Introduction

Theatermania: Presentation

In the second half of the eighteenth-century, the new relationships that the thought began to establish between the body and the soul triggered a discourse that would have a significant impact on how the value and function of theater art was conceived. So much of Pre-Romanticism began to see theater as the possible, privileged medium for uniting the conscious and the unconscious, matter and spirit, the particular and the universal – as in Schiller’s Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man or Schelling’s Philosophy of Art – as an instrument for expressing the most hidden abysses, a means for externalizing a truer and more vital reality (Randi 2016).

It was in the context of this change, which Marion Schmaus (2009) dates back to 1778 – the year of publication of Herder’s Plastik –, that the Theatermania phenomenon came to life, of which leading literary expressions give contemporaneous evidence – such as, to limit ourselves to the German context, Goethe’s Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister (1795 – 1796) or Karl Philipp Moritz’s lesser known but absolutely emblematic Anton Reiser (1785 – 1786).

Theatermania was not just, as is often generically thought, synonymous with an inordinate passion for theater, but an authentic disease. Though rarer than Melancholia, it was considered, along with the latter, the pathology par excellence of the age, caused by a hyperactivity of the imaginative faculty, the main faculty of art, since it is not detached from the intellect, but is also not entirely logical, at the same time unconscious and rational, and therefore a privileged means for achieving a conjunctio oppositorum, considered the ultimate goal of human experience.

Art, insofar as it is essentially the result of the imaginative faculty, is able by virtue of this tool to blend the material plane with the immaterial, the visible with the invisible, giving the latter concreteness and thus making it experiential. At the dawn of modern psychology – in the passage between the first and second half of the eighteenth-century – when the different fields of knowledge began to converge on That invisible thing called soul (Obermeit 1980), the eminently human art of theater began to acquire value as a privileged tool for investigating the inner human being, giving substance to the phenomenon of Theatermania: an incessant desire to change clothes, to experience the most diverse emotions, to interpret roles and parts, to feel and exhibit oneself as other than oneself, in a process that ultimately led to the discovery of one’s very own I (Ruppert 1995).

The probing of the discourse on Theatermania, carried out not only within Germany’s borders, but seen in its relative European variations, is the subject of this volume, whose ultimate purpose is to add a non-secondary element to the profile of the late eighteenth-century concept of theater: a century that redefined the role, value and importance of theater, leading to its full revaluation in the Romantic age.

It is of special interest to compare Germany with France, for in French-speaking Europe, too, the eighteenth-century is universally recognized as the century of Theatermania (Frantz and Sajous d’Oria 1999). In France, too, the term refers not only to an obsession with everything related to theater, from playgoing, just when the bourgeoisie was entering the nation’s cultural life, to writing for the stage; from the increase in the number of playhouses and performances in the Parisian perimeter, to the birth of the théâtres de société, improvised theaters in the homes of aristocrats given over to parties and worldly pleasures, of which Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721), the famed the fête galante painter, left a definitive iconography.

But to a much greater extent, Theatermania is to be considered the first manifestation in the modern age of a real society of spectacle (Poirson and Spielmann 2017), in which intellectuals and men of theater began to question the notions of spectatoriality, performativity, staging and role, discovering that social life intrinsically thrives on theatricality, no longer understood in the ordinary sense of illusion, imitation and simulacrum, but as a founding element of sociability.

The phenomenon was so vast that even the theater chronicles – a genre, not surprisingly, born in France at the start of the century – became a sort of ongoing metaphor that described both the spectacular event in itself and the history of the shared social practices and uses that surrounded it. As the Mercure de France noted, “the taste for theatrical performances has never been so strong, nor so widespread, not only in France, but also abroad” (Anon. 1732, 775).

From Paris, in the luxurious Maison de campagne, by way of Vienna’s Imperial Court, to as far as the Duchess of Holstein’s palace in Dresden, aristocratic theater lovers staged the most important Italian and French comedies, duplicating in their private rooms the great urban theaters and thus theatricalizing the life of the small society gathered for a worldly, dramatic exercise.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau (1671 – 1741) analyzed this game of mirrors and cross-references between social life and theater, perhaps borrowing Shakespeare’s metaphor of “all the world’s a stage” (As you like it, II, 7), and long before the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922 – 1982) made his definitive theorization. Rousseau comments in his Épigrammes:

Ce monde ci n’est qu’une œuvre comique / Où chacun fait ses rôles différents. / Là, sur la scène, en habit dramatique, / Brillent prélats, ministres, conquérants. / Pour nous, vil peuple, assis aux derniers rangs, / Troupe futile et des grands rebutée, / Par nous d’en bas la pièce est écoutée. / Mais nous payons, utiles spectateurs; / Et quand la farce est mal représentée, / Pour notre argent nous sifflons les acteurs.1 (Rousseau 1743, t. II, 146)

This immoderate passion for theater, which Pierre de la Montagne (1755 – 1825 c.), in his Théâtromanie of 1782 defined as a mal épidémique, also testified to the centrality of theater in the process of human formation and education, which had commenced in the Siècle des Lumières. For Voltaire, theater was “the only way to unite people and make them sociable”, and the philosophes went so far as to substitute it for the Church as a sanctuary of secular eloquence and the new ideas about libertinage. In an era in which no public space was available to give expression to the tastes and tendencies of the emerging classes, theater became the privileged place for the political and cultural formation of the masses. At the dawn of the French Revolution, the public sphere was structured by theatrical life (Balme 2014), considered as a social fact and an omnipresent aesthetic and ideological mechanism (Chaouche 2010).

This volume covers these two aspects of Theatermania: as a means of self-investigation and as a vehicle for social construction, gathering viewpoints from different areas of the humanities – German, Italian, English, French and the history of ideas. The first section opens with essays by the Germanists Helmut Pfotenhauer (Emeritus of the University of Würzburg) and Gabriele Guerra (University of Rome Sapienza), both focusing on the work of Karl Philipp Moritz, who with his review of empirical psychology and his ground-breaking psychological novel Anton Reiser undoubtedly acted as one of the cornerstones of the subject’s entire architecture. In both cases, theater revealed its ability to dialogue with the new human sciences, such as the dawn of anthropology and psychology, while as a historian of ideas, Marco Menin (University of Turin) reflects, through the emblematic study of the metamorphosis of the concept of sensibility, on how in late eighteenth-century France theater became a privileged testing ground for expounding ethical and aesthetic thought.

The conflict between emotions – sentiments, passions, aspirations – and the rigid moral setting of a Germany caught between Pietism, Enlightenment and pre-Romantic surgings was at the center of Jakob M.R. Lenz’s dramaturgy, which Micaela Latini (University of Ferrara) interprets as the paradigm of a lacerating relationship between the individual and society, which ultimately led to the individual’s withdrawal into his private dimension. Theater not only written and tasted, but also participated in, with the ability it offered to immerse oneself in the most diverse roles, situations and emotions, often becoming for many the only escape from social restrictions. This is the aspect that Sonia Bellavia (University of Rome Sapienza) focuses on, as a theater historian dissecting the phenomenon of Theatermania from the actor’s privileged viewpoint.

Roberta Ascarelli (University of Siena) focuses on the German-speaking world through Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, interpreted as an open work that deals with a more or less explicit multitude of themes demonstrating the infinite political, ethical, critical...