Daniel Smith, Northwestern University

Theatre historians have long harbored an interest in obscene drama in eighteenth-century France, variously characterizing such plays as “libertine,” “erotic,” “clandestine,” or “pornographic.” Le Bordel, ou le Jean-foutre puni (1732?) by the Comte de Caylus, is one of the most frequently cited of these obscene comedies. In this paper, I situate Le Bordel as participating in two kinds of voyage. First, using prefaces and critical reactions, I consider Le Bordel as part of a discourse on the obscenity of the ancients, which was a significant argument against the Ancients in the late-seventeenth century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Second, I interrogate the brothel as a destination for both sex workers and clients, using social history to illuminate the norms presented in the fictive world of Le Bordel.

During the eighteenth century, Le Bordel was a staple in anthologies of licentious plays, with its preface serving as the introduction to such collections as the Théâtre gaillard anthologies that were first published in 1776.¹ This preface twice cites Horace’s Ars poetica, playfully misinterpreting his edicts about characters speaking plainly and appropriately to argue in favor of the use of dirty words and the moral imperative of showing what happens in a brothel in order to discourage young people from going there. This mocking appeal to ancient authority presents a strange take on the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, one that is replicated in other examinations of obscene comedies, notable Delisle de Sales’ preface to his Théâtre d’Amour (with comparisons to Petronius and Alcibiades) and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s critique of “Clandestine comedy,” which classifies these plays as a renewal of Atellan farce.

René-Louis Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson considers Le Bordel in his Notices sur les oeuvres de théâtre.² He initially compares elite taste for “extreme and shocking” humor to “ancient custom,” then makes an ambivalent comparison between Caylus and Molière. These critical appraisals participate in the same debates on ancient obscenity and classical comedy. Paulmy concludes with a focus on the author’s grasp of prostitute argot, painting Caylus both as a kind of ethnographer interested in sociolinguistic accuracy and as a man who spends a lot of time in brothels. Drawing on the work of historians of eighteenth-century Parisian prostitution (Erica-Marie Benabou, Kathryn Norberg, and Nina Kushner), I attempt to situate Le Bordel in social history. How does the brothel as destination explore travel across classes, and travel from the provinces to Paris?

Ellwood Wiggins, Yale University

Arguably the most significant event in German theatrical history during the eighteenth century was the arrival of Shakespeare. From actual journeys made by actors like David Garrick to the published promotions in essays and translations by Lessing and Wieland, Germany’s growing obsession with the transplanted English playwright led to the wide acceptance of such later blanket claims as “Germany is Hamlet.” The naturalization of Shakespeare as a model German poet was perhaps the only thing that Enlightenment thinkers, Storm and Stress playwrights, proponents of Weimar Classicism as well as the Romantics could all agree on, and hence Shakespeare’s travels in Germany can be seen as the uniting thread connecting all the major intellectual, literary, and theatrical movements in the latter half of the century.

In this paper, I examine this theatrical immigration through the lens of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which is largely a tour through all the various forms and possibilities of theater in eighteenth-century Germany. After situating Goethe’s depiction of Shakespeare’s revolutionary effect on Wilhelm within the historical context, I turn to a close reading of Wilhelm’s production of Hamlet, which figures as both an exultant culmination and pointed expose of theater’s potential and limits. It is in the context of this ambivalent success or failure of Hamlet’s and Wilhelm’s respective theatrical experiments that my paper first explores Wilhelm Meister’s production of Hamlet, before using this analysis to return to the question of what role the theater might play in Wilhelm Meister’s development and society at large.

]]> http://astrconference.org/2009/10/06/%e2%80%9cshakespeare%e2%80%99s-german-apprenticeship-wilhelm-meister-and-the-mousetrap-of-hamlet%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 http://astrconference.org/2009/10/06/transatlantic-slavery-in-the-1820s-the-second-jonathan-in-england/ http://astrconference.org/2009/10/06/transatlantic-slavery-in-the-1820s-the-second-jonathan-in-england/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:49:35 +0000 bakhtinjali http://astrconference.org/?p=142

Kate Roark, University of Houston

Two hit plays titled Jonathan in England debuted on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the 1820s. The first premiered in London in 1824 and depicted the titular Jonathan (an American Yankee character) as an abusive slave owner, absurdly hypocritical in his bragging about American liberty. The second Jonathan in England was an American creation, debuting at the Park Theatre in New York in 1828, and though it also featured a Yankee character, this Yankee had nothing to do with slavery. Despite having the same title, these were two completely different plays, the only similarity being they both featured an American Yankee character out of his element in English society. My paper focuses on the American, 1828 version of Jonathan in England as a direct response to the English version, particularly regarding the volatile issue of slavery. In this period before the abolition of slavery in the English colonies (1833) the American version of Jonathan In England cleverly drew attention to England’s practice of slavery in Jamaica as well as England’s impressments of Americans in the War of 1812. This second Jonathan in England was a direct rebuttal of the first’s depiction of American hypocrisy regarding slavery and liberty, instead offering images of English hypocrisy. Furthermore this case study offers a new avenue of interpretation for the immensely popular American stage Yankee character as a transatlantically contested symbol of American slavery as well as liberty.

]]> http://astrconference.org/2009/10/06/transatlantic-slavery-in-the-1820s-the-second-jonathan-in-england/feed/ 0 http://astrconference.org/2009/10/06/chance-destination-the-last-of-the-pequots/ http://astrconference.org/2009/10/06/chance-destination-the-last-of-the-pequots/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:45:11 +0000 bakhtinjali http://astrconference.org/?p=140

Joseph Roach, Yale University

Disappearing is a thankless task, and it never seems to end. Wikipedia recalls that Herman Melville named his doomed Nantucket whaler “Pequod” after the Pequot Indians, “who were annihilated in the Pequot Wars” of 1637. Wikipedia goes on to cite the author of Moby Dick as its authority for the fact that the Pequots became as ‘“extinct as the ancient Medes’” (Chapt XVI) in the mid-seventeenth century. Yet in 1786 in New London, CT, a Pequot was hanged after being convicted of homicide, allegedly motivated by a quarrel over a basket of strawberries. The condemned malefactor courteously “thanked the sheriff [for fitting the noose gently], and launched into the eternal world.” She was Hannah Ocuish, aged 12 years. Today the Pequots, 785 in number, operate the Foxwoods Resort Casino, which vies for the title of the world’s largest gaming destination, with 7,400 slot machines and keno drawings every eight minutes. At the same site, they also operate the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center to document their continuous history and celebrate their heritage. This paper will interpret the experience of the museum, which was originally conceived as a theme-park “heritage ride,” in terms of performance, with special attention to its treatment of the non-disappearance of the Pequots in the eighteenth century.

Heather S. Nathans, Department of Theatre, University of Maryland

The figure of the itinerant Jew, unmoored from the confines of national belonging, is a familiar figure in European literature. Whether villain, clown, or figure of pathos, the character wanders among the various communities that he encounters — always ineluctably foreign.  The status of permanent traveler distinguishes the fictional Jewish character from his Gentile counterpart, who, no matter the difficulty of his circumstances, or however far he treks from his native heath, may still imagine a home in the way he frames his performance of self.

This same sense of dislocation and renunciation applied to seventeenth and eighteenth-century European Jewish performers as well. As Kal Burnim notes in his biographical essay on Anglo-Jewish theatre artists, many of these figures deliberately shed their Jewish pasts in order to establish homes in the Christian-dominated regimes of Western Europe. Thus the voyages of many Jewish theatre artists in Europe ended in conversion and in deliberate erasure or sublimation of Jewish culture within a larger evolving Anglo-European performance tradition.

However, across the Atlantic, Jewish artists faced a different picture. In the 1760s the British government confirmed that Jews in America need not relinquish their faith in order to become naturalized citizens of the colonies. Colonial Jews could openly create synagogues, practice their faith, and sustain their cultural traditions. In the wake of the Revolution, American Jews struggled to re-establish their rights in the new nation, but that struggle was based on an already established expectation of citizenship. New Jewish immigrants whose travels brought them to the young country encountered lively debates over integrating and assimilating Jewish culture into American identity.

Thus throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, Jewish culture began to be “performed” in a different way on both the national and theatrical stages of America. Itinerant Jewish performers (such as Mr. and Mrs. Solomons) would travel from South Carolina to Maine, playing the dual roles of “wandering Jews” and community members at the same time (as the description of their performances suggests). By 1796, their daughter, Miss C. Solomons, who settled semi-permanently in Philadelphia, would be dubbed a “muse” of the American stage. Her family’s cosmopolitanism became an asset, rather than a liability in establishing her credentials on the national stage. The collision of immigrant cultures, diverse practices, and increasingly cosmopolitan sensibilities appeared among the next generation’s Jewish American playwrights as well. Many of their dramas re-trace voyages from Spain and Portugal, framing a peripatetic past into a new performance of the American pioneering spirit. These themes of travel, heredity, and belonging continued to resonate well into first decades of the nineteenth-century.

In this paper, I trace the ways in which the “wandering Jew” of literature and legend found a home in eighteenth-century American theatre and culture. I examine how the tradition of traveling informed Jewish American identity and its representation in the playhouse and American popular culture.

Mechele Leon

Associate Professor of Theatre

University of Kansas

It is common to regard cross-Channel voyages of drame bourgeois as a transparent affair. With seemingly little trouble, middle-class drama and theory of the eighteenth century passed back and forth between England and France. George Lillo’s The London Merchant became Louis-Sébastien Mercièr’s Jenneval; Denis Diderot’s Le Fils naturel became Dorval, or The Test of Virtue—just two examples from over fifty years of active transcultural exchange involving both plays of and theory about domestic drama. Yet, was the movement of this genre as transparent as our theatre history textbooks would have it? This paper will look comparatively at some of the first translations of French and English middle-class dramas. What was involved in translating domestic existence in France to an English context, and vice-versa? How do these texts negotiate both culture and language? How are paratexts (prefaces, etc.) employed to support these translations? What is assumed in the translation of terms like genre mixte or domestic tragedy? And as a matter of theatre historiography, how do competing claims to English or French origins of domestic drama continue to shape our notions of the status of drame as an ancestor of modern realism? This paper will discuss these and other key questions in an effort to explore the transnational liminality of the drame bourgeois.

Odai Johnson, University of Washington, Seattle

Somewhere in the mid-1760s David Douglass, a Scottish immigrant, manager of a itinerant company of actors, and modestly, the founder of the American theatre, began to sign his name ‘Esquire’. When and how exactly the social promotion occurred is not clear, nor is it clear what exactly it entailed to be a member of what Roy Porter called ‘para-gentry’ (88), but some change in status or acquisition encouraged Douglass to begin to style himself a gentleman. It’s a small claim in a nation of self-fashioning strangers, but how a traveling actor-manager (a stroller in the true sense of the word) became a gentleman is central to understanding the American possibility of re-invention, individually as immigrants first and afterwards, collectively as a nation.

If we are considering the art of re-invention, of stowing away the past and assuming the promise of a new continent of self, no place was easier (and to a degree, safer) than shipboard on a transatlantic crossing. Here passengers discarded their old identities and in the open expanse of opportunity became anew in America. I want to look at one passage of one voyage that left a few legible traces of this sea-change on each of its passengers–actors, future signers of the Declaration of Independence, royalists, rebels, fence-sitters, all re-fashioned — and a reunion of that passage ten years later in the theatre, in which the old marks, histories, stigmata, were exposed afresh, and publicly unhistoried.

Erith Jaffe-Berg, University of California, Riverside

Carlo Goldoni reflects 18^th transnationalism in his frequent voyages within France and Northern Italy, writing from both locations and writing in both Italian (Venetian) and French. Perhaps for this reason, Goldoni frequently explores national identity and characterological identification with national identity in his plays by foregrounding visual appearance and languages. Such is the case in La donna di garbo (The Lady of Fashion) as well as in an extreme form in his opera, collaboratively created with Haydn, Il mondo della luna (The World of the Moon). In this way, while clearly committed to the national project of contributing to an “Italian theatre,” in his plays, paradoxically, Goldoni often ridiculed national identification and humorously foreground the absurd in national languages.

In this paper I propose to study Goldoni’s reflections of national identities in his realistic plays, his comedies that are derived from commedia dell’arte and his operas. I will look both at the ways in which identity is figured, the ways in which national identity is ridiculed, (frequently through exaggerated linguistic play), and the ways in which Goldoni’s writing space itself may have influenced his different approaches to national identity at different times.

In 1757, amidst the swirling controversy over John Home’s Douglas, the Reverend John Witherspoon published a treatise against the stage, a pamphlet entitled:  A Serious Inquiry Into the Nature and Effects of the Stage.  In 1812, Witherspoon’s Serious Inquiry was republished in a New York edition; it was prefaced with An Address, By Several Ministers in New-York, To Their Christian Fellow-Citizens, Dissuading them from Attending Theatrical Representations, and paired with A Sermon, on the Burning of the Theatre at Richmond.  This juxtaposition was no mere coincidence, for soon after the Douglas controversy, Witherspoon emigrated from Scotland to America, where he ultimately rose to positions of great prominence both as the President of what would one day become Princeton University and as a signatory to the Declaration of Independence.  In the context of my current book project—an examination of the history of antitheatricality from the English Renaissance to the present time in the United States—Witherspoon’s pamphlet represents a kind of linchpin that links the antitheatrical strains of Puritan England and Presbyterian Scotland with a persistent prejudice toward, and suspicion of, theatricality in American culture.

I begin my paper with an examination of the pamphlet in its cultural and historical context and then trace the various philosophical, theological, ideological, and political threads forward for their influence on antitheatrical discourse in an American context.  To be more specific, Witherspoon took it upon himself to write against Home’s tragedy on at least two occasions.  In each instance, he focused attention not just upon the distortions of morality that he believed were concomitant with the theatrical experience but more significantly upon the emerging political powers that were driving this cultural transformation of morality and sociability.  Indeed, what distinguishes Witherspoon’s tract from all of the others is not just the logical quality of his arguments but rather their substance—in particular a series of stunning passages in which he articulates the significance of the battle at hand and acknowledges the broad impact that the new moral philosophy had already had on social, moral, and political life in Scotland.  In my paper, I will focus on this peculiar blend of eighteenth-century enlightenment thought, religiosity, and political pragmatism to suggest their enduring influence on antitheatrical discourse and to illuminate the ways in which they still resonate in current debates about theater and the arts in the United States.

The figure of the itinerant Jew, unmoored from the confines of national belonging, is a familiar figure in European literature.  Whether villain, clown, or figure of pathos, the character wanders among the various communities that he encounters — always ineluctably foreign. The status of permanent traveler distinguishes the fictional Jewish character from his Gentile counterpart, who, no matter the difficulty of his circumstances, or however far he treks from his native heath, may still imagine a home in the way he frames his performance of self. This same sense of dislocation and renunciation applied to seventeenth and eighteenth-century European Jewish performers as well.  As Kal Burnim notes in his biographical essay on Anglo-Jewish theatre artists, many of these figures deliberately shed their Jewish pasts in order to establish homes in the Christian-dominated regimes of Western Europe.

Thus the voyages of many Jewish theatre artists in Europe ended in conversion and in deliberate erasure or sublimation of Jewish culture within a larger evolving Anglo-European performance tradition. However, across the Atlantic, Jewish artists faced a different picture. In the 1760s the British government confirmed that Jews in America need not relinquish their faith in order to become naturalized citizens of the colonies.  Colonial Jews could openly create synagogues, practice their faith, and sustain their cultural traditions.  In the wake of the Revolution, American Jews struggled to re-establish their rights in the new nation, but that struggle was based on an already established expectation of citizenship.  New Jewish immigrants whose travels brought them to the young country encountered lively debates over integrating and assimilating Jewish culture into American identity.

Thus throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, Jewish culture began to be “performed” in a different way on both the national and theatrical stages of America.  Itinerant Jewish performers (such as Mr. and Mrs. Solomons) would travel from South Carolina to Maine, playing the dual roles of “wandering Jews” and community members at the same time (as the description of their performances suggests).  By 1796, their daughter, Miss C. Solomons, who settled semi-permanently in Philadelphia, would be dubbed a “muse” of the American stage.  Her family’s cosmopolitanism became an asset, rather than a liability in establishing her credentials on the national stage.  The collision of immigrant cultures, diverse practices, and increasingly cosmopolitan sensibilities appeared among the next generation’s Jewish American playwrights as well.  Many of their dramas re-trace voyages from Spain and Portugal, framing a peripatetic past into a new performance of the American pioneering spirit.  These themes of travel, heredity, and belonging continued to resonate well into first decades of the nineteenth-century.

In this paper, I trace the ways in which the “wandering Jew” of literature and legend found a home in eighteenth-century American theatre and culture.  I examine how the tradition of traveling informed Jewish American identity and its representation in the playhouse and American popular culture.