Wednesday, January 8th

• In England, Modern began to be used circa 1600 to mean “current,” “fashionable,” or “of present times,” and writers first began using the three-part division of Ancient-Medieval-Modern to map out history.

• But the Modern was often treated as only a reiteration of the Ancient in new trappings: London was the “modern Babylon,” various writers were the “modern Plato” or a “modern Sappho,” and so on.

• Lionel Abel (influential 20th-Century critic) considered Hamlet the first modern play, because it was “metatheatrical” (see Abel, Metatheatre,1961). Others point to Shakespeare or Marlowe because of their emphasis on epistemological doubt (uncertainty about whether we can trust what we think we know) and their depiction of social mobility.

“The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”• A dispute within the Académie Française circa

1690, over whether present-day writers could create new forms that were equal to or better than those devised by the Ancient Greeks and Romans.

• The Moderns, led by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, argued that scientific and technological discoveries gave the Moderns capabilities that the Ancients lacked. The supporters of the Ancients countered that modern science and art merely built upon the accomplishments of the Ancients.

• Supporters of the Ancients in drama included Jean Racine, the most famous tragedian of the period.

• The first modern playwrights, from this perspective, included Pierre Marivaux (1688-1763), whose “sentimental comedies” fit within none of the Classical genres and subverted audiences’ stylistic expectations; and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who was also a dramatist, and coined the term melodrama.

Wrote The Robbers in 1781, when he was a

medical student in Stuttgart.

The Robbers was admired by the leaders of

the French Revolution, but Schiller was

appalled by the Revolution’s excesses.

From 1787-1797, he gave up playwriting to

become a philosophy professor at the

University of Jena. During this period he wrote

On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a

Series of Letters (1794), which argues that

art’s capacity to create a “space of play”

(spielraum) makes it a tool for social

improvement.

Co-founded the Weimar Theater with Goethe

in 1799.

Later key works include Mary Stuart (1800)

and William Tell (1804).

• Over the 18th Century, modern and modernity began to

be used to describe a new era fundamentally different

from previous ones, in which totally new modes of living

were possible.

• An increasing number of natural scientists and philosophers

were asserting that the natural world changed over time and

that “human nature” changed in response to changes in

environment (e.g. Hutton in geology; Buffon in biology; Locke

and Rousseau in philosophy).

• Among artists, this led to the idea that art could evolve like an

organic life form or be methodically improved like a scientific

theory (both ideas have obvious appeal for theatre-makers, for

whom improvement through repetition is a practical necessity).

• The 19th Century saw increasing reference to modernity as a condition in which all meaningful continuity with the past has been lost.

• Marx and Engels: Revolution• History is accelerating toward a moment when all existing political and economic

relations will be overturned, society will be fundamentally re-organized, and history will effectively end. (See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology [1846] and Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848])

• Durkheim: Anomie• Rapid changes in social conditions, such as the mass migration of workers from

small towns to cities, have made individuals feel rootless, alienated, and without purpose. (See Durkheim, Suicide [1897])

• Weber: Disenchantment• Modern empiricism and materialism have destroyed our comforting beliefs in the

supernatural and the transcendent. (See Weber, The Sociology of Religion [1870])

With the development of lithography (1796), the steam-powered printing press (1814), and the rotary printing press (1843), books and visual art became reproducible as cheap commodities on a mass scale.

Andy

Warhol,

Campbell’s

Soup Cans,

1962.

With the development of lithography (1796), the steam-powered printing press (1814), and the rotary printing press (1843), books and visual art became reproducible as cheap commodities on a mass scale.

Andy

Warhol,

Campbell’s

Soup Cans,

1962.

“That which withers in the age of mechanical

reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] The

technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced

object from the domain of tradition. By making

reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a

unique existence.”

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction”(1936)

• Do we need a Theatre of the Future? If so, what does it look like? How is it different from the Theatre of the Past? Can the a Theatre of Future enact social evolution or revolution?

• Do we need a theatre that can heal the supposed rupture between modernity and the past—that reconnects and “re-enchants”? Is such a thing even possible?

• What does—or should—a theatre for the masses look like? Can the same play be a work of “high” art and “mass” art at the same time?

• What is the theatre’s purpose when its reach is vastly exceeded by that of new media technology?