Abstract
A full analysis of the effects of Continental influences upon English drama cannot but be complex and encyclopaedic. It should not be limited to those influences that have affected the writing of dramatic literature but must refer also to acting, production, stage design, lighting, and so on. My concern here is very much more limited. I seek to trace, as succinctly as I can, the path by which certain devices that break the dramatic illusion were re-introduced into English drama from the European Continent some twenty years ago, and the effect they may have in productions in England. I shall, exceptionally, include a discussion of three American plays — those by Wilder — which have made an important contribution to the use and revitalisation of such devices.
‘There are’, she said, ‘a kind of folk Who have no horror of a joke.’ (Lewis Carroll, The Three Voices)
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Notes
W. S. Gilbert,Selected Operas, second series (London, 1928) p. 175. There is nothing novel in the relativity of time in literatufe. Gilbert may well have had in mindAs You Like ItIII.ii.328–55, or Bolingbroke inRichard II1. iii. 261.
Notes from Undergroundtrans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York, 1961) pp. 117–18.It will be recalled that ‘the Popish doctors’ of Slawkenbergius’s tale inTristram Shandy maintained that God could make two and two add up to five - an idea taken up by Orwell in1984.
Alfred Tennyson,Poems(2 vols (London, 1845 ) 11, 146–7.
I am greatly indebted to Dr Manfred Draudt of the University of Vienna for answering many questions for me about Tieck and his interest in Elizabethan drama. Basic sources are: Karl Goedeke,Grundriss zur Geschichte der Deutschen Dichtung(Berlin, 1898) vi, 28–45; H. Lüdeke,Ludwig Tieck and das alte englische Theater(Frankfurt a. Main, 1922);
Robert Minder,Un poète romantique allemand: Ludwig Tieck(Paris, 1936). The information to the end of this paragraph has been drawn from that given to me by Dr Draudt. Needless to say, any confusion or errors are my own.
John Willett,The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht(1967 edn) p. 112.
See Ewan MacColl, ‘Grass Roots of Theatre Workshop’, Theatre Quarterly3, 9 (1973) 58–68. Joan Littlewood arrived in Manchester in 1934 and joined Ewan MacColl, who was then working in street theatre. Shortly afterwards the Theatre of Action was formed.
Thornton Wilder,Our Town and Other Plays(Harmondsworth, 1962) p. 14. Quotations from Wilder’s plays are from this edition.
Ann Righter,Shakespeare and the Idea of the Playpp. 206–7; she quotes from Richard Bernheimer,Theatrum Mundi’, The Art Bulletin38, pp. 225–47. See also Gordon Williams, ‘Shakespeare, Kyd, and the Nature of Reality’,Trivium12 (1977) 30, where Bernini’sCommedia dei due Covielli(1637) is set in European and English traditions.
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© 1982 Peter Davison
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Davison, P. (1982). The Continental By-Pass: from Tieck to Brecht. In: Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05177-9_3
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