The Death of Dramaturgy: Begins.

Given the way that dramaturgy gets discussed, it's surprisingly easy to find a point of historical departure. Back in the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, dramaturgy was introduced to the world by G.E. Lessing. His Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69) was written as a critical guide to the programme of the German National Theatre in Hamburg, and covered a wide variety of theatrical concerns, including the performance of the actors, the quality of the scripts and the debates raging around theatre in France. Before this point, the debates about theatre relied on Aristotle's Poetics, and tended to consider the script rather than the production.

cool French theatre

The subsequent definitions of dramaturgy have made the subject more complicated - sometimes it refers to the specific strategies employed by an artist in production, sometimes it is dumped for the discipline of 'performance studies'. However, its foundations within the Enlightenment project reveal an interest in the theatre as a phenomenological experience rather than a literary one. In other words, dramaturgy recognises theatre as an event in real time and not a text to be read. Aristotle, for all his virtues, looked at theatre as a form of poetry rather than performance: when he listed the importance of the elements of theatre, 'spectacle' comes in last.

Although there are plenty of specific issues addressed in Lessing's dramaturgy - best of all, his frequent snarky comments on the arrogance of Voltaire - the Enlightenment Dramaturgy focuses on three specific areas. Appropriately for the era, the application of reason is key; then there's an enthusiasm for performance (ranging from notes on the training of the actor to the response of the audience) finally, the notion of  genius. That last one will come back to haunt theatre, and was probably introduced as a get-out clause for those elements of theatre that can't be resolved by the application of reason.

uncool British theatre

Lessing's Dramaturgy is a strange read. He's almost always referenced in studies of theatre, but rarely read. My evidence for this is anecdotal. There is only a single copy in translation held by Glasgow University library, and I've had it out for over a year, with no recalls. I tried to buy it  but the Dover Thrift Edition (published in the 1960s as a cheap copy) comes it at £600 (second hand). For such an influential document, the lack of reprints is... fascinating. 

It does contain moments of superb analysis - his analysis of why audiences mistake shoddy acting for brilliance is, itself, brilliant. However, he gets a bit wandered now and again. He'd make a great blogger: he's not above discussing a tiny point of detail across nine essays. I see him as an inspiration.

Mind you, reading the Hamburg Dramaturgy is like standing waist-deep in a flood of warm water, trying to catch flakes of ice. 

if I might interject...

Between slagging off French theatre - both for its reliance on neo-classical formalism, and the French belief in their cultural superiority - Lessing quotes the philosopher Diderot. Editor of The Encyclopedia, an attempt to categorise all knowledge ever and put it at the service of reason against tradition, social butterfly and occasional playwright, Diderot set out his earliest thoughts on theatre in his erotic novel, The Indiscreet Jewels. Lessing quotes this at length - after apologising for it 'NSFW' content. Lessing also translated Diderot's two plays into German, and calls Diderot 'the equal of Aristotle'. 

Enlightenment dramaturgy could be called the 'Diderot-Lessing dramaturgy', since the key features result from the conversation between these two thinkers. They certainly share an interest in the potential of theatre as a medium for the discussion of ideas, a distaste for the neo-classical drama's reliance on authority, a respect for the genius and a fascination with the on-stage business of performance, rejecting the overly literary language of tragedy and even making suggestions towards a physical theatre. 

Coming Soon: How The Enlightenment Dramaturgy coded its own inevitable death into its theories of theatre...

Passions and Pits and People and Plays

Every passion has its own eloquence, is alone inspired by nature, is learnt in no school and is understood by the most uneducated as well as by the most polished.

Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, essay 59

How well the dramaturges of the Enlightenment have done their work: when Lessing appealed to Diderot, and shouted for a theatre based not upon itself or precedent, the stage was full of mannered fops. Moving between confidence and tragedy, the actors played out the drama in a language of the stage, rhetorical and pompous. Now, there is no playwright who would disagree, that the language on the stage reflects the language of the pit or parterre. 

Diderot went further, of course: he imagined the high words of the classical tragedy replaced by inarticulate cries and moans. When Ambrose Bierce described opera, he noticed in it the traces of previous grandeur.


Opera, n. A play representing life in another world whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures, and no postures but attitudes.

This grandeur has departed, even from the opera (which paces out its tales of heightened emotion on a scale that reflects rather than exaggerates). At one time, this was sedition, a resistance to the dominance of Aristotle and the classical ideal. These days, it is barely worth mentioning and a curious waste of the reader's time. 

Good Nature and Ignoring Audiences

The spectators are partly not connoisseurs, and in part too good natured, and they take the desire to please them for the deed.
Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy No.5

While I am reluctant to be as bold as Lessing - who is commenting on the habit of certain actors raising their voice as they exit a scene in order to ensure a round of applause - the good nature of audiences could be a fair reason for the critic to ignore their responses in the assessment of a performance's quality. Having endured a dismal evening at Wonderland - a new musical which takes liberties with Lewis C's fantastical tale of Mad Hatters and tyrannical queens, I pondered how this mismatch of story and song could attract such warm audience approval. In this matter, as in so many, Herr Lessing has anticipated my perplexity.

At one point, Alice (now transformed into a middle-aged divorcee) makes an apparently trenchant speech in which she realises that her ex-husband, previously her authority, is, in fact, a mean-spirited authoritarian. Love is replaced by hate, and this stands for some form of liberation. On cue, the audience interrupted the performance to vigorously approve her new-found independence.

And yet - leaving aside whether hate rather than indifference marks liberation from patriarchal oppression - Alice had not earned her attitude. In the magical world of Wonderland, self-realisation comes from jumping through a magic mirror. A symbol of Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith' perhaps, but an unsatisfying symbol that removes the need for either self-awareness or struggle. This is lazy writing, and the speech's feminism is poorly served by the easy resolution of Alice's long-term repression.

It is a signifier of a trenchant speech, rather than the thing itself. The significance is not within the words but the dramatic pause, the invitation for applause. The audience is invited to participate, to award the play with meaning. 

Perhaps this is the training of television, with its laughter track teaching the viewer how to respond. Rewatching I'm Alan Partridge, the laughter track is briefly replaced after one character's monologue - about shooting up a friend with an attack helicopter - with a ripple of applause. Suitably equipped, the viewer is educated in the shape of 'important moments' without needing the shape to be further refined or contoured. While ignoring audience response is perhaps a step too far, this example suggests a place for suspicion, at the least.

Five Fantastic Facts about Lessing, the Father of Dramaturgy

Everyone knows that Lessing first used the word 'dramaturgy' in the 1760s, and gave birth to a field of study that has befuddled students of theatre ever since. However, there are many things about this great Enlightenment philosopher that are not well-known, and may or may not shed light on the reasons behind his attempt to develop a systematic framework for theatrical theory.

He was a right geek as a kid
In a letter to his mum, he straight up admits that he's thought his life would be spent with books, but as soon as he started to hang out with the cool kids, he realised that he wasn't making friends with that attitude. So he took up dancing and fencing, which meant that, even if no-one liked him, he could stab them up.
(Letter to Justina Salome Lessing of 20 January 1749)

He thought that The Bible was too long
Even in the post-modern world, where everything is everything and 'cross-discipline study' helps gets scholarships, Lessing the dramaturg and Lessing the theologian get treated like separate people. I actually have to keep checking that the Lessing who wrote in defence of what would now be seen as a 'liberal' Christianity is the same guy as the author of Laocoon. 

Grappling with the competing inspirations of his Lutheran upbringing and Enlightenment reason, Lessing stood up for 'the inner truth' of Christianity. Roughly, this meant that all that stuff in The Bible about history was too much information, and he hoped to find somebody who could teach the Christian message 'like Jesus would have done'. He wasn't exactly asking for A Beginner's Guide, but he is unlikely to have had much sympathy with the fundamentalist's insistence on the absolute truth of Genesis.

He was a Social Justice Warrior
Spend five minutes on YouTube, and a neckbeard will appear, explaining how the Enlightenment Project is being destroyed by Social Justice Warriors. Apparently, the worship of science, penis and playing computer games is the logical end of the Age of Reason, and those people who, like, promote feminism and are against Islamophobia are Cultural Marxists plotting to destroy civilisation. 

Only, Lessing was all about the egalitarian and the cosmopolitan. His play Nathan the Wise featured a wise Jewish dad who told a parable which explained the equality of the three monotheisms. In fact, Nathan even hints that the Jews are wiser than the Christians. It's a shame that this parable is still relevant today. 

He was the sweet talking son of a preacher man
Oh yes he was. His dad was a Lutheran pastor. 

Even after his death, he was causing a right ruckus
Following Lessing's early departure from this mortal coil, two of his mates, Moses Mendelssohn and Freddy Jacobi threw down over which one of them ought to be considered his philosophical heir. It was a controversy that lit up the German intellectual scene. To be honest, it all reads as a bit trivial to me - it seems to be about whether Lessing ended up supporting Spinoza's pantheism or retained a more orthodox position on theism. But it might have had some importance in the shift from Enlightenment to Romantic modes of thinking, so there's that.

Source: Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment (OUP, 2003)
Toshimasa Yasukata

Lessing Liked God and Drama

The story so far...

In his quest to discover the meaning of Dramaturgy, Gareth K Vile has gone back in time to the eighteenth century. Noticing that Lessing first used the term in the 1740s, he is tracing the relationship between Enlightenment thought and the functions of Dramaturgy. He's convinced that placing Dramaturgy within the context of its genesis, he'll be able to create a working definition that allows him to further his studies. 

My suspicion is that the past is constantly in a process of revision. Rather like in those X-Men adventures when a character goes back in time to prevent a particular event, which then changes history, contemporary thinkers re-evaluate their ancestors in an attempt to prove their own position.

I've been looking up Lessing, and just discovered the other academic discipline that is still interested in his writings. Turns out that the son of a preacher-man did some theology. In 1961, Irving Louis Horowitz examined Lessing's theology (Lessing and Hamann: Two Views on Religion and Enlightenment: Church History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep., 1961)). Far from being a complete religious sceptic, Lessing attempted to reconcile religious revelation and reason. He's kind of a compromise between the anti-clerical thoughts of Diderot and a more philosophical - and mystical - Christian tradition.

Apart from challenging the mythology of a 'secular Enlightenment', Horowitz's essay notes that Lessing identified God as 'immanent' rather than 'transcendental'. Roughly, his notion is that God exists within the Universe, and doesn't sit on a big throne stroking his beard. Immanence ranges across a wide set of models, from a pagan pantheism where God is the physical universe (and nothing more) to a Christian view of the divine as incarnated within the world. 

There might be a big 'so what?' about to follow, but here's the thing. The Enlightenment - say in Anthony Pagden's Big Cool Tome - is often interpreted as a break with religious thought. Kant's reply to the question 'what is enlightenment?' (TL;DR: 'grow up') is taken as a rejection of the 'authority through revelation model' encouraged by churches. But Lessing doesn't go that far. He sustains a dialogue with religious thought. 

He doesn't dethrone reason, but he does see it in collaboration with spiritual faith. His ability to integrate the two approaches makes him more Reasonable than some of the more explicitly atheistic thinkers, and while he locates religious sentiment within the personal rather than social sphere, he's not abandoning the Christian tradition for an all-new, sparkling godless universe. 

I fear we are still in the 'so what?' zone.

Well, there's the idea that continuity is important when considering the Enlightenment. Then there is the question of how a theological thinker might perceive theatre. Knowing that Lessing rejected the more Catholic notion of 'religion as social process' but accepted a personal engagement with the spiritual might help make sense of how he would then interpret various plays. It's all conjecture, but give it a chance...

What is Dramaturgy? One Thing....

Lessing attempted to turn the gestalt of the actor into a Lacanian mirror for the spectator, leaving the actor confronting the problem of trying to live up to the critic's demand.' 
Of Textual Bodies and Actual Bodies The Abjection of Performance in Lessing's Dramaturgy, Jurs-Munby 2005

Ah, the magic of academic writing. I might come back to this later, but a paragraph of introduction might be helpful...

Investigating the idea of Dramaturgy, I've ended up reading a great deal about The Enlightenment. That's a period of great

A Big Book (Unread)

philosophical debate that can be seen, depending on your preference, as the first great explosion of rational, secular thought or a goddamned nightmare that led to the genocidal mania that marked the twentieth century. Lessing (Gotthold, not Doris) coined the word during his period as the in-house critic for a German national theatre in the 1740s, and I wanted to find out a bit more about the intellectual context in which he was writing. 

Lessing is one of the many thinkers who walks the Enlightenment beat. Son of a preacher-man, ripping off Diderot (whom he does compare to Aristotle), he rags on Voltaire and describes the various performances staged at his local. He had plenty of big ideas, but tends to be referenced more often than he is cited. We know he's a big deal, but his actual writing is less interesting than his status.

Jurs-Munby is being anachronistic by suggesting that Lessing had a Lacanian intention (Lacan was born, like, two centuries later), but her point is well-made. Lessing was interested in transforming the way that theatre was discussed, and claimed to have a special interest in the actors' performances. Since they were ephemeral, they deserved more attention than the script itself. Between slagging Voltaire's opinions on theatre - in a manner that borders on racist - Lessing critiqued the actors, until they started to get annoyed with his comments.

Voltaire as described by Lessing

Anyway, Jurs-Munby draws attention to something I'd call characteristic of the Enlightenment: an emphasis on the physical. When Lessing commented on the actors, he was stressing the importance of the actual event as perceived in time and space. He did plenty of plot summaries, too, and these are as functional as you'd expect.

The point of all this reading I did when other people were tucking into turkey and spuds is to discover what Dramaturgy might be, by placing it within its historical context. So, adapting Jurs-Munby, I'd venture...

that Dramaturgy concerns the performance of drama in 'real time', and the relationship between actor and audience. He encourages a reading of theatre as an event, not a script.

He does a bunch of other stuff, too, but I have had enough for one day.