{"id":2864,"date":"2012-10-12T16:31:43","date_gmt":"2012-10-12T16:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lilec.it\/romanticismo\/wp\/?p=2864"},"modified":"2016-11-09T18:26:31","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T17:26:31","slug":"romantic-irony-metadrama-and-the-demonic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lilec.it\/romanticismo\/romantic-irony-metadrama-and-the-demonic\/","title":{"rendered":"Romantic Irony, Metadrama and the Demonic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rather than wrestle in the abstract with the concepts \u00abRomantic Irony\u00bb and \u00abMetadrama\u00bb, I will begin with two examples, modern and ancient, in order to triangulate the direction that I wish to pursue in the drama of the Romantic era. The modern example is Tom Stoppard\u2019s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour<\/em> (1977). The ancient example is Aristophanes\u2019s first play The Acharnians<\/em> (425 B.C.). These two plays exercise a multistability of representation that allows the playwright to engage contrary levels of response. Following the age of rational enlightenment, the Romantic stage witnessed not a relapse into superstitious credulity, but rather an increased endeavor to explore the origins of taboos and fears. Obviously I am implicating what Coleridge called \u00aba willing suspension of disbelief for the moment\u00bb. But I am also describing a situation in which belief and disbelief may become interactive when the light of reason fails to dispel the abiding horrors deep within the shadows of the subconscious. The demonic reinforces itself in multiple dramatic manifestations \u2013 as a haunting afterlife that we are reluctant to dismiss, as personification of human evil, as metaphor for madness. It reaffirms and reconstitutes itself on the stage, even while the audience rationally scorns the possibility, even while characters in the play \u2013 and here is the metadramatic ploy \u2013 join the audience in scorning the possibility. Not a rejection of supernaturalism, but an increased fascination with its causes and effects are manifest in the proliferation of Gothic novels and plays. James Cobb\u2019s The Haunted Tower<\/em>, Matthew Gregory Lewis\u2019s The Castle Spectre<\/em>, George Coleman\u2019s The Iron Chest,<\/em> Charles Maturin\u2019s Bertram<\/em> all demonstrate the deft balancing of skeptical distance and emotional immediacy that belongs to the stage representation of the demonic. For efficiency of argument, however, I turn to two more pronounced examples of interweaving of irony, metadrama, and the demonic: Christian Dietrich Grabbe\u2019s Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning<\/em> (1822) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes\u2019s Death\u2019s Jest Book <\/em>(1825-1829).
\nMore than any other playwright after Luigi Pirandello, Stoppard is noted for twisting the metadramatic inversions and confounding the interplay of what is \u00abinside\u00bb the play and what is \u00aboutside\u00bb. For examples of such twists, I might comment on The Real Inspector Hound<\/em> or Arcadia<\/em>. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour<\/em>, however, offers a more complex dimension as a stage play with orchestra, music written by Andr\u00e9 Previn. In the midst of the full orchestra are two tabletop stages: on the one stand two prisoners in a Soviet stalag<\/em>, on the other the prison guards. When one of the prisoners declares that he is standing in the middle of an orchestra, the guards scoff at his foolish attempt to pretend insanity in order to be transferred from the harsh stalag<\/em> to a hospital. The situation, we recognize, is much the same as in Joseph Heller\u2019s Catch-22<\/em> (1961). But in Stoppard\u2019s ingenious conception, the music itself becomes a dramatic character and enters into the dialogue. The music, as defined by those who perceive it and react to it, seems to possess radically different personalities. Because the structural constancy of Previn\u2019s music is at odds with the multistability of its perceived character and voice, it functions much as the demonic in Romantic drama. Indeed, it has its antecedents in the musical demonia of Carl Maria von Weber\u2019s Der Freisch\u00fctz<\/em> (1821). I will return to this sustained multistability in Stoppard\u2019s musical, but first my ancient example: long before Pirandello sent six characters on a similar quest, Aristophanes in The Acharnians<\/em> sent his lead character in search of an author to create a role for him. This is the play that August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Lectures on the Drama<\/em> (1809), chose as historic example of metadrama

[SCHLEGEL 1962-66, V, pp. 130-155].
\nThe 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 Achar\u00adnians 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: \u00abHave yourself wheeled out\u00bb. Calling attention to the artifice of stage illusion, Aristophanes puns here on the eccyclema<\/em> [SCHLEGEL 1962-66,V, p. 198, 256n.], a turntable upon which an exterior fa\u00e7ade may be rotated to reveal the interior. \u00abWell, let them roll me out\u00bb, Euripedes consents, \u00abas to coming down, I have no time\u00bb. Dicaeopolis pleas for the \u00abmiserable tragic rags\u00bb he needs to help him win his appeal and save his neck.
\nAs the dialogue proceeds, Euripedes recalls various tragic characters: the aged Oeneus, the blind Phoenix, the beggar Philoctes, the lame Bellero\u00adphontes. 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\u2019 tragedy. With his newly acquired persuasive skill, he persists in begging while Euripedes laments ever more loudly that the intruder robs his dramatic devices: \u00abYou are stealing a whole tragedy…. it is all over with my plays!\u00bb. The eccyclema <\/em>rolls Euripedes back in again, and Dicaeopolis, swelling with the rhetoric of tragic pathos (\u00abfully steeped in Euripedes\u00bb), prepares to confront the Lacedaemonians \u2013 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.
\nIn 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 dra\u00admatic illusion. This disruptive intrusion, the parabasis, <\/em>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<\/em> (Illusionszerst\u00f6rung<\/em>) misrepresents the dramatic situation: the primary dramatic illusion is not destroyed, it is merely suspended for the moment (aufgehoben<\/em>); 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.
\nIn his essay \u00abOn the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century\u00bb, Charles Lamb praised John Bannister\u2019s ability to sustain double roles, one \u00about of character\u00bb revealed as a \u00absecret\u00bb to the audience, the other \u00abin character\u00bb interacting with the other characters in the play. Bannister, Lamb explains, \u00abhad two voices, both plausible\u00bb; for his asides to the audience he used a \u00absecondary or supplemental voice\u00bb which was \u00abmore decisively histrionic than his common one\u00bb. This \u00absupplemental voice\u00bb was \u00abreserved for the spectator \u2026 the dramatis personae<\/em> were supposed to know nothing about it\u00bb. Like Schlegel, Lamb deems this art of \u00absubinsinuation\u00bb as fit exclusively for comedy. In \u00abOn the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth<\/em>\u00bb, 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 \u00abpeculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity\u00bb because its \u00abre-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\u00bb. 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, <\/em>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 <\/em>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\u2019s plays \u2013 Prince Zerbino<\/em> (1796-98), Bluebeard<\/em> (1797), Puss-in-Boots<\/em> (1797), Topsy-turvy World<\/em> (1798) and Tom Thumb<\/em> (1811) \u2013 Schlegel also acknowledged an extended manipulation of illusion [SCHLEGEL 1962-66, III, p. 265]. Not August Wilhelm, but Friedrich Schlegel formulated the concept of \u00abRomantic Irony\u00bb as \u00aba permanent parekbasis\u00bb. I have already mentioned \u00absustained multistability\u00bb in the musical demonia of Carl Maria von Weber\u2019s Der Freisch\u00fctz<\/em>. More problematic than \u00absustained multistability\u00bb, a \u00abpermanent parekbasis\u00bb is, in fact, a contradiction in terms. Parabasis<\/em> means literally \u00aba going over\u00bb, \u00abstanding in another place\u00bb. 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<\/em>, was a stylistic term, referring to a deviation from the theme, a digression rather than a transgression. A \u00abpermanent parekbasis\u00bb cannot be \u00abpermanent\u00bb 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 Illusionszerst\u00f6rung<\/em>?
\nThe plot of Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning<\/em> is literarily diabolic, for the devil himself is the instigator of the primary action. Here\u2019s the plot: as heiress to Baron von Haldungen\u2019s 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 \u00abfellow poet\u00bb to escort Liddy to an isolated Inn where Mordax can have his way with her.
\nSo much for the Devil\u2019s plot. The counter-plot is more wayward and capricious, and the surprises reside in the several literary dimensions announced in the play\u2019s 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 \u00abgenius\u00bb 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 \u00abugliness\u00bb, 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\u2019s Grandmother. Liddy fights valiantly and manages to subdue the abductor, just before she is \u00abrescued\u00bb by Mollfels.
\nThis plot summary provides a few clues where to anticipate Grabbe\u2019s irony: a bride sold by her fianc\u00e9; 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.
\nAmong Grabbe\u2019s first literary endeavors, Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning<\/em> (1822) is acclaimed as one of the foremost examples of \u00abromantic irony\u00bb, climaxing a mode of self-reflexive theatricality that had commenced with Ludwig Tieck\u2019s Puss-in-Boots<\/em> (1797), but also participating in the comic tradition of Aristophanes, and anticipating such 20th<\/sup>-century playwrights as Pirandello and Stoppard. Grabbe\u2019s other dramatic works include: Don Juan and Faust<\/em> (1828), with the two archetypal heroes of his age \u2013 the one famed for his sexual conquests, the other for his restless intellect and pact with the devil; Cinderella<\/em> (1829), a fiabesque comedy; Napoleon, or the 100 Days<\/em> (1830), an anti-heroic drama of the period between Napoleon\u2019s return from Elba and his defeat at Waterloo. Tieck, in his \u00abplay-about-a-play\u00bb, introduces the famous stage designs of Mozart\u2019s Zauberfl\u00f6te<\/em> as a device to \u00abrescue\u00bb the inept playwright. Grabbe follows Tieck\u2019s strategy. Just as Tieck could conjure by appealing to Mozart\u2019s Zauberfl\u00f6te <\/em>in the 1790\u2019s, the popular opera of the 1820\u2019s was Der Freisch\u00fctz<\/em> 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\u2019s libretto was based on a tale by Johann August Apel, and it was De Quincey\u2019s translation which was adapted for the English performance, The Fatal Marksman; or, The Demon of the Black Forest<\/em> (Coburg, 23 February 1824).
\nSamiel, the Devil from Weber\u2019s Freisch\u00fctz<\/em>, has corrupted the hunter Kaspar, who then becomes the devil\u2019s agent to likewise corrupt Max, the hero of the tale. Grabbe\u2019s Devil declares that Samiel, Weber\u2019s Devil, had been evicted from Hell and sent to Heaven because he was \u00abtoo noble\u00bb, having failed to bring down death and damnation upon Max and his beloved. Grabbe\u2019s Devil is also \u00abtoo noble\u00bb, 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\u2019s play is model for metadrama of Tieck\u2019s calling upon the Zauberfl\u00f6te<\/em> and Grabbe\u2019s inserting the Freisch\u00fctz<\/em>.
\nFor 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\u2019arte<\/em> 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\u2019s plays were staged less and less. But the trend persisted, especially in Germany where Gozzi\u2019s accomplishment was praised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel, adapted by Friedrich Schiller in his Turandot<\/em>, and successfully imitated by Tieck, who made use of German fairy tales and replaced the improvisational commedia dell\u2019arte<\/em> with the improvisational clown, Hanswurst. Tieck\u2019s Puss-in-Boots<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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\u2019arte<\/em> 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 betru<\/em>\u0308<\/em>gliche Schein, oder: Man muss nicht glauben, was man sieht <\/em>(1796).
\nThe harlequinades, as crafted by Lewis Theobald for John Rich in the 1720s made the most of\u00a0 metadramatic self-reflexivity.In Harlequin, a Sorcerer, with The Loves of Pluto and Proserpine<\/em> (1725),\u00a0Theobald 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\u2019arte<\/em> performers would enact a familiar tale from classical mythology or folklore, then in the second part, as in the Aristophanic parabasis<\/em>, 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 <\/em>is certainly about the genre itself and its staging. And Harlequin At Home<\/em> parodies Mathews\u2019 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\u00a0also provides a moment of parabasis, a meta-theatrical and self-reflexive situation, akin to the play-within-a-play or the\u00a0play-about-a-play.
\nThe irony and metadrama of Death\u2019s Jest-Book<\/em> 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\u2019s quest for revenge, Duke Melveric\u2019s selfish passion for Sibylla, and Ziba\u2019s too compliant service to Melveric\u2019s desires. There are two fools, Isbrand the cunning fool and Death\u2019s Jester; Mandrake, the na\u00efve 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\u2019s revenge is motivated by the conviction that Duke Melveric has usurped paternal lands and wealth. Melveric\u2019s jealousy leads him to kill the loyal Wolfgang, and Wolfgang\u2019s death precipitates the despair and death of Sybilla. Beddoes\u2019s coup de theatre<\/em> 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 \u00aba ghost of longer standing \u2026 seems to be putting himself together\u00bb 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\u2019s The Castle Spectre<\/em>, the final curtain would fall with the villain\u2019s 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\u2019s fools. And that folly, the fatal fact of mortality, justifies in Isbrand\u2019s 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\u2019s metadramatic mirroring of \u00aball the world\u2019s a stage\u00bb, 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:<\/p>\n

\u00a0If 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\u2019s 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]\n

\u00a0The concept of Destiny, as Isbrand declares, makes wisdom a foolish pretense. Without volitional control of one\u2019s 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 \u00abveal, liver and lights, tripe and capon\u00bb. The grotesque body becomes what it consumes in a counterfeit metempsychosis or mock-evolution:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Some 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 \u2026 the real history of the World is Aesop\u2019s fable-book in masquerade. [I.i. ll. 116-123]\n

\u00a0As 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. \u00abI like to see Ruin at dinner time\u00bb [IV.i. ll. 82], declares Isbrand. The grotesque body is celebrated in the perverse wit of Isbrand, but also in the songs of Death\u2019s Jest-Book<\/em>: 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:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 The puppets, whose heart-strings I hold and play Between my thumb and fingers, this way, that way; Through whose masks, wrinkled o\u2019er by age and passion, My voice and spirit hath spoken continually; Dare now to ape free will? Well done, Prometheus! Thou\u2019st pitied Punch and given him a soul, And all his wooden peers. [V.i. ll. 7-13]\n

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\u2019s Man a Machine<\/em> (1748), through the Schicksaltrag\u00f6die<\/em> culminating in Zacharias Werner\u2019s Der vierundzwanzigste Februar<\/em> (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 \u00abpermanent parekbasis\u00bb, 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

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  • SCHLEGEL, A.W. : Vorlesungen \u00fcber dramatische Kunst und Literatu<\/em>r, in Kritische Schriften und Briefe<\/em>. 5 vols., ed. Edgar Lohner, Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer. 1962-66<\/li>\n
  • STOPPARD T.: Every Good Boy Deserves Favor<\/em> and Professional Foul<\/em>, New York, Grove Press, distributed by Random House. 1978<\/li>\n
  • STROHSCHNEIDER-KOHRS, I.: Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung<\/em>, T\u00fcbingen, Niemeyer Verlag, pp. 296-332. 1977<\/li>\n
  • TIECK, L.: Der betru<\/em>\u0308<\/em>gliche Schein, oder: Man muss nicht glauben, was man sieht<\/em>, Berlin and Leipzig, s.n. 1796<\/li>\n
  • \u00a0\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013 : Der gestiefelte Kater. <\/em>Puss-in-Boots<\/em>, ed. and trans. Gerald Gillespie, Austin, Univesity of Texas Press. 1974<\/li>\n
  • \u00a0\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013 : Schriften<\/em>, 28 vols., Berlin, G. Reimer. 1828-1854<\/li>\n
  • WEBER, C.M.v.: Der Freischu<\/em>\u0308tz: an opera in 3 acts, Opus 77<\/em>. Libretto by Johann Friedrich Kind, New York, M. Herman and R. Apter 1988<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    <\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Rather than wrestle in the abstract with the concepts \u00abRomantic Irony\u00bb and \u00abMetadrama\u00bb, I will begin with two examples, modern and ancient, in order to triangulate the direction that I wish to pursue in the drama of the Romantic era. The modern example is Tom Stoppard\u2019s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977). The ancient example […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nRomantic Irony, Metadrama and the Demonic - Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lilec.it\/romanticismo\/romantic-irony-metadrama-and-the-demonic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"it_IT\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Romantic Irony, Metadrama and the Demonic - Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rather than wrestle in the abstract with the concepts \u00abRomantic Irony\u00bb and \u00abMetadrama\u00bb, I will begin with two examples, modern and ancient, in order to triangulate the direction that I wish to pursue in the drama of the Romantic era. The modern example is Tom Stoppard\u2019s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977). 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