Shifting Views of the German Principalities

Abstract

Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoers needed a substantial effort of imagination to visualize the countries that they would encounter within geographic texts, described as they were from political, ethnographic, and cultural perspectives. This imaginative capacity was aided in the dramatic exchange, where the representation of foreign spaces required a similar effort of visualization, but where people and nations were given life on stage through individual characters within the drama or allusions to national features. In a psychological study focusing on the intellectual and cognitive significance of drama, Richard Courtney describes the route of information processing and concept formation as developmental steps in human cognition and argues that, in Western societies, the predominant images are visual, and when visual images are used in dramatizations they tend to be more vivid than in other forms of representation.¹ Some of the ethnographic clichés about the German states and their inhabitants extant in early modern geography texts might have sifted into the drama, but the image here is radically deformed through the shifting mirrors of visual perception and the dramatic interaction. While early modern geographers and historiographers displayed some sense of geography and history when depicting what they believed to be the general characteristics of the Germans — even though writers were lured by the rhetoric of commonplaces and their scientific text revealed a fictional aspect — English playwrights were easygoing and informal in their dramatic portrayal of German individuals or cities, alluding to the foreign and the familiar in one dramatic stroke.