The history of the German stage remains to about the second decennium of the 18th century one of the most melancholy, as it is in its way one of the most instructive, chapters of theatrical history. Ignored by the world of letters, The stage before its reform. the actors in return deliberately sought to emancipate their art from all dependence upon literary material. Improvisation reigned supreme, not only in farce, where Hans Wurst, with the aid of Italian examples, never ceased to charm his public, but in the serious drama likewise (in which, however, he also played his part) in those Haupt- und Staatsactionen (high-matter-of-state-dramas), the plots of which were taken from the old stores of the English comedians, from the religious drama and its sources, and from the profane history of all times. The hero of this period is “Magister” J. Velthen (or Veltheim), who at the head of a company of players for a time entered the service of the Saxon court, and, by reproducing comedies of Molière and other writers, sought to restrain the licence which he had himself carried beyond all earlier precedent, but who had to fall back into the old ways and the old life. His career exhibits the climax of the efforts of the art of acting to stand alone; after his death (c. 1693) chaos ensues. The strolling companies, which now included actresses, continued to foster the popular love of the stage, and even under its most degraded form to uphold its national character against the rivalry of the opera, and that of the Italian commedia dell’ arte. From the latter was borrowed Harlequin, with whom Hans Wurst was blended, and who became a standing figure in every kind of popular play.[281] He established his sway more especially at Vienna, where from about 1712 the first permanent German theatre was maintained. But for the actors in general there was little permanence, and amidst miseries of all sorts, and under the growing ban of clerical intolerance, the popular stage seemed destined to hopeless decay. A certain vitality of growth seems, under clerical guidance, to have characterized the plays of the people in Bavaria and parts of Austria.
The first endeavours to reform what had thus apparently passed beyond all reach of recovery were neither wholly nor generally successful; but this does not diminish the honour due to two names which should never be F. K. Neuber, Gottsched, and the Leipzig school. mentioned without respect in connexion with the history of the drama. Friederike Karoline Neuber’s (1697-1760) biography is the story of a long-continued effort which, notwithstanding errors and weaknesses, and though, so far as her personal fortunes were concerned, it ended in failure, may almost be described as heroic. As directress of a company of actors which from 1727 had its headquarters at Leipzig (hence the new school of acting is called the Leipzig school), she resolved to put an end to the formlessness of the existing stage, to separate tragedy and comedy, and to extinguish Harlequin. In this endeavour she was supported by the Leipzig professor J. Chr. Gottsched, who induced her to establish French tragedy and comedy as the sole models of the regular drama. Literature and the stage thus for the first time joined hands, and no temporary mischance or personal misunderstanding can obscure the enduring significance of the union. Not only were the abuses of a century swept away from a representative theatre, but a large number of literary works, designed for the stage, were produced on it. It is true that they were but versions or imitations from the French (or in the case of Gottsched’s Dying Cato from the French and English),[282] and that at the moment of the regeneration of the German drama new fetters were thus imposed upon it, and upon the art of acting at the same time. But the impulse had been given, and the beginning made. On the one hand, men of letters began to subject their dramatic compositions to the test of performance; the tragedies and comedies of J. E. Schlegel, the artificial and sentimental comedies of Chr. F. Gellert and others, together with the vigorous popular comedies of the Danish dramatist Holberg, were brought into competition with translations from the French. On the other hand, the Ekhof Leipzig school exercised a continuous effect upon the progress of the art of acting, and before long K. Ekhof began a career which made his art a fit subject for the critical study of scholars, and his profession one to be esteemed by honourable men.
Among the authors contributing to Mme. Neuber’s Leipzig enterprise had been a young student destined to complete, after a very different fashion and with very different aims, the work which she and Gottsched had begun. The critical genius of G. Lessing. E. Lessing is peerless in its comprehensiveness, as in its keenness and depth; but if there was any branch of literature and art which by study and practice he made pre-eminently his own, it was that of the drama. As bearing upon the progress of the German theatre, his services to its literature, both critical and creative, can only be described as inestimable. The Hamburgische Dramaturgie, a series of criticisms of plays and (in its earlier numbers) of actors, was undertaken in furtherance of the attempt to establish at Hamburg the first national German theatre (1767-1769). This fact alone would invest these papers with a high significance; for, though the theatrical enterprise proved abortive, it established the principle upon which the progress of the theatre in all countries depends—that for the dramatic art the immediate theatrical public is no sufficient court of appeal. But the direct effect of the Dramaturgie was to complete the task which Lessing had in previous writings begun, and to overthrow the dominion of the arbitrary French rules and the French models established by Gottsched. Lessing vindicated its real laws to the drama, made clear the difference between the Greeks and their would-be representatives, and established the claims of Shakespeare as the modern master of both tragedy and comedy. His own dramatic productivity was cautious, tentative, progressive. His first step was, by his Miss Sara Sampson (1755), to oppose the realism of the English domestic drama to the artificiality of the accepted French models, in the forms of which Chr. F. Weisse (1726-1804) was seeking to treat the subjects of Shakespearian plays.[283] Then, in his Minna von Barnhelm (1767), which owed something to Farquhar, he essayed a national comedy drawn from real life, and appealing to patriotic sentiments as well as to broad human sympathies. It was written in prose (like Miss Sara Sampson), but in form held a judicious mean between French and English examples.
The note sounded by the criticisms of Lessing met with a ready response, and the productivity displayed by the nascent dramatic literature of Germany is astonishing, both in the efforts inspired by his teachings and in those Efforts of the theatre and of literature. which continued to controvert or which aspired to transcend them. On the stage, Harlequin and his surroundings proved by no means easy to suppress, more especially at Vienna, the favourite home of frivolous amusement; but even here a reform was gradually effected, and, under the intelligent rule of the emperor Joseph II., a national stage grew into being. The mantle of Ekhof fell upon the shoulders of his eager younger rival, F. L. Schröder, who was the first to domesticate Shakespeare upon the German stage. In dramatic literature few of Lessing’s earlier contemporaries produced any works of permanent value, unless the religious dramas of F. G. Klopstock—a species in which he had been preceded by J. J. Bodmer—and the patriotic Bardietten of the same author be excepted. S. Gessner, J. W. L. Gleim, and G. K. Pfeffel (1736-1809) composed pastoral plays. But a far more potent stimulus prompted the efforts of the younger generation. The translation of Shakespeare, begun in 1762 by C. M. Wieland, whose own plays possess no special significance, and completed in 1775 by Eschenburg, which furnished the text for many of Lessing’s criticisms, helps to mark an epoch in German literature. Under the influence of Shakespeare, or of their conceptions of his genius, arose a youthful group of writers who, while worshipping their idol as the representative of nature, displayed but slight anxiety to harmonize their imitations of him with the demands of art. The notorious Ugolino of H. W. von Gerstenberg seemed a premonitory sign that the coming flood might merely rush back to the extravagances and horrors of the old popular stage; and it was with a sense of this danger in prospect that Lessing in his third important drama, the prose tragedy Emilia Galotti (1772), set the example of a work of incomparable nicety in its adaptation of means to end. But successful as it proved, it could not stay the excesses of the Sturm und Drang period which now set in. Lessing’s last drama, Nathan der Weise (1779), was not measured to the standard of the contemporary stage; but it was to exercise its influence in the progress of time—not only by causing a reaction in tragedy from prose to blank verse (first essayed in J. W. von Brawe’s Brutus, 1770), but by ennobling and elevating by its moral and intellectual grandeur the branch of literature to which in form it belongs.
Meanwhile the young geniuses of the Sturm und Drang had gone forth, as worshippers rather than followers of Shakespeare, to conquer new worlds. The name of this group of writers, more remarkable for their collective significance The Sturm und Drang. than for their individual achievements, was derived from a drama by one of the most prolific of their number, M. F. von Klinger;[284] other members of the fraternity were J. A. Leisewitz[285] (1752-1806), M. R. Lenz[286] and F. Müller[287] the “painter.” The youthful genius of the greatest of German poets was itself under the influences of this period, when it produced the first of its masterpieces. But Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), both by the choice and treatment of its national theme, and by the incomparable freshness and originality of its style, holds a position of its own in German dramatic literature. Though its defiant irregularity of form prevented its complete success upon the stage, yet its influence is far from being represented by the series of mostly feeble imitations to which it gave rise. The Ritterdramen (plays of chivalry) had their day like similar fashions in drama or romance; but the permanent effect of Götz was, that it crushed as with an iron hand the last remnants of theatrical conventionality (those of costume and scenery included), and extinguished with them the lingering respect for rules and traditions of dramatic composition which even Lessing had treated with consideration. Its highest significance, however, lies in its having been the first great dramatic work of a great national poet, and having definitively associated the national drama with the poetic glories of the national literature.
Thus, in the classical period of that literature, of which Goethe and Schiller were the ruling stars, the drama had a full share of the loftiest of its achievements. Of these, the dramatic works of Goethe vary so widely in form and Goethe. character, and connect themselves so intimately with the different phases of the development of his own self-directed poetic genius, that it was impossible for any of them to become the starting-points of any general growths in the history of the German drama. His way of composition was, moreover, so peculiar to himself—conception often preceding execution by many years, part being added to part under the influence of new sentiments and ideas and views of art, flexibly followed by changes of form—that the history of his dramas cannot be severed from his general poetic and personal biography. His Clavigo and Stella, which succeeded Götz, are domestic dramas in prose; but neither by these, nor by the series of charming pastorals and operas which he composed for the Weimar court, could any influence be exercised upon the progress of the national drama. In the first conception of his Faust, he had indeed sought the suggestion of his theme partly in popular legend, partly in a domestic motive familiar to the authors of the Sturm und Drang (the story of Gretchen); the later additions to the First Part, and the Second Part generally, are the results of metaphysical and critical studies and meditations belonging to wholly different spheres of thought and experience. The dramatic unity of the whole is thus, at the most, external only; and the standard of judgment to be applied to this wondrous poem is not one of dramatic criticism. Egmont, originally designed as a companion to Götz, was not completed till many years later; there are few dramas more effective in parts, but the idea of a historic play is lost in the elaboration of the most graceful of love episodes. In Iphigenia and Tasso, Goethe exhibited the perfection of form of which his classical period had enabled him to acquire the mastery; but the sphere of the action of the former (perfect though it is as a dramatic action), and the nature of that of the latter, are equally remote from Schiller. the demands of the popular stage. Schiller’s genius, unlike Goethe’s, was naturally and consistently suited to the claims of the theatre. His juvenile works, The Robbers, Fiesco, Kabale und Liebe, vibrating under the influence of an age of social revolution, combined in their prose form the truthful expression of passion with a considerable admixture of extravagance. But, with true insight into the demands of his art, and with unequalled single-mindedness and self-devotion to it, Schiller gradually emancipated himself from his earlier style; and with his earliest tragedy in verse, Don Carlos, the first period of his dramatic authorship ends, and the promise of the second announces itself. The works which belong to this—from the Wallenstein trilogy to Tell—are the acknowledged masterpieces of the German poetic drama, treating historic themes reconstructed by conscious dramatic workmanship, and clothing their dialogue in a noble vestment of rhetorical verse. The plays of Schiller are the living embodiment of the theory of tragedy elaborated by Hegel, according to which its proper theme is the divine, or, in other words, the moving ethical, element in human action. In one of his later plays, The Bride of Messina, Schiller attempted a new use of the chorus of Greek tragedy; but the endeavour was a splendid error, and destined to exercise no lasting effect. The reaction against Schiller’s ascendancy began with writers who could not reconcile themselves with the cosmopolitan and non-national elements in his genius, and is still represented by eminent critics; but the future must be left to settle the contention.
Schiller’s later dramas had gradually conquered the stage, over which his juvenile works had in this time triumphantly passed, but on which his Don Carlos had met with a cold welcome. For a long time, however, its favourites The popular stage. were authors of a very different order, who suited themselves to the demands of a public tolerably indifferent to the literary progress of the drama. After popular tastes had oscillated between the imitators of Gotz and those of Emilia Galotti, they entered into a more settled phase, as the establishment of standing theatres at the courts and in the large towns increased the demand for good “acting” plays. Famous actors, such as Schröder and A. W. Iffland, sought by translations or compositions of their own to meet the popular likings, which largely took the direction of that irrepressible favourite of theatrical audiences, the sentimental domestic drama.[288] But the most successful purveyor of such wares was an author who, though not himself an actor, understood the theatre with a professional instinct—August von Kotzebue. His productivity ranged from the domestic drama and comedy of all kinds to attempts to rival Schiller and Shakespeare in verse; and though his popularity (which ultimately proved his doom) brought upon him the bitterest attacks of the romantic school and other literary authorities, his self-conceit is not astonishing, and the time has come for saying that there is some exaggeration in the contempt which has been lavished upon him by posterity.[289] Nor should it be forgotten that German literature had so far failed to furnish the comic stage with any successors to Minna von Barnhelm; for Goethe’s efforts to dramatize characteristic events or figures of the Revolutionary age[290] must be dismissed as failures, not from a theatrical point of view only. The joint efforts of Goethe and Schiller for the Weimar stage, important in many respects for the history of the German drama, at the same time reveal the want of a national dramatic literature sufficient to supply the needs of a theatre endeavouring to satisfy the demands of art.
Meanwhile the so-called romantic school of German literature was likewise beginning to extend its labours to original dramatic composition. From the universality of sympathies proclaimed by this school, to whose leaders Germany The romantic school. owed its classical translation of Shakespeare,[291] and an introduction to the dramatic literatures of so many ages and nations,[292] a variety of new dramatic impulses might be expected; while much might be hoped for the future of the national drama (especially in its mixed and comic species) from the alliance between poetry and real life which they preached, and which some of them sought personally to exemplify. But in practice universality presented itself as peculiarity or even as eccentricity; and in the end the divorce between poetry and real life was announced as authoritatively as their union had been. Outside this school, the youthful talent of Th. Körner, whose early promise as a dramatist[293] might perhaps have ripened into a fulness enabling him not unworthily to occupy the seat left vacant by his father’s friend Schiller, was extinguished by a patriotic death. The efforts of M. von Collin (1779-1824) in the direction of the historical drama remained isolated attempts. But of the leaders of the romantic school, A. W.[294] and F. von Schlegel[295] contented themselves with frigid classicalities; and L. Tieck, in the strange alembic of his Phantasus, melted legend and fairy-tale, novel and drama,[296] poetry and satire, into a compound, enjoyable indeed, but hardly so in its entirety, or in many of its parts, to any but the literary mind.
F. de La Motte Fouqué infused a spirit of poetry into the chivalry drama. Klemens Brentano was a fantastic dramatist unsuited to the stage. Here a feeble outgrowth of the romanticists, the “destiny dramatists” Z. Werner[297]—the Later dramatists. most original of the group—A. Müllner,[298] and Baron C. E. v. Houwald,[299] achieved a temporary furore; and it was with an attempt in the same direction[300] that the Austrian dramatist F. Grillparzer began his long career. He is assuredly, what he pronounced himself to be, the foremost of the later dramatic poets of Germany, unless that tribute be thought due to the genius of H. von Kleist, who in his short life produced, besides other works, a romantic drama[301] and a rustic comedy[302] of genuine merit, and an historical tragedy of singular originality and power.[303] Grillparzer’s long series of plays includes poetic dramas on classical themes[304] and historical subjects from Austrian history,[305] or treated from an Austrian point of view. The romantic school, which through Tieck had satirized the drama of the bourgeoisie and its offshoots, was in its turn satirized by Count A. von Platen-Hallermund’s admirable imitations of Aristophanic comedy.[306] Among the objects of his banter were the popular playwright E. Raupach, and K. Immermann, a true poet, who is, however, less generally remembered as a dramatist. F. Hebbel[307] is justly ranked high among the foremost later dramatic poets of his country, few of whom equal him in intensity. The eminent lyrical (especially ballad) poet L. Uhland left behind him a large number of dramatic fragments, but little or nothing really complete. Other names of literary mark are those of C. D. Grabbe, J. Mosen, O. Ludwig[308] (1813-1865), a dramatist of great power, and “F. Halm” (Baron von Münch-Bellinghausen) (1806-1871), and, among writers of a more modern school, K. Gutzkow,[309] G. Freytag,[310] and H. Laube.[311] L. Anzengruber, a writer of real genius though restricted range, imparted a new significance to the Austrian popular drama,[312] formerly so commonplace in the hands of F. Raimund and J. Nestroy.
During the long period of transition which may be said to have ended with the establishment of the new German empire, the German stage in some measure anticipated the developments which more spacious times were to witness in The German stage of the latter half of the 19th century. the German drama. The traditions of the national theatre contemporary with the great epoch of the national literature were kept alive by a succession of eminent actors—such as the nephews of Ludwig Devrient, himself an artist of the greatest originality, whose most conspicuous success, though nature had fitted him for Shakespeare, was achieved in Schiller’s earliest play.[313] Among the younger generation of Devrients the most striking personality was that of Emil; his elder brother Karl August, husband of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, the brilliant star of the operatic stage, and their son Friedrich, were also popular actors; yet another brother, Eduard, is more widely remembered as the historian of the German stage. Partly by reason of the number and variety of its centres of intellectual and artistic life, Germany was long enabled both to cherish the few masterpieces of its own drama, and, with the aid of a language well adapted for translation, to give admittance to the dramatic masterpieces of other nations also, and to Shakespeare in particular, without going far in the search for theatrical novelty or effect. But a change came over the spirit of German theatrical management with the endeavours of H. Laube, from about the middle of the century onwards, at Vienna (and Leipzig), which avowedly placed the demands of the theatre as such above those of literary merit or even of national sentiment. In a less combative spirit, F. Dingelstedt, both at Munich, which under King Maximilian he had made a kindly nurse of German culture, and, after his efforts there had come to an untimely end,[314] at Weimar and at Vienna, raised the theatre to a very high level of artistic achievement. The most memorable event in the annals of his managements was the production on the Weimar stage of the series of Shakespeare’s histories. At a rather later period, of which the height extended from 1874 to 1890, the company of actors in the service, and under the personal direction, of Duke George of Saxe-Meiningen, created a great effect by their performances both in and outside Germany—not so much by their artistic improvements in scenery and decoration, as by the extraordinary perfection of their ensemble. But no dramaturgic achievement in the century could compare in grandeur either of conception or of execution with Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth performances, where, for the first time in the history of the modern stage, the artistic instinct ruled supreme in all the conditions of the work and its presentment. Though the Ring of the Nibelungs and its successors belong to opera rather than drama proper, the importance of their production (1876) should be overlooked by no student of the dramatic art. Potent as has been the influence of foreign dramatic literatures—whether French or Scandinavian—and that of a movement which has been common to them all, and from which the German was perhaps the least likely to exclude itself, the most notable feature in the recent history of the German drama has been its quick response to wholly new demands, which, though the attempt was made with some persistence, could no longer be met without an effort to span the widths and sound the depths of a more spacious and more self-conscious era.[315]