Romantic Irony, Metadrama and the Demonic

[SCHLEGEL 1962-66, V, pp. 130-155].
The Acharnians, an Attic people suffering under oppression, are angry with Dicaeopolis and threaten to execute him because he has accepted peace with the enemy. He agrees to address the Lacedaemonians, but the Achar­nians require that he put his head on the block while he delivers his speech. If he fails to persuade them, he shall lose his head. Dicaeopolis, in whom we recognize Aristophanes himself, goes to Euripedes to beg from him the pitiful appearance in which his tragic heroes always appeal for sympathy. The scene takes place in the street. Euripides is writing a tragedy and his servant refuses to disturb his master in the midst of his creative transport. Dicaeopolis continues shouting for Euripedes until the playwright, much disturbed at the interruption, appears at the upstairs window. Although he replies that he has no time, Dicaeopolis insists: «Have yourself wheeled out». Calling attention to the artifice of stage illusion, Aristophanes puns here on the eccyclema [SCHLEGEL 1962-66,V, p. 198, 256n.], a turntable upon which an exterior façade may be rotated to reveal the interior. «Well, let them roll me out», Euripedes consents, «as to coming down, I have no time». Dicaeopolis pleas for the «miserable tragic rags» he needs to help him win his appeal and save his neck.
As the dialogue proceeds, Euripedes recalls various tragic characters: the aged Oeneus, the blind Phoenix, the beggar Philoctes, the lame Bellero­phontes. Dicaeopolis keeps calling for an even more miserable and pitiful figure. When Euripedes names Telephus, the exchange begins. In putting on the ragged costume of Telephus, Dicaeopolis also puts on the rhetorical manner, echoing lines from Euripedes’ tragedy. With his newly acquired persuasive skill, he persists in begging while Euripedes laments ever more loudly that the intruder robs his dramatic devices: «You are stealing a whole tragedy…. it is all over with my plays!». The eccyclema rolls Euripedes back in again, and Dicaeopolis, swelling with the rhetoric of tragic pathos («fully steeped in Euripedes»), prepares to confront the Lacedaemonians – and put his head on the block. More than just a parody, this dialogue requires attention to the artifices of staging and language as it demonstrates the differences in comic and tragic style.
In tragedy, the chorus turns its attention inward, engaging in the dialogue and commenting on the tragic action. In comedy, however, the chorus turns its attention outward, directly addressing the audience and disrupting the dra­matic illusion. This disruptive intrusion, the parabasis, is appropriate to comedy, Schlegel argues, even though it would destroy the effects of tragedy. In comedy, the audience welcomes the play with form as well as the play with subject matter. Too strict an adherence to the formal principles of the drama would be at odds with the celebration of laughter. Schlegel reminds us that in contemporary European theater, a comic character often plays to the audience with winks and gestures as well as verbal asides. Yet many critics maintain that the drama, whether comic or tragic, should remain a closed circle; neither the playwright nor the actor should trespass the boundaries of the stage and interact directly with the audience [SCHLEGEL 1962-66, V, pp.135-136]. Because he advocates audience participation, we would expect Schlegel to object to this principle of exclusion. He has already argued that the audience belongs within the circle of the dramatic performance [SCHLEGEL 1962-66, V, pp. 135-136]. Unfortunately, he raises no counterargument here and seems content to leave his audience as idle voyeurs outside the circle. The very plurality of a company of voyeurs changes the nature of voyeurism into something of a conspiracy. Should a player step out of his role and address the audience in terms of their collective identity and shared experience, the theatrical experience remains intact. As it is usually defined, the concept of destroyed illusion (Illusionszerstörung) misrepresents the dramatic situation: the primary dramatic illusion is not destroyed, it is merely suspended for the moment (aufgehoben); in its place, the playwright introduces a second illusion. The character, after all, may have stepped out of one role but he stepped into another. Schlegel might well have reasserted, at this point, his argument on the illusion of spontaneity [SCHLEGEL 1962-66, I, pp.110-112]. The fundamental principle of all dramatic illusion is spontaneity. The actor should never seem to be speaking lines he has learned by rote. By having a character step out of his role and speak as a player, perhaps directly to the audience, perhaps to the other players, the playwright has enhanced, not destroyed, the illusion of spontaneity. The deviation from his role is seen as a spontaneous intrusion not as another part that the actor has learned.
In his essay «On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century», Charles Lamb praised John Bannister’s ability to sustain double roles, one «out of character» revealed as a «secret» to the audience, the other «in character» interacting with the other characters in the play. Bannister, Lamb explains, «had two voices, both plausible»; for his asides to the audience he used a «secondary or supplemental voice» which was «more decisively histrionic than his common one». This «supplemental voice» was «reserved for the spectator … the dramatis personae were supposed to know nothing about it». Like Schlegel, Lamb deems this art of «subinsinuation» as fit exclusively for comedy. In «On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth», Thomas De Quincey offers a different rationale for the intrusion of the comic in the midst of tragedy. The scene with the porter, following immediately upon the murder of Duncan, reflects back upon the murder with such «peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity» because its «re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them». The scene with the porter is not the parenthesis within the tragedy; rather, the transgression of Macbeth murdering his sleeping King is the parenthesis [DE QUINCEY, III, pp. 150-158]. Contrary to Schlegel, De Quincey argues that the comedy of mundane reality provides the defining contrast to the horror of tragic brutality. The doubleness provides the necessary leverage. The advantage of the parabasis, then, is not simply that it disrupts illusion but rather that it calls attention to the imaginative process of creating illusion. Schlegel, however, offers no other justification of the parabasis than the authorial play with form [Schlegel 1962-66, V, pp. 136, 150]. Schlegel returned to the problem of disrupting the illusion in discussing the kindred modes of irony in Shakespeare [SCHLEGEL 1962-66, V, pp. 136-139, 146-149]. In Ludwig Tieck’s plays – Prince Zerbino (1796-98), Bluebeard (1797), Puss-in-Boots (1797), Topsy-turvy World (1798) and Tom Thumb (1811) – Schlegel also acknowledged an extended manipulation of illusion [SCHLEGEL 1962-66, III, p. 265]. Not August Wilhelm, but Friedrich Schlegel formulated the concept of «Romantic Irony» as «a permanent parekbasis». I have already mentioned «sustained multistability» in the musical demonia of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. More problematic than «sustained multistability», a «permanent parekbasis» is, in fact, a contradiction in terms. Parabasis means literally «a going over», «standing in another place». In its New Testament usage, it signifies a moral transgression. It defines, literally, a movement from one place, or situation, or condition, to another; and by implication a disruption of order. The Latin form, parekbasis, was a stylistic term, referring to a deviation from the theme, a digression rather than a transgression. A «permanent parekbasis» cannot be «permanent» at all, except in the sense of being permanently in flux. How often can a playwright shift illusion without utterly shattering the illusion, a total Illusionszerstörung?
The plot of Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning is literarily diabolic, for the devil himself is the instigator of the primary action. Here’s the plot: as heiress to Baron von Haldungen’s estate, Liddy has the advantages of wealth and education. A resourceful, emancipated woman, she is nevertheless caught in an unfortunate dilemma. Separated from the friend of her childhood, Mollfels, whom she greatly admires, she has become engaged to Mr. Wernthal, whose eagerness to marry Liddy has been motivated not by love, but by a desperate need for her money to pay off his gambling debts. She is also sought after by Freiherr von Mordax, who has no interest in her money but lusts sadistically after her body. Brought to Haldungen Hall by four scientists who have found him freezing in the woods, the Devil, declaring himself to be Bishop Theophilus Christian Teufel, quickly commences to wreak havoc. He persuades Wernthal to sell his bride for a sum more than adequate to finance his gambling. Once Mordax has demonstrated his loyalty by murdering a few innocents, the Devil promises to deliver Liddy into his arms. After flattering the inept literary talents of Rattengift, the Devil arranges for his «fellow poet» to escort Liddy to an isolated Inn where Mordax can have his way with her.
So much for the Devil’s plot. The counter-plot is more wayward and capricious, and the surprises reside in the several literary dimensions announced in the play’s title. In the opening scene, the Schoolmaster is interrupted in his daily task of getting drunk by the arrival of Tobias and his not-too-bright son, Gottliebchen. The Schoolmaster, persuaded by the offer of an annual stipend of six fat geese and a full barrel of brandy, agrees to take Gottliebchen under his tutelage and educate him for the clergy. Hoping to gain a further commission for the education of Gottliebchen, he attempts to present Gottliebchen as a «genius» at Haldungen Hall. At the Hall, the Schoolmaster begins to suspect the true identity of Bishop Theophilus. Once his suspicions are confirmed, he baits a trap with condoms and pornographic novels to catch the Devil. Meanwhile, Mollfels, returning from a three-year journey to Italy, visits the Schoolmaster, then proceeds to Haldungen Hall to declare his love to Liddy. She greets him affectionately, but must inform him of her engagement. Devastated, full of suicidal despair over his «ugliness», Mollfels is rescued by Rattengift and taken to the Schoolmaster, where the three of them, joined by Gottliebchen, drink themselves into a stupor. In the final act, the trap is built and Liddy is delivered to the Inn. The Devil is caught, only to be released again at the intervention of the Devil’s Grandmother. Liddy fights valiantly and manages to subdue the abductor, just before she is «rescued» by Mollfels.
This plot summary provides a few clues where to anticipate Grabbe’s irony: a bride sold by her fiancé; the ugliest suitor emerging as the most attractive; the Devil disguised as a Bishop; a dimwit presented as a genius; a poet who writes poems about not being able to write poems. Because none of the characters are quite what they seem, none of their actions are quite what would be expected. The Devil is almost a superfluous character, for the evil that he manipulates and directs already resides in the characters over whom he would hold sway: the vanity of the poet, Rattengift; the greed of the gambler, Wernthal; the lust of the would-be rapist and abductor, Mordax. As I anticipated in my opening paragraph, the demonic here is very much a personification of human evil.
Among Grabbe’s first literary endeavors, Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning (1822) is acclaimed as one of the foremost examples of «romantic irony», climaxing a mode of self-reflexive theatricality that had commenced with Ludwig Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots (1797), but also participating in the comic tradition of Aristophanes, and anticipating such 20^th-century playwrights as Pirandello and Stoppard. Grabbe’s other dramatic works include: Don Juan and Faust (1828), with the two archetypal heroes of his age – the one famed for his sexual conquests, the other for his restless intellect and pact with the devil; Cinderella (1829), a fiabesque comedy; Napoleon, or the 100 Days (1830), an anti-heroic drama of the period between Napoleon’s return from Elba and his defeat at Waterloo. Tieck, in his «play-about-a-play», introduces the famous stage designs of Mozart’s Zauberflöte as a device to «rescue» the inept playwright. Grabbe follows Tieck’s strategy. Just as Tieck could conjure by appealing to Mozart’s Zauberflöte in the 1790’s, the popular opera of the 1820’s was Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber with a libretto by Friedrich Kind. Indeed, Grabbe was able to integrate even more effectively than Tieck the metadramatic doubleness. Johann Friedrich Kind’s libretto was based on a tale by Johann August Apel, and it was De Quincey’s translation which was adapted for the English performance, The Fatal Marksman; or, The Demon of the Black Forest (Coburg, 23 February 1824).
Samiel, the Devil from Weber’s Freischütz, has corrupted the hunter Kaspar, who then becomes the devil’s agent to likewise corrupt Max, the hero of the tale. Grabbe’s Devil declares that Samiel, Weber’s Devil, had been evicted from Hell and sent to Heaven because he was «too noble», having failed to bring down death and damnation upon Max and his beloved. Grabbe’s Devil is also «too noble», for his plotting ends only in saving Liddy from her evil suitors and uniting her with her true lover. The trick, as we have seen, is an old one. The appeal to Euripedes in Aristophanes’s play is model for metadrama of Tieck’s calling upon the Zauberflöte and Grabbe’s inserting the Freischütz.
For his use of the fiabesque, Tieck acknowledged his debt to the Italian playwrights. It was not just the turn to fables for plot and character that nurtured the theatrical ploys of parabasis/irony. Revived by Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, commedia dell’arte had been effectively banished from the stage for the preceding fifty years, rendering it increasingly difficult to find experienced performers of the highly refined improvisational drama. After the breaking up of the Sacchi company, there were few skilled performers available and Gozzi’s plays were staged less and less. But the trend persisted, especially in Germany where Gozzi’s accomplishment was praised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel, adapted by Friedrich Schiller in his Turandot, and successfully imitated by Tieck, who made use of German fairy tales and replaced the improvisational commedia dell’arte with the improvisational clown, Hanswurst. Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots is still cited as a prime example of Romantic irony in German literature [Burwick 1991, pp. 150-152, 279-295]. A second nurturing factor was the stylistic shift. In Princess Brambilla, Hoffmann has the actor Giglio caught in the shift from neo-classical performance, in the manner of Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni, to the revival of the commedia dell’arte and the new fascination with the fiabesque. Drawing upon the popular harlequinades of London, Tieck made the very process of constructing and demolishing illusion into the subject of Der betrügliche Schein, oder: Man muss nicht glauben, was man sieht (1796).
The harlequinades, as crafted by Lewis Theobald for John Rich in the 1720s made the most of  metadramatic self-reflexivity.In Harlequin, a Sorcerer, with The Loves of Pluto and Proserpine (1725), Theobald achieved the two-part form that would define the harlequinade throughout the century to come [NICOLL 1955-1959, II, p. 359]. In the first part the commedia dell’arte performers would enact a familiar tale from classical mythology or folklore, then in the second part, as in the Aristophanic parabasis, Harlequin as master of revels would lead Pantaloon, Clown, and Columbine in a revolt against the very roles they had been performing. But Harlequin Hoax; or, a Pantomime Proposed is certainly about the genre itself and its staging. And Harlequin At Home parodies Mathews’ popular one-man show. Jane Moody is absolutely right that many of the Harlequinades address local matters of immediate concern to the working- and merchant-class audience in their daily lives [MOODY 2000, pp. 222-226]. When a character steps out of role and critiques the part that he has been required to play, the shift also provides a moment of parabasis, a meta-theatrical and self-reflexive situation, akin to the play-within-a-play or the play-about-a-play.
The irony and metadrama of Death’s Jest-Book is a more complex matter. So too is the demonic. There are no devils, no evil spirits, distinguished from the main characters of the play. There are, to be sure, ghosts, but they reside in an afterlife where there is neither Heaven nor Hell, neither God nor Satan. The agency of evil resides completely in Isbrand’s quest for revenge, Duke Melveric’s selfish passion for Sibylla, and Ziba’s too compliant service to Melveric’s desires. There are two fools, Isbrand the cunning fool and Death’s Jester; Mandrake, the naïve fool, fond believer in alchemy and the occult. There are two ghosts: Mandrake, who is merely tricked into thinking that he is a ghost, and Wolfram, Knight to Melveric and brother to Isbrand, who is slain by Melveric as a rival in love with Sybilla. There are two rivalry plots, both leading to murder: Melveric and Wolfgang, in love with Sybilla; the sons of Melveric, Athulf and Adalmar, in love with Amala. Isbrand’s revenge is motivated by the conviction that Duke Melveric has usurped paternal lands and wealth. Melveric’s jealousy leads him to kill the loyal Wolfgang, and Wolfgang’s death precipitates the despair and death of Sybilla. Beddoes’s coup de theatre occurs in Act III, scene iii. Melveric persuades the sorcerer Ziba to raise the ghost of his beloved Sibylla. Ziba performs the magical rites and from the sepulcher emerges the would-be ghost, Mandrake. Melveric lapses into a vehement tirade on the villainous trickery of the magician and the fool, whom he believes have rehearsed this scam. Before Mandrake departs, however, he warns that «a ghost of longer standing … seems to be putting himself together» within the vault. And sure enough, after Ziba and Mandrake have exited, and Melveric is left alone in the sepulcher, Wolfram emerges to accuse his murderer. If the plot were as simple as Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, the final curtain would fall with the villain’s confrontation with the spirit of his own murderous crime. Instead, the murderer is linked to his victim by the bond of his guilt. They wander forth together to play out Acts IV and V. Immortality is mocked, but so is mortality. As Isbrand declares, we are all Death’s fools. And that folly, the fatal fact of mortality, justifies in Isbrand’s reasoning a brutish selfishness. In contrast to the malevolence of Isbrand, Melveric undergoes a conversion from ruthless jealousy to an ultimate resignation to death. In Beddoes’s metadramatic mirroring of «all the world’s a stage», the stage of life is itself a Punch-and-Judy show. Men and women are mere puppets, not guided by the hands of divine puppeteer, but dangling from their own whims and desire. The puppet-metaphor throughout the play is voiced exclusively as the wicked wisdom of Isbrand:

 If the good lord of creation, being a beggar in foolery, will in spite of Destiny ride a cockhorse on Wisdom, why! he must needs gallop to Bedlam. I wash my hands of him. Well, now that the Fates are no more humorous, they have been converted by the Knowledge Society tracts. And to make something useful of their cotton, do now with the threads of noble men’s destinies knit matrimonial night-caps for old Goody Nature and Gaffer Mankind to play Punch and Judy in. But I grow delirious and utter grave Truths. [I.i. ll. 75-83]

 The concept of Destiny, as Isbrand declares, makes wisdom a foolish pretense. Without volitional control of one’s own fate, the mind is nothing more than a mirror of the present and trashcan of the past. Isbrand thus ridicules the animality of the human condition: a bag of flesh stuffed with «veal, liver and lights, tripe and capon». The grotesque body becomes what it consumes in a counterfeit metempsychosis or mock-evolution:

 Some one of those malicious Gods who envy Prometheus his puppet show have taught all confounded sorts of malcontent beasts, saucy birds and ambitious shell-fish, and hopping creatures of land and water, the knack of looking human to the life … the real history of the World is Aesop’s fable-book in masquerade. [I.i. ll. 116-123]

 As Isbrand pursues his comparative anatomy, the human body not only sheds its aesthetic appeal, it is perceived as a deformity of animal shapes. Even as it eats, drinks, copulates, defecates, dies, and rots, the grotesque body is being consumed, digested, and transformed into the world. The grave is simply another hungry mouth through which the world feeds its ravenous appetite. «I like to see Ruin at dinner time» [IV.i. ll. 82], declares Isbrand. The grotesque body is celebrated in the perverse wit of Isbrand, but also in the songs of Death’s Jest-Book: the psalm-farting bride of St. Gingo [I.iv], the egg-laying tailor [I.iv], Harpagus dining on his slaughtered son [IV.iv], Adam and Eve as carrion crows [V.iv]. Because the grotesque body dangles upon the strings of the appetites and moves to the dance of destiny, Isbrand sees the opportunity to usurp the natural course of things and seize the strings in his own hands:

  The puppets, whose heart-strings I hold and play Between my thumb and fingers, this way, that way; Through whose masks, wrinkled o’er by age and passion, My voice and spirit hath spoken continually; Dare now to ape free will? Well done, Prometheus! Thou’st pitied Punch and given him a soul, And all his wooden peers. [V.i. ll. 7-13]

In presuming a role as puppeteer, Isbrand himself apes the free will he mockingly denies. The puppet is more than metaphor: it dramatizes that dehumanizing teleological conception of man, from Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1748), through the Schicksaltragödie culminating in Zacharias Werner’s Der vierundzwanzigste Februar (1815), and the Naturalism of Emile Zola. Romantic irony and metadrama both serve the representation of the demonic in Gothic drama. Romantic Irony as a «permanent parekbasis», in which the author constantly shifts the grounds of representation; metadrama as a self-referentiality, in which the pretenses of play-acting become the very subject of the play-acting; the demonic, in which the occult is scoffed at and dismissed even while it is being conjured.

 

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