Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note on the Translation
- Introduction
- Part One Plays
- Part Two Stories
- Part Three Essays
- Remarks on the Theater
- On Götz von Berlichingen
- Review of The New Menoza: Written by the Author Himself
- On Scene Changes in Shakespeare
- On the Marriages of Soldiers
- Part Four Poems
- Chronology
- A Note on the Currencies in Lenz's Works
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Remarks on the Theater
from Part Three - Essays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note on the Translation
- Introduction
- Part One Plays
- Part Two Stories
- Part Three Essays
- Remarks on the Theater
- On Götz von Berlichingen
- Review of The New Menoza: Written by the Author Himself
- On Scene Changes in Shakespeare
- On the Marriages of Soldiers
- Part Four Poems
- Chronology
- A Note on the Currencies in Lenz's Works
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This text was read aloud in a society of good friends two years before the appearance of German Character and Art and Götz von Berlichingen. Because it might still contain something of interest to today's belles-lettres that those two pieces have not rendered entirely superfluous, we will share it with our readers as a kind of rhapsody—even if it's nothing more than the first unimpeded reasoning of an unbiased dilettante.
Gentlemen,
Nec minimum meruere decus, vestigia greca
Ausi deserere—
Horace
The subject of a few remarks that are on my mind to share with you will be the theater. The value of drama is too well established in our times for me to have to start off with a captationem benevolentiae because of this choice. Regarding the nature of my presentation, however, I must beg your indulgence, because my present state and other chance circumstances do not allow me to treat my subject as widely or to penetrate it as deeply as I would like to. I am building in my imagination an enormous stage, on which the most famous actors of ancient and modern times will pass before our eyes. There you will see the great masterpieces of Greece acted out by equally great masters, if we are to believe Aulus Gellius and others. In the second department, if you please, you will notice the tragedies of Ovid and Seneca, the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the great actor Roscius, whom the famous Mr. Cicero himself mentions with much respect. You will see the three actors who share one single role, the masks so extensively described by Mr. du Bos, the entire fearsome apparatus, and then you will still have to do justice to the ancient Romans: the essential constitution of their stage and their audience, which, as God willed it, consisted of nothing less than the whole nation, made necessary these seeming departures from nature. That the ancients sang more than recited their plays appears to me very probable from du Bos, for it can be explained so naturally from the origin of drama. In the beginning, drama seems to have been nothing more than a song of praise to father Bacchus sung by various persons together.
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- Information
- Selected Works by J. M. R. LenzPlays, Stories, Essays, and Poems, pp. 257 - 285Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019