• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

SCRIBE AND BÜCHNER
LECTURE NOTES

1) Paris in mid-nineteenth century: 

         The cultural centers of 19th. century Europe were Paris and Vienna - as London was its commercial center.  In Paris the arts and literature were paramount.  The great names are: in painting, Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and the great Impressionist painters (and later the Expressionists); in poetry Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé;  in the novel, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola;  in music, Berlioz, Bizet, Saint Saëns, Gounod, Fauré and Franck.     And in the theatre?  Pixérécourt, Eugene Scribe, Aleander Dumas fils, Augier and Sardou!  In other words, theater in France was mediocre,at nowhere near the level of the other arts.  The best dramatist of the time in France, Alfred de Musset, wrote what he called  'armchair drama' (closet drama) - that is, plays he did not try to get performed in the theater - basically, because the theatre profession would not have understood what he was doing in the drama.  (I strongly suggest students look at de Musset's plays, esp. Don't Trifle (Fool) With Love  - they are playable, and fine dramas.)   Theatre in London and America was even more mediocre than in France.  Indeed, the best known play to survive from nineteenth century Paris, apart from Camille, is Rostand's Cyrano de Bergérac, a sentimental and  escapist fantasy.  It is startling to realize it was written long after Ghosts!

A NON-SUBVERSIVE THEATRE FOR THE BOURGEOISIE

         Parisian theatre was mediocre because it was safe, whereas the best drama is dangerous.  We'll see a little later why Parisian drama and that of England and the U.S., was so timid.  It was the theatre of the new bourgeoisie, the middle class, the most dynamic class, perhaps, since the Athenians of the classical age.  It was a class that had displaced the aristocratic center of power and so could now sentimentalize it, as in Scribe’s The Glass of Water.  It created a whole new economic power; huge industrial cities with their large proletarian populations; imperial possessions for its trade; in America, slavery and the annihilation and dispossession of the native people; and it needed to construct a morality that conveniently went along with all this.  This morality was loudly proclaimed and was carefully constructed not to interfere with the acquisition of wealth.  In other words, morality became ‘respectability’ &nd ash; I think for the first time in culture.  As a voracious new class, the bourgeoisie wanted an art that reflected its tastes and morality.  There was an explosion of art to suit this taste: in painting, sculpture, music, ballet, opera, and the theatre.
         Most of this art was what we now find to be very bad -‘Victorian’ has become synonymous with bad taste; basically because it was designed to evoke excitement without danger and pleasure without awkward questions.  You could find erotic excitement in ‘allegorical’ paintings or sculptures of ‘classical’ nudes and purportedly disapproving pictures of lasciviously decadent orgies; or in situations on stage in which wickedness could be deliciously shown before being punished. There was plenty of moral-heroic jingoistic attitudinizing in heroic battle scenes, in the statuary for tombs, war memorials, etc. In all this prolific output the conventional  ‘idea’ was presented without any strong critical or aesthetic counter-vision.  It was the beginning of two centuries of atrocious taste provoking a reaction as ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ and the various Modernist and avant-garde movements that mostly originated in Paris.
          Paris was the only theater city in France (touring companies from Paris finished off the provincial theaters) so that the situation in Paris was the situation of France and of Europe which took what Paris, dictated culturally.  And from the mid-nineteenth century, the well-made-play absolutely dominated the fashionable, and melodrama dominated the popular, theatres of Europe.  Both forms upheld a rigidly conventional social and political system of beliefs.

WHO WENT TO THE THEATRE?

          The audience that assembled in the Parisian or the London theatres was a miniature reconstruction of society.  In the stalls and dress circles sat the well-to-do; in the next gallery, the middle-middle classes.  In the top galleries, those better-off working classes who did not patronize the melodrama.  For the maximum receipts, all the classes in the theatre had to be kept amused and contented: not divided into hostile factions.  Any ideas that encouraged critical thinking about society were kept off the stage.  The managers simply could not afford to offend any section and lose its patronage. 
          Not only were theatre managers careful not to permit subversive ideas - they conspired with the Censors, in e.g. Paris, London and Vienna, to attack and eradicate anything that hinted subversion.  The theatre was - and still is - the most reactionary cultural institution.  Yet there was a minority of the public that supported the progressive elements in the other arts, in politics and in criticizing the social system.  They wanted a theatre: but no theatre could afford to cater to them.  While the theatre supplied what Ibsen called “Scribe & Co.’s sugar-candy confections” the rest of the culture, at its minority advanced levels, was undertaking serious and revolutionary ideas of the nature of the forces in history that went into making the conflicts of the present.
         The Parisian theater-going public in belle-époque Paris consisted of the wealthy patrons of the boulevard theatres; smart, sophisticated, international patrons of opera, ballet and well-made-plays written to formulae. (There was, for instance, much patronage from the South American rubber plantation owners).  This was a public interested in undemanding entertainment and definitely not interested in complex  'ideas' or any truly controversial subject matter.  We see, here, the first example of that commodity entertainment produced now by Hollywood and Broadway for the huge international market of avid consumers.

THE FINANCIAL INVESTMENT IN THE THEATRE

         It was the period of large financial investments in the theater: in the buildings, sets, costumes and star actors.  (With such investments managers dared not risk alienating the public with controversial work.  This theater industry represented the opposite of the idea of drama that would be handed on from Schiller, Goethe,  Kleist, Büchner and Hebbel, to the best dramatists of the modern theatre.   The situation was the same as with Broadway today: a commercial success could make the fortunes of a show: but the show demanded a tremendous outlay of expenses for stars, sets, costumes, etc.  The Glass of Water, for example, required sumptuous Queen Anne sets and costumes: this was much of its appeal.  A failure could be catastrophic because of this expense.  Thus the only thing for theatre managers (in England they were actor-managers) was to play safe and try to continue to "give the public what it wants."  This really meant playing to a common denominator which, by definition, could not be divisive, subversive or particularly distinguished
         The reason for this is logical.   Society is made up of people who, in smaller aggregates, like some things very much: and of much larger aggregates who like some things moderately.  The smaller aggregates might like string quartets, poems, fine art, philosophy, serious politics, history, difficult drama, innovative paintings, the novels of Flaubert or Henry James.  None of these smaller groups can generate the amount of profit that the public as a whole can give.  Now if we take, not the smaller groups, but almost everybody, we find that they nearly all like something a little (that is, not very much).  As with Hollywood and T.V. today, the trick for entrepreneurs of entertainment (and, today, the corporations who control them) is to give the large public what it all likes a little)  Very few smart Parisians would like Don Carlos but those who did would like it immensely.  Victor Hugo’s Hernani was a Don Carlos for the crowd: a lobotomized Don Carlos. Controversial or original plays, like Alfred de Musset's, or Büchner’s Danton’sDeath  also would not attract the large crowd.   A theater of the very few is not profitable business, even if it is good art.
         Most of the public would be agreeably and mildly entertained by The Glass of Water and would pay to see it, as a lot of people, today, are entertained by Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.  What we have, with Scribe and the melodramatists, is the arrival of an entertainment industry.  In the art of the novel, a major writer like Flaubert, Henry James or Joseph Conrad could survive on a relatively small and select readership (as with fine novelists later).  He or she would not become immensely rich but could make a comfortable living.  And would not risk immense loss.  But the economics of theatre meant that drama could not address a select and discriminating few: which is why de Musset wrote armchair dramas There was not yet a Little Theatre movement that was to arrive later, mostly because of Ibsen.  (There is something similar in today’s cinema between the blockbuster and the emergence of the art movie houses.)

     The main money-making creations of the nineteenth century commodity theatre were:: melodramas increasingly for popular audiences; farces (by Labiche and Feydeau) and well-made plays.  Also operettas (e.g. Offenbach) ballets, vaudevilles, the circus - every kind of both sophisticated and elementary entertainment.

2) THE WELL MADE PLAY: (Scribe, Dumas fils, Augier and Sardou)

            There are enjoyable aspects of the well-made-play: it is safe entertainment for the intelligent and sophisticated. The pleasure of the well-made play was to see the ingenious ways in which Scribe and his follows adapted the formulae to new subjects.
 The technical finesse of the well-made-play   (Cf.  Stephen Stanton:  pp. xvi xvii)
The formula, once mastered, could be repeated countlessly, in rapid succession.  Scribe wrote over 300 full length plays, and nearly as many shorter farces, opera libretti and operettas.  (This is no necessary indication of superficiality: the great Spanish dramatist, Lope de Vega wrote over 1,500 plays).  However, Scribe himself would have been the first to admit his plays were really just entertainments, with no serious purpose behind them other than to be popular and profitable.  The one admirable quality of the well-made-play as that it was at least well-made: and in Paris it was performed with a great deal of artistic skill.

         The American novelist, Henry James, was an avid theatergoer in Paris and London and he was impressed by the Parisian product:

“A good French play is an admirable work of art, of which it behooves patrons of the    contemporary English drama, at any rate, to speak with respect.  It serves its purpose to perfection, and French dramatists, as far as I can see, have no more secrets to learn.  The first half-a-dozen a foreign spectator listens to seem to him among the choicest productions of the human mind, and it is only little by little that he becomes conscious of the extraordinary meagerness of their material.  ...Prime material was evidently long ago exhausted, and the best that can be done now is to re-arrange old situations with a kind of desperate ingenuity.  The field looks terribly narrow, but it is still cleverly worked.”
“An old theme, - but with a difference,” the workman claims; and he makes the most of the difference - for laughter, if he is an amuseur pure and simple; for tears if he is a moralist.”
 (Henry James: The Scenic Art )

          In other words, the French turned out a well crafted product which could be appreciated by middle-class connoisseurs of smart taste.  This affected the whole way drama was discussed. Unlike the critics of the earlier period, who fought passionately over principles of dramatic art, there now appeared a whole new class of critic serving the commodity theatre and its skills.  For these critics, theatre was on the level of social events, fashionable dress or furniture design. The pleasure was found in the ingenuity with which a safely familiar product could be made to look original.
In the well-made plays of Dumas fils and Augier, even the ‘problem play’ or piece à thèse  (thesis play) like Olympe’s Marriage was really a spicy entertainment with no serious call for cultural soul-searching.  This is an audience that would have been either outraged or bored; most likely both - by Ibsen’s Brand, or Büchner’s Woyzeck,.  The 19th. century theatre was the last place in which to expect a visionary artist to appear.

            By 1850, Paris had 50 theaters  and an even greater number of theatres outside France willing to translate or adapt  the plays, so that well-made-plays, if successful, could be performed in numerous international venues and make a dramatist's fortune;  and the fortune of everyone connected with the enterprise, from the stars to the janitor and the theatre’s resident cat.  This was a totally new development in dramatic art: that a whole network of theaters were in place throughout the world to put on the latest product from Paris.  Scribe became immensely rich by his writing, much like Neil Simon today.  This, of course, is a legitimate function of theatre: to keep up the profession, give it lots of work to do, and please a theater-going public.  It even might be an essential function: for once you get this public, then it is possible for the serious playwright to arrive and challenge it.  The well-made-play created in reaction, an audience if not ready to accept Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw, at least ready to be offended, perplexed, and ultimately even intrigued by them.  Ibsen could not have become a world dramatist without the creation of an international, conventional theater public. e Conventional playwrights like Scribe Augier and Sardou created the theatrical 'vocabulary' which the serious writers could then violate or extend into truly imaginative, bold and subversive art.

Shaw: Dramatic Opinions
         The best introduction to this is the dramatic criticism of Bernard Shaw (in the Hunt Library: Dramatic Opinions in 2 vols.)  Shaw is one of the finest and funniest theatre reviewers ever and most of the work he had to review was mediocre British adaptations of French well-made-plays.  But Shaw was reviewing just as Ibsen’s plays were infiltrating London - in fact he was a major champion of the ‘New Drama’.  Dramatic Opinions is an on the scene account of a revolution taking place in dramatic art.

3) THE CENSORSHIP AND THE THEATRE

Censorship was vigilant against any drama that might disturb the bourgeoisie.  Europe, after the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and the Commune of 1871, was reactionary and highly nervous about dangerous ideas.  The theatre has always been a potentially explosive art form, the one where the representative public, gathered together, can be most 'worked upon.  The Censorship in the European countries, France, England, Germany, made sure that drama remained safe and totally non-subversive.  The secret behind the immense hysteria with which Ibsen was greeted, especially in London, is that the European bourgeoisie professed a form of social morality, based on Christian ethics, that was everywhere contradicted by their capitalist way of life - still the situation in the United States.  It was a class with a very guilty and vulnerable conscience, vigilant against anything that exposed the prevailing hypocrisy.  Hence the prosecutions of writers and artists like Baudelaire and Flaubert; the hostility encountered by Manet and the Impressionists; the banning of works (e.g. Ghosts)from public performance;  the tremendous cultural controversies of the time.  This century had experienced, not just political revolutions, but had seen both Charles Darwin and Karl Marx shatter the conventional assumptions by which the middle classes sought to understand their world.

         Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art) has written that the nineteenth century bourgeoisie was the only class in history whose right to exist was challenged from the outset: and by both the Right and the Left.  The Right attacked it for its irreligious materialism, its crass taste, its hypocrisies and cowardice: the Left attacked it for its social injustices.  All this had to be kept out of the drama if the unified and lucrative mass audience was to be appeased.

         Though‘mere entertainment’,  conventional art like the well-made-play served a political purpose, just as modern entertainment and sports do today. La Dame aux Camélias (Camille) is a highly sentimental, conventional drama but, because of its sympathetic portrait of its courtesan heroine, it created  a scandal that led to calls to ban it from the stage.  The official Censor, however, permitted the 'performance of the play to divert attention from controversial government policies. There was nothing in the play seriously to challenge the operating beliefs of society.  Naturally, the play became a hugely popular success.

          The clever formula of the well-made-play was to get the audience caught up in a suspense-filled action that never strayed beyond conventionally accepted subjects or themes.   This required creating a purely tactical situation, usually adultery and murder, or risqué sexuality, located in smart society, and then subject it to the pressure of urgent and artificial time. Scribe was the master of this art.

4) Eugene  Scribe (1791-1861)

         The Glass of Water is history devoid of all meaning: its only lesson is that history has no meaning; that it is futile to search for deep causes behind historical events. As ‘real’ causes are simply trivial accidents, the kind of intellectual analysis that might instigate radical action is patently a delusion: a view that those in power obviously would encourage.   The contrast with Friedrich Schiller’s  Don Carlos couldn't be greater.  In Schiller's play the story allows us to see and better understand behind the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, the competing ideologies of Catholicism and Protestantism, of orthodoxy versus freedom of thought,  and how this conflict can be read as a metaphor for understanding our modern condition.  The human story opens up a huger perspective, a possibility for change at a turning point in western history: the idea of history that Scribe emphatically denied. 

         In The Glass of Water the quarrel between two nation states, England and France, is reduced to the infatuation of two women over a cute guardsman, Masham, and the stratagem of a cynical politician,  Bolingbroke, to use of this situation to bring about his policy of peace between Britain and France.   Because none of the characters represents any conceivable idea, the struggle over Masham is hardly more than the struggle of cardboard figures over a military tailor's dummy.  There is nothing in the action that indicates larger issues of war and peace, or any serious reason why, for instance, the Duchess of Marlborough should be the enemy of Bolingbroke.  Scribe is a master is making all this theatrically suspenseful.  There is no denying the play is enjoyable, just as e.g.  a well-performed detective story on TV is enjoyable.  It is a well crafted use of the formula. The 'reversals' are almost purely mechanical and tactical, not serving any 'meaning' and not advancing any argument.  It is action more or less disconnected from themes or ideas like a cleverly contrived mechanical toy.

THE THEATRE OF THINGS, OBJECTS

         In fact, the well-made-play increasingly focused attention, not on ideas or themes but on contrived situations and on things: a glass of water, a “scrap of paper”, an incriminating bracelet,(Wilde)  a sealed letter, a locked cabinet, a gun: some thing that could be mentioned, anticipated, received, hidden, and finally flourished and used fatally or triumphantly.   This served the purpose of suspense and was the perfect device of a materialistic society.  The analogy is with the suspense of the gambling table or the Stock Exchange.   But this emphasis on things which was used by Scribe & Co. only for sensationalist purposes was to create a new form of theatric poetry in the hands of Ibsen whose realistic plays are filled with symbolic things: objects that carry along the argument of the play as much as does the dialogue.  (As 'artistic director' of the theatre in Bergen, as a young man, Ibsen had to oversee the productions of hundreds of well-made-plays, mostly by 'Scribe & Co.  For this was what the Norwegian public wanted)

         The fashionable well-made play was a sophisticated, urban production and excluded the Romantic idea of the world of nature as a ‘dimension’ to human action. . The world of the well-made-play is smart society, either in historical times or in the present (mostly the latter.   One of the better practitioner's of the well-made-play was Oscar Wilde, who used the creaky formula shamelessly but then set about subverting it with his epigrammatic wit.   The melodrama, by contrast, employed powerful elements of the natural world: of storm, earthquake, flood, fire: all these were the 'amazing' interventions of the world of nature onto human affairs.  These interventions by Nature were the equivalent of the 'metaphysical landscape' employed by Elizabethan theatre: the supernatural characters, the storms and miraculous manifestations of Shakespearean drama.  Ibsen will bring back this natural world in Brand and Peer Gynt  and in the Realist Cycle he will smuggle Romantic natural perspectives into his images of modern life         Scribe obviously approved of the cynical world-weariness of his Bolingbroke.  None of his characters are capable of change or growth, of evolution or devastation because there is nothing in them to evolve or be devastated. Similarly, it is pointless to look for meaning in history: it is nothing but a play of trivial causes, of chance. (cf. Bolingbroke: Stanton, p. 46)

         This idea of history would make any attempt consequentially to change society obviously futile.   Any belief in revolution, in reform, in passionate involvement in a cause, similarly would be futile.  Obviously this was a very congenial philosophy for a modern capitalist bourgeoisie uneasy or in denial about the injustices and horrors its system had created.  Scribe is perfectly aware how the theme of the play is one that his patrons appreciate - that is the political purpose of such a play, as it is of Hollywood and the T.V. networks.  And Scribe is no fool.  He is certainly clever in the way he manipulates his play so that we will be on Bolingbroke's side.

         ‘We' are on Bolingbroke's side because he brings us into his confidence - as in his speech (p.46) on the theme of meaninglessness in history.  By this speech, Scribe gets his audience to conspire with his hero: we are flattered in being addressed as if we, too, know the way of the world:   And now that this speech has removed serious morality or ideology from the conflict, we can settle down and enjoy the ‘Snakes and Ladders’ procedure of the plotting.  Such procedure is good entertainment.    Each Act ends on a resounding 'curtain' which will make the audience eager to hurry back after the intermission to see what will happen next.  The curtain usually is some tremendous reversal of fortune for the sympathetic party, so that the audience interest is how the sympathetic party will recover from this latest blow.  These are the ‘curtains’ of each act:  Act I.  Masham has killed his enemy in a duel and is in danger.  The Duchess buys up Bolingbroke's debts and has therefore power over him   She ascends the ladder.  Act II. Bolingbroke forces the Duchess to find a place at court for Abigail, and so his plot advances. He ascends the ladder Act III. Abigail discovers the Queen is in love with Masham, and so she seems to slide down the snake.  Act IV.  The Duchess discovers the Queen is her rival for Masham and so she discloses he has killed someone in a duel.  The sympathetic party slides down the snake.  Act V.  Triumph of Bolingbroke over the Duchess, and happy love ending for the innocent Abigail and Masham.  In all this, not a single serious issue has been raised.  The play is full of bustle and intrigue, cleverly signifying nothing. 

           Later writers, Alexander Dumas fils, and Augier, introduced some safe moralism into their well-made-plays.  In Camille (La Dame Aux Camélias) Dumas takes up the theme of the demi-monde, the world of courtesans, and presents Marguerite Gautier with sympathetic sentimentality. However, Dumas kills her off, sentimentally of course, in a deathbed scene before she can prove socially awkward for his hero, Armand, and himself.    Augier shows a less sympathetic courtesan in Olympe's Marriage and righteously shoots her for the final curtain.  He is no more lethal to his heroine than Dumas, however.  In both these plays, ideas that might challenge decent middle-class morality are simply terminated. The well-made play is created precisely to please the conventionally moral middle-class.  The a 'moral' or 'message' inserted into the well-made-play was an extra luxury - a good conscience, which Scribe could do without.  We are familiar with the formula in Hollywood and T.V. drama where a ‘troubling issue’ is raised but its more challenging implications carefully evaded.
         The powerful ideological presence of History in the plays of Schiller and Kleist, is here an exotic plot device for the fashionable dramatist. What is the cause of the enmity between Bolingbroke and the Duchess of Marlborough?    He is the leader of the Tories.  The Duchess and her husband, the military Duke, lead the Whigs who are in office.  The Duke is conducting wars abroad, which the Tories oppose. What do these wars represent?  Are there any large issues involved in them?   The play does not mention them but focuses on the love intrigue between the Queen, the Duchess and young Masham.  It is not demonstrated that Bolingbroke is morally or ethically superior to the Duchess of Marlborough - only cleverer.  It is true that he more or less protects the innocents, Masham and Abigail, but this is mere sentimentality - the reverse side of cynicism.  (Bolingbroke, surveying the sleeping and brainless Masham is a superficial version of Satan observing Adam and Eve in Milton’s  Paradise Lost}  Masham and Abigail bring nothing to the drama but their own decorative vulnerability.  Because they are so vulnerable, we find ourselves on the side of Bolingbroke, their protector.  What all the characters represent is utterly conventional: we find them in all mainstream works: the kind of people harassed by monsters or criminals or vampires and rescued by a Dr. Hesling, Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot: the kind of innocents menaced by a Dracula, Moriarty and so on, representatives of the conventional world needing protection from the cleverly wicked.  (In Ibsen's reversal of this scenario the ‘outsider’ world of the unconventional, the dreaded, the strange needs protecting from the encroaching banality of the conventional world).

         Bolingbroke's cynicism is that of a man who finds the world as it is, and himself in it thoroughly acceptable.  We have not really met this type before, in all its unflappable complacency; it is a type manufactured by Scribe and polished up by Oscar Wilde (e.g. .Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband; the best of Wilde’s well-made-plays).   Bolingbroke has no genuine self to be alienated from. He once could love, he tells Masham, until he married: now, in his cynical later years, he takes to politics for the sheer excitement, (37).  It's true he opposes war and wants "peace and industry" - two bourgeois values: but this is only presented to get the plot going. It is not the guiding principle of the dramatic action of the play: it is not investigated, explored, questioned. Bolingbroke wants to avert a war with France, but it is nowhere demonstrated that this war would be unjust or that any principles are involved in the conflict between the two countries.  We are told that Bolingbroke makes his enemies tremble with his written articles, but we can't really see that he represents anything to tremble at - not in the way in which e.g. Karl Marx made capitalist Europe tremble.  He mentions that his allies are Swift and Pope, but Swift and Pope, as Tories, were also genuine moralists.  Swift, in his writings, defended the Irish against England's policies and, along with Pope, attacked precisely the kind of moral cynicism that Bolingbroke in this play represents.

When Ibsen began his apprenticeship in the theater he had to oversee the production of hundreds of well-made-plays, for that was what the public wanted - he called it performing daily abortions.  Ibsen's own early plays show much of the ingenious trickery of Scribe, especially his first attempt at tragedy, Lady Inger of Østraat. Here we have fatal letters, withheld information, people speaking at cross purposes and fatally misunderstanding each other, great co-incidences, up until the denouement when a mother unknowingly murders her own son.  We can see that the author of Lady Inger has great talents: but the Scribean formula ends up by strangling them.    But the big difference is that the issues and the characters of Lady Inger so compel our interest and sympathy that we protest at their being manipulated by the mechanical devices of the well-made-play. The achievement of Scribe was to perfect an exciting theatrical entertainment which others could learn and take up. Scribe's name on a playbill guaranteed an evening of ingenious and clever entertainment, like Alan Aykbourn or Neil Simon today.  This was the entertainment of that smart society that Georg Büchner, as much as Ibsen, detested

5) GEORG BÜCHNER (1813 - 1837)

DRAMATIC VERSE  vs. ‘PROSE’ DRAMA

      Don Carlos and The Prince of Homburg were written in ‘elevated’ verse:  an ‘elevated’ dialogue that intensifies into rhetoric at levels of consciousness raised above that of ‘ordinary’ utterance; in a dimension outside (above) that of everyday experience. It is highly conscious of the precision and fullness of its utterances.   The writer of poetic drama sets a high level of controlled utterance, where metaphor, imagery, rhythm, alliteration ‘counterpoint’ the ‘motives and intentions of the characters, who cannot be separated from this heightened state of existence.  We also expect and permit a heightened form of action to accompany this consciousness.

             Woyzeck, on the other hand, is the very essence of what the new prose dialogue can do. The depiction of a mind fragmenting and breaking down needs the dislocated jerky, disconnected and fragmented speech of prose.  (Woyzeck also has an operatic ‘other life’ in the similarly fragmented, atonal music of Alban Berg’s opera).  In King Lear when the King’s grasp on reality breaks down into madness, Shakespeare writes a prose often similar to Büchner’s.

.  Büchner and Scribe would seem to have nothing in common except that they were contemporaries.  Georg Büchner is the author of only three plays, written before his early death at the age of 23. Büchner, in Germany, and Scribe in Paris, wrote at a time when the theater was prosperous, popular and entering a phase of cultural insignificance.  It was a situation in which Scribe, not Büchner, could thrive. One might say that the difference between Büchner and Scribe is, that while both believed history to be meaningless, in contrast to Schiller; Büchner lamented this situation: Scribe happily exploited it.  At his death Büchner was practically unknown to the public and remained so until the early twentieth century when he was rediscovered.  So he is more a twentieth-century dramatist than a Romantic one: a force behind the modernist and avant-garde theatre.     

The development of a dramatic prose capable of the same intensity as verse is going to change all the rules of drama: of scene, character, action, dialogue, props.  The development took some time: English dramatists (e.g. George Lillo: The London Merchant) and the French tried and failed with the new bourgeois ‘serious’ drama (drames).  In Germany, Lessing attempted bourgeois tragedy with Miss Sara Sampson and Emilie Galotti  These, for us, fail because they convert the old verse rhetoric into an equally fervid prose rhetoric: they changed the milieu of the play from aristocratic to bourgeois but keep the rhetorical histrionics which still derived from the neo-classical verse theater. However, in Germany Stürm und Drang dramatists, like Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, (1751-1792) adapted many of the elements of the Serious Drama, broke with the artificial rhetorical style, and depicted shockingly violent actions and dialogue to create genuinely interesting drama. {Büchner wrote a sympathetic novella about Lenz's mental breakdown which has strong parallels with the plot of Woyzeck}  Lenz’s The Tutor, and The Soldiers search out a striking new, indeterminate dramatic form -Lenz called his plays comedies, but then changed his mind - that anticipates Büchner's Woyzeck,  (The often extreme violence of some scenes of the Stürm und Drang  plays anticipate the work of Sarah Kane. In The Tutor the hero castrates himself onstage). Other 'disciples' of Lenz are Franz Wedekind and Bertolt Brecht (Brecht adapted The Tutor}., Though Lenz rather incongruously tries to tack on a ‘moral’ at the end of his violent plays, (e.g. better treatment of tutors: regulated prostitution for the military) these can painlessly be removed to reveal one of the major modern dramatic methods: the episodic {epic} drama.  Lenz and Büchner did not found a tradition in their own times, but were discovered in the 20th. century by Wedekind and Brecht. Woyzeck seems an elaboration, in working class terms, of Büchner's account of the mental breakdown of Lenz ; which is itself a brilliant piece of imaginative writing.  The fragmentation of reality is even more acute, leading to the protagonist's breakdown into insanity.

      This Stürm und Drang tradition (which Goethe and Schiller subscribed to in their early plays) is a major alternative to the more ‘formal’ dramatic tradition of Ibsen and the modern realist and dialectical dramatists. .  Lenz and Büchner show us one possible tendency of modern drama, held in suspension until it was taken up in the early 20th. Century. . There is a fluid, organic, seemingly unstructured nature to their succession of scenes and the scenes very casual relation to each other: and in the finely indeterminate moods:  comic, pathetic, tragic, satiric, grotesque - all evident of a totally serious art, determined to break away from neo-classical models. The staccato rhythms, sudden outbreaks of violence (the tutor's self-castration) and indeterminacy of mood, part pathetic, part tragic, part comic grotesque anticipate Büchner's Woyzeck). Bertolt Brecht wrote an adaptation of The Tutor.
            

Büchner and Modern Drama

             Büchner created a new dramatic language: that of a modern ‘fragmented,’ disconnected and displaced consciousness  The centre of his play is the disintegrating mind of Woyzeck and Büchner manages to create the greatest psychological intensity within this totally localized suffering. It is not a dramatic prose that can organize an elaborate, multi-dimensional dramatic argument

             Büchner’s impact upon modern ‘cutting edge’ drama since has been immense.  Hauptmann, Wedekind, the German Expressionist playwrights and Bertolt Brecht all acknowledged him.  Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov did not know his work.   Büchner’s plays are experimental, difficult to interpret, discomfiting to most audiences.  His most daring play, Woyzeck, has been made into a superb modernist opera by the composer Alban Berg.  His historical pl;ay, Danton's Death takes up the major theme of Romantic drama in Schiller, Goethe, Kleist: the individual caught in the great historical moment, being shaped by it and himself/herself shaping it.. 

             In Schiller a Posa might fail in his attempt to bring the new ideas of liberty to Philip's Spain, but the effort is not seen as pointless. It has value for Schiller’s audience as a ‘legacy’ for the future.
In The Prince of Homburg the Prince's subjective dream of achieving his destined identity of personal glory from the historical circumstances of the thirty years' war, has to be replaced by his submission to the objective realities and requirements of the cause (Brandenburg patriotism) that he serves.  In both plays, individuals are seen to have, actually or potentially, influence on historical events.

             The French Revolution, above all other events, was the moment when human beings seemed to seize hold of human history and destiny, "the only revolution in the world," wrote Hegel, "that set out to remake mankind."  It was so confidently believed that the alienated Past could be cast aside and the Future inaugurated, that the French stopped the clocks in Paris, changed the calendar to start at year one, and changed the names of the months of the year. 

             In Büchner’s play, as in life, Marat, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, seem to have got hold of a historical moment, and the opportunity to shape human destiny beyond the wildest dreams of Posa, Wallenstein, or Prince Friedrich of Homburg. Yet the play pessimistically denies them any triumphant victory: it dramatizes only the failure of the project.   In less than a decade, the French were living under a self-proclaimed emperor who had made his family the kings and queens of new monarchies. Frenchmen were dying in the tens of thousands in a series of wars of conquest.  (For Büchner's account of this see Hessian Messenger pp. 47-48)

             Napoleon, however, was a liberating force compared with the powers that followed his defeat and overthrow.  In Büchner's time Europe was governed, once again, by tyrannies, by a 'Holy Alliance' of reactionary monarchies guided by Metternich  .  These had reversed the whole movement towards revolutionary change started by the French Revolution.  So Danton's Death is a glance back at what went wrong with the greatest historical experiment yet seen.  He chooses that very short time between the death of Danton at the guillotine, in April, 1794, to the death, three months later, of Robespierre and St. Just.  We see only the death of Danton, but we know, from history, that Robespierre and St. Just also are doomed.  It is the revolution self-destructing and making way for Napoleon, a "man of destiny."

             In an important letter answering objections to his method in Danton’s Death, Büchner told his parents (275-276) "I can't make a Danton and the bandits of the Revolution into virtuous heroes!  To show their dissoluteness, I had to let them be dissolute, to show their godlessness I had to let them speak like atheists....As far as the so-called idealistic poets are concerned, I find they have produced hardly anything besides marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected pathos, but not human beings of flesh and blood, whose sorrow and joy I share and whose actions fill me with loathing or admiration.  In a word, I think much of Goethe or Shakespeare, but very little of Schiller.

             In Büchner and in Scribe, Schiller’s idea of historical drama as locating the great historical forces that made us what we are gives way to a less idealistic view.  In Büchner’s last play, Woyzeck, the idea of living in historical times has dwindled down to a view of human life as absurd, animalistic, controlled by sensations and impulses: And beyond Woyzeck’s individual situation of mental disintegration, society, too, is seen as hopelessly disintegrated and fragmented, none of the fragments communicating to each other - an idea sounded in Danton's Death, also. Woyzeck portrays a world where no-one is in control of events or even able to understand them.  Instead of giving shape to reality, reality itself disintegrates into fragments.   The disorder within Woyzeck’s brain makes him see a world in disorder. This goes even further than Kleist who, in all his plays, had portrayed reality as fundamentally unstable.  In Danton’s Death and Woyzeck, it is shown to be totally without meaning.

The Break with Dramatic Linearity

             In its very structure, Woyzeck is a sequence of fragments; and the very order of these fragments is uncertain - and it does not matter.  For, breaking with historical causality, with the confident interpretation of the forces involved, Büchner also breaks with dramatic linearity.  If events cannot be logically linked to reveal some 'higher' pattern, then the most authentic presentation of experience is of its essential disconnectedness. Woyzeck seems an elaboration, in a working class character, of Büchner's account of the mental breakdown of the Stürm und Drang dramatist, Jacob Lenz   Büchner’s biographical essay, Lenz  is a brilliant piece of imaginative writing, where Büchner enters into the disintegrating mind of Lenz.  The fragmentation of Woyzeck’s reality is even more acute, leading to the protagonist's breakdown into insanity. This break with dramatic linearity, his Episodic method, I believe, is Büchner's most radical innovation. It was taken up by the Stationsdramen of German Expressionism and by Bertolt Brecht. Büchner's work remained unknown for long and modern drama took a different path, retaining the narrative linearity of traditional literature, the "Aristotelian” drama' that Brecht was to oppose.

             Danton's Death and Woyzeck are not analyses but‘presentations: the plays do not symbolically and dialectically shape the situation, or try to discover its ideological causes as Schiller would, nor internalize it as part of an inner dialectics as  Kleist did in The Prince of Homburg.  When Prince Frederick goes through the devastation that makes all existence absurd, there is an alternative, perhaps still stable objective order for him to re-enter, transformed.  In Büchner’s plays, there was never such an Order in the first place.

             Büchner, as an important biologist and a materialist, had no patience with the tradition of Idealist thought out of which Schiller, Kleist and, later, Ibsen formed their plays, in which dramatic actions also establish a conflict of Ideas. Büchner insisted the good dramatist, must "create human beings of flesh and blood with all their unflattering characteristics included”.  Drama had to be neither more nor less moral than history itself. 

             The disjointed, episodic method of the play, insists there is no logical necessity behind the sequence of scenes and actions in the play: in fact, editors are not sure what the sequence should be - there is more than one version.  So, just as Büchner takes logic out of history, so he seems to take it out of dramatic plotting.  His plays represent what Aristotle thought was the worst of plots - the episodic.  It was the worst, he thought, because it did not reveal any tragic necessity behind the action, such as we find in e.g. Don Carlos. Büchner, however, did not see any such necessity.  He protested that Schiller’s method is just not how we experience reality. Instead, he wanted to bring drama down to the way we experience day to day life where we do not see large patterns behind events.

             In its very structure, then, Woyzeck is a sequence of fragments the order of which is uncertain - and this does not matter.  Breaking with historical causality, with the confident interpretation of the ideological forces involved in reality, Büchner also breaks with dramatic linearity.  If events cannot be logically linked to reveal some 'higher' pattern, then the most authentic presentation of experience is of its disconnectedness.  In Danton’s Death, Robespierre and St. Just do confidently see a pattern of "progress" behind events: but Danton, once a revolutionary hero, now cannot see progressive linearity: the guillotine (Death) has reduced existence to absurdity.                

Sources for WOYZECK:

1. Büchner's own rewriting of the diaries of Lenz: one of the Stürm und Drang dramatists writing just earlier than Schiller.  Woyzek’s inarticulate breakdown follows closely the pattern of Lenz’s mental breakdown that Büchner sympathetically recounted.
2. The account of the trial and execution of an actual soldier, Woyzeck who killed his girl friend in circumstances very similar to the play.  The original (real life) Woyzeck also heard voices telling him to kill.
                Büchner's combines the mental breakdown of Lenz, and the misfortunes and humiliations of Woyzeck to create a kind of nightmare world, seen through the deranged mind of the hero (like the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - an Expressionist movie).  Most of the figures, like the Doctor, the Captain, the Drum Major are more like frightening puppets, or caricatures, and only Woyzeck, Marie and André seem human.
3. Büchner also utilizes Lenz's theory of art: the need to immerse oneself in the life of the humble people.and the accidental, spontaneous, unplanned nature of beauty: of ordinary things in all their simple truth.
                Dramatic logic, necessity, has been removed.
                So that the forces working upon Woyzeck, leading to his breakdown into insanity are purely haphazard and it is impossible to say what 'caused' the breakdown.

The Aggravations of Woyzeck’s increasing insanity:
First, Marie's infidelity: then -
a. The Captain's cruel jokes about Marie and the Drum Major
b.  The Doctor's experiment with a diet of only peas.
c. Woyzeck's own failing grasp upon events.
d. Andre’s revelation of the drum major’s boasting about Marie
e.  The humiliations inflicted by the drum major

Dramatic characterization.

Only Woyzeck and Marie - and maybe André -  are seen 3-dimensionally.  Everyone else in the play is a caricature, seen through Woyzeck's distorted vision. The jagged, staccato, episodic succession of the scenes 'decentralizes' the drama, creating the idea of a fragmented reality, a smashed up world, without apparent logic.  As in Danton’s Death characters talk past each other - cannot communicate and affect  each other.The Doctor  the Captain and the Drum Major are brutally indifferent to Woyzeck’s inner self, the suffering they are inflicting on him, so that they don't even attempt to communicate with him. Even Marie is trapped within her own world, unable to communicate with Woyzeck.’s.  The result is that the play creates a sense of impenetrable isolation. 

            The episodic method means that the audience is presented with disconnected pieces of action that it has to piece into an idea of what is going on. In Alban Berg’s opera, this fragmentation of the text is matched with the fragmented style of the dodecaphonic (12 tone) musical system.
Let's look at the sequence of brief episodes which really decides the fate of the characters, WOYZECK and MARIE.  (Remember, this sequence is an editor’s/director’s choice.  Another sequence is possibly

THE EPISODIC SCENES OF THE PLAY  (One reconstructed sequence)

I.  At the Captain’s.  The Captain’s self-centered, indulgent philosophizing Romantic ‘angst’  vs. Woyzeck’s own private distress: the two cannot communicate.
II  Woyzeck and Andre.  Woyzeck’s first signs of madness.  Woyzeck’s single camaraderie is with Andre.
III  MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR - WOYZECK
Marie catches the eye of the Drum Major.  Marie already reputed to be ‘loose’which is one source of Woyzeck’s torment?  Again, a gulf between him and another human being.
IV.  FAIRGROUND. The Animals (Monkey and Horse) and the animalic actions that follow.  Leading to MARIE’S physical excitement and her seduction by the Drum Major.
 V.  Inside the circus booth. MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR are intensely aware of each other: the horse, "behaving indecently" arouses their sexual excitement.  The DRUM MAJOR makes his move.
      MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR  have begun their affair.  The earrings are the DRUM MAJOR'S    
      gift to her. WOYZECK understands what has happened but neither of them actually communicate 
      this.
VII. THE DOCTOR sees Woyzeck only as some kind of animal object without feelings, to experiment upon (VII. 115) and totally ignores the obvious signs of WOYZECK'S growing insanity.

VIII. DRUM MAJOR and MARIE.  She resists then succumbs

IX.  The CAPTAIN uses WOYZECK as an audience for his own sentimental ruminations: he could as well be talking to himself.  He callously torments WOYZECK with cruel allusions to MARIE'S affair with the DRUM MAJOR, only for his own amusement. He is totally oblivious to the fact he is driving WOYZECK out of his mind and driving him to murder.
X.  MARIE and WOYZECK at last confront each other.  There will be twelve more brief scenes before the murder, but we already know it is going to take place.  From now on, the action of the play is simply that of approaching, episode by episode, the inevitable outcome.
XVI (125) Büchner has a fine 'echo' of Othello when WOYZECK learns from the innocent André (unwittingly playing IAGO) that the DRUM MAJOR has boasted (as Cassio was supposed to have) about MARIE.  It is the furthest remove from the Othello- rhetoric but it packs a similar pathos.
XVII  Tavern:  The humiliation of Woyzeck by the DRUM MAJOR.
 XVIII  Woyzeck buys a knife from a Jew
And so on.  The scenes are each a disconnected succession, not a ‘sequence’ concluding in catastrophe.  The arbitrary nature of the succession of scenes denies the ‘comfort’ of seeing a significance behind the events: we are confronted with the ‘facts’ that defy ‘interpretation.’

Definition: A hero is as 'tragic' as the issues he/she engages with.