shown, feature an ongoing process of assimilation and adaptation of inherited dramatic genres.

In The Death of Tragedy (1961) George Steiner indicated “Romanticism” as the aesthetic turning-point marking the final demise of tragedy. After the advent of the “Romantic movement,” the writing of proper tragedy became an impossibility: the new ideas and aesthetic principles were metaphysically and ontologically unsuitable to the genre. In actual fact, in his landmark study Steiner posits tragedy not so much as a corpse but as a revenant in Romanticism. A ghost stalks Romantic-period literatures (and their stages) and it is a tragic one. Indeed the critic explicitly announces that “at the origins of the romantic movement lies an explicit attempt to revitalize the major forms of tragedy” (108). If, on the one hand, the genre is present and located at the roots of what Steiner repeatedly calls the Romantic movement, on the other it is also constantly on the point of dissolution. Even as he hints at forms of coincidence and convergence, Steiner firmly dismisses any potential compatibility between Romanticism and the tragic, a position he has reformulated in his recent essay “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered” (2004). Here, too, a surprisingly cohesive aesthetic termed Romanticism is found to be radically incapable of tragedy and, specifically, of the “ontological homelessness,” awareness of original sin, and all-exacting lack of hope that are essential to the creation of real tragedy (2).

A crucial fact that effectively limits the validity of these assertions, and one frequently invoked by Steiner’s critics, is that the development of tragedy as a genre can hardly boast an uninterruptedly consistent history.³ For, if genres invariably follow discontinuous evolutionary trajectories, this is all the more apposite for tragedy in the Romantic period when, as Paul Fry observes, “the contempt for rules presumed – qua rules – to be mechanical and arbitrarily superimposed is after all an undeniable hallmark of Romanticism” at a European level (9). In addition, Tilottama Rajan has stressed how Romantic theory, and especially German Idealist aesthetics, “replaces earlier pragmatic or formalist approaches with a phenomenological approach to genres as expressing sometimes conflicted states of (cultural) consciousness,” so that genres tend to take on the shape and function of “sites of negotiation” (226). If, in any literary and cultural phase, “the discursive and metadiscursive existence of genres do not necessarily coincide” (Rajan and Wright 1), this lack of synchrony is in full sight in the context of the Romantic-period redistribution and reinvention of genres, where these categories shift from being modes of textual patterning to opening up new possibilities of inscription and representation.⁴

In this light, tragedy becomes visible as an aesthetically, historically, and ideologically conditioned set of rules or frames which enable playwrights to confront and express the experience of evil and suffering. And this approach is exactly what emerges from August Wilhelm Schlegel’s observations on the nature of the genre in his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 1809–11), especially where he points out the crucial relevance of the experiential nature of the tragic as the foundation of a class of literary and dramatic writing he calls “tragic poetry”:

When, however, we contemplate the relations of our existence to the extreme limit of possibilities: when we reflect on its entire dependence on a chain of causes and effects, stretching beyond our ken: when we consider how weak and helpless, and doomed to struggle against the enormous powers of nature, and conflicting appetites, we are cast on the shores of an unknown world, as it were, shipwrecked at our very birth; how we are subject to all kinds of errors and deceptions, any one of which may be our ruin; that in our passions we cherish an enemy in our bosoms; how every moment demands from us, in the name of the most sacred duties, the sacrifice of our dearest inclinations, and how at one blow we may be robbed of all that we have acquired with much toil and difficulty; that with every accession to our stores, the risk of loss is proportionately increased, and we are only the more exposed to the malice of hostile fortune: when we think upon all this, every heart which is not dead to feeling must be overpowered by an inexpressible melancholy, for which there is no other counterpoise than the consciousness of a vocation transcending the limits of this earthly life. (Course 45)⁵

“This,” Schlegel observes, “is the tragic tone of mind” (Stimmung), and when it “pervades and animates a visible representation of the most striking instances of violent revolutions in a man’s fortunes, either prostrating his mental energies or calling forth the most heroic endurance – then the result is Tragic Poetry” (Course 45–6).⁶ What these words bring into focus is basically a progressive shift away from tragedy as a closed generic system and toward a tragic turn in unison with the wider epistemic changes affecting Romantic drama. In Cox’s words, these transformations especially concern “the lack of both the social order that supported the traditional [tragic] hero and the providential order that shaped the tragic plot,” so that “the tragedy of Romantic man arises in the gap that separates him from the fully meaningful world of gods and heroes” (Cox, “Redefinitions” 158). Thus, Schlegel’s definition of a tragic “tone of mind” points in the direction of a Romantic identification of a tragic mode permeating different forms of literary and dramatic expression, a general “poetic” quality linked to an experience of the tragic that informs and sustains tragic writing.

If there is no death of tragedy in the Romantic period, then what we have to confront is an array of multiple and simultaneous reinventions of it. To be sure, statements about the failure of contemporary staged tragedies and complaints about a genre in an advanced state of decay were much louder in Romantic-period European cultures than countervailing statements about its good health and overall liveliness. Yet the latter were not entirely silent either.

If we take the view from Britain, the years 1819–23 saw at least 69 new tragedies published and most of them performed, some with very satisfactory runs and an excellent critical reception (Stratman). At the same time, the appreciation of tragedy by one of the most alert theatrical critics of the period, William Hazlitt, visibly oscillated between dismissals and outbursts of enthusiasm. In a piece for the Edinburgh Review of February 1816, Hazlitt stated that “The object of modern tragedy is to represent the soul utterly subdued as it were, or at least convulsed and overthrown by passion and misfortune” (“Schlegel” 76), thus making plain his belief in the possibility of a modern interpretation of the tragic genre. The following year, however, in an essay “On Modern Comedy” (published in the Round Table) he remarked that, at present, “Tragedy, like Comedy, must defeat itself,” for “its patterns must be drawn from the living models within the breast, from feeling or from observation; and the materials of Tragedy cannot be found among a people, who are the habitual spectators of Tragedy, whose interests and passions are not their own, but ideal, remote, sentimental, and abstracted” (13). Here the tragic genre appears to be a much more unlikely achievement for a contemporary playwright, precisely because Hazlitt reads it as a form bent on self-defeat for reasons that seemingly anticipate Steiner’s argument about the death of tragedy. Similar positions emerge also in The Plain Speaker (1826), where the critic again assesses contemporary versions of tragedy as unsuitable to convey present concerns. But this is far from being Hazlitt’s last word on the subject, as in The Spirit of the Age (1825) he celebrates James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius (Covent Garden, 17 May 1820) as “the best acting tragedy that has been produced on the modern stage” (184). This play confirms that it is still possible to write good tragedies that may be successful on stage and also encapsulate contemporary culture and the present condition of human beings through a careful observation of “the living models within the breast.”

Writing on the death and disappearance of tragedy in nineteenth-century Britain, Michael Booth unequivocally stated that, even if it was “Victorian theatre [that] witnessed the death of English classical tragedy,” this had been “a form exhausted and in ill health all through the eighteenth century, but whose conventions and styles had persisted on the stage for over two hundred and fifty years” (21). As Hazlitt’s vacillating position indicates, even though commentators repeatedly phrased and rephrased its obituary, tragedy and the tragic mode plainly refused to disappear during the major generic readjustments of Romantic literary culture. Cox has correctly pointed out how playwrights in this period show a marked “drive to create a new form of tragedy,” part of a tendency to find new forms of “serious drama,” eventually resulting in a variety of manifestations which, in Britain, went from “Shelley’s imitations of Aeschylus to Byron’s turn to medieval mystery plays, from Elizabethanizing turns to calls to return to neoclassical rules” (Cox, “Tragic Drama” 412–3). On the whole, the British situation b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part I
• Part II
• Index