Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama . Matthew S. Buckley . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. vii+191.
2010; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/650523
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewTragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama. Matthew S. Buckley . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. vii+191.Wendy C. NielsenWendy C. NielsenMontclair State University Search for more articles by this author Montclair State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe French Revolution was the key event of the European Romantic era not only because it led to several wars on the Continent and the birth of nations abroad (Haiti) but also owing to its impact on Western thinking, letters, and ontology. Recommending introductory reading about the French Revolution is a rather difficult task, and Matthew S. Buckley's new book, Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama, explains why: the objective “truth” about the Revolution is as elusive as the tragic drama it evokes. The first three chapters of Tragedy Walks the Streets (“The Theater of the Revolution,” “The Drama of the Revolution,” and “The Revolution and British Theatrical Politics”) serve as a thoughtful introduction to the French Revolution and its theatricality. As Buckley's smart book maintains, one can understand the French Revolution only by dissecting its theater, and scholars of modern drama need to appreciate the momentum of revolutionary theatricality in order to comprehend the impact of this political theater on audiences' sense of time and even space. Buckley makes a measured case for this argument in three national contexts—France, Britain, and Germany—and examines the rise of journalism alongside discrete moments in theater history.Scholars link the prehistory of the Revolution to the theater, such as the imprisonment and censoring of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. However, almost no one remembers the plays brought to the French stage between 1789 and 1794, for fairly good reason. Especially under Jacobin rule, the ever-growing number of Parisian playhouses staged, for the most part, quickly written pieces about the events of the rebellion, such as the dozen or so plays about the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat documented by Marie-Hélène Huet ( Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793–1797, trans. Robert Hurley [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982]). Politicians and journalists—categorically the same species according to Buckley—seized on these moments and broadcast them to French and British readers. The success of these tableaux can be measured in their longevity. The fall of the Bastille has become synonymous with the Revolution, and representations of the Tennis Court Oath—one of many scenes made famous by the Jacobin artist Jacques-Louis David—paint the otherwise violent rebellion as a triumph for democratic reason.In chapter 1 Buckley contributes to this historiography by tearing away the veil of the revolutionaries' carefully wrought images. For example, during the so-called October Days (October 5–6, 1789), armed women forcibly removed the royal family from Versailles to Paris. However, several men dressed as women and joined the mob, a finding Madelyn Gutwirth illustrates in her excellent book The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For Buckley this transvestism represents “a theatrical reminder to armed forces at Versailles that their actions were taking place in view of a larger public and that, insofar as that public was concerned, the crowd marching through the gates at Versailles was composed entirely of women” (32).The Tennis Court Oath, the fall of the Bastille, and the October Days happened in mere months ( June through October 1789). Thus the Revolution was not a static picture but rather an unfolding dramatic narrative that gave rise to a sense of momentous history. Ironically, while representations of the Revolution amounted to staged scenes, its leaders espoused a rhetoric based on transparency and authenticity and sponsored “realist-illusionist theater” such as public festivals celebrating the Supreme Being (37). After all, members of the Old Regime were lampooned for their theatricality and falsity (even director Sofia Coppola drew on the image of Marie Antoinette playing the role of a peasant in her mock village in the 2006 film Marie Antoinette). Buckley finds that this “accelerating drive toward contemporaneity” affects the theater's use of time, such as the compacting of action into one day in Beauchmarchais's Marriage of Figaro (45). In a rare look at comedy, Buckley suggests that the generic hybridity of Marriage of Figaro (1781) mirrors this driving action. The Great Terror and the rise of Robespierre marked a shift in the portrayal of the Revolution as a domestic drame . Robespierre became isolated in a “sort of tragic echo chamber,” and the Republic of Virtue came to its final act (63).Even before the outbreak of war in 1793, British writers, readers, and audiences closely watched the unfolding of the French Revolution. The third chapter canvasses the connections between politics, theater, and journalism in 1790s London: “British politicians spoke in effect to an audience composed of representatives of the party-supported press—representatives who were also members of a theater industry that was itself carefully controlled by the government” (81). Richard Brinsley Sheridan illustrates these overlapping relationships best. Author of The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), he managed one of London's few royal, or patent, theaters, Drury Lane, even while he served as member of Parliament for Strafford and eventually became a member of the Privy Council. Sheridan resembled another famous Irish-born member of Parliament, writer, and orator: Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), famous in its own right but also in notable rebuttals to it—Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1790). Buckley ties Burke's use of histrionic rhetoric to the Elocutionary Movement, to which Sheridan also belongs. This chapter also briefly examines The Triumph of Liberty; or, the Destruction of the Bastile [sic] (1789), a pantomime by John Dent performed at Palmer's Royal Circus, in the context of Paine's “prisoner of misery” (89).The second half of the book studies writers' engagement with Robespierre and Danton. Chapter 4, “The Fall of Robespierre and the Tragic Imagination,” connects the popularity of Macbeth and international journalism to Coleridge's play The Fall of Robespierre (1794). In the early years of the Revolution, the newly founded Times (1785) was able to bring news from Paris to its readers in eight or nine days, an unprecedented amount of time. However, in the summer of 1794, news traveled twice as slow, leading the Times to speculate on the fate of Robespierre. In this confusion, the paper juxtaposed accounts of Robespierre with reviews of Macbeth and “attached a character and a plot to actual events, not merely foreseeing a tragic end for Robespierre but also drawing particular attention, in its reference to Banquo's ghost, to the Jacobin leader's imagination” (109). These events help to explain why Coleridge portrays Robespierre as a tragic, albeit sympathetic, hero.The final chapter jumps ahead forty years and analyzes Georg Büchner's play Dantons Tod (Danton's death) in detail. Büchner wrote the tragedy in the winter of 1835, after he went into hiding following a failed attempt to start a revolution in Hesse (north central Germany). Buckley's close textual analysis here reveals Büchner's obsession with the living but decaying material history of the Revolution. Büchner seems to reject the dramatic pictography of the Revolution in favor of “resuscitating the political speech of the Revolution's dying body—to catalyze the political action of a renewed revolutionary drama” (127). The challenge in this chapter is relating Büchner's dense tragedy to the stage. Like Woyzeck, Dantons Tod waited until the early twentieth century for its debut performance. Not only was the play too politically explosive for Hessian authorities, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century, state-sponsored playhouses like those in Paris and London were also just beginning to take shape.Buckley's study remains disciplined and concise with its scope and material, and in this way, it serves as a model for interdisciplinary rigor. Readers interested in theater history and audience reception can augment their understanding of the era's stage with Marvin Carlson's historiography The Theatre of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Jane Moody's The Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2000); or, for a more thorough treatment of German plays, Jeffrey Cox's In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in England, Germany, and France (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). For scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, this project contributes to our understanding of periodical print culture and its relation to politics and the theater. In addition to its breadth, this book's main strength lies in its examination of the ways in which late eighteenth-century media engage in sophisticated practices, such as the orchestration and dissemination of portraits that convey political messages through arrested actions. Perhaps modern audiences' distrust in these dramatic images—such as George W. Bush's “Mission Accomplished” speech—can be traced to the French Revolution and its theatrical rhetoric. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 107, Number 3February 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/650523 Views: 357Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Zahra Sadat Ismailinejad Molière’s Tartuffe: A Foucauldian Reading, IJOHMN (International Journal online of Humanities) 4, no.55 (Oct 2018): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.24113/ijohmn.v4i5.63
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