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Social and Political Ideas of Mahatma Gandhi

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46 Rescuing the Public Sphere
Pauline Johnson
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Peter J. Adams

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David Grant

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60 Essays on Arundhati Roy
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Mark G.E. Kelly

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Fabienne Peter

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Ann Brooks

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77 Comedy and the Public Sphere

The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern
Public Arena
Arpad Szakolczai
Comedy and the Public Sphere
The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the
Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena

Arpad Szakolczai
 

First published 2013

by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Szakolczai, Árpád.
Comedy and the public sphere : the rebirth of theatre as comedy and the genealogy of the modern
public arena /by
Árpád Szakolczai.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 77)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Theater—Europe—History. 2. Theater and society—Europe—History. 3. Comedy. I. Title.
PN2570.S93 2012
792.094—dc23
2012019828

ISBN13: 978-0-415-62391-9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-08126-6 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-1-136-17254-0 (epub)

Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
To the memory of our grandparents
Contents

  Preface
  Acknowledgments
  Introduction

PART I

The Public Sphere as a

Theatrical Arena of
Mocking Contest:
Comedy, Mask, Laughter

The Public and Its Masks: Permanent

1 Hyper-Critique and
Hypocritical
Performance

Nietzsche’s Intuitions: From Theatre

through Humanist Philology to
2
Richard Wagner, or the Genealogy of
the Modern World as a Stage

3 Ridicule as a Public Weapon

PART II

The Rebirth of Theatre as

Comedy out of the Spirit
of Byzantium

4 The Byzantine Spirit and Its Sources

Transmitting, Receiving and Nurturing

5
the Byzantine Spirit

6 The Rise of Theatre in Venice

PART III

The Effect Mechanism of

Commedia dell’Arte:
Visions and Realities of
Commedification

Commedia dell’Arte: Schismogenic

7
Sub-plots and Irresistible Stock
Types

Shakespeare: The Tragedy of World

8
History Being a Comedy

Representing Representation:
9 Visionary Images of Commedia
dell’Arte

PART IV

The Rebirth of
Commedia dell’Arte as
the Avant-Garde

The Rebirth of Pierrot as Suffering

10
Victim
11 Obsessed with Paris and Public Fame:
Richard Wagner, the
Mimomaniac
Revolutionary

Pierrot and Pulcinella between Paris

12 and Petersburg: The
Avant-Garde of
Diaghilev and Meyerhold
  Conclusion
   
  Notes
  Bibliography
  Name Index
  Subject Index
Preface

Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘On Reading and
Writing’

Theatre governed Rome.

—Cicero

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,

The sentimentalist himself; while art

Is but a vision of reality.

—W.B. Yeats, Ego Dominus Tuus

In November 2008, Al Franken was elected a U.S. senator. The contest was
particularly bitterly fought, and the
results were so close that the ballots had
to be recounted several times, with the Minnesota Supreme Court
declaring
Franken’s election only on 30 June 2009. The eventual margin of victory
was 312 votes, or 0.011%. What
is really interesting, however, is that
Franken was not a politician but a comedian, one of the founding writers
and performers of a most successful comedy programme in American
television called Saturday Night Live,
who had moved to Minnesota from
New York only a few years before. After Ronald Reagan and Arnold
Schwarzenegger,
it is no longer surprising—though it always should be—
that actors become politicians. A comedian becoming a
senator, however,
was still a great leap. The case is not isolated. Further examples include
Italy, not only
through the political activities of Nobel Prize winner Dario
Fo but also by the efforts of another comedian,
Beppe Grillo, who launched
a political movement called ‘Five Stars’. Another example comes from
Iceland, where,
in June 2010, comedian Jon Gnarr became the mayor of
Reykjavik, the capital. There are also many others.
 The loss of boundaries between comedy and politics has not been
limited to matters of personal background. It is
enough to take a look at the
speech given by Franken to the Monticello Chamber of Commerce on 21
April 2010 to
see that even as a senator he kept performing like a stand-up
comedian. After the standard rhetorical start of
thanking his hosts, he led off
by cracking a joke: ‘I thought I’d start by telling you how I got here. Not
here
today. Today I took 94 [referring to the bus line]’. From here onwards,
the speech mixed sentimental personal
reminiscences with bombastic
rhetoric and a series of disconnected facts, peppered with further jokes and
puns.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were certainly rolling over
in their graves; especially because, after all,
and apart from the effect
mechanism of the jokes, it was not so different from the by now
usual fare
of American politics, radiating around the world.
What could be called, with a neologism characteristic of sociologists,
the ‘commedification’ of politics is not
restricted to this area of social life.
It extends to the sphere of family life and intimate relations in
general,
where boundaries that had always been considered sacrosanct are daily
challenged and dissolved through
television series and media stories,
mostly by a clever and persistent confusion stimulated between real events,
commercials, and comedy shows.
The outcome is an elimination of the boundaries between private and
public, personal and political, intimate and
communicable, with most
cherished details of personal life being regularly exposed through
disinvolved public
chatter and watched by millions or more people. Given
that viewers are regularly bombarded by always new kinds of
stories, so
that they become lost in the details conveyed to them day by day if not hour
by hour by the media,
they may fail to realise that the stories they have
gotten used to are simply absurd from the perspective of a
life lived with a
minimal degree of normality and decency. We are holding our breath to find
out whether David
Strauss-Kahn actually raped the maid in the hotel,
passionately taking sides, ignoring the more general point of
how absurd it
is for a public figure to casually attack any woman who has the misfortune
of getting within his
predaceous orbit.

Having excited but also disoriented most people through such stories, the
media, like a good nurse in a
psychiatric ward, proceed to comfort their
audiences, lulling them to sleep: everything is fine, because every
human
being has the right to enter politics, so it would be unacceptable and
discriminatory to rule out
comedians. Whoever thinks otherwise is opposed
to basic human rights and the principles of full democracy and is
thus an
enemy of the people; while sexual behaviour is a purely private matter,
having nothing to do with
economic, political or scientific competence if
performed by consenting adults.
Yet, though it is not ‘politically correct’, many are dazed and confused
by such developments. Such bewilderment
is only increased by another
closely related and recurrent line of media stories featuring political
corruption.
For some, the link between political and personal corruption is
evident, including any conduct that raises
suspicion about personal
integrity; for others, the central issue is limited to the private abuse of
public
funds. Whatever the case, the evident solution offered by the media
is the same: all such corrupt practices must
immediately be brought into the
light through a fully open ‘public sphere’, requiring the permanent and
unfailing
public scrutiny of every act by all political figures, a total
transparency of public life. Everything in
politics must be fully open and
visible.

The writing of this book was motivated by a perception, developed over

many decades, that something is
fundamentally wrong with this
perspective: while at face value the argument seems so disarmingly
convincing, it
actually recycles the source of illness as remedy. For a
sociologist, data—properly
understood—are fundamental, and they speak
for themselves in this case: the more journalists, fearless knights of
truth in
our times, chase public figures, submitting their lives to relentless and
increasing scrutiny, the more
politicians are unmasked as figures of
comedy: clowns rather than statesmen. Let me make it immediately clear
that the transformation of politics into farce is not a matter for joking; it is,
rather, extremely serious; but
it can no longer be ignored, pretending that
everything is business as usual. The justification offered by the
media is
that this was always the case but we simply did not know about it. There is,
however, an explanation
more convincing for social theorists: in the
analogy of performative speech acts, one can talk about performative
media
acts. The real issue is not that whoever is looking for something will find it
—which one of us is free from
all blemish, after all—but that the
omnipresence and omnipotence of the media selects, over the decades, the
kind
of politician who is willing to undergo such permanent torture and then
promptly provides the media with the
stories they were looking for.
Originally this was only a vague feeling. What exactly is going wrong in
our
increasingly free, open and transparent public sphere? This is the
problem.
It has been evident from the start that one must go beyond the approach
of Habermas, which restricted the public
sphere to ‘rational’ discussion, as
the ‘rational’ and non-rational aspects of public life are inseparable; this
was the initial problem. However, it was much more difficult to define what
was wrong, and so fundamentally
wrong, with Habermas, and what a more
fruitful approach could be. The problematisation of the ‘public
sphere’, in
the original sense of Foucault, took place in three steps, through three main
thinkers. The first was
offered by Foucault’s recognition of the significance
of Bentham’s Panopticon for understanding modern politics,
and public life
in general, through the trap of visibility. The second was provided by two
crucial passages in
Plato’s Statesman (291A–B and 303C–D), in which
Plato, as if through a sudden vision, recognised the
politicians of his times
as satyrs and centaurs, or as incarnations of wild, fierce and sensuous
mythological
beasts. Together with the image of the rhapsode in Ion, the
pervasive theatricality of the
Symposium, and the diagnosis of
‘theatrocracy’ in Laws, such a rereading of Plato in a sociological
key has
helped to place the relationship between politics and theatre at the centre of
attention; a dimension
that Foucault did not explore. Finally, this led back
to Nietzsche, given that the inventor of genealogy chose as
the theme of his
first book the origins of theatre in classical Greece. It was thus possible to
approach the
problems of contemporary life, its commedification (a term
developed on the basis of Green 1986) and the
subsequent loss of
authenticity, even the loss of reality in our very existence, by reconstructing
the way in
which theatre was re-born during the late Renaissance in Europe
as low-level comedy, and the manner in which this
turned out to be
instrumental in producing the modern ‘public sphere’.
The intent of this book is to recapture this development.
Acknowledgments

Although this book was written by one person, it was actually a joint effort
in many ways. Ever since we wrote
with Agnes Horvath our book together,
published in Hungarian in 1989 and in English in 1992, any work was
always
shared, though the ultimate inspiration was singular and always the
same. Agnes was the animating spirit behind
the various activities and
events that provided the soil and forum for this book, out of which it grew
and where
it could be presented and tested bit by bit. These include the
Socratic Symposia, organised since 2006, where we
discussed, year after
year, on 7 November, Plato’s birthday—annually in Florence except for
2011, when the
symposium was held in Cambridge—selected dialogues by
Plato, having thus far covered Ion, the
Statesman, Timaeus, the Sophist, the
Symposium, and the Laws; the journal
International Political Anthropology
Agnes founded after the second symposium, together with Bjorn
Thomassen and Harald Wydra, and running since 2008; the International
Political Anthropology Summer Schools, held
in Florence since 2009, so
far devoted to the themes of ‘Mask of the Contemporary’; ‘Ekstasis (out of
ordinary) in Politics: studying revolutions, wars, and other liminal
moments’ and ‘Forgery and Corruption in
Politics’; and the International
Political Anthropology workshops in Ireland, held in Cork and Waterford,
on
themes closely corresponding to the summer schools.
Very special thanks are due to all of those who supported us in these
ventures, first of all Bjorn Thomassen and
Harald Wydra, co-founders of
International Political Anthropology and tireless participants of practically
all symposia, summers schools and workshops, even organising related
events, like the 2009 and 2010 Cambridge
conferences on liminality and on
new wars; Kieran Keohane, my colleague in Cork, similarly a tireless
supporter
of these and other ventures; Tom Boland, Lorcan Byrne, James
Cuffe, Julian Davis, and John O’Brien, our students
and former students,
privileged audience and increasingly equal interlocutors; and all those
contributors and
students who participated in these events, repeatedly
presenting papers or taking the effort of coming again and
again to listen,
rekindling our belief that serious scholarship, outside the standardised
forums of
hyper-specialised professional work, and independent of
intellectual and political fashions,
is still possible. Without pretending
completeness, and in the hope of not doing injustice to anyone, let me list
here those who helped most: Paolo Bonari, Kieran Bonner, Gonzalo
Fernández de Córdoba, James Fairhead, Derrick
Fiedler, Brian Finucane,
Rosario Forlenza, Arvydas Grišinas, Peter Kearney, Carmen
Kuhling,
Joanna Linehan, József Lőrincz, Patricia McGrath, John McNamara,
Eugene
McNamee, Acomo Olaya, Jill O’Mahony, Maeve Nagle, Richard
Sakwa, Cesare Silla, Lionel Thélen, and Michael Urban.
A number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances gave me most
valuable help and advice through conversations,
concrete advice, and
personal example. Let me express here my gratitude to them by mentioning
their name, knowing
that the list is incomplete, and with the usual provisos:
László Adorjáni, Mario Alinei, Johann Arnason, Nándor
Bárdi, Peter
Burke, Paul Caringella, Consuelo Corradi, William Desmond, Emese
Egyed, Harvie Ferguson, Jürgen
Gebhardt, Bernhard Giesen, Pier Paolo
Giglioli, Elemér Hankiss, John von Heyking, Michael Howlett, Peter
McMylor,
Mauro Magatti, Monica Martinelli, Stephen Mennell, Anders
Petersen, Alessandro Pizzorno, Gianfranco Poggi,
Geoffrey Price † , Paul
Rabinow, Mathias Riedl, Martin Riesebrodt, Tilo Schabert, Margaret
Somers, Iván Szelényi,
Vilmos Tánczos, Keith Tester, Stephen Turner, Ruth
Webb, and David Wengrow.
I’m grateful to colleagues and former colleagues at University College
Cork, who assisted me in various kind of
way, particularly to Paddy
O’Carroll, and our unforgettable Sunday evening pints at Bishopstown Bar;
then to
Fiachra Long, Paula Meaney, Grace Neville, Eleanor O’Connor,
Tony O’Connor, Paddy O’Donovan, Patrick O’Mahony,
Jerry O’Sullivan
and Pat Twomey; and especially to Caroline Fennell, Dean of Arts, who
gave me crucial support
especially, especially at difficult times.
 Special thanks are due to the libraries that have often become second
homes for me over the years, in particular
the Boole Library of University
College Cork, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and the Library of the
European
University Institute in Florence, and the Library of Cambridge
University. Libraries are still beacons of light
for learning and European
culture, representing Plato’s Academy and the medieval universities,
faithful to their
traditions, just as they were under totalitarian regimes.
All responsibility for the content of this book, needless to say, is fully
mine.

Most precious intellectual, mental, and spiritual support was given to this
book by James Fairhead, who
repeatedly listened to many of the ideas that
made it to this book—and even more others—when they were most
immature, reacting with true wisdom, courtesy and friendship during our
regular meetings and discussions in the
Abbey pub, even reading many
chapters and related papers in draft versions, for which I will forever remain
grateful.
Very special thanks, and the usual apologies, are due to our children,
Daniel, Peter, Janos, Tommaso, and
Stefano, who demonstrate, most of the
time, a remarkable resilience and patience for being brought up by two
academics who always have a deadline, a paper, a thesis, a lecture, an
article proof, or
just a new idea to be occupied with, that cannot suffer any
delay.

This book could not have been written without the experience of having
been brought up in close contact with my
grandparents. Having been born
well before WWI, reaching as far back as 1886, they were still formed in a
world
which, while by no means perfect, and already showing signs of
decay, was still intact; in which it was possible
to be brought up, in a matter
of fact way, in a life of decency and integrity. At difficult moments of life it
was always possible for me to step back, reflect, and pose the question:
what would my grandmother or grandfather
have done in such a situation?
Agnes did not know any of her grandparents; and it was only when the last
touches
were added to this book that she came to know that her
grandparents, unknown and unmentionable parents of her
mother, brought
up in an orphan house, died in the Katyn massacres.
This is why the book is dedicated to the memory of our grandparents.
  Introduction

The aim of this book is to study the constitutive links between comedy and
the ‘public sphere’. This means that
the public sphere, considered as ‘a
domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be
formed’ (Habermas 1997: 105), cannot be understood if it is isolated from
theatrical spectacles, in particular
the staging of comedies, as the formation
of this ‘public sphere’ and the rise of modern forms of public
spectacles
were strictly interconnected. Its study therefore requires a genealogy.
Genealogy is an approach for the study of formative historical events
that was pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche,
and further developed by Michel
Foucault.1 However, the work of a number of central figures in comparative
historical sociology, first
and foremost Max Weber, but also some of his
closest followers like Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin or Franz
Borkenau, each
strongly influenced by Nietzsche, has strong affinities with genealogy. The
genealogy of a
particular political institution or social practice is concerned
with the exact manner in which this emerged and
the lasting effects it might
exert, even after it ceased to exist. A joint genealogy of the modern public
sphere
and theatre therefore aims to establish how the rebirth of theatre in
Europe, in the form of comedy as commedia
dell’arte, had a decisive role in
forming both the structured space that is called the ‘public sphere’ and the
dominant attitudes related to it, even governing its functioning and broader
effects.
A direct pursuit of a genealogy of the public sphere is hindered by a
puzzling fact: the main genealogists of
modernity were preoccupied with
the contribution of closed institutions rather than open public spaces to the
emergence of modernity. Foucault studied asylums, hospitals and prisons;
Weber, Borkenau and Mumford monasteries;
Elias the absolutist court;
Koselleck secret societies. The rise of the public sphere was studied only by
Habermas; however, his work was not genealogical in design; it presumed
the ‘rationality’ of the modern public
sphere as an ideal, and owing to its
shortcomings it cannot be used as a starting point for analysis.2 There are
two works of historical
sociology that offer a few precious hints. One is
Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis, written at the same
time as Habermas’s
work but coming to a radically different assessment of the Enlightenment:
for him ‘critical thinking’ was rather a conspiracy of disenchanted
intellectuals, without
political responsibility, organised in secret societies
and belonging to the ‘pathogenesis’ of the modern world.
Given that
Koselleck was particularly interested in the schismatic character of the
Enlightenment, his diagnosis
could be re-phrased, following Gregory
Bateson, as the ‘schismogenesis’ of modernity. The other important
contribution is by Margaret Somers (2008), who studied with Alessandro
Pizzorno and whose work as a genealogy of
the Anglo-American idea of
citizenship complements several themes discussed in this book. Somers
argues that
‘market fundamentalism’ eroded citizenship and denuded it; that
‘civil society’ remains too close to the private
sphere; and that—at the
methodological level—sociological analysis must incorporate philosophical
issues (Somers
2008: xiii–iv; 254–257; 287–288). However, while Somers
argues that the public sphere does offer a proper
countervailing power to the
markets, this book will show that the public ‘arena’ rather complements the
market
and technology in rendering human beings defenceless and exposed,
and that a more specific attention to
belongingness in existential
communities and the experience of home is needed, in contrast to the
boundlessness
of the modern global ‘public’ (see Szakolczai 2008a, 2008b).
This book received vital inspiration from two historical works. The first,
by the Yale historian Jean-Christophe
Agnew, is about the crucial role
played by theatre in the genesis of modern capitalism. According to Agnew,
the
theatre was the ‘laboratory’ (Agnew 1986: xi, 54) or the ‘incubator’
where the new types of social relationships,
characteristic of the market
society and hostile to the very logic of ordinary human interaction and
social life,
were ‘experimented’ with.
The way in which the theatre accomplished this feat was by combining
imitation and fragmentation. There are two
ways in which two equal and
therefore replaceable and individually worthless pieces can be produced out
of a
single whole: by breaking it to two or by copying it into a double.
Theatre performed this trick by representing
artificial persons on the stage
who reduced concrete, living human beings to abstractions (the ‘merchant’,
the
‘doctor’, the ‘knight’, the ‘servant’), often already on the stage doubling
such generic figures (thus we often
have two servants and two pairs of
lovers; see, for example, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors) and in doing
so
reducing the complex net of human relations and motivations to very simple
and identical moving forces, desire
and gain. In the next step, it managed to
reduce human life to ‘an infinitely divisible series of trade-offs
consciously
or unconsciously entertained by the individual’ (Agnew 1986: 3). This was
performed on the stage,
where human life was represented as a combination
of either antagonistic struggles, most often in the form of
duels (usually
with the aim of erotic conquest), or as bargains, to which human
conversation was reduced.
The central figure in the first period of the theatricalisation of social life
(1550–1650) was the actor of
‘Protean’ character—a central metaphor of
the times—able to literally
metamorphose himself from one personality into
another. This resulted in a schismogenic duel with the Puritans.
The
Puritans correctly identified the central problem as boundlessness, even
recognising the crucial role played
by the actor in dissolving boundaries and
borderlines, jumping in between the liminal and the liminoid, and that
therefore the world was ‘threatened to become, in effect, a permanent
carnival’ (Ibid.: 54); but they erroneously
thought that all this could be
resolved by administrative and police actions against the entertainers. The
actors, however, returned the challenge, accusing the Puritans of hypocrisy
on their own. The fight between the
actors and the Puritans was staged in
the new public ‘sphere’, and it was not realised, just as it is not seen
even
today, that the public arena is indeed the par excellence place for wearing
masks. Thus the pretence of
being totally straight and honest in public is the
biggest and most ludicrous mask of all.
One of Agnew’s most interesting points is the idea that a kind of ‘pact’
emerged between the actors and the
audience (Ibid.: 114, 124), or an
implicit complicity best seen through the frequent use of asides in
addressing
the audience. Such complicity and duplicity in breaking the
codes and boundaries of social existence amounted to
a joint breaking, or
literally corruption.

If in the first part of the theatricalisation of social life the public scene was
dominated by the actor, in the
second (1650–1750) the focus shifted to the
spectator. The central figure here is Adam Smith, who first
identified the
position of the ‘neutral spectator’ as a privileged point for moral
philosophy. From there,
he could pronounce his well-known judgments
about laissez faire, the universality of the human motivation
concerning
gain, and the similar universality of the division of labour. The division of
labour is the central
analytical tool in Adam Smith’s economic theory;
indeed, it is the vantage point from which moral philosophy and
political
economy are all but equal, and it would also become the foundation of
Durkheimian sociology. The work
of Agnew helps us realise what is wrong
with this seemingly trivial idea, a presumed sign of ‘progress’. The
division
of labour literally implies the fragmentation of an activity; it therefore
breaks continuous
participatory human life into segments. It performs and
perpetuates violence. Human life has its own rhythms, and
the harmonious
accomplishment of various activities implies a respect for such rhythms,
borderlines and
identities. Rupturing takes place when a concrete activity is
broken down into identical segments, with different
people ‘specialising’ in
performing this or that part of the process, and where eventually they can be
replaced,
through technological ‘progress’, by machines. Such
fragmentation can continue into infinity; this is the meaning
of
digitalisation. This is rendered possible by a previous fragmentation,
governed by the principles of gain and
substitutability.3 The two
halves
complement each other and form the taken for granted framework of
rational choice theory, where
‘autonomous’ and ‘rational’ individuals can
increase their ‘earnings’ by infinitely fragmenting and breaking into pieces
their own human and social lives. As human beings thus fragment
and
break up their lives together, through ‘contracts’ that prepare and sanction
such ‘mutual advantages’, the
system works on the basis of ‘joint
fragmentations’ or ‘joint breaking’, thus—literally—‘corruption’. The basic
moving principle of market society is thus corruption; and the model
through which corruption as guiding
principle was invested and
disseminated in social life was the theatre. This book will extend the
arguments of
Agnew concerning the formative significance of theatre from
the market to politics and the public sphere, and,
complementing Agnew’s
critique of the market, will eventually come to the realisation that, far from
promoting an
ideal society, the ‘public sphere’ in its ideal form, and not
because of its own corruption, is just as much of a
menace as the market for
politics guided by the ideal of the ‘common good’ and society guided by the
ideals of
decency, respect and reputation.
A similarly important guide is The Triumph of Pierrot, a book written
by Martin Green in collaboration
with John Swan (Green 1986). Green’s
monograph on the von Richthofen sisters offered vital details about the life
and times of Max Weber (Green 1973). In this 1986 book, taking inspiration
from a classic work by Starobinski
(1970),4 a crucial figure of
the ‘Geneva
school’, he developed the term ‘commedic’ for a mode of living
characteristic of the fin-de-siècle
avant-garde, which took models for living
out of characters from popular comedy, rooted in commedia dell’arte,
thus
consciously confusing the borderlines between reality and theatre, as a
resistance to a world that had
become ossified into conventionalism. The
striking significance of this for politics is illustrated by the cases
of Donald
Maclean and Guy Burgess, the Cambridge spies for the Soviet Union, who
managed to act uncovered for
decades, in spite of suspicion surrounding
them, ‘because nobody could take them seriously—because they were felt
to be zanni, the commedia buffoons’ (Green 1986: xvii). Green attributed a
vital role to the music of
Wagner in this ‘commedification’ of European
social life, and this will be a main guide for the arguments of Part
IV.

With the help of Koselleck, Bateson, Agnew and Green, among others, it is
now possible to offer a solution to the
puzzle posed by the fact that
genealogists of modernity were so much focused on closed institutions.
Since the
path-breaking work of Weber on Protestantism, strongly relying
on Tocqueville’s emphasis on the role of Puritans
in American democracy
and on the importance of the absolutist state for explaining the continuities
in France
after the Revolution, genealogists have focused on austerity,
Puritanism and discipline for the rise of the
modern world—not only
through the external controlling of individual behaviour by the institutions
and organs of
the state but also by in inculcating and internalising a
normative conduct: self-discipline (Foucault),
self-control (Elias), and the
rationalisation of the conduct of life (Weber). It was either completely
overlooked5 or at least
underplayed6 that such
rationalisation and search for
control had a schismogenic counterpart in the
‘commedification’ of social
relations, and that the paradox of the fully open public sphere, both in terms
of its
concrete singularity and the substantial and highly problematic kind of
control exerted by it, could be resolved
through the study of this other,
theatrical and non-rational aspect, constitutive of the modern world.
A focus on theatre also redirects attention to the very origins of
genealogy, given that Nietzsche devoted his
first book to the birth of theatre
in classical Greece, all the more so as he connected this analysis, though in
a rather confused and confusing way, through the music of Wagner, to the
modern world. While Nietzsche’s interest
in Wagner was much ignored by
social theorists, Green’s book helps to revalorise his insights and interests
for a
genealogy of the modern public sphere as theatre.

Although this book is fully self-contained, it is part of a broader project, of

which this is the fifth Routledge
monograph. In a first stage, this project
reconstructed, in some detail, the lives and works of the most
important
genealogists of modernity, including Weber, Foucault, Elias, Voegelin,
Borkenau, and Mumford
(Szakolczai 1998, 2009), focusing in particular on
their ‘visions’ of modernity (Szakolczai 2009) and the reason
why several
of them returned to the distant roots of the modern world in antiquity
(Szakolczai 2003). In a second
step, the significance of the Renaissance was
reassessed for the rise of the modern world, much neglected by
historically
oriented social theorists since Weber directed attention to the Reformation
(Szakolczai 2007). This
book complements the previous fourth in the sense
that the rebirth of comedy was one of the major reasons for the
collapse of
the Renaissance. In reconstructing these developments it will also make a
contribution to comparative
historical sociology by bringing in a field
almost completely absent there, the study of Byzantium (Arnason
2010).

CHAPTER STRUCTURE

The central thesis of the book is that the public ‘sphere’ is not simply an
ideal, fully free and open ‘space’
(note the implicit allusion to the ‘sphere’
as the perfect shape) for ‘rational’ discussion; rather, it has
fundamental
theatrical qualities, and that a central—in a way even the pivotal—mode of
achieving dominance
in this arena is by using the force of laughter through
ridicule and mocking.
The book consists of four parts, each having three chapters. The first
part presents some of the main background
theoretical approaches and
arguments. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of ‘public sphere’ through its
main
champion, Jürgen Habermas, whose work, however, both concerning
its historical reconstruction and theoretical
underpinning is shown to be
defective beyond repair. Its history is based on a modified evolutionary
narrative,
from ancient and medieval ‘representative publicness’, through
the appearance of the ideal of a free public sphere in the Enlightenment,
culminating in a sad corruption of this ideal due to
capitalist
commercialism, combined with a similarly deplorable refeudalisation,
finishing with the battle cry of
re-launching the Enlightenment project.
However, the medieval world ignored a separation between actors and
audience, while the rebirth of theatre as comedy, the invention of printing
and the resulting public
technologisation of learned discourse, and the
commercialisation of both spectacles and publishing all happened
at the
same time, culminating in the emergence of the ‘public arena’. At the
theoretical level, and in contrast
to Habermas’s vision of the public sphere
as the location of the ‘ideal speech situation’, the public ‘sphere’ is
shown
to be a liminal or liminoid arena, with a highly specific structure. It has a
point of entry, assuring that
human beings entering the arena will be
denuded of their identities, ready to undergo the terrorising ordeal of a
full
scrutiny of their ideas and beliefs, at the end of which they will be stamped
by the ideological arguments
prepared in advance by the ‘masters of
ceremonies’ of the arena, shrewd agitator-tricksters, but especially bound
with their own arguments. It will then be shown how the liminal features of
both the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution have elective affinities
with the liminal features of this public arena.
From Habermas the argument moves to some of the main ideas and
protagonists of the ‘performative turn’,
preferring the approach of Bernhard
Giesen, with its focus on the solemn representation of out-of-ordinary
events
and the sacred over Jeffrey Alexander’s problematic identification of
everyday life with theatricality. It will
then review Plato’s arguments
concerning the manner in which the sophists and theatre contributed to the
destruction of democracy in Athens, and then the ideas of Alessandro
Pizzorno and Friedrich Nietzsche concerning
the practice of wearing masks,
coming to the conclusion that the public arena becomes the par excellence
location
for playing hypocritical games and wearing masks the more it lives
up to its promise of free entry and full
transparency.
Chapter 2 is devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche, the thinker who first
recognised the significance of developments in
theatre for the rise of the
modern world, who, in his Birth of Tragedy, also pioneered the
‘genealogical
method’. Central to this method is the concern with
‘backward inference’, or the idea that one must intuit the
forces that
contributed to the emergence of certain social or political practices and
institutions that are taken
for granted in the present and thus historically
reconstruct their ‘conditions of emergence’. Beyond studying
theatre,
Nietzsche also had illuminating insights concerning the links between the
rebirth of theatre in Europe
after the collapse of the Renaissance and the
emergence of the new discipline of philology, while being concerned
with
the modern world, he offered a vital diagnosis of Richard Wagner, a par
excellence mimomaniac and perfect
representative of this modern world as
the age of the actor.
Chapter 3 will conclude this theoretical overview by discussing the
social significance of laughter. After
presenting a few basic ideas from Elias
and Plato, it will focus on three main
figures of 19th-century French culture
—the poets Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire and the philosopher Henri
Bergson, each of whom made vital and mostly ignored contributions to
understanding the significance of humour and
comedy for the modern
world. Victor Hugo recognised the fundamental theatricality of the world
inaugurated by the
French Revolution, indeed of the Revolution itself, but
still believed that modern theatre, by combining the
grotesque and the sub-
lime, the beautiful and the ugly, could arrive at a harmony of opposites.
Writing a few
decades later, Baudelaire came up—in an essay whose
significance is comparable to his famous essay on
modernity—with the
striking idea that laughter is outright satanic, given that it is disgraceful and
represents a
hubristic assertion of superiority, contrasting laughter with the
innocent smile characteristic of children. Yet
in introducing the term
‘absolute comic’, he also argued that laughter reveals something
fundamental about the
supposedly schismatic nature of the human
condition. The most important part of the chapter is devoted to the
ideas of
Bergson. It shows that on the one hand Bergson’s analysis is grievously
one-sided, as it simply reduced
laughter to mocking, ignoring the balancing
attempts of Hugo and Baudelaire; while on the other it contains vital
insights about the social significance of mocking. In particular, the
definition of the comic offered by Bergson
establishes a vital link between
Girard’s analysis of the sacrificial mechanism and Habermas’s ideas about
the
‘ideal speech situation’, explaining why the approximation of the
Habermasian ideal irresistibly leads to a
system of terror and the resurgence
of the sacrificial mechanism, helping to explain the worst features of
20th-
century history. The concluding remarks of the chapter present the—not
fully successful—efforts of Nietzsche
and Hölderlin to separate the healthy
aspects of joy and laughter from mere ridicule and mocking.

The second part of this book reconstructs the re-emergence of theatre at the
end of the Renaissance in Europe,
focusing on the not properly
acknowledged strangeness of the fact that theatre re-emerged as primarily
comedy,
and not tragedy, and on the contribution of the rebirth of theatre to
the collapse of the Renaissance. As the
most important source of this rebirth
of theatre as comedy in Europe was the Byzantine world, and that it even
stamped a certain Byzantine ‘spirit’ on Europe, in the sense pioneered by
Nietzsche and Weber, Chapter 4 had to
be devoted to the task of
reconstructing this Byzantine spirit—a task rendered at once necessary and
difficult by
the absence of studies in comparative historical sociology on
Byzantium. The central claim of the chapter is that
the Byzantine spirit is
essentially schismatic, torn between the high ideals promoted by the
Orthodox Church,
also relying on a neo-Platonic cult of beauty, and an
increasingly sophistic and cynical court politics and
culture that found the
most proper expression of its view of the world in public flattery and
mocking. The
schismatic nature of Byzantium was promoted by the special
position of the
Hippodrome in Byzantine culture and politics: it was the
main contact point between the emperor and the populace,
the scene of
sumptuous, at once religious and civic rituals, but also of low-level popular
entertainment, legacy
of the Roman Empire, with an increasing dominance
of mime shows. Byzantine schismogenesis was further aggravated
by a
series of liminal crises, eventually resulting in the claustrophobic climate of
a closed court society. In
order to understand the dominance gained by
sophists and mimes in the Byzantine world, the second part of the
chapter
reconstructed its Roman roots in the Second Sophistic and the pantomime,
showing that both emerged at
liminal moments in the rise of the Empire.
Chapter 5 then reconstructs the manner in which this Byzantine spirit
was transmitted to Europe around the time
of the collapse of the Byzantine
world, helped by the rise of Renaissance humanism in Europe and its
interest in
the philosophy of Plato. It shows that the Byzantine ‘sages’,
instead of translating the work of Plato, were
rather interested in
propagating the view of the world characteristic of Byzantine court
sophists. The
transmission of this Byzantine spirit, by Chrysoloras, was
helped by the presence of rogue humanists like
Conversini and Barzizza
and the strange figure of Guarino da Verona, who at the rather advanced age
of thirty
(for a student, especially then) suddenly became the choice student
of Chrysoloras and eventually built up in
Ferrara the most famous humanist
school, which became the origin of modern philology. The chapter
discusses in
detail the special role played by Ferrara as the ‘incubator’ of
the Byzantine spirit in Europe, in particular
through its joint influence on
painting, theatrical performance and dancing, all mixed with humanist
education.
The chapter closes by indicating the vital role played by the new
fad of moresca dancing in transmitting the
Byzantine spirit outside Ferrara.
Chapter 6 plays a pivotal role in the book, as it treats the question why
and how the theatre was reborn in the
first decades of the 16th century in
Venice. It explains why it was the case that while Venice should have
played
a pioneering role in this rebirth of the theatre—indeed, the first
theatrical performance after a gap of about a
millennium took place there—
it put up a strong resistance against the staging of theatrical performances.
Recent
Italian research shows how Venice’s pioneering role in staging
theatre, following on the humanists of the
previous century, was led by
buffoons, in the context of the weakening power of Venice, exposed
through the
vicissitudes of the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–1517).
In this liminal moment the rebirth of theatre was
consciously promoted by
an alliance between buffoons and young disenchanted patricians, extending
the carnival
season and radicalising performances during the liminal times
of warfare. In the eventual organisation of
theatrical troupes, a vital role
was played by charlatans, who also appeared in the last decades of the 15th
century, bringing together mimes and moresca dancers. The effective result
was the rebirth of theatre in the form
of commedia dell’arte.

The third part of this book turns from historical reconstruction to analysing
the effect mechanism of this new cultural practice. Its central argument is
that, far from being a mere
entertainment, the new theatre played a vital role
in transforming the very tissue of European society, being a
schismogenic
counterpart of the disciplinary mechanisms of the rising absolutist states
and the Puritan sects and
movements. Chapter 7 presents in some detail the
main plots, sub-plots, and stock types of the new ‘Italian
comedy’, focusing
on the way in which developments in the theatre pioneered the process to be
captured by Hegel
as the ‘dialectic of the master and the serf’ and by
Nietzsche as the ‘slave revolt of morality’. The next two
chapters show how
the best artists perceived, on the spot, the frightening reality of such a
‘commedification’ of
European societies. In Chapter 8, the dynamics of the
life work of Shakespeare are reconstructed, relying on
pioneering works by
René Girard and Ted Hughes. Far from taking up a side in the debate
between Puritans and
actors about the theatre, Shakespeare problematised
from inside the effect mechanism of theatre, in particular
comedy,
culminating in his paradoxical self-identification with the arch-villain and
trickster Iago; in the
anguishing dilemma of Hamlet about the impossibility
of restoring order in a time that is ‘out of joint’; and the
eventual farewell to
theatre in The Tempest. Chapter 9 presents similarly visionary images by
three main
visual artists of the absolutist period. Jacques Callot was a
French etcher who spent considerable time in Italy
and managed to identify
the sources of theatrical shows in fair entertainments, focusing, in a highly
ambivalent
manner, on the truly demonic impulses agitating such
performances. Antoine Watteau was the most famous painter of
absolutist
France, and his Gilles/Pierrot offered, in ways recalling Shakespeare, a self-
portrait of the
artist as a figure in between the fairground mountebank and
the ‘Zanni’ of commedia dell’arte: a victim exposed
to the shifting vagaries
of the public; complementing Callot’s vision of the Zanni as a perpetrator,
mocking his
public while infecting it with all kinds of desires that cannot be
satisfied. The most important artists
discussed in the chapter, however, are
the Tiepolos, who were not only the most important Venetian painters of
the
18th century but also managed to capture, through their almost obsessive
interest in the figure of
Pulcinella, the heart of the transformation effected
by this commedia figure not just on Venice but on European
society at
large, culminating in the harrowing vision that the French Revolution would
not bring about a perfect
social order of freedom, equality and fraternity but
rather a world of Pulcinellas.

The last part of the book shows the degree to which these visionary insights
turned out to be correct. The end of
commedia dell’arte in the decades just
before the French Revolution did not mean its disappearance but rather its
mutation and resurgence in a modified form as the animating spirit of
romanticism and then the avant-garde. The
fundamental ambivalence and
problematicity of these cultural movements lay in the fact that although
they realised that European societies were fatally wounded by the previous
centuries
of absolutism, Puritanism and commedification, with social roles,
authorities and bonds being transmogrified into
their mere hypocritical
masks, they came to promote further such commedification by reinventing
ever more radical
forms of critique and ridicule, thus re-injecting the toxin
into the social body as the purported medicine.
The three chapters of Part IV discuss three such instances of ‘hyper-
commedification’ by the avant-grade. Chapter
10 shows the re-invention of
the Pierrot figure by Gaspard Debureau in the post-revolutionary Paris of
the 1820s
and 1830s, focusing on the particular spin given to the old
commedia character by combining it with
self-victimisation and resentment.
Chapter 11 focuses on Richard Wagner and his lifelong obsession with the
search for public fame, in particular in Paris, at any price, further
disseminating the commedic revolutionary
virus in Europe. The last chapter
shifts the focus to Russia, though keeping the close connection both with
the
obsessive model role of Paris and model figure of Wagner, presenting
first the rise and effects of Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes and then the avant-
garde theatre of Meyerhold. Both had a vital impact on the political and
artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century and also on the promotion of
market and capitalism through the joint
legitimation of an ever-increasing
mechanical division of labour on the one side and the obsession with
fashion,
marketing and public image on the other.
Part I
The Public Sphere as a Theatrical
Arena of Mocking Contest
Comedy, Mask, Laughter
 The Public and Its Masks
Permanent Hyper-Critique and Hypocritical
1 Performance

INTRODUCTION

This book is not just about the public sphere but about the modern public
sphere as a problem. With such
an idea, one enters uncharted waters. The
‘public sphere’ is a central idol of contemporary intellectual and
political
life, seemingly beyond reproach. This book, however, argues that the
problem lies in the ideal
of the public sphere—suggesting that this ideal has
vital shortcomings and that it is the actual pursuit of this
ideal, and not the
failure to realise a fully open and free public sphere, that produces the
nefarious effects
that are all too evident in contemporary politics, just as
they are in social life and in the more intimate
sphere of human existence.
Such way of posing the problem implies that it is necessary to directly
address the ‘public sphere’ and the
modern revolutionary tradition of which
it is a pivotal part.

HABERMAS AND THE TWO ‘IDEAL TYPES’ OF THE PUBLIC

SPHERE

The standard work on the public sphere is Jürgen Habermas’s Structural

Transformation of the Public
Sphere. Given that Habermas is one of the
most important figures of contemporary social theory and that
furthermore
the book contains, in its first part, a historical account of the rise of the
modern public sphere,
which has set the agenda for the current debate
(Roberts and Crossley 2004: 1), it would be self-evident to
consider this
work as the starting point for any genealogy of the links between comedy
and the public sphere.
Unfortunately this is impossible owing to its serious
flaws, including its mode of proceeding (methodology) and a
series of
untenable historical claims, just as its problematic interweaving of
substantive analysis with a
normative perspective that is taken as a self-
evident background, elucidated in later writings, but is itself
deeply flawed.
Given the high repute of Habermas’s entire work, such a negative
assessment might easily be considered reckless.
Habermas, of course, has
been criticised, and quite extensively (Calhoun 1992), even—according to
his supporters—‘unfairly’ (Roberts and Crossley 2004: 1). However, the
aim here is not to
take up and continue some of the lines of criticism
already expressed, as that would go beyond the scope of this
genealogical
book; rather, our aim is to argue that the work simply cannot be used as a
historical background
reference. Before giving concrete reasons for such an
assessment, however, two more general problems must be
raised concerning
the reception of Habermas’s work. The first addresses a basic dimension in
the appreciation of
Habermas’s work that has so far remained tacit, hidden,
unargued; whereas the second expresses perplexities about
the publication
and reception of the book that might be controversial yet cannot be avoided.
Concerning the first point, parallel to the reception and critical
discussion of Habermas’s work, there exists a
definite non-reception. A
significant section of contemporary social theory simply fails to engage
with
it. Foucault offers a perfect example. There is an extensive literature
on Foucault and Habermas; however, it is
largely oblivious to the fact that
Foucault did not see any significant parallel between his work and
Habermas’s.
Didier Eribon’s second book on Foucault contains some
relevant evidence (Eribon 1994: 289–96). In 1983, when Paul
Veyne invited
Habermas to give a series of lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault
strongly disapproved. He
turned out to be right in the most literal sense, as
Habermas started by denouncing all Nietzscheans, knowing
well that in
France Veyne and Foucault had, for decades, been the main promoters of
Nietzsche’s thinking.
Foucault repeatedly claimed that for him there were
three types of thinkers: those he didn’t know, those he knew,
and those he
knew but failed to discuss (Foucault 1994, IV: 591–4); thus it can be safely
assumed that the latter
group certainly included Habermas. Furthermore,
given the starting and title theme of this interview, which was
Foucault’s
pronounced desire to avoid polemics, he might have refrained from
discussing the work of Habermas in
order to achieve this. Yet the problem
remains: Why not render explicit what is wrong with Habermas?
A reason why a large segment of social theorists refrain from addressing
directly the work of Habermas is the
extreme difficulty of confronting the
heart of his position, both at the analytical and ‘normative’ levels. In
both
areas, and indeed jointly, forming an almost indiscernible whole, Habermas
formulates the most trivial
commonplaces of intellectual life, which,
however, seem to be almost irresistible. Many may feel the banality of
this,
and sense that something is not quite right with it, yet they are unable to go
beyond it. Habermas’s ideas
are thus deceptively seductive for some, while
they are also unattractive but impossible to oppose for others.
After all, we
as academics and intellectuals all like free and open discussion, in a forum
where we are not
subjected to external constraints; and any reference to the
dire facts of social reality or power relations is
immediately met with the
claim that still, ‘ideally’, communication should be perfectly free, and we
have nothing
better to do than to promote a free and open exchange of
ideas. Given that the medium of academic life and
education is language, in
particular speech, it is practically impossible for
social theorists to oppose
to this argument. Furthermore, deployed in front of the right kind of
audience, at the
right moment, one can easily become ‘hooked’ by it—the
‘ideal situation’ for such ‘hooking’ being the lecture
hall, full of
enthusiastic young students, preferably in a society whose order itself is
decaying. The aim of
this chapter, and in a way the entire book, is to put a
finger on what is so wrong with Habermas.
The second, concrete background point concerns the actual reception of
the work. The detailed history of its
publication and reception is yet to be
written and cannot be attempted here. All that is possible is to indicate
a
series of perplexities. The most important of these concerns the puzzling
delay of its translation into
English. The reason, it seems, was Habermas’s
unhappiness with certain details of the book, especially the need
to update
the empirical material. Finally, after 27 years, the book came out at a most
timely moment—the collapse
of the Berlin wall, but also the English
publication of its dangerous competitor, Koselleck’s Critique and
Crisis.
The strategic targeting of the original edition also raises queries. At that
time Habermas was a
young scholar, not an iconic figure; furthermore,
arguably, by choosing to ‘critique’ Horkheimer and Adorno’s
approach to
the Enlightenment, he opted for a particularly courageous way of
proceeding, his Habilitation
not being accepted by Adorno. However, in
another sense, the very novelty of the book, its championing of a
bridge
between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘critical’ social theory, while anticipating the
future, also pre-empted a proper
assessment. It burst into a gap, creating a
new, ‘liminal’ field in between the two dominant discourses;
thus it was not
and could not have been properly scrutinised by anyone. For ‘mainstream’
historians and social
scientists, the book, with its Marxist terminology, was
an exercise in left-wing ideology.1 For Marxists, however, Habermas was
still ‘one of us’, and Marxist social scientists at the time lacked the
competence to enter Habermas’s imported
‘bourgeois’ ideas.2
The surprising outcome of this short overview is that Habermas’s first
work was not and could not have been
subjected to any serious critical
scrutiny, whether in German or in English.
Actually, the situation is even more paradoxical. The book has three
main concerns, in two parts. The central of
these, dominating the entire
work, is the development of a normative theory of the ‘ideal’ public sphere,
later
expressed in terms like the ‘ideal speech situation’ and more recently
‘discursive ethics’. Although any
substantial scrutiny of Habermas’s work
is rendered difficult by the continuous evolution of the work, which
implies
that any ‘external’ critique is supposedly rendered irrelevant by the
‘internal’ critique of Habermas
himself, it is also accepted that there is
fundamental continuity in the work (Calhoun 1992, Roberts and Crossley
2004); often combined with claims about the foundational role of the first
work. It is here that the difference
between the two historical parts of the
book, devoted to the presentation of two ‘ideal types’ of public sphere,
the
second and third main concerns of the book, comes to the fore. While the
second part, a critique of the contemporary mass media—dominated public
sphere, is recognised as too simplistic
and largely superseded, the first,
background part is still considered as exemplary historical sociology.
The central concern of this book will lie here. It is argued that the
background part of the historical
chapter is untenable, and seriously
misleading; and this book will offer, instead, a proper genealogy of the
‘public sphere’ as it emerged, as a difference, during the Renaissance, in the
late medieval period. Concerning
Habermas’s work, four specific points
will be made. First, it will be argued that Habermas is not merely guilty
of
imposing a normative framework on the historical material, seriously
confusing Max Weber’s term ‘ideal type’
as a tool of historical analysis
with a normatively ‘idealised’ type, but that he did this through a perpetual,
vortex-like shifting between normative and analytical, contemporary and
historical meanings, generating a basic
confusion that was consistently
hidden by references to evidently universally shared modern normative
positions
that still are—and especially were at the time of writing—
impossible to elucidate and ‘criticise’. Second,
Habermas’s historical
analysis is based on a contrast between the old, pre-modern, merely
‘representative’ public
sphere (politics before the people), and the modern,
bourgeois, rational public sphere, based on free and
open discussion
(politics for the people) (Habermas 1989: 8). The problem is that such a
strongly
ideological contrast is pure fiction, based on a profound
misunderstanding of the medieval idea of participatory
representation and
of the general anthropological significance of participatory rituals. Third, it
will be shown
that the ‘ideal speech situation’, both ‘anticipated’ by the
earlier historical work and based on this flawed
‘historical’ analysis, is itself
a profoundly flawed idea, ignoring basic sociological and anthropological
realities. Finally, it will argued that both the historical and theoretical
shortcomings of Habermas’s work can
be illuminated through the term
‘liminality’. Needless to say, within the limits of this book only a cursory
presentation of these points is possible.

The first point can be illustrated through Nietzsche’s recognition of a major

error in writing history, the
failure to have a proper talent for backward
inference. It implies a look at the past through the optic of
the present,
failing to move back ‘from the work to the maker, from the deed to the
doer, from the ideal to those
who need it, from every way of thinking and
valuing to the commanding need behind it’ (Nietzsche 1974, no.
370).
Structural Transformation is literally saturated by mistakes in backward
inferences, and the manner
in which they were quite systematically
deployed renders this practice particularly problematic. The standard
logic
is the following. Habermas takes up a central concept in social or political
thinking that gained a
specific contemporary meaning, widely shared by
‘liberal’ and ‘critical-Marxist’ social theorists, and in the
broadest possible
sense of the terms, in a joint analytical and normative sense; and then
extends this meaning backwards to the past, in the same, self-evident but
normatively binding sense,
even after having given a cursory evocation of
the historically specific sense of the meaning given. Let
me single out three
central terms for attention: Öffentlichkeit (this is what has been translated as
‘public sphere’, but its original meaning and etymology explicitly implies
openness, having in German affinity
with the word ‘revelation’
(Offenbarung), so central for German Protestantism); Publikum (meaning
the public as audience; here again the specific German connotations are
important, as in German public openness
and revelation are connected to a
‘listening’ audience, corresponding to the manner in which revelation to
prophets in the Old Testament tradition was oral, while in Greek mythology,
religion and philosophy divine
revelation as ‘epiphany’ is a much more
visual concern); and ‘representation’. Concerning the first term,
Habermas
mentions the fact that in German the word was introduced only in the 18th
century and considered
awkward; yet, literally with a slight of hand
(‘nevertheless’ gleichwohl), he considers this fact as
irrelevant and
immediately retrojects the term, in its exact contemporary meaning, as far
back as ancient Greece
(Habermas 1989: 2–3; [1962]1990: 55–6). However,
this way of proceeding is extremely problematic, as the modern
meaning
assumes a specifically modern invention, the newspaper, which is based on
an earlier and again highly
specific technological innovation, the printing
press. Any query raised about such anachronism, however,
including a
simplistic application of the private-public distinction to antiquity, is
silenced by a normatively
loaded reference to ‘patrimonial slave economy’
(Habermas 1992: 3), which has nothing to do with the argument,
but
establishes a certain complicity with the reader, feeling oneself as
enlightened (this is what can be called,
paraphrasing Bruno Latour (1991),
the flattering self-identity ‘we moderns’), as opposed to those barbarian
Greeks who supported slavery. Thus the fact that Habermas fails to discuss
either the specificity of the agora or
the significance of theatre for the Greek
‘public life’ and education (Voegelin 1957) remains surreptitiously
unnoticed.
 The situation is very similar with the term Publikum. Following Erich
Auerbach, an important classic
author, Habermas notes that the word,
before it was connected with newspapers or political speeches, simply
meant
a theatre audience, following a French usage dating back to 1629
(1989: 256, fn.4; [1962]1990: 90), and that,
furthermore, both in European
languages and in Latin, the word originally had a different legal and
political
meaning. Yet the fact that the specifically modern sense of the
‘public’ as an ‘audience’, fundamental for the
rise of the ‘public sphere’ in
the modern sense, emerged in the early 17th century as a novelty would
simply be ignored. The new sense would be taken as a background meaning
—as if it had existed eternally.
Finally, something even worse happened with the term ‘representation’.
Here again, a footnote referring to the
then recent and by now classic work
of Gadamer ([1960] 1989) makes it evident that the medieval sense of the
word placed emphasis on the concrete aspect of bringing something absent
into
presence, focusing on participation. However, the entire corpus of the
book simply ignores this point and takes
the modern meaning of
representation as a merely visual illustration as given.3 It is in this sense
that a central concept of the
book is introduced: ‘representative publicness’
(repräsentative Öffentlichkeit), defined by the English
translator as ‘the
display of inherent spiritual power or dignity before an audience’ (as in
Habermas 1992: xv).
However, it is here that we move from questions of method to the heart
of the
fundamental substantive problems with Habermas’s early book.

In a standard neo-Kantian manner, making allusions to Max Weber’s ideas

but not following in any way the word or
spirit of Max Weber, Habermas
builds his thesis around a crude dichotomy between the old, ‘bad’, merely
representative public sphere and the new, bourgeois public sphere featuring
free and open public discussion. It
is in the positive assessment given to
procedural rationality that the novelty of a work—otherwise written from a
radical Marxist standpoint—lay, anticipating the fusion of radical liberal
and post-Marxist views on democracy,
the taken-for-granted horizon of
contemporary political theory, an agenda set up by Rawls (1971). On a
closer
look, however, this is not so different from the standard Marxist
assessment of the revolutionary character of
the bourgeoisie, already
present in the Communist Manifesto. Since the 1962 book, Habermas’s
thinking
indeed did not move away from this radical revolutionary agenda,
which implied the fluidification or liquefaction
of every single stable aspect
of social and cultural life—whatever was still left intact by the similarly
dissolving chemical activity of the market. Although purportedly attacking
only the solidification of market
interests through publicity or marketing,
the claim concerning ‘refeudalisation’, while at one level purely
provocative, at another can be interpreted as a principled hostility to
anything that is stable and solid—that
cannot be immediately and
recurrently altered, subject to the conditions of a ‘reasoned discourse’.
Before further discussing the problems concerning the ‘bourgeois’
public sphere as ideal, in particular the trap
set up through the ‘ideal speech
situation’, it is necessary to reconsider the other part of the dichotomy. In a
fundamentally non-Weberian way, Habermas considers the two ideal types
as being both normative and
also as constituting a historical sequence—
exactly the kind of argument Weber was most opposed to.
According to
Habermas’s fictional history, the bourgeois public sphere grew out of the
eternal and timeless
background of ‘representative publicness’.
Habermas’s idea of ‘representative publicness’ has the theatre as its
model. Apart from the linguistic discussion
referred above, this is best
visible in the central claim according to which—before the modern, rational
public
sphere—politics was done simply in front of the public, thus
implying a public as an audience, exactly as
in theatre.
However, the problem is not only that the very term ‘public’, used in the
sense of an audience, dates back only
to the 17th century but that theatre as
an institution did not exist during the Middle Ages. The principles of
representation during that period were quite different from the ‘theatrical’.
As historians of the theatre argue,
up the late 15th century, the most basic
facts concerning the functioning of the theatre were ignored even in
Italy,
while the medieval sacred representations (rappresentazione sacra) have
very little to do with
theatre as we understand it, assuming institutionalised
separation between actors and audience and a wide and
persistent gap
between the two.4
Habermas’s historical analysis therefore has no foundation. The social
and political use of theatrical
representation and the printing press, and
indeed even marketing and publicity, far from representing stages in a
process—with ceremonial representation as a timeless background, the
printing press and rational discourse as the
heroic invention of the
revolutionary bourgeoisie, and then marketing and publicity as the ploy of
modern market
capitalism to hijack and ‘colonise’ this innovation, to be
liberated in a finally fully open and democratic
public sphere—is pure
fiction, a piece of mobilising flattery for the all-too-willing contemporary
self-designated freedom fighters for ever more progress and democracy. In
actual fact, theatre, press, marketing
and publicity all emerged
contemporaneously, and in a closely related manner. The central aim of this
book is to
demonstrate exactly how this happened.

The ‘Ideal Speech Situation’ as Trap

The ‘ideal speech situation’, connected to ‘pure communicative action’
(Habermas 2001: 98), is a central concept
in elucidating the underlying
theoretical assumptions of Structural Transformation. Its main features are
the absence of any external constraints on argumentation and
communication, a ‘freeing of discourse from coercive
structures of action
and interaction’, and of ‘distorted communication’; a complete equality of
opportunity and
universal interchangeability of taking up ‘dialogue roles’,
or a ‘general assumption of symmetry’; full
transparency, meaning that ‘the
subjects are transparent to themselves and to others in what they actually do
and
believe’; and that therefore the only source of power acceptable is the
force of the ‘better argument’ (Ibid.:
98–9; see also Fultner 2001: xv, xx).
Again, such claims seem to be plain truisms governing any intellectual
exchange; and indeed Habermas argues that they were not only implicitly
present in Structural
Transformation but are also assumed and anticipated
by any human communication. However, Habermas assumes
something
much more: evoking basic principles of philosophical hermeneutics, it is
claimed that it is also
foundational for social life, or the ‘life-world’, given
that the central aspect of this background is
‘consensus’. This means that
the ‘background’, or the very foundation of social existence, is based on the
same
assumptions and the similar argumentative structure that characterises
the
‘ideal speech situation’ and that therefore, through ‘communicative
action’, we simply return to this same
foundational moment of social life.
By re-discussing consensus, we only place it on a more stable footing. This
analysis, however, is a piece of pseudo-hermeneutics, as the foundation of
social life is not and cannot
be purely argumentative discussion. It is rather
provided by mimesis, according to Plato, Aristotle, Tocqueville,
Tarde or
Girard; by gift relations, according to Mauss; by sociability, according to
Simmel; by play, according
to Huizinga; or by circles of recognition,
according to Pizzorno. All of us are deeply embedded in a thick
network of
social relations, which is taken for granted, and which is based first on
passive learning in an
environment that we take as our ‘home’ and then on
the active identification and recognition of a whole series of
attributes and
values that help us properly conduct our lives. The central features of this
background
hermeneutics are trust, belief, personality, innocence, respect,
and reputation, each of which in every concrete
relationship and context can
become problematic. However, neither problematisation nor the eventual
solution of
such crises is based on discursive arguments; rather it depends
on the recognition of personal valour. Under the
guise of hermeneutics,
Habermas is performing rationalistic reductivism—the technique also
utilised by
utilitarian economists, and adherents of modern scientism.
Thus, behind the smoke of a disarmingly self-evident idealisation of
‘rational discourse’, a question must be
posed: what is the exact
arrangement of which Habermas tries to convince us?

The first point concerns the ‘entry’ into an ideal speech situation. Habermas
paints a deceptive image of
complete freedom, understood as an absence of
external constraint; but even Marx called attention to the
ambivalence of
‘freedom’ as a value. The condition of possibility of modern capitalism,
according to him, was the
freedom of workers in a double sense: free of
feudal constraints but also of protective social networks. Does an
entry into
an ‘ideal speech situation’ also assume defencelessness? The answer lies in
the point already raised
concerning Habermas’s pseudo-hermeneutics. By
entering a space of ‘pure communication’, we assume that anything
that we
cherish and hold sacred about our personal life, values and belief, becomes
open for a ‘rational’ debate.
It means that we simply cannot accept anything
as given; we must provide a linear verbal account
justifying everything we
do or think, rendering it open to public counterarguments. Our ‘freedom to
enter’
thus also implies nakedness, in the sense of defencelessness and
vulnerability—the giving up and jeopardising of
our very identity. The
public sphere, thus, is more than an open field: it rather assumes the
characteristics of an arena.
This leads to the second point. We entered the arena; but whom are we
meeting there? An arena is a place for
fighting; and in the ‘open field’ into
which we have been lured we are now constrained to fight for something
that, according to Pizzorno and Agamben, is much more important than our
‘naked’ life: our identity. However, anyone is ill placed in the ‘public’ for
such a vital struggle, as in a
‘free space,’ we cannot rely on those who
might otherwise help in matters of identity: members of our ‘circles of
recognition’ (Pizzorno): our friends, colleagues and relatives. They are not
present; or if they happen to be
there, they are just as naked as we are,
reduced to ‘pure’ argumentative rationality, fighting for their own
identity.
In such a setup, where all are forced to act with their backs against the wall,
we can expect no
sympathy. Forgiveness and mercy—basic principles of
sociability—will not be asked for and at any rate not given.
However, even in this new and open field, not everybody present will be
equal. People are not equally suited to
come up with ‘rational’ arguments;
some are ‘naturally’ better equipped with powers of reason (thus, in this
new
society to be produced by ‘pure communicative action’, social
hierarchy will be closely based on IQ scores);
while others gain more
experience in attacking and defending exclusively through words.
Thus—and this is the third point—while Habermasian theory assumes a
context and identity-free debating arena, it
still is a very concrete field,
much limited in both time and space: those lured into a free and open
discussion
about potentially ‘everything’ must come up with the right
arguments in the here and now—as otherwise they would
never regain their
identities, foolishly suspended at the threshold, as if left in the cloakroom
together with
their coats and hats. The situation would thus soon be close to
desperate, claustrophobic, as psychological
pressures will be tremendous,
while the weapons at their disposal are not up to those handled by others.
Of such
weapons, two are particularly lethal: the weapon of ridicule and
laughter, provided by the ‘others’ as a
whole; and the weapon of lucidity, of
cool and neutral, distant and never involved, not participatory
‘rationality’
acquired by those who had a long experience of being outsiders to bonds of
community, participation
and emotionality and who therefore are bound to
rule the new field; just as the early ‘entrepreneurs’ were bound
to gain the
upper hand over the groups and estates of the medieval order. After all, how
could anyone possibly
give an account in public, in front of anybody, about
the reasons why he or she lives at a particular
place, in a given family,
believing in powers higher than oneself (including one’s meagre powers of
reasoning and
the minuscule knowledge anybody can possess); and even
connect it to a critique or defence of ‘the government’?
Fourth, although Habermas is quite right in arguing that in the ‘public
arena’ individuals will not be subject to
external constraints, this by no
means renders their situation better: they would simply be caught and
bound by
their own arguments. Having entered the ring, they have given up
their identity; they foolishly traded the most
cherished and trusted elements
of their experiences, even their very being, to the deceptive force of mere
reasoning power; as a result, they will now be forced to replace them with
whatever they have managed to fish from their memories, through the
powers of their reasoning, and
with this their own word will now be bound.
As Foucault argued concerning the Panopticon, internal or
internalised
power can be much more lethal than mere external constraint.
Fifth, Habermas makes it explicit that entry to this ring is not just a
onetime event. Even those who luckily got
off the hook for the first time
must face the threat and torture again and again, indeed permanently. The
‘critical standard’, like a vigilant night watchman, never sleeps; rather, like
the secret policemen of a
totalitarian state, it can ‘be used to call into
question any factually attained consensus and to examine whether
it is
sufficient’ (Habermas 2001: 97). Seemingly a champion of openness and
pluralism, Habermas refutes the idea
of a ‘perfect’ argument and rather
stresses that the central source of validity is only a ‘better argument’;
however, what is overlooked is that this assumes a permanent attacking of
anything anybody is holding stable and
sacred in his or her life. Open
discussion is thus transmogrified into permanent hyper-criticism. The
universal
freedom of argumentation becomes an obligation to give reasons
about one’s conduct. The parallel with
totalitarian states is by no means a
sly attack: anybody who has lived a good part of his or her life under them
knows that the problem there is not simply the right of policemen, whether
uniformed, plainclothed or secret, to
ask questions about anything, but the
resulting, pervasive social practice where everybody who is resigned
to this
logic will play the game of posing indiscreet questions—and looking
forward to having the chance of
laughing at the victims of their questions,
whom they have managed to ridicule.
The last point concerns the nature of the identity assigned by the public
arena. It has two central aspects:
self-deception and ideology. The first
concerns the fact that the continuous playing of the game implies that the
nature of the ‘ideal speech situation’ as a trap must remain hidden. Those
who enter it, taking a leap into
nothingness, will have their identities
destroyed; but they cannot face this fact and thus, instead of revealing
the
trickery of ‘pure’ communication, they rather propagate the myth of
freedom and openness. This is helped by
the new, ideologically based
identity ‘constructed’ through mere communication: the identity of being
‘modern’, forever on the side of ‘progress’. This identity has two aspects:
the first, corresponding to the
world- and life-hostile, purely abstract nature
of rational communication, implies belief in this or that version
of
modernist utopia: a perfect society or state, through socialism or through
communication technology. The
second, more emotional aspect implies a
game with suffering: progress is called forth, and measured, by
eliminating
all suffering from the world. The two can be combined, but the second is
actually more permanent and
lethal: after the collapse of abstract utopias, it
can still persist and exert an influence, all the more so as
the task is indeed
eternal, and those who call attention to the realities of social life and human
nature can be
labelled as conservatives or cynics.5

The Public Sphere as a Liminal Arena

As the previous discussion makes evident, the ‘public sphere’ is not the
‘promised land’ of unlimited freedom,
cornerstone of the perfect social
order; rather, it is a liminal place, full of the ambivalence characteristic of
liminal situations, except that—in the absence of awareness about liminality
—the negative aspects inherent in
such situations are bound to gain the
upper hand. In a ritual, liminality is generated by the ‘rites of
separation’, or
the suspension of the normal structures and identities of social life, exactly
as assumed by
Habermas; it continues with a ‘performance’, where the new
identity is assigned, just as it happens, through
debates, in the ‘ideal speech
situation’; however, in contrast to rituals, where the successful completion
of a
ritual is ended by the rites of reaggregation, in the Habermasian
Universe this never happens, as one is force to
live, forever, suspended in
the permanent discursive problematisation of all the aspects of one’s life.
The
proper analogy for the Habermasian ideal is thus the ‘liminoid’
condition of ‘permanent liminality’;6 while in the language of Plato,
using
the khora as analysed in the Timaeus, it is a non-place between being and
becoming, the
location of ‘bastard reasoning’ (52b).

Liminality, Enlightenment, Revolution

If the theory of the public sphere idealises a liminal situation, then it should
be possible to re-analyse the
concrete historical situation when this space
appeared, in the late 17th century in England and the 18th century
on the
continent, as a ‘liminal moment’. Given that the genealogy offered in this
book deals with an earlier time
period, this cannot be attempted here.
However, in order to illustrate the potential fruitfulness of such a
perspective, let me offer a few words arguing that the link between the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution,
an old historical problem, can be
established through liminality.
From this perspective the Enlightenment can be conceived of as the
intellectual movement that lured the
incautious to enter the trap of pure
discursive rationality. If this were right, the values of the French
Revolution
could be characterised as permanent idealisations of the values associated
with temporary liminal
situations. This can be shown by re-interpreting the
three central values of the French Revolution in light of
Turner’s classic
1967 essay. Freedom (liberty) is the first of the three central values of the
French Revolution,
and it can be associated with the start of a rite of
passage: the bracketing and elimination of all stable
structures and
boundaries of social life. The second value, equality, comes next in rites of
passage as well and
signifies the equality of condition imposed on all those
undergoing the ritual: among the initiate, no
distinctions are made between
offspring of the tribal chief and the most humble members of the village.
Finally,
brotherhood (or fraternity) is the conclusive value associated with
passing the
test, the experience of communitas: all those who have
undergone a rite together will become and stay
friends, or brothers, for life.
The three values of the French Revolution are not only present in rites of
passage: they are the three major values associated with the ‘ritual process’
(Turner 1969) as a
mechanical procedure.
Through rites of passage and the concept of ‘liminality’, it also becomes
possible to understand the lasting,
irrepressible hold exerted by these central
values of the European revolutionary tradition. At the same time this
also
identifies a serious limit of validity: liminal moments are transitory,
restricted in time and place; they
cannot last. The idea that a society of free
and equal humans, bound together in eternal bonds of fraternity, can
be
created is ludicrous nonsense, as it means the infinite extension of the
peculiar situation of a liminal
moment, defying the realities of social life
and human nature. Yet, this is exactly what European societies,
tricked and
entrapped by the ideologies of the Enlightenment, are purporting to propose
as the central
values of human and social existence. The result is that, once
the impossibility of the joint realisation of the
three values is revealed
through the nightmare of terror—a necessary stage in any revolution where
the alchemic
transformation from seductive ideal to grim reality was made
—political movements were born that idealised one of
the three, conceiving
a liminal value as the unquestionable ideal of human life: liberalism,
promoting
freedom; socialism, glorifying equality; and nationalist, even
racist movements trying to establish the exclusive
unity of an all-en-
compassing group. The ‘pure’ ideals of liberalism, socialism and
nationalism or racism are one
by one revealed as chimeras, at a tremendous
cost in human suffering; yet enchanted by the revolutionary promises
of
progress, modern societies evidently are unable to move beyond them. This
is the trap in which contemporary
societies are still firmly enclosed; and the
ideal of a ‘public sphere’, with its Enlightenment-inspired ‘ideal
speech
situation’, is the central ideology justifying the impossibility of escaping the
trap.

The theatrical aspects of the French Revolution are common knowledge,

and idea that the modern ‘public sphere’
has fundamentally theatrical
aspects is widely shared. Most importantly, it has become a main feature in
what has
been called the ‘performative turn’ in the social sciences. Indeed,
the genealogy of the public sphere to be
offered has important affinities
with aspects of the ‘performative turn’.
THE ‘PERFOMATIVE TURN’

The expression ‘performative turn’ is used to denote the systematic analysis

of the purported theatrical aspects
inherent in social and cultural practices,
even the formation of identity, in the sense that ordinary human
beings,
under certain conditions, or indeed even in routine everyday life, behave as
if they were acting on a stage (Alexander and Mast 2006, Burke 2005).
Such an idea is traced back
to the immediate post-war period, with Kenneth
Burke’s dramatistic approach to the underlying motives of human
behaviour
and John Austin’s philosophical ideas concerning performative speech acts
as pioneers, with the works
of Goffman (in sociology) and Victor Turner (in
anthropology) being classic statements.
Central to the approach is an emphasis placed on meaning, in contrast to
structuralist-functionalist or
utilitarian approaches focusing on formal truth
or instrumental rationality. However, ‘meaning’ can be assigned
quite
different interpretations, and the perspectives of Alexander and Giesen, or
Goffman and Turner, indeed
differ quite significantly. Alexander, closely
following Goffman and ultimately relying upon the work of
Durkheim,
takes the theatrical metaphor in a narrow, literal sense, arguing that
ultimately there is a close
analogy between regular everyday social life,
ritual, and performance. Giesen, however, following more closely
Turner,
and drawing upon Max Weber and Marcel Mauss, connects the
performative aspects of social life with the
sacred, rather than with ordinary
social life, and emphasises the significance of out of ordinary events.
The nature of these differences needs to be established in some further
detail.

Jeffrey Alexander
Alexander starts by acknowledging that insincerity, faking and hypocrisy
are major problems plaguing contemporary
political life, aggravated by
developments in electronic mass communications. Yet, he refuses to grant
any
validity to concerns with authenticity or the destruction of boundaries
between theatre and social life, which he
associates with post-modern
critics, dismissed, through an all-too-familiar technique of labelling, as
‘political
conservatives’ driven by nostalgia for a lost past, or simply
‘Heideggerianism’ (Alexander and Mast 2006: 5–9).
He even considers,
following Durkheim and neo-Kantianism, but also ‘New Hegelians’ like
Feuerbach, the sacred as
a mere construct (Ibid.: 18). Instead, he suggests
that a return to meaning lies in recognising that social life
is nothing else
but performance, and that therefore life even in the most rationalised
society remains
enchanted (Alexander 2006: 76).
This point lies at the heart of Alexander’s approach, identified as
‘cultural pragmatics’. According to
Alexander, previous theoretical
approaches, including Turner and Goffman, failed ‘to take advantage of the
theoretical possibilities of understanding symbolic action as performance’
(Alexander and Mast 2006: 12), which
he proposes to remedy by
developing ‘a macro model of social action as cultural performance’
(Alexander 2006:
77). While the term ‘as’ in the previous sentence can be
read as a mere metaphor, Alexander is close to offering
a literal identity
between social life and performance—a point underlined with particular
clarity in the repeated
focus not simply on the performative ‘aspect’ of
social life but also on the
idea that everyday, regular social life simply is
theatre. Thus the introduction identifies as the single
most important
common thread connecting the essays in the volume the effort to examine
‘the theatrical dimensions
of social life’ (Alexander and Mast 2006: 16–7).
In particular, and in radical contrast to Victor Turner, the
image of theatre is
more appropriate for capturing social life than participatory rituals: ‘[t]he
process by
which culture gets embedded in action, in fact, more closely
resembles the dynamics of theatrical production,
criticism, and appreciation
than it resembles old fashioned rituals’ (Ibid.: 17). Or, as it is stated in a
programmatic manner on the first page of Chapter 1 of the book, ‘cultural
pragmatics demonstrates how social
performances, whether individual or
collective, can be analogised systematically to theatrical ones’ (Alexander
2006: 29).
But how to distinguish the genuineness of meaning as generated
through performance from the fake diagnosed
earlier? Alexander suggests
the criterion of ‘success’; a central term for his approach, the evident reason
why
this is called cultural pragmatics. The measure of success, at a first
level, is convincing power:
‘[s]uccessful performance depends on the
ability to convince others that one’s performance is true’ (Ibid.: 32).
As
Alexander recognises, however, the truthfulness of performance is a very
ambivalent criterion of success, and
therefore (at a second level) success is
connected to effect produced, in the sense of integrative power. It is
here
that Alexander introduces the central term of his analysis, ‘fusion’,
demonstrating that his analysis of
theatrical performance coincides
perfectly with Durkheim’s analysis of ritual: a ritual or a performance is
successful if it has managed to generate social cohesion, integration or
solidarity.
This idea, no matter how simple and self-evident it may look, is,
however, based on the assumption that social
order and cohesion were
indeed weakened, undermined, or in any way came under some kind of
threat. Instead of
taking up such a concrete, contingent or historical
approach, Alexander follows the road of general theorising,
arguing that
any cultural performance can be conceptually broken down, or ‘defused’,
into its constitutive
elements, and thus the effectiveness of social
performances depends on their ability to ‘re-fuse’ them (Ibid.:
32). This
replacement of the simple terminology of ‘integration’ or ‘fusion’ with the
couple ‘de-fusion’ and
‘re-fusion’ is justified by an argument concerning
‘complexity’—where therefore the general theoretical argument
at the same
time becomes historically specific, assuming the ‘complexity’ of the
modern world. Alexander then
proceeds by listing and analysing such
elements—without discussing explicitly the issue of the applicability of
such ‘elements’ to a non-modern setting and therefore failing to address the
question whether ‘de-fusion’ into
elements is an analytical tool or a
historical process or both at the same time.
The question, however, is of fundamental importance, going to the heart
of the proper and improper ways of
combining historical and
anthropological data, thus reproducing the fallacy of evolutionism, one of
the most
important errors in Durkheim’s work. The Durkheimian method,
which Alexander
follows, assumes that the analytical breakdown of a
performance into its constitutive parts—such as ‘actors’,
‘audience’, ‘means
of symbolic production’ and ‘miseenscène’—purportedly mirrors the way
in which ‘over time’,
with the rise of ‘complex societies’, social life
actually developed, thus still following the ideas as developed
by Durkheim
concerning the inexorable necessity of the increasing division of labour in
his 1892 doctoral
dissertation. This is a reason why Durkheim then wrote
about Australian aborigines, assumed as the ‘most
primitive’ kind of
surviving society, so that—literally as if using a ruler—he could draw a
straight line
connecting the most primitive, compact, and the most
developed or complex societies, development being measured
by the
proliferation of ‘de-fusion’ and ‘re-fusion’.
However, such a historical narrative is purely fictional, as such
‘elements’ of social life do not simply exist
out there, prior to the ‘de-
fusion’, as the atomic particles of a Newtonian universe, but are rather
actually
formed by social life, together, through participation, whether in
daily life or in rituals. Let me give a
most simple example, the case of
marriage. ‘Wife’ and ‘husband’ are not ‘elements’ of a ‘social practice’ that
can be defused or refused at pleasure; they do not even exist before and
independently from the formative
and participatory ritual of a wedding
ceremony. It is this ritual that, through a series of performative
speech acts,
generates a marriage, and thus a couple.
Human beings participate in a great number of social networks or
circles where their identity, or being, is
formed and transformed—or
deformed. The weakening or breakdown of any of these circles, and the
need for
formation or re-formation, is a fundamental, ever-present, yet
always concrete and contingent social and
historical problem. This is the
point where the theatrical metaphor reaches its limit; instead, one needs to
analyse the extent to which ritual performances mirror events and help in
the solution of genuine social crises.
It is here that the perspective of
Bernhard Giesen, based more on Weber and Mauss than on Durkheim, and
following
more closely the footsteps of Victor Turner than of Erving
Goffman, helps to move further.

Bernhard Giesen
For Giesen the central issue concerning modernity and meaning is not
complexity, rather the void; not an
inexorable evolutionary progress of
social life, which, alas, renders social life ever more differentiated, thus
requiring the staging of ‘re-enchanting’, illusion-mongering, and ‘effective’
rituals, rather the concrete
erosion of the necessary transcendent
foundations of any social order. This way of posing the problem is central
to his more recent, comprehensive presentations of his position, each using
a characteristic tripartite
formulation: one more historical, concerning the
‘three cultural projects of
modernity’ (Giesen 2009), and another, more
conceptual, resuming his work on triumph and trauma, about the three
major modes of performing transcendence in politics (Giesen 2012).
According to the former, the first cultural
project of modernity was the
Enlightenment, whose central thrust was an attempt to move beyond all
concrete
boundaries of descent and locality in the name of human autonomy
and the objectivity of science, thus replacing
the transcendent sacred with
the transcendental and community with cosmopolitanism. However, with its
opposition
to the personal, it gradually emptied the world of meaning. It is
because of such a perceived void that the
second cultural project,
romanticism, emerged, with its search for meaning at the level of feelings
and not
objective reason, resulting in a ‘plunging into the abyss of the
subject’ (2009: 243). It is against the
shortcomings of both projects that the
third project was formulated, which Giesen identifies, paraphrasing Dewey,
as a ‘new quest for certainties’ (Ibid.: 245), a ‘return to commitment’, or
‘the return of religion’ (Ibid.: 239,
247–9). Such return, however, does not
imply a simple reassertion to past traditions; it is modern, as it ‘is
based on
a deliberate choice and planned decision for a form of life’ (Ibid.: 247); a
point where the positive
affinities with Alexander’s project become visible.
The problem of the void is formulated even more explicitly in his
Cambridge presentation (Giesen 2012), which
also returns to a link between
performance and the sacred, already central for Giesen’s contribution to the
2006
book. The three main modes of performing the sacred in politics are
the charismatic hero and sovereignty; the
rule of law and the problem of
deviance, or the perpetrator; and the memory of victimhood (Giesen 2012).
The
first point is fundamentally Weberian, but in addition Giesen makes an
explicit distinction between two modes of
transcendence, the genuine
sacred and the monstrous or demonic,7 and puts more emphasis on the
question of presence, also pointing
out the impossibility of a continuous
performance of charisma, which eventually results in the rule of the
written
law.8
It is the impersonality of the written law and the resulting void of
meaning that calls forth the fascination
with transgression, or the going
beyond all limits and boundaries, which, however, not only generates
further
loss of meaning and the intensification of the abyss and the void, but
also the proliferation of victims. This
situation gives rise to the third mode
of performing transcendence in politics, particularly characteristic of
our
times, the representation and heroisation of victims, where Giesen returns to
the Durkheimian point
concerning the foundational role of rituals of
sacrifice, recently also re-proposed by René Girard. The cult of
victimhood,
however, could only multiply and proliferate victims, as the main
totalitarian movements of the past
century have already made it evident,
closing the circle and sending us back to the question of a foundational
sacred, beyond victimhood.9

As the focus on the void makes evident, Giesen’s approach within the broad
coordinates of the ‘performative turn’ is quite different from Alexander’s.
In contrast to the latter, Giesen
recognises that the lack of authenticity is a
genuine issue (Giesen 2006: 342–3, 350); that the dilution of
borderlines—
in particular the modern urge to ignore and/or transgress any possible
boundaries and limits—is also
a serious problem (Giesen 2009; see also
Szakolczai 2009); and, most importantly and centrally, that the sacred
is not
merely a ‘construct’ but a presence and also an event, even an irruption into
social life, in the form of
‘epiphanies’ (Giesen 2006: 327, 335–6).10 The
thematisation of the link between event and performance takes up a central
place in
Giesen’s framework, corresponding to the contrast between de-
fusion and re-fusion in Alexander’s ‘cultural
pragmatics’. Instead of all but
identifying ritual, performance, theatre, and everyday social life, as
proposed
by Goffman and Alexander, though in different ways and with
certain provisos, Giesen proposes a sequence between
events, rituals and
theatre: in contrast to the original sacred event, which has a participatory
component beyond
explicit communication and in particular ‘resists being
told to outsiders’, rituals are ‘ “second-order events”
that frame and tame
the impact of unmediated (epiphanic) events’, while a theatrical
performance ‘may be regarded
as a “third-order event” ’ (Ibid.: 327).
Rituals at one level repeat events while at another they are events on
their
own (Ibid.: 338–9); like theatrical performances, they can also become
events if they manage to evoke the
participation of the audience in a
cathartic experience (Ibid.: 358). We can see here that the logic of Giesen’s
argument moves in a direction opposite to Alexander’s: while Alexander
(and Goffman) reduce event and ritual,
even ordinary social life, to theatre
(even using the term ‘pure performativity’, with close parallels to
Habermas’s ‘pure communicative action’), Giesen claims that even ‘mere’
theatre can produce a participatory
event.
Here the fundamental differences between the philosophical, even
cultural, backgrounds of Alexander and Giesen
become visible—central for
a proper interpretation of theatrical performativity and thus the underlying
theoretical framework for this book. Alexander ultimately follows
American pragmatism, interpreted as being
fundamentally concerned with
successful effect: every social action and practice is a performance, the
basic
question being success or failure. Giesen, however, follows the
German tradition of deep hermeneutics: social
life is ultimately constituted
of a web of meaning that cannot be identified, though it involves presence;
it is
invisible and non-representational and exactly for this reason must be
represented, though only on certain
special occasions (2009: 248–9; 2012).
Success is measured not by accepting a performance as a real everyday
action but rather by managing to go beyond the routinised everyday and
restoring meaning by re-establishing
contact with sacred presence, the
ultimate transcendent foundation of social and political order.
Theatre cannot be a model of ordinary social life, given that it ‘requires
the presence of a non-acting third
party’ (Giesen 2006: 346, following
Nietzsche).11 It is non-participatory, while the central
aspect of social life is
that we participate in it. Still, even such an artificial staging can produce a
genuine participatory experience if it is accepted ‘by the audience as a true
and authentic representation of its
own longings, hopes, fears, and
obsessions’, thus ‘an authentic representation of its own internal world’
(Ibid.:
358). For Giesen, and most emphatically, ‘[t]his is the real moment
of fusion’ (Ibid.; emphasis in
original). But theatre can also produce exactly
the opposite effect: an existing ‘fusion’ or a participatory
experience can be
unsettled and destroyed by ‘the sudden appearance of subversive “demons”
’, or through
‘subversive mimical event[s]’, which ‘shatter the structure of
meaning and allow for a glimpse into the abyss’
(Ibid.: 359)—the same
void and abyss identified before as the central problem of modernity.
Theatre produces such
suspension and subversion through laughter—and
here we enter directly into one of the central concerns of the
historical
reconstruction contained in this book: What is the exact meaning and
significance of the fact that the
theatre, in the late Renaissance and early
modern period, was reborn in Europe not as tragedy but as comedy?

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: SOPHISTS AND PUBLIC DECAY

IN ATHENS (PLATO)

Plato is the founder of philosophy as we know it; but this undertaking was
inseparable from his attempt to
reflect on his own place and time as a
situation of crisis. Thus, in the terminology of Foucault, he could well
be
considered as a ‘historian of the present’, or a genealogist; or, from a
Weberian perspective, it would not be
wrong to consider his work as having
a properly sociological dimension. Plato’s entire work, following the
‘mission’ of Socrates, was set in motion by a passionate effort to try to
understand what was going on in his
beloved Athens; why it happened that
the city, at the height of its greatest glory, was being subsumed into a
repulsive kind of decadence and decay, striking at the heart of its greatest
assets: politics (democracy) and the
theatre.
Plato attributed the greatest role in this to the corrupting influence of the
sophists. The first series of
dialogues, centring on the figure of Socrates,
illustrate and diagnose their nefarious activity in the
marketplace (agora),
focusing on the power of words. This was rendered particularly difficult by
a major paradox:
the diagnosis of the sophists required the use of words,
thus there was the possibility that such a diagnosis
would use the power of
words in a manner not so dissimilar from that of the sophists. Even further,
as words are
artefacts, they do not have a real, material substance of their
own; not possessing concrete, personal
characteristics, the same words can
be deployed, cunningly, cynically or sophistically, for a variety of
different
and often opposed meanings. The core of Plato’s philosophy touches upon
human virtue, the good life and
the beauty of the world, but all these terms
can be used to question, denigrate
or ridicule the very same ideas. The
formulation of a theoretical discourse therefore is not sufficient; the
power
of words must be combined with the force of personality.
However, after a time Plato came to realise that the central concern of
the sophists, the rise to dominance
through the emerging, open and
desocialised public arena, was more effectively served by images than by
words: by
a strategic deployment of fancy, imagination and fantasy. This is
the reason why the Sophist, his dialogue
intended to provide a conclusive
assessment of the sophists, has as its centre the power of the image to
insinuate itself in reality and thus alter it.
Yet soon after he finished this dialogue, Plato’s diagnosis moved to a
third level. A glimpse of this is
contained in a genuine ‘vision experience’
Plato evidently had while working on the next dialogue, the
Statesman: the
core of the lethal activities of the sophists resides in the particular
combination of
words and images that is the theatre (see 291A–B and
303C–D). The issue of theatricality was touched upon by
Plato before.
Looking back from the perspective of the diagnosis of ‘theatrocracy’
offered in the Laws,
one gains the impression that such a connection
between the sophists and the theatre was always lurking in the
back of
Plato’s mind. It was central for the Ion, and the Symposium also has strong
theatrical
aspects—it even ends on the note of Socrates discussing the
identity of writing tragedies and comedies. These two
dialogues are
notoriously difficult to date and are considered transitional.

Theatrocracy in the Laws in Context

The central aim of the Laws, the last of Plato’s dialogues, intended to be
conclusive, is the proper
foundation of a city. Plato was well aware of the
paradox that a perfectly functioning city can actually be
counterproductive,
as people would be deprived of the experiences necessary to gain wisdom;
thus it could easily
subsume to the forces of corruption (Republic 609c).
The central question concerns the sources that could
derail the functioning
of a polity, which gives Plato the chance to revisit the effect mechanism of
the sophists.
Plato starts by diagnosing the present: discussion of the right
constitution is necessary as the city has lost
its way, following now the
advice of the ‘pleasure principle’, being captivated not simply by doing
whatever
brings immediate pleasure and avoids pain, but also indulging in
‘opinions about the future, which go by the
general name of “expectations”
’ (Laws 644b–c). In such a context, the philosopher must remain truthful,
which ‘require[s] a bold man who, valuing candour above all else, will
declare what he deems best for the city
and citizens [ … ] in the midst of
corrupted souls’ (835c).12
The diagnosis of corruption is offered in three steps. In the first, Plato
identifies the basic, anthropological
sources of corruption in the imitative
arts (668c). Imitation is a
fundamental aspect of human life, essential to the
possibility of learning and education. The imitative arts use
and abuse this
fact to the full, reproducing and enacting certain aspects of human
behaviour, trying to make them
‘pleasing’. The problem concerns the
manner in which one can judge and recognise the rightfulness of such
imitations (668d–9a).
The third discussion of the theme returns to the problem with particular
clarity and also offers a crucial
personal insight. Plato asserts that there are
dangerous works that should not be produced, read, shown or
played; but
that it is quite difficult to discuss such matters, as ‘it is no easy matter to
gainsay tens of
thousands of tongues’ (810d). Yet there are thornier issues
than external opposition and the courage required to
face it, and here we get
a rare glimpse of personal tone. Plato admits here his own perplexity, as he
himself is
quite fond of mimetic art (811d–e).13 It is well worth recalling
here a somewhat earlier passage, which discussed, in an
astonishingly ‘non-
Platonic’ way, the relationship between the playful and the serious. Plato
formulates here one
of his most important and perplexing claims about
humans: they are not merely playthings of the divine, like
puppets on a
string (about this, see 644d–5b); rather, one of the most important aspects of
human life is
playfulness (797a–9e). Play is not only closely related to art,
both being highly mimetic, but also to education
and culture, which in
Greek are even etymologically connected (paideia). Genuine priorities are
thus
opposite to what people think today. Through such revaluation of
values Plato returns to the original,
uncorrupted state of human affairs:
people now ‘imagine that serious work should be done for the sake of play;
for they think that it is for the sake of peace that the serious work of war
needs to be well conducted. But as a
matter of fact we, it would seem, do
not find in war, either as existing or likely to exist, either real play or
education worthy of the name, which is what we assert to be in our eyes the
most serious thing’ (803d).
 The second major discussion is the most important and specific of the
three. It is there that Plato presents his
diagnosis of ‘theatrocracy’.

The context is the preparatory discussion of the right constitution: in order

to find it, one must have a good
knowledge of the existing ones. The right
constitution must strike a harmonious balance between two equally
disastrous positions: excessive centralisation or decentralisation of rule;
monarchy or democracy. The term
‘laws’ (nomos) must be understood in
this sense, making use of the original ‘musical’ meaning of the term,
and
not through modern analogies like the ‘rule of law’.
Music implies harmony, and harmony is the rightful coexistence of
different sounds and kinds of music; thus ‘it
was forbidden to set one kind
of words to a different class of tune’ (in Greek called nomes, root of the
term used for ‘law’, nomos) (700b–c). Those who were producing music
had to recognise and follow such
rules and not ‘the mob’s unmusical
shoutings, nor yet the clappings which mark
applause’ (700c). Such rules
were accepted as legitimate without any dissent; yet ‘with the progress of
time,
there arose as leaders of unmusical illegality poets who, though by
nature poetical, were ignorant of what was
just and lawful in music; and
they, being frenzied and unduly possessed by a spirit of pleasure, mixed’
the
different genres, pretending as ‘the best criterion [ … ] the pleasure of
the auditor, be he a good man or a bad’
(700d–e). The consequences were
fatal: in this way,

they bred in the populace a spirit of lawlessness in regard to music,

and the effrontery of supposing themselves
capable of passing
judgment on it. Hence the theater-goers became noisy instead of silent,
as though they knew
the difference between good and bad music, and
in place of an aristocracy in music there sprang up a kind of base
theatrocracy. For if in music, and music only, there had arisen a
democracy of free men, such a result would not
have been so very
alarming; but as it was, the universal conceit of universal wisdom and
the contempt for law
originated in the music, and on the heels of these
came liberty. For, thinking themselves knowing, men became
fearless;
and audacity begat effrontery. For to be fearless of the opinion of a
better man, owing to
self-confidence, is nothing else than base
 effrontery; and it is brought about by a liberty that is audacious to
excess’. (700e–1b)

In the next passage, the consequences are shortly elaborated. They contain
two points of particular interest for
our modern world. First, the eventual
consequences of such decay, through a series of steps, would be a reversion
to the ‘original’ state, an idea that would be taken up by Hobbes. Second,
the main figures who exemplify such an
error are the Titans, alluding to the
figure of Prometheus and his revolt, hero of the sophists, in particular
Protagoras, and hero again of the modern champions of Enlightenment and
technological progress.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL BACKGROUND: MASKED IDENTITIES IN

PUBLIC (PIZZORNO)

Given that preparing and wearing masks as ritual objects is a most

widespread practice on the planet, one would
expect the theme to be a
standard and classical topic in anthropological and ethnological research.
Yet it is one
of the most ignored and misunderstood areas of
anthropological research and in social theory in general. It will
be argued
that much of the current inability to deal with the practice is due to the
failure to realise the
problematic manner in which public spaces form
identities. This issue will be approached through a ‘hidden
classic’ by
Alessandro Pizzorno, one of the most important contemporary theorists of
identity
formation.14 Its Maussian inspiration, taken especially from the
essays on ‘Gift’ and ‘Person’, in
title, style and substance, is evident.
Although the first anthropologists attempted to fit the practice into their
evolutionary theories, considering
masks as survivals (see Edward Tylor),
even at this very basic level two major problems soon emerged. First of
all,
in all the ‘monotheistic religions’ there is a strong resistance to the wearing
of masks (Pant 1987: 20),
which is considered an act of dissimulation, lying
and hiding, and also a disfiguring of the face, which is held
in particularly
high regard as an imago dei. Such hostility was repeated by all the main
forms of thought,
spirituality and philosophy, including those hostile to all
manifestations of religion, like the Enlightenment.
Second, such masks
manifested two basic characteristics: they were prepared with evident care,
often showing
considerable aesthetic qualities; yet many of them were just
as strikingly repulsive, even horrifying, resorting
to materials from the
human body (skin, hair, even skull) as part of their decoration in an effort
not merely to
disguise but to call attention, even to shock and terrorise.15
These two problems became reflected in theoretical accounts of masks
—or their absence. In spite of their evident
significance, masks are hardly
mentioned in anthropologically inspired works of social theory. They are
barely
discussed in classic works by Durkheim or Mauss16 or by the main
theoreticians of rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner,
though rites of passage are particularly closely associated with the wearing
of masks.
Explicit theorising about masks has also reached an evident dead end.
Here a major step is represented by a 1898
work of Leo Frobenius,
connecting the wearing of masks to the spirits of the dead and secret
societies,
supposedly organised by men in order to counter the power of
women (Pernet [1982]2006: 2–3). This thesis was
further elaborated in
1932–1933 by Karl Meuli, who incorporated the comparative method and
the perspective of
psychoanalysis (Ibid.). More recent works, however,
questioned most of the assumptions on which this line of
theorizing was
based, and the survey of Henry Pernet claims that much of what was argued
at a general level about
the wearing of masks can be considered as ‘a myth
of the white man’ (Ibid.: 160).
Yet masks have been worn in an extremely wide range of societies over
a very long time span and have also been
considered to be highly
problematic, again in a significant number of important traditions. It is in
this regard
that Pizzorno’s contribution marks an important step.

Pizzorno starts by questioning a taken-for-granted but anachronistic,

modernist, psychologizing perspective,
according to which the mask serves
to hide. Quite to the contrary, when used by its makers, the mask had a
fundamentally positive, formative, shaping role—though in close
relationship with its negative, covering
character. These positive, formative
effects of the mask are produced by a delicate game between absence and
presence.
 The mask first of all creates an absence: it erases the real, concrete
human
being whose most distinguishing feature, his face, becomes invisible
through the wearing of a mask. This
disappearance generates a void that
resembles death—in fact, historically the mask probably emerged as a death
mask. Yet out of this absence and void something new is created that not
only recalls what has been eliminated
but evokes a strong presence, a being
of a higher order than the concrete, living individual bracketed by the
mask:
a spirit of the dead, an ancestor of the tribe or a supernatural power. Thus,
by an absence, the mask
generates participation, and of the highest possible
kind—a passage to another world. The terms ‘participation’
and ‘passage’
repeatedly recur and at most emphatic places in Pizzorno’s essay (Pizzorno
2010: 10, 13, 17–18).
The question now is how and why masks ‘work’.
Still at the level of ‘beliefs’, the mask is supposed to produce this effect
through its own materiality. Made of
simple material, usually wood, its
preparation is a sacred activity, using sacred instruments. Even the colours
used for masks are sacred: white—the colour of the spirit; red—referring to
blood; and black—evoking death. It is
often assumed that the shape of the
mask is already there in the material; the maker only brings out what is
already ‘present’ in a piece of wood (Ibid.: 6–7).17
The transformative effect of the mask depends on a number of further
conditions. First and foremost is the
presence of others. The mask is put on
only when others are present, and in the ritual scene, not only in
order to
‘hide’ the individual but rather to focus and galvanise attention on its
bearer. The mask is put on
for the others as much as against them.
Wearing a mask in front of a group of unspecified others thus assumes a
powerful game of gazes.18 The masked individual can look at
the others—
the eyes and the mouth of the mask are open; and while the others look at
him, they cannot actually
see his face: he feels liberated. This play of gazes
is fundamental for evoking a sacred presence and is
furthermore helped by
two additional aspects of context, related to time and space. One is music,
singing and
dancing, implying rhythmic movement, thus time. The second
is a particular spatial setting: the village circle.
Members of the tribe dance
and move around the central masked figure in a closed circle. This closed
spatial arrangement19
provides the perfect counterpart to the freedom
generated by disguising: the masked individual in the centre is
liberated
from his own individuality while at the same time being trapped in the
centre of the circle.
When all these conditions are jointly present, those who participate in
the masked dance experience participation
in something else as well:
sharing in a divine presence, they gain passage to a different mode of
existence,
becoming as if ‘transported’, in the Shakespearean sense, from
their mundane everyday existence to the realm of
the sacred. Thus, argues
Pizzorno, whatever opinion we have about the ontological status of the
sacred presence
that has been magically evoked in the circle, the ritual
produces a very real
effect: it reinforces, or alters, the very identity of those
participating, jointly at the individual and
collective levels.
While the play of gazes—with its hiding and revealing, focusing of
attention yet hiding the face—has concrete
spatial and temporal
coordinates, the effective impact of such a ritual, in terms of the identities
shaped, is
lasting. Here we move from the world of rituals to the world of
myths, in particular myths of foundation and
especially their single
common origin, the primary events that lie at the foundation of both
political authority
and culture. Here the article enters the murkier waters of
the connections between masked dances and rituals of
warfare and also the
terrorizing appearance of the mask; it is also here that a much more serious
problem
emerges, going to the heart of political anthropology and the
philosophy of Plato: should we, after all, take
seriously the concerted
problematisation of wearing masks and even depicting images shared by the
major world
religions, spiritualities, and philosophies, or should we
consider all this as just a kind of prejudice? Such
problematisation is not
modern and not western; and although we clearly need to follow Pizzorno
in moving beyond
the simplistic and dichotomizing analysis of masks, this
should not imply, implicitly or explicitly, an ignoring
of the problem that
the characteristics of masks and particularly their wearing implies.

NIETZSCHE ON THE MASK: THE MODERN PUBLIC AS REALM

OF THE ACTOR
Nietzsche discussed the question of masks at the heart of some of his most
important and influential mature work
and in a manner quite similar to
Pizzorno’s, focusing on the positive aspects of this mode of disguising.
Masks
are not necessarily signs of superficiality; rather, they might be
needed exactly by those who are honest and
even ‘profound’ (Nietzsche
1966, no.40). This is because Nietzsche came to assume here, as
background, the modern
context of the ‘public arena’, where everything is
immediately commented upon, interpreted and dissected; thus
any argument
that questions the wisdom of the ‘mass’ is destroyed before it can be
properly formulated (Ibid.,
no. 288–9). Wearing masks is necessary in order
to avoid being mis-understood (Ibid., no. 40); far from being a
sign of
weakness, it is rather a manifestation of the order of rank (Ibid., no. 221).
Still, masks might be put on for the opposite reasons. They are worn and
must be worn by the outcasts of
society, who need to disguise themselves in
order to hide their search for revenge (Ibid., no. 25). Here we move
a level
up in Nietzsche’s own in-depth psychological understanding, where not
only the proponents of unegoistic,
unconditional morality (Ibid., no. 221)
but even scientists (Ibid., no.270) are unmasked as wearing a ‘seductive’
mask: a moralistic mask, the mask of the agitator, in order to conceal their
own deepest motivation,
ressentiment.
Thus Nietzsche rehabilitates the practice of wearing masks not in order
to
assert it as unconditionally ‘good’, but—as always—only in order to
distinguish between two different
modalities of mask wearing: a mask worn
out of strength (and for its preservation) and one worn out of weakness.
At
the next level he makes the two perspectives look—at least superficially—
even more similar: outcast outsiders
wear masks in order to hide the
resentment they accumulated due to their sufferings, whereas noble spirits
also
gained their status through the discipline of suffering, even great,
profound suffering, as such suffering
literally ‘separates’ one, sets one
apart, making one elevated or noble (vornehm) (Ibid.: nos. 225
and 270).20
Such spirits
even enjoy wearing masks. The similarity between outcast and
noble suffering, however, is only
superficial, remaining at the level of mere
descriptive facts: ‘setting apart’ may be the consequence of failing
to meet
the test, while it can also mean selecting somebody who responded well to
the trial and thus got ‘tested’
and ‘hardened’.
 Nietzsche returns to the kinds of ‘mask-bearers’ in the fifth book of the
Gay Science, written after
Beyond Good and Evil but just before the
Genealogy of Morals. It starts by presenting the
truth-teller, a figure lying
the farthest possible away from the wearing of masks (Ibid.: no. 343ff); but
Nietzsche works his way towards an account of his views on the artist
(Ibid.: no. 361), including the idea that
Greek comedy destroyed Rome
(Ibid.: no. 356), a prelude to his short but in many ways conclusive works
on his
tormented relations with Richard Wagner (advanced in Nietzsche
1974, nos. 369–370). Nietzsche here identifies his
concern with the actor as
his longest preoccupation, defines the central characteristic of the actor as
falseness
with a good conscience, confirms the tight connection between the
actor and certain members of the lower social
classes, and even claims that
understanding the actor might hold the key to unlocking the nature of the
artist,
and—through the ‘case of Wagner’—even central aspects of the
modern world. Thus it is both a very modern problem,
concerning the
search for recognition in the new and—supposedly—fully open ‘public
sphere’, and a very old
one, because he returns to the problem of the
Dionysian, understood as the manner in which masked people,
especially
helped by rituals of singing and dancing, might—through imitative forms of
behaviour—suggest to each
other forms of behaviour that are frightening,
deeply problematic and violent, and which otherwise they would
never be
engaged in. The person and music of Wagner do not capture what is noble
in the Dionysian but are
relevant exactly for what is most problematic there:
the irresistible power of the mob, a limit case of the
‘public’.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: LIMINALITY AND THE MASK

Much of the previous discussion can be rendered intelligible by calling

attention to the highly liminal character
of the practice of wearing masks.
The affinity is evident both at the general
level—as phenomena like
ambivalence, paradox, or the Janus-faceted aspects of evident
contradictions are signs of
liminality; and the concrete level—as ritual
dances or rites of passage are again by definition liminal
phenomena.
However, the liminal aspects of ritual masks are not exhausted here—one
could easily write a full
article just by detailing the various aspects. Masks
are two-dimensional, flat surfaces, placed on the face, and
so represent a
limit between the single person and the world outside. In this sense they are
often considered as
thresholds or doors (Pant 1987: 58). They also perform
a mediating or in-between role.
Masks are liminal not only in the sense of a transition but also of an
origin. One of the most important, widely
analysed characteristics of
masked dances is that they represent not only ancestors or spirits of the
dead but
also concrete events; more specifically, an original event that
represents something like the first rupture in
the order of the cosmos (Ibid.:
26). Thus, just as rituals and myths were always connected, posing a
chicken-and-egg—like problem concerning priority, the wearing of masks
is associated with staging rituals
concerned with the origin of the world, the
very order of the cosmos—or rather (which is either the same thing or
the
exact opposite, something that is fully unclear, up to the theories of Girard)
the very first collapse
of this world order.
Still concerning liminality, the wearing of masks is a pervasive and
transformative phenomenon. It is pervasive,
as it is connected to everything
else in the ritual process, and takes complete hold of the persons involved;
most singularly, it induces some kind of immediate change in behaviour,
which can be captured by terms like
possession or ekstasis. This represents
one of the thorniest, evidently irresolvable problems
around the wearing of
masks. The idea that by putting on a mask one becomes a different person,
literally and
physically taking up the spirit of a dead person or the other
way around, has conventionally been held as a clear
sign of a ‘primitive
mentality’; it has consequently been debunked by more ‘modernised’
anthropologists as a
typical evolutionary myth. Yet at the same time other
scholars assert that indeed masks are worn in order to
induce some kind of
state of possession; and that they work.
It is exactly this positive aspect of masks, associated with the artificial
production of effects in liminal
situations, as some kind of alchemic opus
(Horvath 2009, 2013) that help to make sense of the peculiar
geographical
distribution of masks. The wearing of masks is not universal; rather, it is
concentrated in some
areas and all but absent in others. Masks were
particularly widespread in the northwestern part of America, as
also in
western Africa, from around Senegal to Angola and northwest Zambia.
They were also very popular in
Melanesia and virtually absent in Polynesia
(Pernet [1982]2006: 9). This distribution is closely correlated with
the
presence of tricksters in folklore and mythology, which in general is found
in places where masks are used.
Together with the importance of trickster
figures and deities in Nordic and
Greek mythology and in Phoenicia, it
should be noted that tricksters and the wearing of masks appear to be
associated with areas having strong volcanic or seismic activity—with the
singular exception of western Africa
(Cotterell 1986).21
The last point to be made might be considered as trivial, yet it not only
guides us back to the question of
liminality but also offers a way to solve
the problem concerning the practice of masked rituals and the reason
for the
profound modern and western failure to understand this practice. Masks are
exclusively worn in public. A
private, non-ritualised wearing of masks is
widely considered a major offence, often punishable by death. The
place to
wear masks was always at the centre of rituals, like the village circle; the
place of full public
visibility and not secrecy; and also the place of terror in
all senses of the world.
 Nietzsche’s Intuitions
From Theatre through Humanist Philology to
Richard Wagner, or the Genealogy of the
2 Modern World as a
Stage

Given that Nietzsche is one of the most important thinkers of our times and
that he had a particularly strong
impact on all major genealogists of
modernity, it goes without saying that a book devoted to the rebirth of
comedy should start with The Birth of Tragedy. However, Nietzsche’s
significance for this book is much
more pivotal than his role as a
predecessor or classic.
In the enormous literature on Nietzsche, little attention has so far been
devoted to the question of why
Nietzsche wrote his first book on theatre.
After all it was not a main topic in either philology or philosophy.
Furthermore there is the problem of Nietzsche’s pairing of a discussion of
ancient tragedy with the music of
Wagner. Nietzsche would argue in his
‘Second Preface’ that this connection was flawed and, as a result,
subsequent scholarship would simply fail to address properly the question
of why Nietzsche got so interested in
Wagner and especially why he
returned to Wagner in two books he wrote in his last sane year, together
with
revisiting the Dionysian, hardly mentioned for well over a decade. It
also brings up a third aspect ignored by
Nietzsche scholarship: that
Nietzsche was not only trained as a philologist but wrote a fifth
(chronologically
fourth) unpublished ‘Untimely Meditation’ on philology,
which provides the key to the entire undertaking, as
these meditations were
devoted to the question of education. In a way, he always remained a
philologist.1 Nietzsche’s
decision to study philology was evidently
motivated by the fact that in European culture, going back to the
Renaissance, a central role in education was attributed to philology, or
ancient classics.2 And it is here, through a concern
with culture and
education, that Greek theatre, the modern music of Wagner (or even the
philosophy of
Schopenhauer), and philology as a profession were connected
for Nietzsche. The almost complete omission in modern
Nietzsche
scholarship of these three areas—dominating Nietzsche’s earliest work and
also crucial for his last
period, not to mention the connections between them
—is a serious gap.
The reason for this gap, it is argued, concerns the persistent failure to
recognise the problematicity of the
‘public sphere’.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

While Nietzsche is a giant of modern European thought, it is just as clear

that he was a deeply flawed genius:
his road led to madness, and this fact
cannot be considered as external from and irrelevant to his entire
work.3 It
is highly
instructive that the arguably most important ‘Nietzsche-inspired’
thinker of the past half century, Michel
Foucault, started his work by
investigating the problem of madness—thus taking not only Nietzsche but
the
problem posed by his life and work as well fully seriously. Starting from
Nietzsche thus includes the
question what went wrong with Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s Problem in The Birth of Tragedy and Its Problems

Given that the origin of tragedy was a marginal subject for the ‘serious’
science of philology, just as it is for
modern philosophy, Nietzsche had to
start by trying to convince his professional audience to accept his choice.
The term ‘serious’ (ernst) indeed appears seven times in the original short
preface. His substantial
justification of seriousness through relevance,
however, only further irritated his professional colleagues. He
not only
claimed to have discovered the Dionysian impulse underlying the classic
works of Greek tragedy, which
managed to overcome the pessimistic
worldview characteristics of classical Greece, but presented Wagner’s
music
as an authentic contemporary resurrection of this spirit. In the eyes of
his critics, he attempted to establish
seriousness at the price of substituting a
manifesto for scientific analysis.
Nietzsche’s reasons, however, as he would make it clear in the
following ‘Untimely Meditations’, had much to do
with philology, at least
as he perceived the discipline: a concern with education. Philology was the
discipline that pretended, for a long time in Europe, not merely to educate
but to ‘educate the educators’
through its privileged take on ancient Greece.
It was Nietzsche’s disillusionment with his chosen profession that
led him
first to Schopenhauer, then to Wagner, and then further. Nietzsche chose
philology over philosophy, as
intellectual and even spiritual life in Germany
in the 19th century was dominated by the contrast between
idealist
philosophy (mostly Kant and Hegel) and romanticism, while Nietzsche
rejected both positions as a
starting point. The philosophy of Schopenhauer
seemed to offer a solution, with its focus on the link between
life and work,
when the progressive specialisation of knowledge had led to the
expurgation of the central
questions of human life from the academic
curriculum exactly at the moment when the general problems of the age
rendered confrontation with such questions vital (Nietzsche 1983: 130–4).
Schopenhauer helped him to overcome the
despair generated by Kant’s
scepticism by arguing that a great philosophy can only be based on a
philosophical
life, just as in order to ‘understand the picture one must divine
the painter’ (Ibid.: 141). And Wagner, it seemed to Nietzsche at that time,
offered even more: an over-coming of
Schopenhauer’s dualism and
pessimism. Tragically, and probably even fatally, Nietzsche mistook
Wagner for a
modern-day Dionysos.

The Dionysian, or in Praise of Ecstasy

The most famous idea in The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s discovery of
the significance of the Dionysian
cult for Greek culture. In his time, as part
of a long tradition, Dionysos was considered to represent a
spiritual
dimension alien to Greek culture. Experts met Nietzsche’s claim with
disbelief and ridicule. His
insight was vindicated only in 1951, after the
decoding of Linear B, when the name of Dionysos was discovered in
Mycenaean inscriptions.4
 The fact that Dionysos belongs to the archaic Minoan layers of Greek
culture has at least two crucial
implications for Nietzsche’s work. First,
Nietzsche’s central aim—not just in The Birth of Tragedy but
also in the
series of works he was engaged in before and after completing it, which
was to capture the heart of
the Greek experience—was impossible to realise
in his lifetime, as Minoan Crete would be excavated only from
1900, the
year of Nietzsche’s death, onwards. Second, though the archaeological
evidence does not render it
possible to understand the character of Minoan
religion in detail, it was clearly quite different from the
Dionysian cult as
known from the classic and Hellenistic periods; thus this cult was a late,
corrupted version of
the original. Although Nietzsche’s genial insights even
intuited, without knowing the evidence, some
characteristics of this archaic
religiosity (Kerényi 1976), he was not able to separate the exact
layers—
something that even now lies outside the competence of mere experts. What
this means is that Nietzsche,
just like his more recent interpreters, could
easily take corrupted aspects of the cult as central. Making
statements about
the ‘heart’ of the Dionysian requires not only familiarity with the available
meagre evidence
but also a genuine intuitive affinity with the very heart of
archaic Mediterranean culture—an ability to
reconstruct, mentally, how the
world of Neolithic religion and spirituality, with deep roots even in the
Palaeolithic through basic continuities between the spirituality of cave
paintings and megalithic stone temples,
in profound symbiosis with its
natural surroundings, could have looked many millennia before its
corruption and
decay.
The significance of the Dionysian for Nietzsche was not limited to his
first book. No doubt owing to problems of
reception, the term is all but
absent from the middle period of Nietzsche’s work, only to return in 1886.
The
context is crucial: the completion of Beyond Good and Evil, where it
appears in the penultimate aphorism
(no.295); the Fifth Book of Gay
Science (no.370), a crucial section on romanticism, that would become the
core of Nietzsche Contra Wagner; the series of prefaces to the second
editions of his earlier works; and,
in a broader context, in notes for his
‘conclusive’ work on the ‘will to power’. At this moment, when through
systematic reflections on his former work, as a kind of ‘spiritual exercise’
(Hadot) or ‘technique of self’ (Foucault), Nietzsche’s work jumped to a
higher level and gained a new
focus,5 the nature of the
Dionysian returned
as a prominent issue, and in a highly specific manner: the contrast is no
longer with the
Apollonian but rather with the ‘Crucified’, where death on
the cross, especially in its Paulian interpretation,
becomes associated with
ressentiment and a general hostility to life, identifying Nietzsche as
self-
proclaimed Antichrist.
This is the context in which Nietzsche also reassessed the ‘case of
Wagner’, whom he no longer perceived as a way
out of modern decadence
but rather as a prime symptom of its nihilism.

Dionysos, Wagner, and Modern Europe

Apart from the central insight concerning the Dionysian, Nietzsche’s work
contains a number of further important
guiding ideas. These include the
recognition that tragedy is not just of symbolic value but is the
representation
of an event, that the central, original player of the tragedy
was the chorus (Nietzsche 1967a:
56–9), and that the significance of
tragedy for classical Greece is inseparable from the enormous importance
attributed there to feasting—something that again connects the Dionysian to
the heart of archaic culture. The
book, however, even in Nietzsche’s own
late account, contained a number of serious errors as well. These were due
to its very merits and conditions of possibility: his sources of inspiration,
which rendered it possible to go
beyond German idealism and romanticism
but that in their turn plagued the work with their own shortcomings.
The influence accounts for a number of romantic preconceptions
prevalent in the book. These include the
importance attributed to dreams as
the tools of individual creativity (Ibid.: 33–4, 38–9); the preoccupation with
the ‘intoxicating’ (see Ibid.: 33, 36) experience of a loss of self, out of one’s
own will, in an ocean of
feelings, evoked by (melodic) music; or the
fascination with unconscious forces invading the self from below,
which
closed him to experiences of transcendence from above while reinforcing a
typically romantic fascination
with breaking barriers. The most important
and problematic romantic wandering, however, whose Wagnerian
inspiration is acknowledged, is the fascination with the ‘Titanic’, and
especially the most prominent of the
Titans, Prometheus (Ibid.: 31, 42–3,
46).6 Nietzsche would go so far as to consider the Promethean as a
synthesis of the Apollonian and
the Dionysian (Ibid.: 72). However,
something is clearly going wrong here, as these were the Titans who put the
infant Dionysos to death. Pace Kaufmann, the Wagnerian legacy of the
book cannot be restricted to the last
ten sections but must be as if surgically
removed from the body of the text if we do not want to follow Nietzsche
in
his Wagnerian errancy.
Nietzsche was let down just as badly by his other educator,
Schopenhauer. This is best visible in the marks left
by the two most
problematic aspects of Schopenhauer’s thought: its dualism and
pessimism.
Dualism concerns Schopenhauer’s way of proceeding, a legacy of Kant and
Descartes, visible in the
exclusive contrast between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian, while Schopenhauerian pessimism was projected
backwards as
the existential feeling underlying the origin of tragedy. The way in which
this derailed the
entire book is best visible through Nietzsche’s highly
original but extremely problematic analysis of the
presumed role that
Archilochus, the founder of lyric poetry, played in the genesis of tragedy.

Archilochus
Apart from composing lyric poetry, Archilochus was also a mercenary
soldier who wrote war poems and died in
battle. According to legendary
accounts he was the Greek coloniser of the island of Thasos (Gentili 1993:
5–8),
which has its own significance for the Dionysian. Thasos is a
relatively large island in the north of the Aegean,
just off the Thracian coast
—the only Aegean island that was a Phoenician colony. The Greeks of the
classical
period thought that the cult of Dionysos—whom they considered
an ‘arriving god’ (Kerényi 1976)—came from Thrace.
Two aspects of the
mask of Dionysos gain importance in this context: his huge beard and the
wide open and quite
ambivalent, if not outright ‘demonic’, grin into which
his mouth is contorted—features that are not
characteristic of Greek masks
or statues but show marked similarities with Phoenician ones. The
Phoenician links
of the Dionysos cult, focusing on ecstasy and sacrifice,
unfortunately cannot be further explored here.
Archilochus was also known
as the poet of blame and author of the first pornographic poems, written
explicitly in order to destroy the reputations of certain women.
 These perplexities, which had already vexed Archilochus’s
contemporaries, can be illuminated by attempting to
reconstruct the
experiential basis of his poetry, about which fortunately a crucial episode is
known. Archilochus
evidently witnessed a full solar eclipse, probably on 6
April 648 bc, and this experience formed the basis of his
best-known poem,
capturing the image of a world turned upside down:

Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now

that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made
night out of noonday,
hiding the bright sunlight, and [ … ] fear has come upon mankind.
After this, men can
believe anything, expect anything. Don’t any of
you be surprised in future if land beasts change places with
dolphins
and go to live in their salty pastures, and get to like the sounding
waves of the sea more than the
land, while the dolphins prefer the
mountains.7

The term capturing this experience is adynaton. Literally meaning

‘powerlesness’, it stands for a string
of impossibilities, generating the
impression that the taken-for-granted order of the world ceased to exist.
Archilochus’s interpretation of his experience, and its significance, can
now
be captured. Archilochus witnessed a simple natural event, a solar
eclipse. However, not having a proper
understanding the phenomenon, he
lived the darkening of the sky as a loss of belief in the regular, orderly
character of the world. The Greeks had two words for world: chaos,
standing for the original condition of
disorder, before the imposition of a
divine creation; and cosmos, meaning an ordered and beautiful
world. The
interpretation of his experience by Archilochus re-actualised the
fundamental Greek—and pre-Greek,
like Minoan—experience of
repeatedly facing the abyss due to natural disasters like earthquakes and
volcanic
activities yet preserving intact one’s inner force.
The specific angle added by Archilochus, and unearthed by Nietzsche,
concerns the link between
self-identification as a victim (Burnett 1983: 75)
—a par excellence sacrificial terminology; and the
poetry of blame (in
Greek momos). Somebody resigned to the identity of a victim is bound to
blame
others for his or her own condition, motivated by a general feeling of
envy, reflected in Momos,
deity of blame and also envy in Greek mythology
(Ibid.: 55–8). This includes blaming the gods and having an eager
eye for
whatever is problematic and reproachable in human beings. Archilochos
ends up by vilifying the human race
(Ibid.: 61), closely following Momos,
who had a low opinion of humanity (Ibid.: 56). The lyric poetry of
Archilochus codified as a new genre the image of a world turned upside
down. In contrast both to previous,
archaic (Homeric and Hesiodic), and
later, classical Greek views of the world, it regressed to an earlier,
‘Titanic’
position, where the gods appeared as jealous of mankind.
We are now in a position to discuss the significance of Nietzsche’s
inclusion of Archilochus in the general
argument of The Birth of Tragedy,
and its problematic features.

Music, Ecstasy, Transcendence

Tragedy and lyric poetry are connected through the importance attributed to
music, central for the Chorus, origin
of Greek theatre, and the identification
of Archilochus and Dionysos as victims. Nietzsche focuses on the healing
powers attributed to music, an argument central for the first sections of the
book. This same argument returns at
the close of section 7, the first section
explicitly devoted to ‘the origin of Greek tragedy’ (Nietzsche
1967a: 56; all
emphases as in the original), seeing art as ‘a saving sorceress, expert at
healing’ (Ibid.: 60).
Two pivotal definitions that follow underline the
significance of this passage. However, the content of these
definitions is
most surprising, as none of them is about tragedy: the first defines the
sublime, while the
second the comic as ‘the artistic discharge of the nausea
of absurdity’ (Ibid.). What is going on here?
The puzzle can be resolved at two levels. The first has to do with
Archilochus. The ‘world-turned-upside-down’
experience underlying his
poetry is the central experience of the other
main theatrical genre, comedy,
distilled in the clown (Curtius 1953; Pearce 1970). Thus, having evoked
Archilochus, Nietzsche ended up by first defining the comic, not the tragic.
The second concerns the
manner in which Nietzsche’s mind worked. Great
poets and thinkers do not think logically, in the sense of
following a
consistent, mechanical sequence of arguments, but jump from images to
images. This is the mark of
‘inspiration’ or ‘genius’: one idea sparks
another, recognising connections that lesser mortals would never have
imagined. Thus from the chorus Nietzsche jumped to Archilochus as a
‘musical’ poet, then to his underlying life
experience, and then eventually to
the comic.
The same crucial section 7 contains a number of further precious sparks.
Most important of these is the sudden
jump to Hamlet.

Nietzsche’s Hamlet
Nietzsche starts his unearthing of the underlying Dionysian experience by
using a Hegelian word,
aufgehoben, taken from Wagner, and translated by
Kaufmann as ‘nullifying’ (Nietzsche 1967a: 59). What is
‘nullified’ by the
Dionysian chorus of satyrs is the boundaries of culture, giving rise to ‘an
overwhelming
feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature’
(Ibid.). This is indeed a basic aspect of the
experience of Dionysian ritual
but also a very problematic one. Nietzsche captures this problem in the
sentence
that defines the ‘Dionysian state’ as the ‘annihilation
(Vernichtung) of the ordinary bounds and limits of
existence’ (Ibid.)
through a ‘lethargic element’ in the feelings that follow this experience.
The term is
revealing, as great festive moments of human life do not leave a
sour aftertaste, rather produce an exhilarating
feeling of joy and happiness.
Lethargy is the outcome of a feast turned sour, due to drunkenness or other
excesses, which approach the Girardian perspective on the sacrificial
mechanism.
That Hamlet enters The Birth of Tragedy in this context is twice
significant: First, dramaturgically, as
Hamlet’s figure is widely associated
with leaping over boundaries (see Chapter 8 below), and second,
historically, as Hamlet indeed appeared at a moment of lethargy, both
concerning Shakespeare’s private life (the
death of his only son, Hamnet)
and British history, the seemingly endless series of dynastic and religious
wars
that tore the country apart in the 15th and 16th centuries and which
were the subject matter of Shakespeare’s
early plays—representing the
‘terrible destructiveness of so-called world history’ evoked by Nietzsche in
the
preceding paragraph. The historical significance of Shakespeare cannot
be reduced to England, as it involved
Germany, locus of an entire cult of
Shakespeare, including the presentation of the bard as a Titanic hero, going
back to Lessing, Jean-Paul and Tieck, central for German romanticism,
including the music of Wagner, alluding to
the second part of Nietzsche’s
book.
If we consider a coherent line of argument as the central quality of
academic work, section 7 in The Birth of
Tragedy clearly fails the test. In
this sense, Wilamowitz was
certainly right. Archilochos, Hamlet, Socrates
and Wagner today, just as in the 19th century, belong to widely
different
areas and genres. Yet Wilamowitz was still pathetic, as he failed to
recognise the sign of genius. Much
of the rest of Nietzsche’s work would be
driven by the attempt to work out the exact connections between these
figures, and this book can be construed as an effort to take up at least a few
of the paths of research sketched
by Nietzsche.

NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER

Nietzsche’s genealogy of ancient tragedy was thoroughly compromised by

its Wagnerian inspiration. Nietzsche’s
early infatuation with Wagner had
such a thorough effect on his entire life and career that he can seriously be
considered as Wagner’s ‘victim’. However, his association with the
composer brought its own fruits: through
Wagner, he was able to gain a
glimpse into the very heart of modern decadence or nihilism.8
Nietzsche’s last views on Wagner are contained in two small booklets
whose importance for Nietzsche’s work—and
role in spinning the
accelerating spirals towards madness—can hardly be exaggerated. He wrote
The Case of
Wagner in the spring of 1888—it was his first book after the
crucial Genealogy of Morals—while
preparing for his definite work on
European nihilism, entitled Will to Power, then The Revaluation of
Values.
Nietzsche contra Wagner, on the other hand, is a collection of aphorisms
from previous books,
completed on Christmas Day 1888, or about ten days
before his collapse.
In these books Nietzsche registered his radical shift in evaluating the
significance of Wagner; a shift of
position that caused much internal soul
searching for Nietzsche, as his earlier fascination with Wagner made it
clear
to him how deeply problematic his own position was up to the mid-1870s.
Although in the early 1870s he
perceived Wagner as a heroic figure,
capable of renewing European culture, now he came to recognise him as a
‘child of his time’, which is especially problematic if the ‘spirit of times’ is
decadence (Nietzsche 1967a:
155). Even further, it was exactly in this sense
that Wagner was exemplary, even ‘indispensable’ for a
philosopher—who
must always be untimely—as ‘[t]hrough Wagner modernity speaks most
intimately, concealing neither
its good nor its evil—having forgotten all
sense of shame’ (Ibid.: 156). It is for the same reason that now, far
from
being angry or resentful about his association with Wagner, Nietzsche rather
proclaims profound ‘gratitude’
(Ibid.: 191–2): his familiarity with Wagner’s
work and person helped him not only to a particularly clear
‘diagnosis of
the modern soul’ (Ibid.: 192, sic) but also to realise and overcome his own
sickness (Ibid.:
155). At least, this is what Nietzsche thought and hoped for
in 1888; the reality of 1889 turned out to be
different.
The diagnosis of Wagner starts with his music. Nietzsche doesn’t deny
all value to this music; its melodies even
have ‘healing qualities’. But such
merits indicate grave limitations: Wagner’s
music might be healing, but
only for those who are already sick; while the healthy ‘Wagner makes sick’
(Nietzsche
1954: 664). This is because of the almost physiological reactions
it generates: the oceanic feeling of ‘
“infinite melody” ’ generates a sense of
intoxication, comparable to the experience when ‘[o]ne walks into the
sea,
gradually loses one’s secure footing, and finally surrenders oneself to the
elements without reservation:
one must swim’ (Ibid.: 666).9 Apart from the
feelings evoked by music, the very fact that its merits lie in details, and
not
in the whole, makes it clear that Wagner’s music merely expresses the spirit
of its times, which is
fragmentariness or decadence, and does not go beyond
it.
But Nietzsche moves way beyond a criticism of Wagner’s music that
could still be considered as subjective. At a
next level he offers a Platonic
critique of Wagner—not of the musician but of the actor—as for Nietzsche,
Wagner is ‘essentially also a man of the theatre and an actor’ (Nietzsche
1954: 665). Even worse, Wagner is a
very special kind of actor, for which
Nietzsche came up with an original and extremely important expression: he
is a ‘mimomaniac’ (mimomane), even ‘the most enthusiastic mimomaniac,
perhaps, who ever existed’ (Ibid.).
We can best understand what Nietzsche
means here through Plato’s critique of the performing artist as a mime, in
Ion and elsewhere. An actor performs a work of art written under divine
inspiration, being himself
inspired, thus part of a chain of transmission.
However, a mime merely imitates, or fakes inspiration,
always searching for
the reactions of the audience, and instead of an inspired performance stages
only what the
audience wants to hear. This is the real danger of Wagner: he
is the kind of actor who ‘wants effect, and
nothing more’ (Ibid.: 667).
Wagner, just like Plato’s Ion, avidly searches for the reactions of his
audience, as
his only purpose is to gain fame, success, recognition—
searching for the favour of the ‘masses’: ‘people, herd
female, Pharisee,
voting cattle, patron, idiot—Wagnerian’ (Ibid.: 666). His theatre is all pose,
all
effect, all fake: ‘Espressivo at any price, and music in the service, the
slavery, of poses—that is the
end’ (Ibid.: 667).
Nietzsche considered Wagner’s music profoundly German in the worst
sense of the term, and his critique of Wagner
certainly contributed to the
escalating (self-) criticism of Germany, which had its share in the final
spiralling
of his madness. Still, with prophetic clarity, he also identified two
European countries and cities with which
Wagner’s music had particular
affinities—France (Paris) and Russia (St. Petersburg)—thus connecting,
through
Wagner, 1789 and 1917 (Nietzsche 1954: 671–3; 1967a: 165).
While St. Petersburg is only mentioned, the affinities
between Paris and
Wagner are argued in some detail in a crucial section of Nietzsche contra
Wagner,
originally published in Beyond Good and Evil. France is the most
spiritually refined country in Europe
(Nietzsche 1954: 671), where the
modern soul, with all its sicknesses, has developed more fully, and so ‘Paris
is
the real soil for Wagner’ (Ibid.: 672); visible particularly through the deep
affinities between French
romanticism and the music of Wagner (Ibid.). No
doubt having Baudelaire in mind, whom he re-read intensively
while
preparing The Case of Wagner, he argued that only the French had a
genuine idea of the artist—though it was ‘sick’ (Ibid.: 673).
Nietzsche used the epilogue to The Case of Wagner to offer a succinct
assessment of modernity. Modernity
is thoroughly decadent owing to its
hostility to life, which can be best captured through its attitude not to art
but
to the figure of the actor. In an epochal sense, modernity can be defined as
the age of the actor. An
actor is somebody who stages, imitates, even mimes
—and who, in the worst-case scenario, as analysed by Plato in
Ion and as
followed, unknowingly, by Wagner, fails to realise that he imitates,
pretending to be
authentic, and even believing that true knowledge lies in
ignoring the boundary between the original and the
fake. This is at the heart
of the paradoxical character of the modern condition; the reason why
‘modern man
represents a contradiction of values’ (Nietzsche 1967a: 192).
This is resumed by Nietzsche in a memorable
expression: ‘in our times
falsehood itself has become flesh’ (Ibid.).

NIETZSCHE’S PROBLEMS WITH PHILOLOGY

Nietzsche turned to the origins of tragedy, and the music of Wagner,

because of his disillusionment with
philology, the discipline in which he
was educated. The related ‘Untimely Mediation’ had to remain
unpublished, as it exposed Nietzsche, rendering him defenceless, at an early
moment. In this Nietzsche revealed
the motivation not only for this work
but for writing the entire series as well, as an error: the error he
made by
choosing to become trained as a philologist (Nietzsche 1990: 330). Though
stating explicitly only that he
chose his profession too early, this ‘error’ also
reveals his deeper motivation: he chose philology as the
discipline where
educators were to be educated (Ibid.: 351).
Philology, however, failed to live up to its promises: instead of
educating, it mis-educated. This was
first of all because of its inculcation of
a genuine cult of antiquity, a single and distant instant of the past
being
proposed as the model of human conduct and society; a ‘false enthusiasm
for antiquity, in
which many classicists live’ (Ibid.: 335). The problem of
such an importance attributed to history had already
been theme of the
second, in many ways most important and influential ‘Untimely
Meditation’; but here it is more
tightly connected to Nietzsche’s own
education.
As this image of antiquity was propagated by ‘humanists’, Nietzsche
offers an evaluation of this movement of
thought, fountainhead of all
modern critiques of ‘humanism’, even though Nietzsche’s words, just like
the entire
‘anti-humanist’ argument, were often misconceived. The
humanists’ adulation of antiquity is first of all
misplaced, as much of what
humanists venerated most in antiquity was not at all humane (Ibid.: 328).
Nietzsche
advances an argument that only the most perceptive of observers,
like Plato and Shakespeare, managed to
formulate, against Homer and the
heroes of the Trojan War—endlessly misinterpreted, not least by
‘humanists’ who
angrily defended their idols—claiming that such
veneration of Bronze Age
warrior ethic glorified a militarised life that was
far from being ideal. For Nietzsche, the ‘basis for the
general esteem for
antiquity is prejudices’ (Ibid.: 355), as ‘antiquity was badly understood and
wholly falsified
by humanism’ (Ibid.: 359). Classicists are ‘a conspiratorial
society that wants to educate the young in
classical culture’ (Ibid.: 354;
emphases here and below as in the original).
Even further, this entire orientation to life, presenting the past as
described in a few books as a model,
implied a ‘denial of life’ (Ibid.: 351),
inculcating ‘philistinism’ and an ‘overrating of reading and
writing’ (Ibid.:
374). Such a diagnosis should not be taken lightly, as it would become
central for Nietzsche’s
later concern with nihilism, which is thus connected
to ‘humanist’ philology. Humanist intellectuals are
characterised as little
more than bookworms: ‘The teacher of reading and writing, and the
proofreader, are the prototypes of the philologist’ (Ibid.: 379); promoters of
a most shallow
Enlightenment, ‘windbags and triflers’ who are ‘repulsive’
and who ‘stutter’; ‘filthy pedants’, ‘hair-splitters
and screech-owls’,
‘passionate slaves of the state’, ‘philistines’ (Ibid.: 358–9). Even further,
and with
striking intuition, Nietzsche recognised the source of corruption
and decadence in earlier humanistic philology:
far from being faithful
transmitters of the Greek spirit, this intellectual sect was a peculiar hybrid
of
‘Hellenised Romans’ (Ibid.: 356): ‘pure philologists’ as a ‘species’
emerged ‘in the sophistic movement of the
second century’ (Ibid.: 349). In
sum, classical philology, far from being the domain of academic life where
noble
educators were raising the similarly noble educators of the future,
was rather a field where bookworm state
bureaucrats, under the false
pretence of evoking ancient ideals in their ‘purity’, were reproducing
themselves:
‘The puerile character of philology: invented by teachers for
their students’ (Ibid.: 383). The result is
an ‘advancement of learning at the
expense of man’, and so ‘philology enslaves men and serves the idols of
the
state’ (Ibid.).
In contrast to this, Nietzsche claims that the genuine merit of Greek
culture lay in the spirit of contest
(Ibid.: 337, 382–3)—an educational
practice that arose out of overcoming the Greek ‘dark ages’ after the Trojan
wars and the presumed omnipresence of violence.10 However, even this, the
true Greek model, cannot be simply imitated, mechanically and
slavishly.
This is because all human beings live ‘in a great maelstrom of forces’
(Ibid.: 343), and reading about
the past cannot help one to face this.
Advancing some of the concluding points of Beyond Good and Evil,
Nietzsche claims that the genuine aim of culture should be educating the
‘[m]an of the future: the European man’
(Ibid.: 348).

CORNFORD ON THE ORIGINS OF COMEDY

Given the focus of this book on the genealogy of the modern public sphere,
it cannot review the vast specialised
literature on the origins of theatre
written after Nietzsche. One book,
however, will be singled out for attention
owing to its extreme significance: Cornford’s classic but also very
controversial study.
Francis M. Cornford was a prominent member, together with James G.
Frazer, Arthur B. Cook, Gilbert Murray, and
Jane Harrison, of the
‘Cambridge ritualists’; a group of scholars who produced significant pieces
of work in the
first decades of the 20th century (Calder 1991). Central for
the group was the effort to combine knowledge gained
by the new
ethnographic and anthropological studies with classical knowledge derived
from ancient history,
mythology and classical philosophy. Cornford, in
particular, was a major expert on Plato. The group has become
discredited
because of evolutionist misconceptions that they clearly shared; however,
this by no means justifies
the neglect of its genuine insights, produced
through a combination of expertise sorely missing in contemporary
anthropologists, just as mythologists and classical scholars. Durkheim and
Boas were even more evolutionists
while having far less understanding of
mythology and the classical world than the Cambridge ritualists.
Cornford’s central insight was the recognition of the common origins of
both tragedy and comedy, rendered
possible by his in-depth understanding
of rituals (Cornford 1914). While classical tragedy and comedy both
re-
enact the same archaic ritual drama, comedy is closer to the original source,
which he demonstrates through a
structural analysis of the comedies of
Aristophanes. Though the evolutionist idea concerning a supposed
underlying fertility ritual is not tenable, this does not affect the validity of
the structural analysis.
The book starts by calling attention to the most perplexing aspect of the
comedies of Aristophanes: the
Parabasis (literally ‘a move forward’),
located in the middle of his plays, when the Chorus, in a
completely un-
dramatic way, interrupts the action, releases the actors, takes a few steps
forward (with its back
to the actors), and directly addresses the audience. In
Eliasian terminology, this can be considered as a
stunning combination of
involvement and detachment (Elias 1987). Its main effect is alienating, even
detaching,
as the spell of dramatic action is broken—the enchanting
sequence of acts coming to a temporary halt. Yet at the
same time it is also
particularly involving as the audience is directly brought into the play; the
separation
between the scene and the audience is temporarily erased.
Starting from the Parabasis as the central, middle (or ‘liminal’) scene,
Cornford goes into describing the
two parts (Cornford 1914: 2–3). The first
part starts by with the Prologue, continues with the Entrance of the
Chorus
(the Parodos), and then most of the first part is taken up with the contest
(Agon), where
the hero and villain of the piece encounter and fight each
other. This is the central moment of the play, and
most analysts have
stopped there; however, even after the Parabasis, a series of events take
place that
are not only important but highly peculiar as well. The central
and final event of the second part is a festive
procession (Komos)
celebrating a ‘union’ resembling a marriage. However,
in between the
Parabasis and the Komos a series of further incidents interrupt the
narrative,
possessing a highly peculiar structure, as if relegating the central
event—which after all gave the name to
‘Comedy’—into the background.
The first of these is the Sacrifice, which is followed by a Feast; events that
are
paradoxically related to the main, ‘canonical’ aspects of the plot, the
contest and the ‘marriage’ celebration.
First of all, they represent their
double: an agonistic contest followed by a festive procession forms a
complete ritual, just like a sacrifice followed by a feast. But why are these
two mixed here as part of a single
ritual play, and especially why in this
order? After all, a sacrifice could be connected ‘logically’ to a
contest, but
only by preceding it: before a contest or a fight, the participants offer a
sacrifice to the
gods, asking their favour for a good outcome. But a sacrifice
after a contest, or before a feast,
does not seem to make sense.
 At this moment a further incident takes place in the plot line, at first
increasing complication but at the end
suggesting a solution. It is literally an
intrusion, the sudden appearance of a new figure, named the intruder
(alazon), who interrupts either the sacrifice or the feast and hijacks the
action, boasting that the
victory in the contest was really due to him, so he
merits the beautiful wife. The structure of Aristophanic
comedy can thus be
unpacked like a series of Russian dolls. The intruders in the various plays
by Aristophanes
share a number of basic characteristics, though—most
importantly—Cornford considers the sophist of the
Clouds as the
paradigmatic intruder. They literally come out of the blue like a tempest,
without any
precedent or forewarning, acting like birds of prey; while their
boasting about their—nonexistent—kudos recalls
other stock comedy
figures, like the parasite,11 or the mime, especially the Megarean fool (Ibid.:
129–40). Finally, they are also the
doubles of the protagonist or the
antagonist. Using more recent anthropological literature, the alazon can
be
understood as a version of the trickster; while the connection between
ritual, sacrifice and the feast that
has gone wrong can be connected with the
sacrificial mechanism as analysed by René Girard.
 Ridicule as a Public Weapon
 
3

INTRODUCTION: LAUGHTER AS A NONTHEME IN

SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

In a way comparable to the case of the mask in anthropology, laughter as an

aspect of social and human life, and
even humour more generally, is not
much discussed in sociology or philosophy. Although it is possible to
collect
comments made by philosophers about the theme over the centuries
(Figueroa-Dorrego and Larkin-Galiñanes 2009), in
most cases these were
marginal to the work. Similarly, sociologists of culture have touched upon
the theme in
specialised studies without devoting significant attention to it.
It is revealing that Anton Zijderveld, who
pioneered a sociology of humour,
remarked in 1995 that the lack of interest in humour and laughter by social
theorists is strange, as ‘if there is a phenomenon that is truly social and
solidly entangled in culture, it is
humour’ (Zijderveld 1995: 341)—without
much avail.
This chapter will first briefly present the ideas of Elias and Plato, both
illustrative and explanatory of such
neglect, and then it will review three
French thinkers who, in the ‘long’ 19th century, made arguably the most
important concentrated effort to lay the foundations for a study of laughter.

Elias, or the Uselessness of a Sociology of Laughter

Elias’s unpublished reflections on laughter consist of a pile of notes
available in the Marburg
Archive.1 That they are
from 1956 has its
significance: this is the year in which there appeared Elias’s sole significant
publication
between 1939 and 1968, the first and second editions of The
Civilizing Process, the article ‘Involvement
and Detachment’ (for its book
version, see Elias 1987), containing the core of his methodology, focusing
on the
rhythm between participating and distancing. The notes are
dispersed, full of illegible hand-writing, and the
following by no means
represents a comprehensive assessment; it only takes a few possible,
precious clues from
Elias.
Given that the 1950s were ruled by functionalism in sociology and
utilitarianism in general, Elias starts by
acknowledging that laughter is a
matter of ‘pure pleasure’, without any utility or function; thus its
sociological study appears utterly useless.2 Still, it has its own
anthropological relevance, as few
other animals produce something similar
to laughter; even if at a surface level crocodiles or hyenas seem to
laugh, ‘it
does not give any indication of the conditions of [their] soul or of [their]
mood or [their] course of
action’.3 The third central
point belongs to a
philosophical-methodological level, containing a paradox: on the one hand,
we have an
‘immediate understanding’ of laughter: ‘however varied the
signs, our recognition of smile and laughter when we
encounter it, is
instantaneous’. Thus ‘it is so much taken for granted’ that it presents no
problem.4 Yet it is difficult to explain what
is going on: ‘If we try to raise
our understanding to the level of our reflection the light begins to
fade’.5 A
study of laughter
thus appears indeed useless, comparable to reflecting on
the manner we move our legs, which might result in a
paralysis of
movement.6
This realisation might have resulted in the piece remaining unfinished.
At least, the last sentence typed posed
the following question: every human
being understands this signal on the face, ‘[b]ut what it is?’, only to be
followed by an illegible scribble.7

Plato on Laughter: Myth and Truth

If the reason why comedy is so little reflected upon in the history of
philosophy might be attributed to the loss
of the relevant section from
Aristotle’s Poetics, the blame for the dearth of discussion on laughter is
usually laid on the shoulders of Plato, who supposedly attempted to banish
laughter from the ‘ideal society’.
Such a puritanical interpretation of Plato’s
thought, however, is pure fiction. While the reconstruction of the
history of
such a fallacy leads beyond the scope of this study, the point will be
illustrated through a recent,
otherwise excellent article on the importance of
ancient puppet theatre for the metaphor of the cave.
The relevant section starts by correctly mentioning Plato’s dislike of
violent laughter, but then extends the
point, through Plato’s supposed
‘aversion to change’, to such a stark ‘aversion to laughter that Plato
unabashedly declares the object of comic laughter to be a form of evil’
(Gocer 1999–2000: 215). Here the paper
evokes Philebus (48c1, 49dll–e4),
where, however, Plato only raises some points about laughter that is due
to
envy. Raising the pitch further, the article claims that ‘[t]he nature of the
laughable, Plato contends, lies
in malice,’ while Plato’s argument was the
opposite; that God is also averse to laughter, sending us to passages
in the
Republic (375c, 410d) that, however, fail to contain anything of the sort;
then, returning to the
Philebus, it argues that Plato’s ‘main worry is that the
innocent laughter here and there creates and
feeds false pleasures’ (Gocer
1999–2000: 216), which is again not argued there.
Without offering an extended discussion, Plato’s central point
concerning laughter is the following. While for
Plato there is nothing wrong
in ‘innocent’ laughter and smiling, and in particular in having a cheerful
time
in the company of our friends, as demonstrated by the subtle but
pervasive
irony and teasing interweaving, like a musical theme, all his
dialogues, he was opposed to becoming overwhelmed
by violent laughter,
as it could easily lead to a swing of mood to the opposite direction. The
point therefore
concerns moderation and not an aversion to laughter or to
‘change’, recognising as a basic fact of life that
laughter is an irresistible
and mimetic force: we are forced to laugh when others around us laugh, or
when
hearing certain jokes, even if we strongly disapprove the content.
Furthermore, the particular aversion of Plato
manifest in the passages of the
Philebus referred to above is not about laughter but rather about
ridicule.8
This point helps to turn us directly to the effect mechanism of the
comic.

VICTOR HUGO ON THE COMIC AND THE GROTESQUE

Victor Hugo’s reflections on the comic are contained in the unusually long
preface to his 1827 play
Cromwell, which came to be known as a ‘Romantic
Manifesto’.9 It is not simply a programmatic statement but a highly
influential analytical piece, based on Hugo’s familiarity with French and
German interpretations of the French
Revolution, including the history of
Michelet, the philosophy of Victor Cousin, and the literary criticism of
Madame de Staël (Franzini 1990). Such bringing together of different
traditions enabled Hugo to formulate two
major claims, recognising
similarities between areas that were previously kept separate.
First, beyond a personal preference for theatre, he recognised not simply
the centrality of theatre for the
modern world but the fundamental
theatricality of this new type of society; in particular, the theatrical nature
of
the events of the Revolution. Second, he understood that in this new kind of
‘real’ theatre, which was
foreseen only by Shakespeare, comic and tragic
elements became radically intermingled, and he proposed the term
‘grotesque’, which up to that point was mostly applied to a particular kind
of decorative painting, in order to
capture this phenomenon. By repeatedly
emphasising that philosophy so far has ignored the grotesque, having only
Rabelais and Shakespeare as precursors, he both staked a legitimate claim
that his preface was not simply an
interpretation of art but a philosophical
statement while also venturing the idea, which would return with
such
masters of 20th-century thought as René Girard (1961) and Béla Hamvas
(1994), that
the main line of thinking in European culture cannot be reduced
to philosophy but is just as strongly represented
by artists.
Making it immediately clear that the work is much more than a
normative programme, Hugo starts by formulating a
theory of civilisation.
Its basic outlines are fairly standard for the age: the contrast between
antiquity and
modernity and the novelty introduced by Christianity (Hugo
1909: 3–8). Hugo, however, is not a philosopher but an
artist, which allows
him to add strikingly original insights. First of all, and in radical contrast to
the spirit of both the French Enlightenment and German romanticism, Hugo
does not launch
another critique of Christianity; instead, he simply affirms
the truth of the new Christian religion (Ibid.: 8).
But the manner in which
the nature of this truth is identified is even more striking. This ‘new truth’
implied
concern with reality. While art in classical antiquity was reduced to
a concern with beauty, with Christianity
art has ‘become scientific’ by
incorporating the ugly as well, thus recognising that ‘the ugly exists side by
side with the beautiful, the deformed next to the graceful, the grotesque on
the reverse of the sublime, evil
with good, shadow with light’ (Ibid.: 11).
The new romantic poetry rendered possible by Christianity represents a
great step ahead by combining these two qualities, which in its best
theatrical works finally manages to capture
the real, which is a combination
of the grotesque and sublime, as ‘true poetry, the complete poetry, is in the
harmony of opposites’ (Ibid.: 24).
Anticipating critics, Hugo immediately adds that this vision of art does
not imply an imitation of ugliness. Art
certainly must elevate and ennoble.
The specificity of modern (meaning romantic) art lies in the fact that such a
mobilisation for good taste, for the noble and the graceful is based not on
the exclusion but the proper
incorporation of opposite aspects: ‘it is out of
the fecund union of the grotesque type with the sublime type
that the
modern genius is born’ (Ibid.: 12). This leads directly to the nature of the
grotesque, fundamental for
modern art and thought but not discussed
explicitly by philosophers so far. Hugo offers to fill this gap.
The grotesque is an artificial combination of elements that does not
exist in nature. It has two modalities: the
horrible and deformed, and the
comic and buffonesque (Ibid.: 14). The first protagonists in the history of
the
grotesque were visual artists, in particular Michelangelo and Callot
(Ibid.). The par excellence genre of the
grotesque, however, is comedy,
more specifically modern comedy, given that the grotesque is ‘the germ of
comedy’ (Ibid.: 16).

Classical art was based on the separation of tragedy and comedy, so it could
not stage such a particularly
complex phenomenon as the grotesque. A
central aspect of modern comedy, however, is that it does not want merely
to entertain; rather it strives to perform a parody of the human condition
(Ibid.: 14). Hugo associates
some of the most important figures of European
art with this concern with the grotesque and parody—as in Dante,
Rabelais,
Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. But, most importantly, he sees them as a
source of the crystallisation
of this tradition: the Italian commedia dell’arte,
with its Harlequins and Scaramouches, ‘threatening silhouttes
of man, types
completely unknown in the serious Antiquity’ (Ibid.). While this tradition
was rooted in classical
Italy, it came to full flower only with the works of
Shakespeare, and in particular in the manner in which
Shakespeare based
the dynamics of his plays on the prior separation and eventual linking of
two different types
of personalities: those who embody pure grace, like
Juliet, Desdemona or
Ophelia, and those who are all evil—figures that are
much more varied in character, given that ‘beauty has only
one type, while
the ugly has a thousand’ (Ibid.: 17). Shakespeare became the ‘poetic
summit (sommité)’
(Ibid.: 14) of our age because he managed to find in his
plays a harmonious equilibrium between the beautiful and
the ugly. Modern
Shakespearean drama is thus ‘complete poetry’ (Ibid.: 21). But at the same
time the
theatrical character of the modern world makes this type of drama
also lyrical, as visible in the romantic
concern with melancholy and
dreaming (Ibid.: 21–2). It is for such reasons that ‘everything in modern
poetry
concludes in drama (C’est donc au drame que tout vient aboutir
dans la poésie moderne)’ (Ibid.: 22–3).
Given these claims, Hugo went on to perform the real, and his 1830
play Hernani, opening on 25 February
1830, indeed made a non-negligible
contribution to the ‘revolutionary cause’. However, Hugo’s output petered
off-after the mid 1830s, as the events made evident that there is something
highly problematic in such a tight
connection between theatre and modern
politics. Instead of theatre offering a key to the heart of reality and the
human condition, which then politics—democratic and revolutionary
politics—could put into practice, France (and
soon the entire Europe) was
rather caught in a vortex-like spiral in which politics and theatre
increasingly
started to mimic each other, with eventually devastating
results.
The work and life of the other great French poet of the 19th century,
Baudelaire, whose relationship with Victor
Hugo was so intriguingly
complex (Dotoli 2003), was fully caught in the vortex where being modern
to the nth
degree meant repudiating completely what this meant in the
previous, (n-1)th degree. He promoted decadence, and
eventually the music
of Wagner, in order to fight decadence, though he had no understanding of
music; avidly
frequented brothels, with the understanding that only
suffering makes one noble; and wrote the single most
important analysis of
laughter, which hardly any philosopher or social scientist knows about, in
spite of the
mountains written about Baudelaire being ‘the poet of
modernity’.

BAUDELAIRE, OR LAUGHTER AS SATANIC

Baudelaire’s essay ‘On the essence of laughter’ complements perfectly

Nietzsche’s works on tragedy and on Wagner:
it is written by one of the
most important analysts of modernity, and Baudelaire, just as in his own
way
Nietzsche, considered that his work on a seemingly obscure subject
gave access to the heart of the modern
condition.
Being a poet, Baudelaire wrote essays that were almost exclusively
devoted to poetry or the visual arts. He wrote
only two essays devoted to
socio-philosophical themes. One is the essay on modernity, widely
recognised as
fundamental for social thinking and discussed in classic
works (Benjamin 1992, Foucault 1984, Jauss 1982). The
other essay,
however, has been practically ignored, even in studies devoted to
the comic.
Baudelaire held this writing in particularly high esteem; in a crucial 1863
letter to Victor Hugo,
asking his help for publishing his essays in Brussels,
he suggested that it should lead off the book (Dotoli
2003: 75).
This significance of laughter for the poet of modernity is confirmed in
his distinctly modern setting of
the tone: Baudelaire intimates that for a
long time he was literally obsessed with writing the essay, as he faced
particular difficulties in trying to ‘bring some order’ into his reflections, as
it was a work requiring somebody
who is both philosopher and artist
(Baudelaire 1972: 140).10
Before going into details, we need to keep in mind that the point of
access for Baudelaire’s reflections was the
laughter provoked by a specific
genre, caricature. A central question concerns the extent to which
Baudelaire
managed to go beyond this original limitation.
For a poet in constant conflict with authorities, embodying in his life as
well as in his works the avant-garde,
breaking all conventional limits, the
approach pursued in this essay is stunningly orthodox. His central claim
about laughter is so amazing that we must place it at the start of this
analysis: for Baudelaire, simply and
verbatim, ‘[l]aughter is satanic’ (Ibid.:
148). The poet’s path to this stunning claim begins with a simple
perusal of
the New Testament: ‘the sage of all sages, the Incarnate Word, has never
laughed’—though he knew anger
and tears (Ibid.: 142). This could only
lead to the conclusion that ‘human laughter is intimately connected with
the
accident of an ancient fall’; sign of ‘physical and moral degradation’, and ‘a
state of corruption’ (Ibid.:
143). Baudelaire draws the consequences in the
most uncompromising manner about the general area to which
caricature
belongs: ‘the comic is an element of damnation and of diabolic origin’
(Ibid.: 144); thus, it is ‘one
of the clearest signs of Satan in man’ (Ibid.:
145).
Anticipating that few people would be willing to accept such a striking
view, taking his approach ‘to be vitiated
by the a priori mysticism’ (Ibid.:
144), Baudelaire tries both to substantiate and to qualify the claim.
While
recognising his efforts at coherence, we need to move further and impose a
more theoretical order on his
observations. At a structural level, laughter is
a ‘monstrous phenomenon’, as it ‘comes from superiority’, or
rather an
attempt to establish such a superiority; it is thus profoundly hubristic (Ibid.:
145–6). The argument
resembles more Goethe’s obsession with Prometheus
and the Titanic11 than Hegel’s Phenomenology and the masterserf dialectic;
indeed, this is how Baudelaire continues, searching for allies: ‘[t]he
romantic school, or more accurately, one
of the subdivision of the romantic
school, the satanic school, thoroughly grasped this primeval law of
laughter’
(Ibid.: 147).
At the phenomenological level, laughter is diabolical by being
convulsive; its effects contort the body into
ungraceful spasms. This
characteristic of laughter reveals an inherent schism, a sudden distancing of
the self
from itself (Ibid.: 150). Finally, laughter not only disturbs normal
life and is ungraceful but it outright represents a systematic reversal of the
normal order of things.
Baudelaire illustrates this point through the figure of
Melmoth, ‘the great satanic creation’ of the Irish
Protestant poet and priest
Charles Robert Maturin (Ibid.: 147).
Melmoth is split at his very centre: he wants to believe himself superior
to human beings, and yet he is a
physical cripple and a social outcast.
‘Melmoth is a living contradiction’, so his laughter is a way to
compensate
for his weaknesses and also reveals ‘the perpetual explosion of his wrath
and suffering’ (Ibid.).
Baudelaire’s characterisation of this laughter is one of
the high points of his analysis and needs to be quoted
in detail: as Melmoth
‘has left behind the fundamental conditions of life [ … ] this laughter of his
freezes and
wrings the guts. It is a laughter that never sleeps, like a disease
for ever on its stealthy way, in execution of
a providential command [ … it
is a laughter that] is always fulfilling its function, as it tears and scorches
the
lips of the laugher beyond hope of pardon’ (Ibid.). The laughter of
Melmoth, the social outcast, is a ‘terrible
laughter’; the laughter of ‘the
outsider [l’être déclassé] standing at the extreme limits of the human
world
and on the frontiers of the higher life [ … ] always believing himself to be
on the point of escape from
his compact with the devil [pacte infernal], for
ever hoping to exchange his superhuman power, cause of
his misfortune, for
the pure and undefiled conscience of a simple soul, which he envies’ (Ibid.:
150–1; 1962:
253).
At this moment, the weary reader is desperately looking for a way to
escape: it simply cannot be true that
laughter, widely recognised a most
pleasant and healthy aspect of human life, must be ceded to the devil.
Indeed,
Baudelaire eventually offers an escape. In the very sentence
containing the notorious passage ‘laughter is
satanic’, he continues in a
different key: ‘it is therefore profoundly human’ (1972: 148). Baudelaire
discusses
this human element of laughter in two modalities: one is the
opposite of satanic laughter, while the second
explains why this ‘satanic
laughter’ can be so profoundly and tragically—or tragic-comically—
human.
For Baudelaire, (satanic) laughter is different from the smile, which is
angelic. This smile can be best observed
in children:

[t]he laughter [rire] of children is like the blossoming of a flower. It is

the joy of receiving, the joy
of breathing, the joy of confiding, the joy
of contemplating, of living, of growing up. It is like the joy of a
plant.
And so, generally speaking, its manifestation is rather the smile
[sourire], something analogous to
the wagging tail in a dog or the
purring of cats. (Ibid.: 151; 1962: 253).

The smile is a sign of innocence and an expression of joy. The most

important difference between the joy
expressed in a smile and the
convulsive contortions produced by laughter is in the manifestations of joy,
which
even include its exact opposite, tears: ‘[s]ometimes [joy] can hardly
be detected; at others it expresses itself
in tears’ (1972: 150).
This is because laughter, in a way, is only a symptom; just as a smile, or
tears (of joy), are only outward expressions of a glad, happy state of soul.
What is the exact internal
disposition that is expressed by laughter? Here
Baudelaire turns from a phenomenology of evil to its in-depth
analysis.
This represents the peak of the essay, underlined by its emphatic,
Shakespearean starting question:
laughter is a ‘[s]ymptom of what? That is
the whole question’ (Ibid.). For Baudelaire, joy expresses unity, a
feeling of
being at one with oneself, the Heraclitean experience of panta heinai (all is
one); while
‘[l]aughter is the expression of a double or contradictory
feeling; and it is for this reason that a convulsion
occurs’ (Ibid.). This split
can be characterized as a loss of innocence, at the individual level, or the
Fall, at
the level of a culture, or the entire mankind. In the terminology of
Gregory Bateson, one can refer to ‘double
bind’ situations, which can cause
schizophrenic personalities,12 or, at the level of cultures, to schismogenic
developments. The
angelic and the diabolical aspects are thus not
independent of each other; one can develop into the other.
But if the move from the smile to laughter follows the logic of a fall, a
loss of innocence, can such a
development be reversed at the individual or
the social level? Baudelaire does not pose this question, as his
metaphysics
follows not the question of redemption from evil but rather the logic of
Hermes Trismegistos, or the
idea that what goes up must come down: ‘the
angelic element and the diabolical element operate in parallel.
Humanity
works its way up, and acquires a potential for evil and an understanding of
evil, proportionate to the
potential it acquires for good’ (Ibid.: 149). In order
to investigate the possibility of reversal, we need to
move from Baudelaire
to another poet, just as significant both as a poet and as an essayist, who
was also
profoundly a child of his times and developed his poetry as an
effort to move beyond the limitations of his own
very particular time and
place. This poet is William Blake, who in one of his most important poems,
‘The Smile’,
captured the metaphysics of the conversion that takes place at
the level of the human soul in shifts between
types of smiles and laughter.
The poem starts by a distinction between types of smiles, recalling
Baudelaire’s distinction between the smile
and laughter, but immediately
transcends his own distinction by defining as the ‘Smile of Smiles’ the
combination
of these two smiles. This is followed by another
categorisation, that of ‘frown’, a kind of smile that is solely
negative,
deprecatory. It also has a quintessential version, where one moves from
occasional, negative frowning
to a frown that penetrates the core of one’s
character. This ‘Frown of Frowns’ corresponds closely to the
Melmothian
laughter of Baudelaire; but Blake also postulates a ‘super’ smile that has the
converting power to
redeem, once for all, even the soul who has descended
into the ‘Frown of Frowns’.
Instead of discussing the possibility of redeeming laughter, Baudelaire’s
essay ends with reflections on genuine
laughter and the nature of the comic,
and on the character of the comic actor. As if the shock generated
by his
assertion that laughter is satanic weren’t enough, he now adds the further
claim that ‘the comic dwells in us Christians’ (Ibid.: 150). This is because
those aspects of ancient
rituals that we associate with comedy and laughter,
like Venus and Pan, or the little Priapuses, are not to be
taken lightly.
Genuine laughter is not the product of an effort to establish superiority
over others through their misfortunes
or through accidental ridicule but is
rather the product of an intellectual effort: trying to make sense out of
something extraordinary that was encountered. The question of superiority
thus shifts from man-over-man to
man-over-nature, with examples being
the grotesque (the monstrous) or the absurd (the improbable), involving
creativity and not just imitation. In contrast to the ordinary comic,
Baudelaire defines this kind of comic
effect mechanism producing genuine
laughter as the ‘absolute comic’ (Ibid.: 151–2, 159).
The best example of ‘absolute comic’ is the English pantomime, as it
developed out of the ‘innocent comic’ of
16th-century southern Italian
commedia dell’arte, passing through 17th-century absolutist France into
18th-century liberal England (Ibid.: 154–7). At its best, this kind of
pantomime literally produces, or sparks, a
unique kind of laughter: ‘a riot of
laughter, something both terrible and irresistible’ (Ibid.: 156). The most
important aspect of this kind of comedy is that the type of action that
produces this laughter cannot be
reproduced through words: ‘[s]et down
with the pen, the whole thing seems pale and chill’ (Ibid.: 157). But this
is
exactly why ‘[p]antomime is the distillation of comedy; its quintessence; it
is the comic element pure,
isolated, concentrated’, producing the
‘intoxication’ characteristic of the ‘absolute comic’ (Ibid.).
The question now concerns the way in which the effect of ‘absolute
comic’ is produced, leading Baudelaire to the
idea that this artist by
necessity must be a split personality. A comic artist can produce such a
hilarious
effect only if he is not conscious of what he is doing; thus ‘one of
the most distinctive signs of the absolute
comic is to be unconscious of
itself’ (Ibid.: 160). But, being fortunately before Freud, Baudelaire makes it
immediately clear that ‘unconsciousness’ does not refer to psychic
processes, as the comic is profoundly social:
‘in order for the comic, in
other words an emanation, an explosion, an emergence of the comic, to
exist, there
must be two beings in the presence of each other; [and] it is
particularly in the laugher, in the spectator, that
the sense of the comic
resides’ (Ibid.). This alludes to the mimetic aspects of laughter,
incorporating not just
the interaction between actor and audience but the
action within the audience itself as well. Baudelaire ends
with a revealing
paradox: comic artists can produce an effect only if they are unaware of
what they are doing;
but still, and evidently, they know that what they are
doing is being done in order to produce laughter.
Comic actors thus reveal by their very act, and in a particularly clear
manner, a deep truth about the human
condition: ‘the existence in the
human being of a permanent dualism, the capacity of being both himself
and
someone else at one and the same time’ (Ibid.).

BERGSON, OR LAUGHTER AS RIDICULE

Bergson’s essay on laughter is one of the best-known works of the

philosopher. It is widely used as a starting
point for studies on laughter or
on the comic in general. Bergson does not mention Baudelaire’s essay in his
work, thus much contributing to its neglect; yet, it is evident that Bergson
not only knew the essay but used it
as a reference source. One can safely
bet that Bergson wrote with Baudelaire’s essay open on his desk, so his
failure to acknowledge it illustrates the importance of the unsayable (or
unsaid) in modern culture. This is
visible from the way Bergson followed
Baudelaire’s title, in being concerned with the ‘essence’ of laughter; the
way in which he took up the invitation for the study of laughter, which
belongs to the philosopher just as to the
artist; and from his mode of
proceeding. He also restricted his attention to the comic, even to caricature,
though—in contrast to Baudelaire—he hid this limitation. The work thus
became mis-leadingly one-sided:
while pretending to do a comprehensive
philosophical analysis of laughter, Bergson deals only with a particular
aspect, the act of laughing at somebody, almost exclusively in the sense of
mocking, shifting attention
away from all other kinds of laughter, as if they
did not exist.
The direct drawing upon Baudelaire’s work is also evident in the initial,
three-fold characterisation of the
‘essence’ of laughter (or, in fact, of
mocking), though he also significantly modified Baudelaire’s approach,
displacing accents, and—as he was not referring to Baudelaire’s work—his
displacements became invisible while
being codified as the philosophy of
laughter. First of all, in line with Enlightenment humanism, Bergson
starts
by defining the essence of laughter as being solely human: animals don’t
laugh (Bergson 1956: 62). The
matter seems plain and self-evident, yet it is
twice problematic. First, it ignores the fact, emphasised later by
Huizinga,
but just as evident as the point made by Bergson, that animals do play; and
given the very close
links between playfulness and laughter, a
comprehensive philosophical analysis of laughter should have included
this
aspect as part of the analysis, instead of simply asserting the specificity (and
implicit superiority) of us
humans in this way. The second problem goes to
the heart of Baudelaire’s essay. Baudelaire considered the
humanity of
laughter connected to its satanic aspects. Bergson simply ignores this point
and instead
merely asserts that laughter is a specific feature of humans and
human only, overlooking its problematic aspects,
in spite of restricting
laughter to mocking.
Concerning the second point, the reliance on Baudelaire’s essay is even
more direct. Bergson again distorts the
original sense, though in a more
revealing and thus even helpful manner. Baudelaire considered that laughter
as ridicule implied an attempt to assert superiority; Bergson argued that
laughter tout court
(though implying mocking) requires an exterior, outsider
position: we can only laugh at somebody, at the
misfortunes of another
human being, if we do not feel any sense of community with him; this is
‘the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter’, its ‘natural
environment’
being ‘indifference’ (Ibid.: 63; here as below I reproduce
Bergson’s frequent use of emphasis). As shown by the
case of Melmoth,
Baudelaire was well aware of this aspect of laughter and the problem that
the attempt to assert
superiority by an outsider generates. Bergson, however,
ignored this implied attempt at a revaluation and brought
instead the
attitude implied by laughter close to the ‘scientific spirit’ of pure, objective
exteriority—as if
mocking and scholarly analysis could be all but identified
through their joint assumption of an exterior
position. Finally, and again just
like Baudelaire, Bergson emphasises the social aspect of laughter, but again
in
a different and reductive manner: Baudelaire’s complex awareness about
the mimetic circles of involvement and
detachment is reduced to the mere
need of an echo (Ibid.: 64). In this way society became exteriorised into the
position of the joker or objectified as the butt of the joke.
Based on these three ‘essential elements’ of laughter Bergson proceeds
to give a stunning definition of the
situation provoking laughter: ‘[t]he
comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men
concentrate
their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their
emotions and calling into play nothing but
their intelligence’ (Ibid.: 65).
The description is stunning, as from one angle it reproduces the
scapegoating
mechanism as analysed by Girard: we need only to change the
word ‘group’ into ‘crowd’, which is all the more easy
as Bergson fails to
include any community-forming principle in his analysis; while from
another angle its
structure is strikingly close the ‘public sphere’ of
communicative argumentation as idealised by Habermas. For
Girard, a
persecuting crowd is purely emotional and mimetic; for Habermas, open
public discourse is purely
rational. Bergson adds the component of
exteriority to the scapegoating mechanism, thus helping to identify the
missing element in Girard’s sacrificial mechanism, the individual who
triggers the blaming process, in an
intruding outsider trickster. At the same
time, it complements Habermas’s analysis by identifying mimetic
ridiculing
as the effect mechanism complementing the rational discourse of a public
arena that ignores any
principle of existential community.
The paradoxical consequences of the peculiar approach pursued by
Bergson are now visible. Bergson took as his
point of departure
Baudelaire’s essay but decided not to acknowledge it and departed from it
freely, thus coming
to ignore its limitations as well as some of its most
important assets. As a consequence, instead of providing a
definite
philosophical study of laughter, he simply discussed the specific activity of
mocking, as if this were
the essence of laughter. Still, exactly because of
this same short-coming, his work turned out to be of vital
relevance for
understanding the specific nature not of laughter but of the activity of
mocking, fundamental both
for the sacrificial mechanism and open public
discussion, thus helping to connect comedy with the public sphere.
The rest of the analysis will be conducted under this light: what else can
we learn from Bergson concerning this
connection, central for this book?
Let’s start with the identifying features of
the ‘victim’ of jokes. Not
surprisingly, Bergson’s terminology closely corresponds to Girard’s and to
students of
the trickster.13 It can
be, first of all, somebody with a distorted
exterior appearance, especially of the face; but, more generally, it
can be
anything that is mechanically rigid (Ibid.: 67; Bergson 1988: 8).14 Rigid
behaviour is funny, as it places a person outside the
normal logic of social
life, and such asociality is punished by laughter. This asociality both
associates to and
differentiates this ‘victim’ from the trickster: the trickster
is also a deeply asocial character, incapable of
adhering even to minimal
standards of sociability and decency; however, far from being rigid, he is
rather
extremely mobile and versatile. The immobility of the victim of
jokes, furthermore, helps to set up another
contrast in a closely related and
already much discussed area, the field of aesthetics: the external features
that are prone to select somebody as a butt of jokes are related not so much
to a lack of natural beauty but
rather to rigidity due to a lack of gracefulness
(Bergson 1956: 79).
Bergson concludes the first part of his analysis with an intermediate
reflection, defining the comic
provisionally as ‘[s]omething mechanical
encrusted to the living’ (Ibid.: 84) and suggesting that
further research can
extend in three directions. First, comic is whatever tries to imitate the living
with
something that is not alive but rather rigid and fixed, creating the
illusion of an automatism; the central
example here is the disguise
(déguisement) (Ibid.: 85–7; 1988: 30–2). Second, and in line with the
opposition to graceful movement that originates in the soul, the comic
places emphasis on the body, on its heavy,
resisting, material characteristics.
The comic effect appears whenever the body tries to resist the soul; when
the material world tries to gain domination over the spiritual: ‘Any incident
is comic that calls our
attention to the physical in a person, when it is the
moral side that is concerned’ (1956: 93). Finally, and
emphasising even
more clearly the attempt, in the comic, to reverse priorities and to assert the
victory of
non-living over living, a basic source of laughter is when a
person, temporarily, is outright transformed into an
object. Here again the
perplexing link between the comic and death becomes evident, given that
death is
the most clear-cut example for the transformation of a living body
into a rigid object, a mere corpse. Concerning
the comic in theatre, the best
examples for such objectification are marionettes, puppets and clowns, the
clearest demonstrations of the comic for Bergson, and again particularly
close to Baudelaire’s ideas about the
pantomime being the absolute comic.
Bergson adds two crucial observations. First, clowns, just like puppets,
are engaged in hectic movements on
stage: they ‘collided, fell and jumped
again in a uniformly accelerated rhythm, visibly intent upon effecting a
crescendo. And it was more and more to the jumping again, the rebound,
that the attention of the
public was attracted’ (Ibid.: 98). Second, the stage
activities of clowns often involve gratuitous and contagious
violence, like
hitting each other on the head with their bats, with increasing violence, until
both fell to the ground: ‘[a]t that instant appeared in all its vividness the
suggestion that
the two artists had gradually driven into the imagination of
the spectators: “We are about to become … we have
now become solid
wooden dummies” ’ (Ibid.: 99). In both cases the central aspect of this
‘absolute comic’ is the
absurd: we laugh at scenes of violence, even
outrageous, extreme violence, exactly because it is absurd—and the
results,
therefore, as if through some kind of magic, will also be absurd, as nobody
ever gets really hurt.
Strikingly, particularly vivid examples for this scene
are provided by important early works of two crucial and
closely related
Renaissance artists, Michelangelo and Antonio Pollaiuolo, both frequently
associated with the
monstrous, the uncanny, the bizarre and the grotesque,
though the works had no comic intent: Pollaiuolo’s ‘Battle
of Nudes’ and
Michelangelo’s ‘Battle of the Centaurs’ both depict scenes of extreme,
frenetic, mad violence,
where the objectification of human beings is
underlined by the mechanical way in which the heads and faces
(central for
individual personality) are represented: in Pollaiuolo’s engraving all twelve
battling figures have
identical faces (which are thus turned into masks),
while in Michelangelo’s relief the heads are completely
round, as if they
were bowling balls.15
The remaining chapters of Bergson’s essay are devoted to three further
aspects of the comic: the comic element in
situations, in words, and in
character. Concerning the first, Bergson lists three situations he considered
particularly comic. The first is the ‘jack-in-the-box’ (Ibid.: 105) (the French
original, ‘le diable à
ressort’ (1988: 53), containing an explicit ‘satanical’
allusion), playing with repetitiveness and doubling,
as if bringing forth the
mechanical hidden inside the living.16 The second is the dancing-jack
(1956: 111), or the marionette
puppet moved by cords, recalling the famous
metaphor of Plato (Laws 644d–5b). The emphasis is on the
illusion by
which somebody moved by strings fancies oneself to be fully autonomous.
The third example is the
snowball (Bergson 1956: 112), where the comic
effect is produced by transforming an unfolding process into
mechanical
segments that merely follow each other and can be reversed, as if to mock
the idea of causality,
central for human responsibility.
While the situational comic effect is produced through repetition, the
comic element in words is attained ‘by
transposing the natural expression
of an idea into another key’ (Ibid.: 139–40). Examples include the
transposition from everyday into festive, from classical into modern, or vice
versa; in all such cases effect is
produced by generating confusion. Bergson
lists two important modalities of this transposition: parody and
exaggeration
(Ibid.: 140–1), both points having vital importance. The comic in parody
suggested the idea to some
philosophers that the comic is nothing else but
‘a species of degradation’ (Ibid.: 141); while the
importance of
exaggeration relates it to extremism: ‘[e]xaggeration is always comic when
prolonged, and
especially when systematic’ (Ibid.). As a particularly good
example, Bergson evokes Jean-Paul.
Bergson’s last chapter is devoted to capturing the comic character. He
employs
a strange but revealing terminology to describe his own approach,
using phrases like ‘the chemists of the soul’
(Ibid.: 171), or the way in
which the comic ‘percolates [s’infiltre] into a form’ (Ibid.: 146; 1988: 101).
In trying to capture the central features of the comic character, Bergson
stumbles into another paradox: while
all art tries to move away from empty
generalities, in order to face ‘pure’ reality (1956: 162), and tragedy in
particular turns around individual fate, the comic personality rather tries to
capture directly the general. Such
a contrast between tragedy and comedy is
present at the most visible level in titles; while tragedies, whether
classical
or modern, often have as their title personal names (Orestes, Electra,
Oedipus King, Hamlet, Macbeth,
Romeo and Juliet, or King Lear),
comedies always capture generalities and types (Birds, Wasps, Eunuch,
Impostor,
Imaginary Invalid, Misanthrope, Learned Ladies). The reason
given is that comedy punishes the asocial, so it
targets the largest possible
numbers (Ibid.: 140). Although this claim is not particularly convincing, the
conclusion drawn is extremely interesting: ‘comedy is situated somewhere
in between art and life’ (Ibid.: 140–1).
Belonging neither to life nor art,
comedy is in the liminal in-between, from where—once the occasion
presents
itself—it can start its own mission to conquer not only the arts but
the real world as well.
Still, apart from the general, asocial characteristics exposed in comedy,
are there any specific features that
represent, as if distilled in an essence, the
comic character? Bergson’s response is affirmative, and again
particularly
illuminating: this is vanity (Ibid.: 171–2). The argument illuminates the
19th-century French
preoccupation with the comic, through Girard’s insight
about vanity being central to the post-revolutionary
France of the 1820s,
while its etymology complements Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism:
‘vanity’ is derived from
the same root as ‘vainness’, or being empty. In
order to illustrate this comic vanity, in section 3 of its last
chapter Bergson
makes particular use of the works of Molière, especially Les Femmes
savants, calling
attention in particular to the way in which comic effects are
produced there by transposing matters of knowledge
and reason into the
language of pure feelings (Ibid.: 176).
The penultimate section of Bergson’s last chapter moves from the
causes of laughter to one of its most important
manifestations, the absurd,
which Bergson approaches, again making use of the work of Jean-Paul,
developed
further by Théophile Gautier, as ‘visible absurdity’ (Ibid.: 147).
The absurd constitutes a particular case of
the comic, as it is connected to
the formation of images, or the fluidity of illusion, while the comic in
general
is based on rigidity and objectification. Such a reversal of common
sense is illustrated by an opposition between
two crucial terms, ‘dream’ and
‘fixed idea’. The rigidity of a comic figure is shown in its ignoring the rules
of
common sense through an obstinate pursuit of certain obsessions.17 At
the same time comic absurdity has a lighter touch: the
pursuit of mirages
follows the logic of dreams, as ‘comic absurdity is of the same nature as
that of dreams’ (Ibid.: 180). Still, according to a certain crescendo
dynamics,
illusions can escalate, until ‘the crowning absurdity [l’absurdité
finale] is reached’, with actors being
‘caught up in a very whirlwind of
madness [un tourbillon de folie] as the play proceeds’ (Ibid.: 183).
Bergson
closes the section by analysing one specific type of madness particularly
characteristics of dreams: when
two persons become one yet remain
distinct, of which one is generally the dreamer.
The concluding section of the book circles around a single question. It
literally does so, just as the cat with
the proverbial hot cauldron, as it cannot
properly get a grasp on it; yet the theme is of fundamental importance,
and
even if he could not say much that is useful, Bergson must at least be
credited for calling attention to it.
It is the question of benevolence and
malevolence as reflected in the comic. On a first look, the comic seems to
return the insult which is the asocial distractedness lying at its own heart by
another insult; so ‘evidently
there is nothing benevolent in laughter. It
seems rather inclined to return evil [mal] for evil’ (Ibid.:
186, 1988: 148).
Yet, Bergson also acknowledges that by producing laughter, comedy also
evokes sympathy, thus
benevolent feelings, even though this sympathy is
short-lived. At this point the essay, unable to solve the
dilemma, peters off,
with comments that are little more than sentimental and rhetorical.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS: NIETZSCHE AND HÖLDERLIN ON

LAUGHTER AND MOCKING

Nietzsche developed an entire art of joy and laughter, contained especially

in Gaia Scienza, rooted in
The Birth of Tragedy, presenting the idea that
comedy is the outcome of the medieval transformation of
Eros into the
‘devil’ (Nietzsche 1982, no. 76). An important part of his diagnosis was the
‘spirit of gravity’, a
dwarf, central to Zarathustra. Yet, in this same book,
and in one of its most famous aphorisms, Nietzsche
also identified laughter
as a murderer (see the motto of the Preface). This contrast can be
illuminated through
one of the most important and still much neglected
sources of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, whose status as a philosopher
exerting a
vital impact on Hegel and Nietzsche is increasingly discovered through the
mediation of Dilthey and
Heidegger (Babich 2006; Young 2010: 41–7).18
The ambivalence of laughter is thematised and solved by Hölderlin
through the contrast between the childlike and
ridiculing, related to his
foundational contrast between Athens and the Germans. In understanding
the greatness
of Athens one must avoid confusing effect and cause
(Hölderlin 1994a: 62–7),19 recognizing the central role played by its
historical
experience, unique among ancient Greek cities in being spared
from violent destruction.20 The same applies for the education of children,
who must be left in peace, growing up on a moderate diet, without violent
external influences, rhyming with the
motto of the first volume of
Hyperion: ‘Non coerceri maximo,
contineri minimo, divinum est’, whose
source is a suggested epitaph to Ignatius Loyola (Gaskill 1984: 32–3).
It is
only in such way that the divine innocence and beauty characteristic of all
children can be preserved.
There are two main ways in which the bringing up of children can be
derailed, both particularly characteristic of
Germans. The first is an
education that forces things, considering as the central goal of education to
rectify
something bad (Hölderlin 1994a: 5), a main aspect of German
education, whose main aim is to establish a
separateness from the world
(Ibid.), which is justified—as a performative act—by everything indeed
being
imperfect in Germany, given that they manage to soil everything that
was clean (Ibid.: 130).21
It is here that ridicule and mocking come into play, a central
complementary weapon of this educational
mentality. Ridicule is a main
tool of separation and division; a central way to achieve a schism at the core
of a
human being (Ibid.: 5; ‘es ist noch mit sich selber nicht zerfallen’;
1994b: 17). Ridicule is a despicable
practice (1994a: 114), tool and weapon
of dwarves (Ibid.: 24; 1994b: 41), who use it to revile (lästern)
and mock
(höhen), thus destroying what is divine; who can only kill, creating a dead
order, based on false
sounds, as they are not able to love and to care for
beauty (1994a: 129–31; 1994b: 169–71), identified as a main
characteristic
of the Germans, in this desperately passionate ending of the prose poem. It
is ridicule that
generates, together with austere, loveless education, a
schismatic personality, destroying the childlike
innocence and beauty
present in every human being at birth. This is where we are back to
Nietzsche’s diagnosis,
making full sense of it; and where Nietzsche finds,
beyond the spirit of gravity, the genuine significance of
seriousness: when
adults, in full maturity, can discover in themselves the same honest
seriousness as children
who play (Nietzsche 1966, no. 94; see Babich 2006:
55–7).
The way out for Hölderlin requires a titanic effort, alluded to in the title,
and also characteristic of his
poetic play about Empedocles: it is to reveal,
in open battles, the very powers (Kräfte) of the world,
thus teaching
greatness and forgetting joking (vergassen den Scherz) (1994a: 108; 1994b:
143–4). With such
a conscious evocation of Titanism, however, Hölderlin
tragically and fatally shares the problem of German
romanticism and its
misreading of Shakespeare, failing to recognise the problem in the way in
which Hamlet
posed the problem in the play22 and would soon succumb to
madness.
It might be more prudent to reconstruct, historically, the effective
impact of laughter as mocking, ridicule and
joking, through comedy, on
European culture.
Part II
The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy out
of the Spirit of Byzantium
 The Byzantine Spirit and Its Sources
 
4

The combination of critical and monumental historical sociology of the

public sphere that Habermas’s work
represents is based on a presumed
radical break between the medieval, theatrical and modern, rational types.
In
contrast to this approach that will be shown as factually untenable, the
genealogy of the modern public arena
offered in this book focuses on the
fundamentally theatrical features of the modern public arena. Central to
such
an undertaking is to identify the exact manner in which, after a gap
lasting for well over a millennium, the
theatre was reborn in Europe. One
might think that this should be a relatively simple matter; certainly less
complicated and controversial than the birth of tragedy was in classical
antiquity. Unfortunately and strikingly,
this is not the case.
All histories of modern theatre start from a plain fact: in 1545 a group
of actors registered their company in
Padua, providing the birth certificate
of commedia dell’arte. The name was not yet used—the godfather would be
Carlo Goldoni, protagonist of Venetian theatre in the 18th century—but
there is no question that theatre as a
professional practice is to be traced to
that time and place. Concerning the historical roots of that practice
and its
conditions of emergence, however, we enter a deep fog.

The search for the origins of theatre has explored a number of false paths.
The medieval sacred plays, like
passion plays, can’t be at the origins of
theatre, as such ceremonies ignored the idea of acting, and there was
no
audience involved either (Allegri 1988: ix, 270–4; 2008: 41, 50). Medieval
carnivals could not result in a
permanent theatre, or professional acting. The
humanist comedies written in the 15th century were not written for
performance, while the erudite comedies eventually performed had limited
appeal (Burke 1987).
The problem, as it was soon realised, concerned the central feature of
commedia dell’arte, the extremely
competent improvised acting that was
the driving force of shows since their beginnings. Investigators repeatedly
stated that they were facing something of a mystery. In his classic book Vito
Pandolfi argued that the origins of
the genre are completely labyrin-thine
and still unsolved (Pandolfi 1957: 9). In an important 1981 book, subtitled
The Mask and the Shadow, Roberto Tessari made two points of broad
theoretical significance. First, as shown in the subtitle, after completing his
work on Italian baroque theatre,
he felt the need to go back to its origins,
which were both mysterious and shadowy. The second claim is that the
significance of such a study goes way beyond relevance for the theatre, as it
touches upon the very rise of the
modern type of man: ‘[t]he emergence of
the humanistic self (Io humanistico) comes with the eclipse of the
theatrical
mask’ (Tessari 1981: 26), thus having a fundamental significance for the
genealogy of the modern self
championed by Nietzsche, Weber, Elias and
Foucault. This approach receives further support from the work of Siro
Ferrone, another major expert on Italian theatre, who similarly argued about
not simply about the ‘mysterious’
nature of the rise of commedia dell’arte,
but that this has to do with the ‘mystery that is at the origin of the
rise of
modern society’ (Ferrone 1989: 35). He connects the rise of the theatre to
the emergence of the
disciplinary network of the modern state (Ibid.: 39–
41). In elaborating on this mystery, Ferrone refers to the
‘alchemic’ aspects
of this process: the spectacle is not simply a symbolic space, ‘representing’
ideal models and
projects, rather ‘audience and stage are as if alchemic
condensations of fragments of reality first diluted and
disseminated
elsewhere’ (Ibid.: 45). Central to this mystery is the fact that professional
theatre, using fully
qualified professional actors, seems to have jumped out
of nowhere onto the stage, as if performing a real-world
jack-in-the-box
show.
The most evident explanation for this puzzle was to assume the survival
of ancient Roman theatre; all the more so
as the similarity between some
characters of this theatre and commedia dell’arte, even in their physical
appearance, as between Maccus and Pulcinella, is indeed striking. However,
scholars soon realised that there
could not have been an unbroken
continuity, given that the staging of theatrical performances is a
complicated
matter that should have left traces, while evidence rather
indicates that theatrical performances ceased to be
staged well before the
collapse of the western Roman Empire.
The most evident path, then, is to assume continuity at the level of the
eastern Roman Empire. This approach was
indeed pursued, and in his
classic work Hermann Reich (1903) argued that theatre in the form of mime
play
survived in the Byzantium, and that after the fall of Constantinople in
1453,
these mimes escaped to Italy, transferring their acting skills (Nicoll
1963a).
It is right here, however, that the fog over the past decades became
denser, and perplexities multiplied.
Although the assumption is eminently
reasonable, the presumed Byzantine connections came under intense attack,
and from a variety of sources. It is argued that clear evidence documenting
such escape does not exist, the
argument being mostly circumstantial,
though such criticism ignores the reality that—especially given the
generally meagre information available about the fall of Constantinople—
such facts of necessity had to be scarce.
It is also claimed that the theatre
did not survive in the Byzantine world either, while liturgical celebrations
there were even less theatrical than in the West (Puchner 2002).
The Byzantine track was not well pursued even where it should have
been central: the Italian literature about the
historical origins of commedia
dell’arte. For reasons that go way beyond the scope of this book, Italian
scholarship for much of the past century was extremely reluctant to admit
external, especially eastern, formative
influences on Italian culture, whether
in Etruscan and Roman times or concerning the Renaissance. Among such
influences the effects exerted by Byzantium on Italian culture, in particular
the Renaissance, are probably the
most controversial of all, and for a
number of reasons. First of all, after the Great Schism of 1056, any
explicit
Byzantine influence could receive the charge of heresy, thus was to be
avoided. This matter already much
confused and compromised
‘Renaissance humanism’, leading eventually to the further and much related
confusion
created by the argument that it was the arrival of Byzantine
scholars, the so-called dotti, that sparked
the Renaissance—a clearly absurd
claim, but one that received much voice, especially in the 18th century, and
which proved difficult to eliminate. The problem is only rendered worse by
the stunningly widespread ignorance
concerning the Byzantine world—a
phenomenon that starts by a not fully intelligible scarcity of available
information and continues with an even more surprising ignoring of what
actually is known. Knowledge about
Byzantium seems to be an almost
professional ‘secret’ of a small group of initiates, while even experts on
medieval Europe or the Renaissance ignore all but completely the relevant
contemporary developments in the
Byzantine world. This book, however,
will attempt to penetrate the literature about Byzantium, as otherwise the
rise of the theatre cannot be explained.
Questions related to possible Byzantine influences aside, this rise
presents special difficulties owing to the
strongly interdisciplinary nature of
the topic. According to the logic of contemporary academic life, the rebirth
of theatre is to be discussed by historians of theatre as distinct from
histories of music, dance, painting or
politics, not to mention philosophy.
However, people living in the 15th or 16th century did not respect such
academic distinctions, and the links between various aspects of cultural
(even social and political) life were
particularly tight for such a complex
practice as theatrical performance. Fortunately, it is exactly the
Byzantine
influence that provides a golden thread, helping this book to extend the
investigation into a number of
related areas that otherwise would have been
unmanageable.

From the perspective of possible Byzantine influences, a number of related

questions open up, receiving a new
light. This concerns, first of all, the link
between the rise of theatre and the dynamics of the Renaissance. Of
course
it is extremely difficult and risky to draw causal inferences between two
historical processes that are
themselves so long-lasting, controversial and
complex. Yet, in the context of my previous book (Szakolczai
2007a),
where I argued for an early dating of the Tuscan Renaissance (mid-13th
century) and a similarly early dating of the end of this Renaissance (by
1520), the date now assigned to the
first spectacles in Venice that could be
considered as being theatrical in the full sense of the term (around
1520
again) indicates that a hypothesis connecting the rebirth of theatre to the
collapse of the
Renaissance would merit being formulated and tested. This
perspective also helps to reverse an idea mistakenly
suggested in the mid-
18th century: instead of connecting the Byzantine ‘learned men’ to the start
of the
Renaissance, their activities rather should be connected to the rebirth
of theatre and the end of the
Renaissance; a suggestion that seems all the
more plausible as the dotti indeed played a major role in
directing the
attention of Italian humanists to comedies.
Indeed, it is from this perspective that a phenomenon that so far was
taken for granted as a simple fact becomes
problematic. In the 15th and
16th centuries the theatre was reborn basically as a comedy and not as a
tragedy,
even though in classical Athens tragedy played the central role.
Why this emphasis on comedy in the Renaissance?
Who directed attention
there?
It is in this context that a hypothesis emerged concerning the joint
impact of Byzantine mimes and dotti
on Renaissance Europe. According to
this, following the perspective of Max Weber, such actors and intellectuals
not only transmitted certain aspects of Byzantine culture but outright
stamped a Byzantine ‘spirit’ on Europe,
much contributing to the collapse
of the Renaissance. This made it necessary to identify, at least in its main
outline, the nature of this Byzantine ‘spirit’ and also to explain how it was
possible for simple mimes to embody
and transmit such a ‘spirit’. The
pursuit of these lines of investigation rendered it necessary to move back in
time, before the rise of the Byzantine world, and to present the emergence
of two threads that would play a
central role both in generating aspects of
this Byzantine spirit, and its transmission to Europe: the
legitimisation of
mimes through the rise of pantomime in the early period of imperial Rome
and the rise of the
Second Sophistic.

BYZANTINE THEATRE

The survival of theatre in the Byzantine world is a much neglected yet most
controversial topic in a field
otherwise neglected and controversial—
neglected especially in the social sciences. Given that Byzantium collapsed
well over five centuries ago, such neglect might not be surprising. However,
the fact that it was also almost
completely ignored by all major classic
figures of genealogy, comparative historical sociology and civilisational
analysis is striking. As Johann Arnason argued recently, while ‘the
Byzantine experience ought to appear as an
eminently promising field for
comparative study [ … ] it has, to put it mildly, not been given its due’
(Arnason
2010: 493).
For the Eastern Orthodox Church, the very idea of enacting or
impersonating
somebody was a heresy, and for long it was assumed that
there were no phenomena comparable even to western
rappresentazione
sacra. It was argued that certain aspects of Byzantine liturgical
presentations could be
considered theatrical (Cottas 1931); however, the
idea was never popular, based on confusion between
participatory
ceremony and spectacle (White 2006: 132, fn.2; 218–9).
The survival of a secular theatrical tradition in Byzantium is also hotly
debated. In a series of writings,
Walter Puchner (2002, 2007) strongly
argued against the persistence of any form of secular theatre. His
increasingly rigid position, however, is vexing (Marciniak 2013), as—far
from simply arguing for the
disappearance of classical theatre—he even
denies any survival of secular theatricality, which goes against a
long-
established position concerning the persistence of mime performances. His
argument is based on a combination
of excessive legalism (claiming that a
prohibition of canon law, pronounced in 691–692 at the Council in Trullo,
became simply a fact) and hyper-criticism of sources (denying the validity
of a series of indirect testimonies
about the survival of mime spectacles).
The modicum of truth in Puchner’s argument is that, given the resolute
hostility of the church against such spectacles, the survival of mime
performances is a problem to be solved.
One such attempt is represented by the claim that the entire Byzantine
world was performative (Mullett 2007).
However, this argument is
problematic, as the term ‘performative’ fails to touch the fundamental issue
of
participation. Every sacred ceremony or ritual has visual components, in
which religious personalities
complete certain acts in a religious role; but
this does not make them theatrical or performative in the sense of
a
spectacle being staged by some actors for a given audience.1
The question concerns the reasons for the survival of mime spectacles in
Byzantium, and their broad social
effect.

THE BYZANTINE MIMES

The presence of mimes in the Byzantine world is widely documented
(Ivanov 1992, Maguire 2010, Marciniak 2013,
Tougher 2010, White 2006).
These accounts rely on a variety of testimonies, including western visitors,
repeated
attacks by Byzantine church canonists, and chronicles.2 Still, the
exact nature of the mime performances remains a
mystery (Marciniak
2013),3
a fact which itself is mysterious, requiring an explanation.
Part of the problem is due to an abundance of terms, resulting in a
confusing terminology used for actors and
mimes and reflecting the long
history of transformation associated with theatricality in the Byzantine
world
(Ibid.). The situation is relatively clear up to about the 6th century ad.
Full presentation of comedies and
tragedies ended in about the 3rd century;
after that, the most popular
performers were mimes and pantomimes
(Bowersock 1999: 276). Mimes improvised comic scenarios from the
comedies;
they acted without masks in groups and included female
actresses. Pantomimes were male virtuoso solo performers,
playing
selections from tragedies and wearing masks.4 The three main types were
buffoons/jesters, musicians/dancers, and acrobats (Maguire
and Maguire
2007: 32, fig. 28). These mimes, sometimes performing during intermission
at the Hippodrome and
sometimes in private houses, occasionally still
staged more refined shows, like a ‘fake suicide’ scene or mock
versions of
pagan festivities (Cottas 1931: 263, Marciniak 2013, Reinach 1996: 965).
However, as sophisticated
performances declined, mime acts increasingly
took centre stage at the Hippodrome, even spilling over into the
streets
(Haldon 2002: 62), where Hippodrome spectacles often continued (Garland
1990: 1), becoming increasingly
ubiquitous in Byzantine society and
infecting the imagination, even dreams of the populace (Mango 1998: 74–
5).
Mime spectacles could even turn into riots or become a source of social
protest (Tougher 2010: 139).
From this perspective we can understand both the nature of these acts
and the reasons why details are so
difficult to ascertain. Byzantine mimes
could be best compared to modern-day circus clowns (Maguire 2010: 324).
The specific nature of their acts and the specific problems with them,
however, are connected with the exact
manner in which these performers
tried to provoke laughter. At one level, they used the most simple and
primitive
forms of humour, like slapstick comedy, focusing on hitting the
head or the buttock or the miming and mocking of
public officials, in
particular members of the clergy. At another level, however, aspects of their
shows were
both more sophisticated and also more sarcastic, not to say
vicious. The first aspect was due to the survival of
ancient theatre, given the
training necessary for acrobatic performances. The second, however, is
much more
specific and problematic, leading into the heart of the
problematic nature of the Byzantine spirit and also
helping to explain why
the actual performance of Byzantine mimes, being a dirty secret, remained
for so long
shrouded in mystery.
Mimes did not provide entertainment in the sense of ‘good, clean fun’,
neither did they simply present the vision
of an upside-down world
characteristic of carnivals; rather, they performed acts of a much more
sinister quality.
Even normal clown shows had a preference for emitting
loud noises, especially breaking wind, and were performed
with particular
viciousness, including heavy blows, especially on the head (Maguire 2010:
324). Such silly jokes
would escalate into the tastelessness of scatology, and
from scatology into cruel and mean-minded humiliation,
generating fun by
not only ridiculing excessive or problematical characteristics but also by
humiliating innocent
victims, turning physical deformity into a source of
fun, taking special pleasure in deriding pregnant women, or
routinely
comparing defecation and childbirth (Haldon 2002: 65).
Byzantine mime shows not only challenged the establish world order
and its
ruling authorities but intended to destroy and hurt. This challenge
was both overt and covertly insidious. For
example, by mocking foreigners,
especially for their inability to understand the complexities of bureaucratic
routines (Baldwyn 1982: 25; Haldon 2002: 58–60), the mimes were able to
achieve the same socially destructive
revaluation sought by sophists
throughout the ages—turning knowledge of bureaucratic and legalistic
process into
the pre-eminent hallmark of civilised behaviour. It is for such
reasons that mimes were not so much loved as
feared, objects of a general
repugnance, given that ‘their acting [was] perceived as only cruel and
malevolent’
(Marciniak 2013).5 Of
course it is extremely difficult to
understand and substantiate such points concerning malevolence, given the
great deal of ignorance about the exact details of mime shows; this issue
will have to be revisited at the end of
the chapter. But this is the picture
coming through the surviving evidence, and it both illuminates and will be
illuminated by the analysis that follows.

THE BYZANTINE SPIRIT AND THE TOOLS TO STUDY IT

The argument concerning the ‘spirit’ of the Byzantine world takes as its
model Max Weber’s classic work on the
‘spirit’ of capitalism. Yet, any
effort to identify a Byzantine ‘spirit’ encounters a fundamental difficulty,
which no doubt much contributed to the reluctance of comparative
sociologists, with Max Weber in first place, to
pursue it. The Byzantine
world demonstrates, at its most basic level, a series of inherently
contradictory
features that are all but impossible to bring together into a
coherent picture. At one extreme, as shown with
visionary clarity in two
famous poems by Yeats, Byzantium evokes an unsurpassable image of
eternal beauty,
product of the millennial survival of the Roman Empire. At
the other, however, Byzantine politics is considered
to be impenetrable and
obscure, dominated by revolting court intrigues, the consequences of
extreme
centralisation and bureaucratisation. Given such contradictory
features, it seem all but impossible to capture a
singular Byzantine spirit—
not to mention how such a spirit could be embodied by mimes and
transmitted to Europe.
The resolution of this paradox requires the use of theoretical concepts
introduced into social theory by
anthropologists—concepts that escape the
excessively modern-centred conceptual tool kit of social theory, thus
offering a particularly important contribution to comparative historical
sociology. The first is the term
‘schismogenesis’, introduced by Gregory
Bateson (1958, 1972; see Horvath and Thomassen 2008). Bateson’s central
insight, which occurred to him in the field, when living among the Iatmul in
Papua New Guinea, was that societies
might survive for a long time in a
kind of stalemate, being interlocked in a permanent state of conflict.
Bateson
argued that the identities of the various fragments into which the
previous
entity was decomposed are not given but become defined,
mutually, through self-definition, other labelling, and
reactions to labelling
by others. Concerning the Byzantine world, this means that, instead of
trying to identify
one single underlying ‘spirit’ of Byzantine civilisation, it
is better to recognise the coexistence of
several radically and pathologically
different trends and aspects within the Byzantine world in an effort to
reconstruct the exact character of these ‘schismogenic’ processes.
Here ‘schismogenesis’ must be complemented with ‘liminality’ (Turner
1967, 1969; van Gennep 1960).6 According to Bateson, a
‘schismogenic’
process is set in motion when an identity is broken, whether at the
individual or social level.
Using a complementary terminology, liminal
situations are particularly prone to spark schismogenic developments.
A
liminal situation is a temporary crisis, a suspension of the normal, ordinary
way of doing things owing to
external or internal challenges. If the
individual, group, community or society facing such a challenge manages
to
respond properly, the liminal crisis is solved and the identity survives intact.
In the absence of a
convincing response, however, it might be split, setting
in motion schismogenic processes. Concerning the
Byzantine world, this
implies the need to identify liminal aspects and events.
Two further anthropological concepts help to understand and explain
whether a temporary liminal crisis could be
solved. The term ‘liminal crisis’
is not so different from Weber’s concern with ‘out-of-ordinary’
(ausser-
alltägliche) situations. According to Weber, such challenges call for the
appearance of
‘charismatic’ leaders who might rise to the opportunity and
solve the problem. The presence or absence or
charisma, however, is
unexplained by Weber, remaining a matter of chance, or of divine gift (see
Horvath 2013).
This, however, is not very helpful for sociological analysis,
especially because Weber fails to analyse the
actual processes taking place
in a liminal crisis. Weber’s perspective must be complemented with another
anthropologically based concept, imitation. This term was championed by
another classic figure of
sociology, Gabriel Tarde, a figure radically
different from Weber or Durkheim but close to Simmel.7 The perspectives
of Tarde and Simmel
can even be called anthropological, in the sense of
moving to the fundamental level of the moving forces of human
conduct,
beyond neo-Kantian ‘rationalism’. The centrality of imitation for
comparative anthropology has indeed
been recently argued by René Girard
(1972, 1989; see also Wydra 2008).
The imitative aspects of human behaviour illuminate the connection
between liminality and schismogenesis. The
suspension of previously taken
for granted limits, thus the dissolution of certainties, leads to a search for
points of reference, or the sudden and joint escalation of rational
argumentation and imitation. The question is
whether the newly found
reference points are appropriate to resolve the cause of the crisis. Charisma,
in the
Weberian sense, solves exactly such a problem, whether in the sense
of an ‘exemplary’ prophet focusing attention
on himself by his character
and behaviour or an ‘ethical’ prophet managing to
convince people that he
was personally given, by God, a new set of laws. However, in the absence
of such an
epiphany, imitative processes sparked in a liminal crisis might be
used, and abused, by decisively not
charismatic persons.
This can be analysed through a fourth anthropological term, the
trickster, introduced by Paul Radin,
another maverick figure of classical
anthropology.8 The trickster is outside all communal bonds but has an
extremely good ability to
imitate or mime, both in actual behaviour or
through the use of language. He can thus easily gain the upper hand
in a
situation of liminal crisis, when—keeping his cool and using his outsider
mind-set—he can fake acting as a
saviour when most people, terrified by
what is going on, fail to recognise the difference between the genuine and
the fake.
Thus, in trying to capture the strange, schismatic nature of the
Byzantine spirit, we need to reconstruct the way
in which the liminal
aspects of Byzantine geography and history ended up, through the
intervention of trickster
figures, including mimes, taking such schismatic
turns.
This will begin with a brief illustration of the schismogenic spirit.

CAPTURING A SCHISMATIC SPIRIT: ‘OTHER’ ICONS

Byzantine icon painting is recognised for its intentional, almost mechanical

copying of a few specific, highly
revered models, reputed to have been
painted by the hand of God, like the Hodegetria icon, attributed to the
evangelist St. Luke and destroyed during the 1453 siege. ‘Other’ Byzantine
images, however, are not at all ideal
and rather all too human; they are far
from perpetuating the vision of the world embodied in the icons and reveal
another side of Byzantine art, which is not only irreligious but insidiously
subversive and which furthermore has
intriguing connections with the
centre of Byzantine power (Maguire and Maguire 2007).
The five chapters of the Maguires’ book review representative examples
of such images. The first two are devoted
to hybrid creatures, like centaurs
(half human, half horse), sirens (human-like birds) or the sphinx (‘A shape
with lion body and the head of a man’, in the words of Yeats, in ‘The
Second Coming’). These were not perceived
simply as strange and
unnatural but as radical challenges to the Byzantine vision of the world,
which focused on
eternity and was opposed to innovation. Chapter 3 of the
Maguires’ book presents real and natural creatures, but
only all-too-real and
all-too-natural ones: fierce beasts like falcons and lions, depicted in the act
of killing
their prey, with blood spilling all around, or—a particularly
favourite and especially cruel imagery—eagles or
falcons plucking the eyes
of a most harmless and graceful animal, like a doe or a hare. Chapter 4,
devoted to
nudes, contains multiple twists. While depicting a nude body for
eliciting erotic desire was utter anathema to
the Church, these images not
only do exactly that but also challenge the official position even more
strongly:
the nudes are purposefully disgraceful and evoke humorous or
outright demonic
associations. Thus they depict naked dancers of a ribald
kind who are involved in ‘a great deal of lewd
posturing, especially with the
buttocks thrust out’ (Maguire and Maguire 2007: 109).9 Concerning the
second type, pagan statues were
assumed to be inhabited by demons, and—
just like scenes of animal cruelty—were associated with apotropaic magic.
The last chapter, entitled ‘Decorum, Merrymaking and Disorder’, pulls
together these arguments and connects them
to a special kind of
carnivalesque scenery. It was special as it combined, and in a particularly
accentuated way,
the previous elements, like dancers possessed by demons
(fig 128, p.136), and even more so as such disorderly
merrymaking was not
featured at the margins of social power, like the carnival season in a remote
village, but
rather at the centre of officialdom, the imperial court, and was
combined with ‘decorum’, the central value of
the Eastern Orthodox
Church’s vision of the world, influenced by neo-Platonism (Runciman
1975: 36–7). The
schismatic coexistence of cruelty with exaggerated
merrymaking at the heart of official power was particularly
visible in the
way hunting, feasting and private theatre, featuring mime spectacle, were
combined in the court
(Maguire and Maguire 2007: 47–9).
In their conclusion, the Maguires argue that in this way ‘the Byzantine
church perpetuated its own opposition’
(Ibid.: 160): the more it came to
enforce a strict and unchanging orthodoxy, the more it fed, at the same time
and at the very centre of power, an opposite image as well, its schismogenic
pair, which was itself split. The
neo-Platonic image of eternity and beauty
was contrasted at one pole with the freakish and the funny, at another
with
the sinister and the demonic (Ibid.: 134), while these two kept further
metamorphosing into each other,
conjuring up the demonic clown.10

The following sections will try to capture what animated these underlining
processes; how it happened that the
Byzantine world ended up having two
spirits, with the second continuously splitting further and reconfiguring in
all kinds of strange and puzzling ways.

THE DIFFICULTY OF FOUNDING AN IMPERIAL CAPITAL

It is a well-known historical fact that Constantine the Great, shortly after his
conversion, decided to found a
new capital city, eventually called
Constantinople, thus shifting the centre of the Roman Empire. However, as
is
often the case with such basic historical facts, ritualistic repetition and
recanting has all but obliterated the
extremely singular meaning behind this
basic, indeed fundamental historical event. The central issue concerns the
sociological and anthropological implications of founding a new imperial
capital—and of the greatest empire the
world had so far known. Few cases
in known history are comparable to this, with St. Petersburg coming closest
—with its own significance for this book. Founding a new city ex nihilo
already poses enormous problems, and the case of Rome well illustrates the
point. But founding a new imperial
centre poses specifically sociological
problems with which the founder was little familiar.
A sociological perspective uniquely helpful in this regard is provided by
Norbert Elias’s work on ‘court society’
(Elias 1983). A court is a special
kind of ‘closed institution’. Closed institutions are entities where inmates
spend a large amount of time continuously. They include hospitals,
asylums, prisons, colleges, or monasteries;
these are given a privileged
attention by a number of classic figures of social theory, including Max
Weber,
Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Lewis Mumford and Franz
Borkenau. Compared with other ‘closed institutions’, the
court is highly
unique: it is voluntary and is a centre of power. According to Elias, who
focused on the
absolutist court of Louis XIV, the central features of the
court society as a closed institution are pervasive
visibility, the close
interdependence of all members, and the omnipresence of strategic games
(see Szakolczai
2009: 128–34). In a court all major holders of power live
and act continuously in face of everybody else; thus
there is a constant
game with visibility, trying both to show up things while hiding and
dissimulating others.
Pervasive visibility enforces mutual ties of
interdependence, where every single act, literally from the waking
up of the
king until his retirement to sleep is subject to public scrutiny, and for the
very same reason every
single element and activity of everyday life
becomes a stake in multiple strategic games that everybody present
is
playing with everybody else, eventually resulting in the wholesale
‘strategification’ of human
behaviour.11 Although in
the absence of data it
is not possible to do a comparable sociological analysis of Byzantine court
society, the
results of Elias’s path-breaking analysis will be held in
consideration in trying to understand the kind of
‘spirit’ characteristic of the
Byzantine court, which was then stamped onto the entire civilisation.
However, in the case of the Byzantium, in the spirit of Weber’s and
Dilthey’s concern with understanding
(Verstehen), it is necessary to add two
further points. The first concerns the already mentioned fact that
Constantinople not only ‘became’ an imperial capital but was literally
founded, on relatively meagre bases, as
the capital of the largest empire of
the world; and that, second, such foundation coincided with the conversion
of the empire to the new official religion. This implied that the acute power
struggles, court intrigues and
strategic games involved in building up a new
imperial power structure were partly mitigated and partly rendered
even
more tricky by mass conversion at the level of an imperial power elite—a
problem coming to the fore during
the short reign of Julian the Apostate, so
comparable to the reign of Anne Tudor, after Henry VIII and before
Elizabeth.
 Fortunately there is one particular place that provides an almost perfect
illustration of both the nature of the
problem and its historical evolution,
mirroring, as a true seismograph, the dynamics of the Byzantine spirit while
at the same time being its most important operator. This place is the
Hippodrome.

THE HIPPODROME OF CONSTANTINOPLE, OR A SCHISMATIC

CENTRE

The Hippodrome was modelled on the Circus Maximus of Rome.

Originally the Circus Maximus was not a stadium for
popular spectacles but
rather a sacred space, organised according to strict Etruscan ideas
concerning
cosmological order, and even the gladiatorial fights were sacred
games, accompanying the burial of major figures
of the city and also having
Etruscan roots.
Constantine wanted to re-transform the Hippodrome into an
embodiment of sacred order. To be inscribed through the
Hippodrome into
the very fabric of the city was a combination of Greek (especially neo-
Platonic) and Roman (or
Etruscan) visions of cosmic order and the
Christian ideal of the God of the Heavens. Constantinople as an
imperial
capital was consecrated as the guardian of this divine order, which was
supposed to be guarded by God
himself. In fact, the third and in a way most
significant name of the city, after Byzance and Constantinople, was
nothing
else than ‘the guarded city’. For this reason its symbolic value and
significance was much greater than
just being the centre of an empire, and
not only for Christians: the Arabs, just like the Turks, would consider
capturing the city their ultimate aim; an eschatological undertaking that was
supposed to signal the end of
times.
The Hippodrome was the most important symbolic representation of
this sacred order, its very corporeality.
According to the Constantinian
vision, the emperor was not only a secular ruler but also the mediator
between the
God of Heaven and the realm of human affairs. The
Hippodrome was the physical embodiment of a direct link between
the
emperor, representative of divine order on earth, and his subjects, their
‘essential place of contact’
(Cheynet 2006: 261), symbolizing an outright
‘marriage’ between ruler and the city (Shepard 2008: 18). The sheer
size of
the building was staggering: it was 405 meters long and about 120 meters
wide, having a pronounced oval
shape (Cheynet 2006: 261) and being able
to seat about 100.000 people, which means that it could compete with the
largest stadiums currently hosting sporting competitions around the world.
Thus, while even the theatres of the
eastern Roman Empire embodied a
‘symbiosis of three key elements that now tend to be treated in isolation
from
each other: the exercise of imperial and civic ideology; the display of
theatrical artistry; and an all-embracing
theology that positioned these
spectacles in a divine hierarchy, in which all Roman citizens took part’
(White
2006: 3), this symbiosis was raised to an even higher level in the
Hippodrome of Constantinople.
The nature of this link was literally inscribed in the physical structure of
the space. The Hippodrome was built right next to the palace: the emperor
could walk into his covered tribune
without having his feet touch the
ground. The sacred order was rendered manifest in the resplendent
festivities
and ceremonies held in the Hippodrome, which left, for centuries,
western or northern visitors simply gasping for
words. However, the
Hippodrome had another face as well, as the crowd spectacles characteristic
of the decadent
phase of Rome were also being staged there. These included
various athletic competitions, of which the most
popular was wrestling;
animal exhibitions and fights staged between wild animals; hunting; and—
most popular of
all—chariot races (Guilland 1966: 289–94). These races
had intervals or breaks where the scene was taken over by
mimes, dancers,
comedians, acrobats and clowns. Evidently, occasionally, as for certain
weddings, scenic
representations were staged in the Hippodrome, but about
these no information is available (Ibid.: 293–4). Thus
the popular
entertainments that were organised before the conversion of Constantine,
and which not only involved
cruelty that we today can hardly understand
but where quite often the victims were Christian martyrs, were not
abolished—exactly because they were ‘popular’, part of the ‘bread and
circuses’ mentality without which an
imperial capital could not survive.
For this reason the Hippodrome both represented and embodied a
foundational schism at the very heart of the
Byzantine world. The very
space where the divine order of the only living God was supposed to be
represented, in
the most convincing and resplendent manner possible, was
also the location of the most cruel, inhuman, and
certainly anti-Christian
form of mass spectacles. The inevitable coexistence of these two extremely
different
forms of ‘performance’, one based on total participation and deep
religious belief and the other on the greatest
possible distance between
‘actors’ and spectators, amounting to a most paradoxical situation, an
‘intimate union
between the Circus and the Church’ (Cottas 1931: x), was
bound to generate difficulties the moment historical
events produced cracks
on the image of eternity transmitted by the solemn church ceremonies.
Thus the Hippodrome was a not only liminal but also schismatic place.
These features were articulated upon the
unique spatial liminality of the city
and were further deepened by its again unique historical liminality.

CONSTANTINOPLE AS A LIMINAL SPACE

Owing to its location and without the shadow of a doubt, Constantinople

can be considered to have been the most
liminal city in the world.12 This
can be seen by casting a glance at its physical geography: it was built on a
promontory, in between the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, themselves
places of passage, one between Asia Minor
and the Balkans and the other
between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It continues with its cultural
geography: the city was erected at the meeting point of three continents—in
fact, for most of world history (insofar as we can talk about world history)
—the three continents.
It is the point of passage between Europe and Asia;
but traffic from Africa to Europe, except for the sea, must
also pass through
it (or through the parallel strait at Gallipoli).

THE LIMINAL HISTORY OF THE BYZANTIUM

Liminal features have a tendency to cluster and accumulate. It is not even

surprising that this is so: an area
with a particularly liminal geography,
being a place of transit or crossing, can also easily become the location
of
violent encounters. The Byzantine world, with Constantinople as its capital,
had an extremely weathered
history, with liminal crises piling up on each
other. In recounting these events, the aim will not be to tell
Byzantine
history in a nutshell—this would be as impossible as it would be pointless;
rather, the idea is to
capture and reconstruct the formation and
transformation of the Byzantine spirit, focusing on the way in which
its
schismatic features were accentuated through liminal crises.

The Early Liminal Crises

The eastern Roman Empire remained immune to a significant extent to the
crisis that destroyed the western part;
it even managed to get a foothold
there, up to the late 11th century. Its first major crisis, and the end of late
antiquity, happened about a century later, when the Byzantium, for reasons
that are still not entirely clear
(Mango 2008: 27), got locked into deadly
warfare with the Sassanid Empire (ad 601–628). The mutual destruction of
the two empires generated a liminal vacuum that was filled by the rise of
Islam. Within a few decades Islamic
armies conquered Syria, Palestine and
Egypt; by the end of the century they completed the conquest of Africa, in
711–715 they overran Spain, and in 717–718 they launched a siege of
Constantinople.
The events of the 7th century, dominated by warfare, first with the
Persian Empire and then with rising Arabic
Islam, radically altered the
nature and spirit of the Byzantine world, underlining and deepening its
schismatic
tendencies. Concerning the ‘spirit’ of Byzantium, the most
significant development was that the delicate balance
between the provinces
and the centre was lost owing to the Islamic conquest of the culturally more
advanced
eastern provinces. The cultural elite of Egypt (especially
Alexandria), Palestine and Syria flocked into the
reduced territory of the
empire, especially Constantinople, which became saturated with former
church and empire
officials, members of a cultured elite that considered
itself superior to the functionaries who lived in the
capital but were forced
to submit themselves to the capital’s ways. At the same time the ranks of
the army became
filled with refugees from the former eastern empire, who
brought with them, influenced by local traditions, a hostility to the cult of
images and visual beauty, in particular
the figure of the Virgin, whose cult
was particularly important in the Byzantine East in contrast to Rome, and
who was pronounced the mother of God (Theotokos) during the Third
Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431.
 This resulted in a third main liminal period stamping the Byzantine
spirit: the iconoclasm controversy. Here much
more was at stake than an
unenlightened campaign against images. The fight against image power and
image magic
was part of a coherent and distinctly Platonic problematisation
of the theatre and its surviving residues,
including sophist education. The
link between theatre and sophistry was well known, and an earlier imperial
edict
jointly pulled the state funding of theatres and sophist schools, the
latter being closely involved in the
teaching of dramatic arts. The much
discussed canon law edict of the Council in Trullo in 691–692 prohibited all
forms of theatrical activities. While this decree is occasionally interpreted
literally, it was just canon law
and not imperial law and only reiterated the
persistent but inefficient hostility to performances. Spectacles in
all
likelihood continued in the Hippodrome, though taking a rather macabre
turn. The decree’s importance, as a
signal, is rather elsewhere. It indicated
that around a particularly difficult moment of Byzantine history, with
the
first Arab attack on the city taking place in 673–678, such spectacles were
perceived as problematic for the
continued survival and resistance of the
empire. Such problematisation happened well before the similarly
motivated attack on images, or the iconoclasm controversy, which was
started by Emperor Leo III, ‘saviour’ of the
city, during the threat posed by
the Arab siege in 717–718, owing to the perceived impact of images on the
health
and strength of the city and the empire. In such developments a
central role was played by soldiers, a
substantial number of whom were
refugees from the east and south, the area taken over in the previous century
by
Islam, and who were scandalised by the elegance and sophistication of
Byzantine culture.
While the inspiration behind such measures might have been Platonic,
the actual measures, almost by necessity,
turned out to be puritanical and
schismogenic. The prohibition of images and secular learning, whether by
imperial or canon law, could never lead to desirable results, only the
proliferation of world-rejecting and
beauty-hostile forms of austerity. Any
puritanical prohibition would be haunted by a ‘return of the repressed’.
The
spectacles of the Hippodrome not only survived but gained new
prominence, and—most paradoxically—were joined,
in their most
problematic aspects, to the new, iconoclastic forces.
 This can be best seen through the staging in the Hippodrome of genuine
‘rituals of degradation’ (using a term
from Giglioli, Cavicchioli and Fele
1997). Such practices existed earlier; for example, the prefect Menas was
executed there in 465, and the practice was also used under Phocas (602–
610) (Guilland 1966: 302). But widespread
use of the Hippodrome for
particularly humiliating public shaming, often
combined with executions,
was only made by iconoclast emperors, in particular Constantine V
(Cheynet 2006: 262).
Particularly famous and ruthless examples include the
ceremonies of ridicule organised against the monks and
‘conspirators’ in
August 766 (Shepard 2008: 284); the public mocking of Thomas the Slave
by the army before his
execution in 823 (Ibid.: 277); or when in 767
Constantine V had the patriarch ride a donkey turned backwards
before he
was executed (Cheynet 2006: 262). Such ceremonies amounted to an
officially sanctioned fusion of
political ceremony and low-level slapstick,
given that ‘it is beyond doubt that the main participants in this
kind of
public shaming were mimes’ (Ivanov 1992: 132). This greatly contributed
to the decaying quality of the
ceremonies performed in the Hippodrome
which—analogously to developments in Athens and Rome—was
increasingly
taken over by clown-like mime-play.
The result was a widening schism between an increasingly radicalised
orthodoxy, moving towards puritanical
fixity, and a similarly extremist
cynical ridiculing of this official position by a court and capital culture
whose two major components were the secular humanists and the
Hippodrome mimes, and which became increasingly
impossible to bridge.
The central basis of this incurable rift was the surviving presence of popular
entertainment in the Hippodrome, or the conflation between a place for
ceremonies and a genuinely public arena.

The most significant impact of the iconoclasm controversy on the spirit of

Byzantine civilisation was disturbing
the balance between continuities and
discontinuities in the traditions, seriously undermining those that mattered
while reinforcing the most questionable. Concerning the first point, it
managed to destroy continuities in the
visual arts and in classical Greek
culture. The common element of the two were neo-Platonic ideas, focusing
on
the manifestation of beauty as a central element of sacred order,
receiving support from a relatively continuous
tradition of philosophical
thought, with deep awareness about the differences between philosophy and
sophistic.
Owing to the break in this tradition, the eventual rebirth would
start with a generalised interest in classical,
Hellenistic literature without
any prior distinction between the highly incompatible aspects of that
tradition
(like the conflict between Plato and the sophists), and where all the
known figures of ancient Greek culture
would be glossed with the same
label of being a ‘classic’, without due care about differences in their ‘spirit’.
Concerning the second, the elimination of represented beauty from the
signs of power reinforced the role of the
Hippodrome as the location where
imperial authority was to be manifested to the populace and contributed to
the
justification of the ugly rituals of mocking, helping to move the mimes
and the sophist rhetoricians ever closer
to the centre of power.

Puritanical measures, while always problematic and excessive, also do work

in a certain manner. Restraint builds
up energy like nothing else, and so
from the second part of the 9th century
onwards, after the end of the
iconoclast controversy, a movement of revival took place, culminating in
the first
half of the 11th century. The most visible sign of this cultural
flourishing was a return to a culture of beauty,
leading to a ‘most complete
integration’ of religion and art between the 9th and the late 11th centuries
(Runciman 1975: 120) and rendering Constantinople more resplendent than
ever. It also sparked a return of
interest in classical culture, characterised as
the first wave of Byzantine humanism (Lemerle 1986). The term is
somewhat misleading in the sense that ‘humanism’ is usually associated
with secularisation, while this resurgence
of interest had no anti-Christian
or anti-clerical component but hits the target insofar as this renewal had two
serious shortcomings. First, as suggested above, given that the continuity of
the tradition was significantly
broken, this movement of revival was
hopelessly eclectic, considering as part of the same ‘Hellenistic’ culture
epic poets, theologians and comedy writers and philosophers as well as
sophists. Such eclecticism, due to a lack
of discriminatory power,
characterised even Michael Psellos, the most important Byzantine
philosopher (Duffy
2002; see also Haldon 2002: 65), who was not only a
great admirer of Plato and the church fathers but also of the
Chaldean
oracles and the various Hermetic writings of the Hellenistic period, thus
much contributing to the fact
that during the Renaissance of the 15th and
16th centuries, Platonic and neo-Platonic thought came to be closely
connected with varied and obscure magical ways of thinking (Yates 1964).
Just as fatally, this reinforced a
sophistic methodology at the heart of
Byzantine culture. Finally, the renewal, in its puritanical zeal, opted for
a
return to the ‘purity’ of Attic Greek, thus ending up writing in a language
that was impenetrable to the
uninitiated (Mango 2008: 30–1).

The Crisis of the Late 11th Century

The constitutive ambivalences that underlay the renewal of the 9th to 11th
centuries came to the surface in the
second half of 11th century through a
series of major developments that radically exposed the underlying
weaknesses of Byzantium.
These events started with the Great Schism between the eastern and
western churches, pronounced in 1056, where
the Byzantine side still
played an active, initiating role in the presumed knowledge of its restored
power; but a
series of military developments, in both the East and the West,
and in quick succession, radically and forever
undermined this self-
confidence. These were marked, in the West, by the loss of Sicily to the
Normans (1061),
followed by the loss of Bari (1071), which completed the
withdrawal from Italy; while in the East the Seldjuk
Turks first took
Caesarea (1067) and then achieved a major victory at the Battle of
Manzikert (1071). Soon after
an independent Armenian kingdom was
established in Cilicia (1078), and in 1095, given that the weakening
Byzantine forces were not able to protect the pilgrimage roads to the Holy
Lands, the Norman Pope Urban II launched the First Crusades, thus
handing over the initiative to the Latins even
in the East.
Byzantium never recovered from these blows. This was manifest in an
increasing awareness of human frailty and a
pondering of the cruelty of
fate, which led in the writings of Anna Komnena, daughter of Emperor
Alexios I
Komnenos, to outright indulgence in ‘shameless self-pity’
(Runciman 1975: 128). Such a radical shift at the level
of confidence and
self-perception is perhaps best symbolised by the appearance of a new type
of icon, a novelty
recognised by Michael Psellos: the image of a dead and
suffering Christ on the cross, a kind of representation
previously
unthinkable, and which contrasted radically with the Christ Pantocrator
image that, in the cupola
above the altar, was a standard feature of
Byzantine churches. It is exactly here, in the new emphasis attributed
to the
explicit depiction of emotions, that Runciman recognised the signs of a
stirring humanism (Ibid.:
129)—always a sure symptom of decadence.
The signs of corruption were present everywhere. They were most
visible at the centre, in the most important sign
of the revival, the restored
neo-Platonic culture of beauty, which reached its peak in the early 11th
century but
decayed—owing to the political, religious and military turmoil
—by the end of the century (Ibid.: 124). A main
reason for this was the
increasing formalisation and bureaucratisation of power, as for the new civil
servants of
the capital ‘the identification of the Imperial Court with the
Courts of Heaven was irrelevant’ (Ibid.: 128).
This decomposition gave rise
to particularly striking schismogenic developments in painting, a central
aspect of
neo-Platonic art. At one side, the same cult of suffering as
manifest in the ‘new icons’, though in a quite
different key, can be
perceived in an increasing predilection for scenes of animal cruelty.13 These
motifs, to be sure, could
be perceived earlier, and are ultimately to be traced
to the pre-Christian Hellenistic ekphrastic exercises; but
their increasing
presence in ecclesiastic decorations represented a distinctly new emphasis.
Still at the level
of painting, the opposite end to such scenes of suffering,
frailty and violence is provided by the increasingly
dream-like, floating
figures characteristic of the most artistically accomplished church
decorations—a
development that would reach its apogee in the last
centuries of Byzantium, as in the late-14th and
early-15th-century
decorations of the churches of Mistra, which achieve a supreme, eerie
beauty, as if to assert,
at ‘a time when men were beginning to foresee the
end of the Empire and foretell the end of the world’, and
against all odds,
‘the beauty of things in the true reality that is to come’ (Ibid.: 198–9).

Similar developments characterise the intellectual scene. Owing to the

irreversible though not linear shrinking
of the empire, the capital became
over-crowded with all kinds of intellectuals and office seekers whose
situation
and outlook was profoundly stamped with the apocalyptic
experience of having
lost their homeland. Together with the attractiveness
of Constantinople, this created a claustrophobic feeling,
rendering the
capital a kind of ‘black hole’ that attracted everybody and nobody could
leave: in the words of
Michael Psellos, being exiled from the city could
only be compared with Adam leaving the Garden of Eden (Cheynet
2006:
258). This context renders intelligible that the Macedonian Renaissance
(867–1056), of obscure origins
(Mango 2008: 29–30), with its aim of
returning to the pure spirit of antiquity, promoted a return to Attic Greek.
This inflection of the Byzantine spirit can be illustrated through novels,
a genre often associated with sophists
(Anderson 1993: 156–65; Webb
2009: 178–85). The Hellenistic novel was reborn, as if out of nothingness,
after an
absence lasting about eight centuries, in the second part of the 12th
century (Hägg 1983: 73), the most
significant example being Hysmine and
Hysminias by Eusthatius Macrembolites, the only surviving complete
story
in prose. Earlier studies, based on the pioneering work of Erwin Rhode,
were full of scathing remarks about
its qualities; more current scholarship
argues that the shameless plagiarism of classical authors and the inanity
of
the plots indicate a satirical intent (see Ibid.: 77). Taking it further, this
documents deep-seated
pathologies in the Byzantine spirit, which is all the
more plausible as the novels were driven by a ‘genuine
striving for
contemporary appeal’ (Ibid.: 74), thus aimed at having an effect. They
evidently succeeded, as they
‘seem to have been much read’, even though
written in the Attic language—inaccessible to wider audiences. This
shows
the size and impact of court society intellectuals (Ibid.: 75), all the more so
as the novels were full of
reflections on contemporary politics and court
ceremonial (Ibid.: 74).
Hysmine and Hysminias closely followed, almost mimicked classical
Hellenistic models—though with
significant differences. First, it obliterated
any reference to objective reality. The events happen in
fictitious places and
at an unspecified time; they are told from a first-person perspective but
without
introducing the narrator. Focus was restricted to the inner life of the
hero, in the context of a love affair
that contains a number of highly
peculiar features. This starts by the hero (Hysminias) being explicitly and
seductively excited by the heroine, Hysmine, daughter of his host (note also
the strangely identical names). At
first he shows no interest, but then in his
dream Eros appears to him, and as a result, ‘in a state between dream
and
waking he imagines Hysmine visiting him in his room’ (Ibid.: 75). The
ensuing scene is so extraordinary that
Hägg quotes it on a full page, as the
description of this semi-dream encounter is extremely sensuous, bordering
on the pornographic. This limit is then trespassed in the novel, which
contains explicit description of sexual
acts—though these only take place in
a dream. In ‘real’ life, the exact opposite happens: Hysmine, who
previously
was seductive, like a courtesan, suddenly becomes a hero of
female chastity, resisting the ever stronger advances
of Hysminias, so that
—after the usual series of adventures—at the end of the novel the heroes
unite in marriage,
after Hysmine gives proof of her virginity. In contrast to
the Freudian
interpretation of Hägg, far from offering special insights into
the eternal sameness of the human psyche, the
novel rather documents the
grave state of corruption reached by the end of the 12th century in
Byzantine court
society, where the classical presentation and evocation of
virtue had already become unbelievable, turned into a
source of ridicule.
Novels re-appeared in the 14th century, though again with significant
differences (Ibid.: 80). This concerns
language, with Attic replaced by
contemporary cultivated speech (though still not the language used by
popular
classes), motives and protagonists, with the appearance of new,
folktale-like elements traced to western models,
in particular explicit
allusions to the ideal of chivalry—intended in the same spirit of parody and
ridicule. The
same development could be observed in poetry as well.
Both the linking of increasing cruelty in depicting hunting scenes to
sophistic influences and the significance
assigned to the 12th century can be
reconfirmed through another important study, that of Henry Maguire.
Maguire
argues that the increasing emphasis in Byzantine art on expressing
emotions, especially the emotion of sorrow
(Maguire 1981: 91), can be
traced to the rising influence of rhetoricians on painters. This influence
manifested
itself in three ways: by adding vividness and dramatic detail to
the images, following the ‘spirit’ of ekphrastic
descriptions; by imposing a
rhetorical structure, in particular the opposition between thesis and
antithesis, on
the images; and by enriching the work with flowery verbiage
(Ibid.: 109). Concerning the time period when such
influence was the
greatest, Maguire singles out the 12th century (Ibid.: 110–1). In qualifying
his argument,
Maguire emphasises that this does not necessarily mean that
painters directly executed their works under the
influence of sophists but
rather that the influence of rhetoricians by that time had become pervasive
in
Byzantine society. However, the concluding point of the book raises the
strong possibility that the sophists were
significantly interested in having
such an impact: ‘literary eloquence affected a few, but visual eloquence
spoke
to many’ (Ibid.: 111; last sentence of the book).

The single most striking and particularly Byzantine development, from the
late 11th century onwards, concerned
the pervasiveness of at once
harrowing and hilarious, omnipresent and omnipotent, mocking and
terrorising mime
performances. By the late 11th century not only were any
forms of theatricality with the miminal cultural
pretence absent but chariot
races declined as well. At the Hippodrome only imperial celebrations were
held, where
slapstick mime shows dominated, and prime importance was
given to the carnival season (Garland 1990: 1). In these
shows and also in
the ubiquitous street performances, a type of mockery dominated, where
invective and abuse,
combined with obscenity and nudity, played the prime
role. The aim was by no means to provoke laughter by good
clean fun but
to mock, ridicule and insult, as cruelly and purposefully as possible (Ibid.:
5). Even more
strikingly, this taste, quite repulsive for us and arguably for
any decent
human being, was shared jointly by the populace and the
intellectuals and even by the court, where in 1199–1200 a
series of
explicitly infantile festivities took place, including plays with humiliation
and allusions to the
similarity of defecation and childbirth (Ibid.: 10–1). The
practice even involved the church, as the 12th-century
canonist Balsamon
complained that mimes were performing parodies of the holy mysteries in
the churches (Maguire
and Maguire 2007: 136).
This activity was all the more effective and lethal as it reinforced
important political and intellectual
developments. Perpetuating ancient
Roman models, factions of the various demes were directly involved in the
horseracing spectacles of the Hippodrome. Eventually, in the confusion of
the political-representative and
public-spectacle role of the Hippodrome, the
separation of the two was no longer maintained: ‘[n]ot only did the
demes
gradually behave more like mimes, but the reverse was also true: the former
acquired some political
functions’ (Ivanov 1992: 132; see also Bowersock
et al. 1999: 276). The end product was a quite extraordinary
development
that can be followed through the changed meaning of certain words, visible
in the transliteration of
some of these terms in early Russian in the 9th and
10th centuries: ‘politikos [statesman],
(mis)understood as mimos [mime], is
nearly the same as demotai [member of the demos]
(mis)interpreted as
skomrah’ [this was the term out of which the Russian expression
‘skomorokhi’, used for
mime entertainers developed] (Ivanov 1992: 132).
In the Hippodrome, former seat of the public representation of
sacred order
and imperial power, politics and spectacle became indistinguishable—and
not any kind of spectacle
but ruthless, cynical public mockery.

Late Liminal Crises and Apocalyptic Experiences

This decomposition was confirmed and further promoted by the sack of
Constantinople in 1204, during the Fourth
Crusade—a genuine apocalyptic
experience. Though in 1261 Byzantine rule was reasserted over the city, it
never
recovered from this blow, and political life after 1204 assumed a
baffling complexity (Mango 2008: 32). The
Hippodrome was left in ruins,
but mime shows continued to be staged there, with effects that could easily
be
guessed. In this way the Hippodrome, from its earlier imperial splendour
as symbolic seat of graceful power,
became the source of a very different
though not less powerful radiation: it increasingly infected society with a
spirit of despair and resignation, conjuring up images of impending
apocalyptic gloom.
It was during this period of utter decay that the second period of
humanist revival took place (Lemerle 1986:
xi). It is quite inappropriate to
call this movement a renaissance, as any similarity with the intellectual and
cultural movement of the West is out of the question: the main figures of the
‘Byzantine “renaissance” [ … ] were
bookworms more than original
thinkers’ (Nicol 1993: 166).
The decay of the empire was rendered irreversible by another liminal
crisis in
the middle of the 14th century. As is often the case, seemingly
trivial aspects of everyday life and culture
illustrate better the state of civic
spirit than political events. Palace etiquette broke down under the rule of
Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos (1328–1341), following the period of
the first civil war (1321–1328), when
suddenly everyone ‘was permitted to
wear strange and multifarious head coverings [ … ] according his own
taste’
(Maguire and Maguire 2007: 9). Not surprisingly, this state of affairs
resulted in another, even more devastating
civil war (1341–1347). This was
the context in which, in 1354, through a series of events, a ‘point of no
return’
was reached in the corrosion of the Empire (Nicol 1993: 253). On
the night of 2 March, a devastating earthquake
hit the coastline of Thrace,
followed by a tsunami, which destroyed much of the military defence
system. The
Turks used the opportunity to take Gallipoli, a central piece in
the defence of Constantinople, with a comparable
strategic position.
Though Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos insisted that this was a blatant
violation of agreed
peace conditions, the Sultan first claimed that it was an
‘act of God’ that gave them control over the crucial
crossing point, and
then, after he agreed to personally meet the emperor in order to discuss
matters, he pulled
the trick of pretending illness, thus forcing the humiliated
emperor to return empty handed. These events gave
the emperor the idea of
abdicating. On 10 December 1354, John VI formally divested himself of all
authority, and
entered a monastery.
From that highly symbolical moment onwards, the end was only a
matter of time: ‘the last hundred years [until
1453] only represented the
running down process of a great machine that exhausted its fuel, lost its
driving
force’ (Nicol 1993: 253). The crucial point is that if this statement is
true, it also must have been felt by
those present—at least by those who still
had a proper perception. Among these the ones who lacked involvement
were the first ready to leave the sinking ship. These were not yet the court
sophists, who still could not detach
themselves from the attractions of an
imperial capital; neither the mimes, who could not live without their
public;
but most probably figures at the fringes of the intellectual and artistic scene.
This started in the last
decade of the 14th century, the first main spurt of
Byzantine migrations (Geanakoplos 1976: 75), not involving
large numbers
or well-known individuals—though it would be interesting to know who
exactly they were and where
they went, as they prepared the reception of
the Byzantine figures, and ideas, in the 15th century.

Public politics becoming all but equivalent to mime play, intellectual and
cultural life being reduced to the
monopoly of the initiates who managed to
penetrate the all but unintelligible, archaised Attic language, while
the neo-
Platonic culture of manifesting the beauty of the sacred world order in
shambles: this was the kind of
Byzantine society that lived, for a century, in
the threat and expectation of imminent conquest by the Turks,
generating a
uniquely claustrophobic spirit. This spirit, further stamped by
the final
liminal crisis, the truly apocalyptic experience of the fall of Constantinople
in 1453, was eventually
transmitted by escaping scholars and mimes to
Europe.
As a central aspect of this spirit was the specifically Byzantine sense of
humour, its main characteristics must
be shortly reviewed here.

THE PECULIARITIES AND SIGNIFICANCE OF BYZANTINE

HUMOUR

Humour, through mime plays, exerted a central role in the Byzantine world,
as such plays were performed and
diffused at the very heart of this
civilisation: in the Hippodrome, where the links were forged between the
emperor and the populace but also the intellectuals and both other poles. At
a first level, this humour was
extremely basic, even primitive (Garland
1990: 28), and in the simplest possible sense of the term: it made use
of the
most reductive and basic instincts and aspects of human life, like nudity,
obscenity, the performance of
basic bodily functions, or the mimicking of
violence by smacking of the head. It was also highly effective, again
in the
simplest populist sense: whenever performed in an open public space,
slapstick irresistibly produces
laughter: it is disgusting, yet funny—or
rather, it is funny exactly because it is purposefully disgusting.
Verbal
vilification, of course, as Peter Burke has argued, was an integral part of
Mediterranean culture (Burke
1987: 95–109); which does not, however,
make it less problematic. Nevertheless, and making things worse, here
such
performances were not enacted in some fairground booth but at the imperial
centre where—according to the
intention of Constantine—not simply the
link between the emperor and the populace but between the Heaven and
Earth was supposed to be manifested and thus perpetuated.
There is something inherently problematic and paradoxical about the
use of humour in order to legitimate a
particular social order. Humour is
widely recognised as one of the most subversive aspects of human
behaviour
(Haldon 2002: 65); thus a social order cemented in that way is
bound to be easily undermined, turned around,
‘revolved’ or ‘revolted’, by
the very acts that shaped it. This is because this logic is self-generating and
self-destructive at the same time: it spins a permanent, spiralling increase in
the character of humour thus
produced and staged, needing continuous
escalation in order to produce an impact. The more this technique is used
in
order to forge an alliance between the different social levels, the more it
will produce situations where on
the one hand the kind of humour deployed
will be increasingly violent, angular and exaggerated while at the same
time
the allegiance thus produced will be unstable and fickle, relying on a
permanent and increasing excitation
of the senses.
The nature of such performances also gives a good reason why this—
vital,
central—aspect of Byzantine civilisation is so little known. Those
Byzantines who first considered themselves
carriers of the torch of
civilisation in the midst of a wholesale descent into barbarism, and then
persisted in
considering themselves as bearers of the true spirit of Rome and
Christianity, in contrast to the Latins whom
they kept considering first as
Barbarians, and then as also heretics, would not even want to know about
such
aspects of their world—and certainly did not want others outside to
know.
One of the most important consequences of rituals of degradation being
diffused from the very centre of social
and political life was the thorough
undermining of the sense of judgment. This can be illustrated by Michael
Psellos, the most important intellectual of the Byzantine period, indeed the
only Byzantine philosopher (outside
Church Father theologians) of any
significance, who nevertheless found funny and entertaining jokes that
modern
readers would consider stupid, crude and infantile (Haldon 2002:
65). The pervasive culture of disgusting jokes
became the dirty secret of the
Byzantine world, comparable in nature and kind to contemporary Internet
pornography, which is evidently similarly widespread, not talked about and
irresistible.

The difference between the Byzantine and western sense of humour can be
well illustrated through the behaviour of
respective court jesters (Marciniak
2012). In the West, the court jester was a ‘liminal’ figure, standing outside
the community, but granted free speech; a figure close to the ‘holy fool’.14
The Byzantine jester, however, used not just much cruder
but directly
malicious techniques, focusing on open and personalised attacks and
ridiculing, instead of provoking
fun by role reversal.
Such forms of behaviour were disseminated in texts, produced by
sophist rhetoricians, written ‘deliberately to
mock, humiliate or abuse’
(Garland 1990: 14), proliferating this ‘fundamental approach to humour’
characteristic
of the Byzantine world, resulting in the fact that ‘invective
and abuse were, in general, integral constituents
of Byzantine humour’
(Ibid.: 1). Such sophistic rhetorical writings were based on the genre of
satire, taking the
works of Lucian—particularly popular in the Byzantine
world—as models but gradually shifting emphasis from satire
to abuse and
invective, resuscitating the tradition of invective poetry, going back to the
poetry of Archilochus
(the skoptikoi iamboi; see Baldwyn 1982: 25). Over
time, this revival of Latin satire, according to
Romilly Jenkins, ‘ “lost all
urbanity and charm” ’ (as in Baldwyn 1982: 28), gaining ominous
connotations, as
when sophists joined efforts with the secret police by
‘producing scurrilous pamphlets at the behest of that
sinister character, the
Arab eunuch and secret police chief Samonas, himself no stranger to
accusations of
unnatural vice’ (Baldwyn 1982: 27).

INTERMEDIATE REFLECTION: REASONS FOR AN EXCURSUS

INTO IMPERIAL ROME

The very presence, and eventual impact, of mimes in the Hippodrome poses
two major problems. The first concerns
the question how they could have
gained access to such a prominent place. Mime shows, delivered in village
squares during local festivities, were part of the human landscape as far as it
can be followed through history
and memory; but such mimes had an
extremely low social standing, being itinerants and foreigners, and they
would
never have been allowed to play any role in the public life of cities in
ancient Greece, Italy, or Asia Minor.
Their presence in the Hippodrome, and
the seriousness with which they were treated, rendered possible such a
significant effect on the entire trajectory of a major world civilisation; it
therefore needs an explanation.
The second point concerns the legitimacy and justification of mime
performances. Throughout this chapter comments
have been made
concerning rhetoricians and sophists, and the effects they had in generating
and disseminating the
peculiar, and particularly disgusting Byzantine sense
of humour. The presence of such sophists in the Byzantine
world, however,
is just as puzzling and problematic as the presence of mimes. Sophists, as
analysed by Plato, can
be considered as trickster figures (Szakolczai 2003);
furthermore, and still taking cues from Plato, they can be
associated with
effect-seeking theatrical performances. But, according to received wisdom,
Plato defeated the
sophists, and after that they were supposed to have
disappeared from history. The possible presence of sophists
in the
Byzantine world, and their eventual evident linking up with the mimes,
must be explicitly investigated.

Thus, at this point, the already substantial but necessary excursus

represented by the identification of the
Byzantine spirit must be
complemented by an account of the presence of mimes and sophists in the
Hippodrome, in
the Byzantine court, at the very heart of the Byzantine
civilisation.

THE ROMAN ROOTS OF BYZANTINE MIMES: PANTOMIME

The Emergence of Pantomime

Classical pantomime has little in common with pantomime as it is
understood in the modern world, whether in its
English, Irish, or continental
version. It was a staged performance in which a single actor enacted, in a
sequence and exclusively through movement and dance, without words, a
number of dramatic, tragic or mythological
roles, change between such
roles being signalled by taking up a different mask. As the pantomime actor
did not speak, the masks had a closed mouth, though wide open eyes. Given
that a single
actor was supposed to perform a series of roles—often five or
six, even up to eight: a variety due to which the
pantomime actor was often
compared to Proteus (Webb 2005: 6)—and that, in the absence of speech,
action was
exclusively performed through movements, often through dance,
and always involving the use of hands, such
performances required very
special skills.
The singular specificity and importance of this genre has been realised
only relatively recently, owing to
research done in the last decade or so,
which established that the rise of pantomime was a quite sudden
phenomenon.15 Though its
appearance still involves an element of mystery
(Garelli 2007: 25), this can be connected to a very specific
place and time:
Rome, just at the start of the imperial period (Ibid.: 17). The tight
connections between the end
of the republic, the rise of the empire and the
emergence of the pantomime are underlined by the fact that this
emergence
is connected to the three main moments in the rise of the empire, or a
permanent form of
dictatorship,16 in Rome:
the rule of Sulla (81–78 bc); the
rule of Julius Caesar, after he crossed the Rubicon (49–44 bc); and the first
emperor, Augustus (27 bc–ad 14). The first clear traces of pantomime can
be connected to Sulla, major supporter
of popular entertainment (Ibid.:
135–8). Consolidation of the new genre took place in the second half of the
first century bc, when this new style of entertainment, indeed a ‘new rage’,
took the Roman theatre as if ‘by
storm’, and within a few decades if not
years came to ‘dominate the stage’, so much so that it ‘soon seemingly
consign[ed] to oblivion the traditional genres of tragedy and comedy’ (Jory
2004: 147). It is also to the middle
years of the first century bc that the first
surviving pantomime masks can be dated (Jory 2001: 2–6). The full
blooming of pantomime, however, happened after 27 bc, when Augustus
took up, for the first time, the title of
emperor. The support of pantomime
has become so much associated with the rule of Augustus that when his
successor, Tiberius, tried to curtail its privileges, a series of disturbances
known as the ‘pantomime riots’
broke out in 14ad, repeated in the following
year (Slater 1994).
Given its meteoric rise and the tight connection with empire building,
both the sources of this new theatrical
practice and the reasons for its
success require some discussion.
Scholars now agree that the previous attempts to extend the origins of
pantomime into the 3rd or even 4th century
bc are untenable (Jory 2004:
147–8; Garelli 2007: 17). Of its predecessors and sources, two are of
particular
importance. First, there is consensus regarding the claim that the
pantomime is a form of the mime, its
immediate origins being parodic mime
dance, through an increased specialisation (Garelli 2007: 117). While this
seems trivial enough, it contains a point of central significance for the kind
of entertainment that would be
bequeathed as a legacy of the collapsing
Byzantine world to Renaissance Europe. Mimes did not exist in archaic
Rome; their first arrival, in the form of Greek mimes, have been traced to
the
4th century (Cicu 1988). In Greece, their presence is attested much
earlier (Basch and Chuvin 2007: 55), with
mimes being signalled in Sparta
as early as the 7th century bc (Lust 2000: 22; Towsen 1976: 40). Mimes,
however,
cannot be characterised as being part of Greek culture, being
ambulant migrants (Basch and Chuvin 2007: 55);
their origins are lost in
the mists of time, to be traced to prehistory, probably through mimic dances
imitating
the movement of animals (Reich 1903: 476–80). The
performances of itinerant mimes often involved magic, being
close to
witchcraft, and thus they are assumed to have shamanistic origins, going
back into prehistory. Over
time, and through the fundamental animosity
between nomadic and settled peoples (Taylor 1985: 51), shamanistic
performances as promoted by surviving migrant groups among settled
populations became increasingly theatrical,
involving performances
oriented toward the spectacular; thus the religious component of ecstasy
was replaced by
tricks and the search for effects geared to audience
interaction (Kirby 1975, Taylor 1985).
Though this issue cannot be further pursued here, the important point is
that mime performances were not part of
Greek sacred festivities; they were
only a barely tolerated fringe entertainment. This is because such
performances are ‘pure’ entertainment, their performers not belonging to
the culture of their audience. Shows
served only to entertain, in the sense of
provoking, in the full meaning of the term, laughter or awe. This did
not
imply an experience of participation, and that was the reason why they were
uniformly shunned by all
authorities. The significance of pantomime being
a version of the mime lies in the fact that in this way the mime
somehow
managed to gain a respectable face.
This phenomenon adds a new element to the dialectic of the Dionysian
and the Apollonian as analysed by Nietzsche
in The Birth of Tragedy,
visible in particular in his notebooks.17 According to Jacobs, Nietzsche’s
central insight, which is best
captured in the series of notes that contain the
full movement of Nietzsche’s thought, which cannot be fully
encapsulated
within the genre of a single book, concern a perpetual back-and-forth
oscillation between the
Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian
corresponds to pure visionary impulses, evoked by rhythmic movements
and voices, the dance and the singing of the chorus; while the Apollonian
corresponds to the manner in which such
products of ecstasy are
transformed into forms and images. The movement, however, is reversible,
as the
Apollonian can lapse back into the Dionysian—which would only be
a corrupt Dionysian. This is what
Nietzsche perceived in the case of
Wagner in The Birth of Tragedy, and which he reinterpreted in some of
his
last writings, where he understood even better that such a return—and even
more its faking—can be
highly paradoxical and deeply problematic. This is
the perspective from which we can properly understand the
significance of
the pantomime, both as an actual, literal re-coding or regressing of
Apollonian tragedy into
quasi-Dionysian dancing and movements and also
from which, given the closeness
of the mime and the pantomime, it renders
possible a further move, from pantomime back towards the ‘pure’ mime,
which would happen first in the late stages of the Hellenistic Roman
Empire, especially in the eastern periphery
of the empire (in particular the
Levant) (Segal 1995: 12–3) and then again in the late stages of Byzantium.
The central point, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s insights, is that such a
move back will not imply a return to an
original Dionysian experience;
rather, it will be a late, highly corrupt and decadent re-interpretation of the
Dionysian insofar as that was maintained by itinerant mimes—corrupted
versions of already corrupted forms of
shamanism. Far from representing a
return to—real or presumed—archaic, idyllic origins, it will be positively
decivilisational in the Eliasian sense of the word.

The other point about the distant source of pantomime concerns the
Etruscans. It was recognised already in
antiquity and has been accepted by
modern scholarship that the very peculiar and particularly graceful hand
movements of pantomime actors are closely connected to the dancing
characteristic of certain Etruscan rituals,
first seen in Rome in 364 bc, when
—during a particularly devastating epidemic of the plague and for
apotropaic
reasons—Etruscan dancers were brought into the city (Garelli
2007: 26; Kirby 1975). The combination of Etruscan
and mime origins is
highly peculiar, given that the two words that most characterise Etruscan
rituals—gracefulness and strong religiosity—are polar opposites of the
performances done by ambulant
mimes.18 Furthermore, the
channels of
transmission, if any, from Etruscan ritual dancing to pantomime
performances are unknown.
 Apart from the time and place of its emergence, the coincidence with
stages in the ‘imperialisation’ of Rome,
even the manner of emergence of
pantomime is extremely interesting for social theory, being highly liminal in
the
exact sense of ‘in between’. The precise location where the pantomime
emerged is difficult to pin down, as it did
not emerge in Rome, in the
broader Italy, in Greece or in the East but paradoxically in each and at the
same
time; in fact, it is explicitly claimed that the first emergence of the
pantomime, around 80 bc, took place in a
‘space of exchange (l’espace
d’échange)’ between Italian and Greek culture, being impossible to assign
to
any of the two (Garelli 2007: 117, 125). The first two known pantomime
dancers were of eastern origin: Pylades
(of Cilicia), and Bathyllus (of
Alexandria) (Jory 2004: 147), and the first attested performances took place
in
Greece, in Priene and Delphi (Garelli 2007: 118–23); yet, supporting the
thesis about Etruscan origins, this was
called ‘the Italian dance’ (Jory 2004:
147; see also Garelli 2007: 123). Further underlining the inherently
liminal
nature of pantomime, it was also a hybrid type of performance, being ‘a
genre at the intersection of
musical, lyrical, mimic and orchestral practices’
(Garelli 2007: 132). Finally, its perhaps most important aspect
concerns its
location in between private and public forms of entertainment: the
banquet
and the public festivity, the latter being connected with the sacred. The
pantomime, with its hybrid
character, was the ‘Trojan horse’ by which
mimes got admitted to sacred festivities.

Theatre is a par excellence public entertainment, yet the exact meaning of

this statement must be rendered
precise, as our understanding of ‘public’
and ‘entertainment’ is very far from the ancients’. If theatre was
‘public’, it
was by no means so in the sense of openness and secularity; rather, it
involved the community
as community; it was a sacred and not a ‘secular’
occasion. Furthermore, and corresponding to this, it was
not entertainment
in the sense of spectacle and fun; rather, it was a sacred ritual where—and it
is here that the
genius of the Greeks lay—theatre had an educative purpose.
Classical theatre was a unique rite of passage where
not simply adolescents
passed through the threshold of adulthood, but where an entire community
gained together a
further degree of maturity. This development is
inseparable from the Persian Wars (Meier 1996), thus combining a
real-
world liminal crisis with the artificial liminality produced by a highly
particular ritual.19 The Persian Wars, however, do not
represent a ‘zero
point’ in history (Elias 1994: 480), either for the Greeks or for theatre;
rather, they are a
crucial in-between liminal moment of crystallisation in
politics as well as in culture.
The theatre was always a central sacred community experience—that is,
in Greece. In Rome, however, it never
gained community support in this
sense. When Greek theatre arrived in Rome, around the end of the third
century,
the exact moment when Rome extended its hold over Greece and
when Polybius would compose the first ever work of
comparative
historiography and philosophy of history (Voegelin 1974), it remained more
of a special kind of elite
affair. The fact that the comedies of Plautus were
attended even by the upper classes is often cited in favour of
the high regard
for this comedy, but this is a highly biased interpretation of the
phenomenon. The appreciation
of Plautus always represented the kind of
classicism Nietzsche was most opposed to. Far from being a ‘classic’
with
great intrinsic values, Plautus was a nihilist, and his comedies were
destructive and not educational in
their effect mechanism. If highbrow
intellectuals came to see Plautus in Rome, this was because it was an exotic
(‘Greek’ in the sense of what it meant to them, not to us) spectacle, and not
because it was part of Roman
community life.
It is in this context that the background of Plautus becomes relevant,
and for three reasons. First, by following
a standard pattern, and ‘[l]ike
everything else about him, the details of Plautus’s life are quite mysterious’
(McLeish 1986: 30). Second, as his name indicates, Plautus (the
‘flatfooted’) was originally a mime, or a vulgar
popular entertainer (Pansiéri
1997: 155), before he became, through his adaptation of Greek ‘new
comedy’,
especially Menander, a respectable author of comedies. This is
only reinforced by his other name, Maccus,
designating a well-known
character of Atellan mime spectacles. Third, he was an Umbrian, coming
from Sarsina,
where shortly before his birth (in 254 bc), an insurrection
against Roman
power was put down (in 266 bc), so there was a strong
resentment against Rome (Ibid.: 75). It is in this context
that we should
make sense of the fact that one of the most significant inventions of Plautus
was the importance
attributed to the figure of the clever slave—a figure
present marginally in previous comedies but by no means
having the
primacy accorded to it by Plautus.20 Thus, combining Nietzsche’s The Birth
of Tragedy with his Genealogy of
Morals, his only two book-like
philosophical discussions, one could say that the source of the ‘slave revolt’
of morality was indeed the theatre—though it was not Greek tragedy but
rather ‘Roman’ comedy. It should not be
surprising that the Romans for
long resisted the setting up of permanent theatres on the Greek model. The
first
such construction in Italy was built as late as 55 bc by Pompey—and
even then disguised as a Greek temple
(Garelli 2007: 137).
The resistance of Rome to Greek-style public festivals had an even
stronger reason, which can be understood
through the work of Polybius. If
in Greece the emergence of new comedy was a symptom of decadence, as is
generally accepted, the transportation of this comedy to Republican Rome
could easily have been part of a
deliberate strategy to undermine the spirit
of the republic—the combination of civicness and religiosity which
Polybius singled out as the main reason why Rome gained dominance over
Greece. Being Greek and living through the
traumatic events of the Roman
conquest, Polybius posed the question why the Romans came to dominate
the Greeks
and found the answer in the strength of Roman civic religion.
Polybius was well aware that no power could be
based on mere force but
must be secured by the strength of an underlying civic spirit, and this spirit
can only
be founded on religiosity. If the strength of Rome was thus
identified by a Greek, one should not be surprised
that Romans were weary
of taking over Greek-style religious festivities.
But the paradox had another side as well. While Greek culture had
decayed by the first centuries bc, it was not
yet so decadent as to admit
mimes to the Greeks’ sacred public feasts. Mimes were tolerated in public
only in the
days after the feasts (Jory 2001: 16–7), or they could give
performances in private houses. However, as in Rome
there was no tradition
of sacred public theatre, the borderline between the private and public
performances of
mimes became blurred. The strong reservations against the
mimes were still maintained—they had no
respectability—yet the more
Rome moved towards permanent dictatorship, which implied a kind of rule
whose main
aim was to please the huge and swelling urban masses, the
greater became the temptation of using the appeal of
the mimes, so far
restricted to private parties, for broader, public spectacles as well—if only
they could be
made somehow respectable. This would eventually be
provided by pantomimes, through imperial support, in the three
stages
discussed above, fully consolidated into games by Augustus. Thus it
happened that, through the pantomime,
the mime ‘had successfully
infiltrated the conceptual realm of “theatre”, a
subset itself of “the happy
life” ’ (Jory 2001: 20).

The Sudden Success of Pantomime and Its Reasons

Pantomime had a sudden and resounding success because it fulfilled a
‘function’ responding to a ‘need’. It was to
offer a joint solution to some
central problems that emerged during the transformation of an autonomous
and
prosperous entity into a conquering empire: the provision of a bridge
between the centre of power and the broader
masses, generating broad
support for official policies while minimising the role of the traditional
upper
classes—whose position was based on respect, reputation and
recognition—and still maintaining a semblance of
traditions, pretending to
promote ‘culture’. In this way a particular liminal moment allowed a
concrete group of
people who for long were lurking in the shadows to use
the occasion to make themselves finally legitimate.
As a bridge between the central authorities and the broader masses, the
pantomime enabled communication and a
certain shared experience to take
place. This sharing was not genuine participation, comparable to religious
rituals or civic festivities, but lay at the level of the lowest common
denominator: sharing the simplest and
most vulgar experience of satisfying
sensory pleasure.21 This characteristic of the pantomime, the manner in
which it
was able to impress, through sensuous dancing, dream-like images
on its audience, was already recognised in one
of the earliest written
testimonies about pantomime dances, by the atomist philosopher Lucretius
(Jory 2004:
148). Of course this was exactly the reason why mimes and
pantomimes were considered vulgar and obscene,
lascivious and scurrilous,
and not admitted to the sacred games, being held in low esteem and
continually
combated by the Roman Senate. But the Senate was powerless
concerning private parties, and such private feasts,
financed by the most
potent military leaders, on their way to secure for themselves the imperial
throne, were in
themselves semi-public events. With the rise of the
centralised empire, performances were extended to the public
festivities as
well, in particular the amphitheatre, the Circus Maximus, where they were
brought together with
the shows of the wild animals and the gladiators, thus
providing a titillating and erotic counterpoint to the
increasing violence and
cruelty that came to characterise such shows, a highly schismogenic
development,
‘balancing’ pain with pleasure and vice versa, thus keeping
the ‘masses’ happy and under control, not much
differently from the
manner in which Hollywood, over the last century or so, mixes with
increasing success
violence and sex, magic and action, blood and sugar.
Yet in order to function successfully, to ‘lubricate’ social life by
smoothly joining the very top and the very
bottom ladders of the social life,
the new form of public entertainment also had to gain respectability. Public
festivities need broad recognition. This respect was gained by presenting, at
the level of a ‘Readers’ Digest’, the highlights of famous tragedies and
increasingly the main scenes of
Greco-Roman mythology—scenes that
could be highly attractive, as pantomime dancers took care of selecting
those
mythological scenes that served best the purposes of evoking, through
emphatic mimicking, the dream-like
sensations of erotic pleasure that
audiences were most searching after. As all roles were played by a male
actor,
it contained sufficient ambivalence and thus added extra titillation
concerning the nature of erotic
gratification. Still, members of the audience
could fancy themselves as participating in a cultural event.
This, however, required that there be men of culture who, instead of
pointing out the problematic nature of such
‘cultural’ events, rather closed
their eyes and confirmed the self-delusion of audiences that they
participated
in something noble: the transmission of ancient culture, which
otherwise would fall into disrepute. Such ‘men of
culture’ were the
rhetoricians and the sophists. It was no accident that the rise and
consolidation of the
empire, and the increasing popularity of pantomime
performances, was contemporary with the Second Sophistic.
Yet before discussing in detail this association, it is necessary to
introduce another aspect of the liminal
socio-cultural and political situation
out of which pantomime theatre grew—an aspect that only recently gained
attention and where interest was sparked by the strange and much neglected
phenomenon of ‘pantomime riots’.
Pantomime Riots
A riot breaking out after pantomime performances was a common event in
the history of the Roman Empire. According
to William Slater (1994: 128)
John Jory was previously the only scholar who paid proper attention to this
phenomenon, but his explanation, focusing on the emotions stirred up by
the erotically charged performances, was
in itself not sufficient. The
solution, also going a long way in explaining the social appeal and
significance of
the phenomenon, is to be searched in the great involvement
and interest that younger members of the aristocracy
gained in pantomime
performances—a phenomenon that would be repeated, with stunningly
close parallels, at another
crucial liminal place and time in the history of
theatricality: Venice, towards the end of the Renaissance, at
the start of the
16th century.
The context is the effect on young patricians of the shift in power from
the Senate to the emperor. The Roman
Senate, as its name indicates
(derived from the word senex, Latin for ‘elder’, thus ‘senate,’ meaning the
council of the elders), was an assembly of experienced patricians; the young
had the expectation to enter the
Senate and thus to exercise political power
in due time. The rise of despotism undermined such expectations,
disempowering young aristocrats and pushing them in search of alternative
pursuits.
Not surprisingly, just as medieval aristocrats competed in tournaments
once
the endemic warfare of the early Middle Ages subsided and just as the
English aristocracy came to develop the
sports that were then spread around
the entire globe after the Civil War and the Restoration (see Elias and
Dunning 1986), the attention of young Roman patricians turned to the
amphitheatre, thus ending, and in a
particularly problematic manner, the
Roman resistance to Greek-style festivities (Slater 1994: 138). The first
time a young Roman knight appeared as a gladiator was in 46 bc, in a
festivity organised by Julius Caesar,
followed in 23 bc, now under
Augustus, by a young knight appearing as a pantomime dancer (Ibid.: 129–
32), while
the leaders of young aristocratic associations were equestrians
(Ibid.: 139). These developments destroyed the
boundary between
aristocratic kudos and mere acting (Ibid.: 132)—a serious violation of social
and moral codes,
as actors in all societies, and in particular the Roman
world, were held in low esteem. Not surprisingly, these
developments were
met by a flurry of legislative efforts by the Senate, already from 22 bc
onwards, in
prohibiting patricians from entering the stage, but such laws
were not effective. The practice suited the
emperors only too well, as such
self-debasement by segments of the patriciate helped to undermine its civic
cohesion, thus cementing the alliance between central authority and the
broader masses, fundamental for any
dictatorial popular form of
government. The young patricians, on the other hand, found all kind of
ways to
circumvent the legislation, using legal gaps, or by converting their
own houses to theatre, helped by the nature
of pantomime performances,
which only required one actor and thus did not need an elaborate stage.
The last remaining question concerns the possibility of young patricians
acquiring such special skills, given
that pantomime dancing was highly
difficult. Even in Greece members of young aristocratic associations could
acquire any skill except that of the mime and the acrobat, while in Rome
even Greek gymnastic nakedness was
denounced as decadent, promoting
effeminacy. The answer lies in the new building projects that started just
around that time period, in particular the building of Greek-style public
baths (Ibid.: 136).

The Inexpungability of Mime Performances

This new festival culture, growing out of the emergence of the empire,
where pantomime played such a central
role, reached a new height in the
late 2nd and the 3rd centuries, or the moment when the empire entered not
only
the stage of its consolidation but also its ossification and coming
decadence. The festivities, even in Greece,
increasingly lost their religious
aspect, being transformed into a pure form of mass entertainment, offering
the
opportunity, for single patrons as well as for whole communities, of
projecting their own images (Webb 2008: 34).
At the same time the
connections between rhetoric and pantomime, the ‘two most
widespread
public practices’ during the empire (Garelli 2007: 320), became tighter.
Both were often performed in
the same place, in theatres and amphitheatres
(Webb 2008: 27), and pantomime dances were often described using
sophistic criteria, like ekphrasis (Garelli 2007: 320). This resulted in an
even greater popularity of the
pantomime and in an internal change of the
performances. Both the erudite descriptions offered by the Sophists
and the
public interest in erotic content favoured the performance of mythological
themes over excerpts from
classical tragedies. These performances became
so popular that the word histrio, previously meaning actor
in a general
sense, now started to coincide in meaning with the solo pantomime dancer
(Jory 2004: 154). The
increasingly vulgar, lascivious content also meant
increasing hostility by and conflict with both rising
Christianity and
surviving classical philosophy. However, owing to their immense
popularity, pantomime
performances—which became increasingly difficult
to distinguish from simple mime shows—were impossible to
eradicate. The
conversion of Constantine to Christianity did not mean the end of such
theatrical practices;
instead, by the 4th century, they became centralised,
developing hand in hand with the rise of imperial
bureaucracy and used by
private persons in order to gain public visibility, something like a marketing
tool (Webb
2008: 39–41). In the 5th century a further important
development took place: theatrical entertainment and chariot
races were
amalgamated, their organisation being charged to the different factions of
the demes, thus gaining
political significance (Ivanov 1992; Webb 2008:
42). In the context of such politicisation of public spectacle,
pantomime
dancers gained a central role, becoming—together with the top charioteers
—stars of the show (Ibid.:
43).
Thus the increasingly mime-like pantomime shows took a central role in
the public as well as political life of
the Byzantine Empire and became
impossible to eradicate. Even figures like St. Augustine stood powerless
against
such developments (Garelli 2007: 322), and by the 6th century such
spectacles were accepted as a matter of fact
and as religiously neutral,
though causing a great concern for local and provincial ecclesiastic
authorities, who
were anxious that visitors to Constantinople might be
tempted and lured by them (Webb 2008: 38). The
powerlessness of central
authorities in fighting against increasingly dissolute public entertainment is
best
illustrated by Julian the Apostate. In his efforts to restore classical
Hellenistic culture against
Christianisation, he saw the theatre not as an ally
but as an enemy, being licentious and decaying, far from its
original
Dionysian values; but he felt himself powerless to resist this trend (Ibid.:
36). Meanwhile, in the
western part of the empire, owing to the repeated
destruction of Rome, by the 6th century, all forms of
theatricality were
abandoned. With the Circus Maximus in ruins, in the Byzantium the
Hippodrome with its
entertainment survived.

THE ROMAN ROOTS OF BYZANTINE RHETORIC: THE

SECOND SOPHISTIC

The Striking Resilience of Sophism

The intellectual victory of Plato by no means represented the disappearance
of sophists from the public arena.
Their schools survived as part of the
Hellenistic landscape, and were as if waiting in the shadows for the
occasion to multiply and gain dominance again. We need to recall here that
sophists were first of all mimic
teachers, requiring malleable audiences,
thus liminal situations for their influence to spread quickly; and that
therefore their activities showed particular affinity with the emergence of
empire-like entities. One of their
most lethal impact was to influence
Athenian politicians in the direction of empire building. Thus it is no
surprise that they came back to prominence with the transformation of the
Roman Republic into an empire, in
successive steps (Brunschwig and Lloyd
2000: 973); again in several steps in the Byzantine Empire; and then again
in our times, with British colonialism and then the U.S.-driven economic
globalisation.
The teachings of sophists were useful for imperial bureaucracies. In
contrast to the philosophers’ concern with
an autonomous educational
system, the search for truth and the academic freedom associated with such
research,
they were interested in the training of certain skills to public
officials22 and the freedom of rhetoric (Marsh 1994: 419–20).
The foundation of the second school of sophistic is associated with
Philostratus of ‘Athens’ and Hermogenes of
Tarsus (Anderson 1993). Even
the basic facts concerning their lives and activities and their relationship
immediately illustrate three basic points concerning sophists of all times
and places. The first can be
formulated as a principle of zero or nothing
concerning biographical information: for most of the sophists the
available
biographical information, especially about their early lives, is extremely—
and to a large extent
inexplicably—scarce, animating a distinct suspicion
that they had to hide something about their past; while for
some of them
posteriority is so inundated by an excess of sundry and unclassifiable facts
that it is practically
impossible for scholars to sift through and make some
sense of them. Second, concerning even the most basic facts
of life about
sophists one must start by discarding pieces of disinformation if not out-
right lies, or at least
create some order among a number of misleading and
confusing pieces of information that immediately throw
off-track all but the
most careful and acute observers. Finally, in terms of their interrelationship,
we again
must observe the principle of zero or nothing: a sophist is either
literally worshipping and slavishly imitating
his master or, even when not
ignoring or outright denying any importance, uses every opportunity to
belittle the
impact of his formative influences by making critical or even
desultory comments on them.

Philostratus of ‘Athens’
The founder of the Second Sophistic, Philostratus (170–247) is called ‘of
Athens’, but this is misleading, as he
was born in Lemnos (Anderson 1993:
13). Given that the entire work of Philostratus was devoted to an explicit
revaluation of values, trying to dethrone the classical, Athenian philosophy
of Plato and Aristotle—and meeting
considerable success—it is not forcing
the argument to claim that he must have had his fair share in spreading
this
disinformation, as creating the aura of being an Athenian certainly
promoted his purpose. This was helped by
a relative scarcity of actual
information about his life, even though he wrote a book about the life of
Apollonius of Tyana and one entitled Lives of the Sophists; just as by the
fact that there were two
further sophists called Philostratus, his son-in-law
and grandson, both authors of books containing ekphrastic
descriptions of
paintings.
Philostratus is an extremely important though almost completely
ignored figure in the history of thought, who all
but imperceptibly managed
to perform a full-scale and lasting reversal in the relationship between
philosophy and
sophistic. This was done, on the one hand, by heroising his
own work and that of his fellow sophists and sparking
a genuine
renaissance in culture (Brunschwig and Lloyd 2000: 972), while on the
other denigrating philosophy as
discourse of the official establishment that
is furthermore lying. Sophists like Philostratus or later Libanius
loved to
present themselves as brave fighters who did not shy away from
challenging authorities, but in actual
fact they were shrewd, practiced
courtiers (Anderson 1993: 19). Just like the sophists of the classical age,
they
were often travelling scholars, moving from one city to the other in
search for students and susceptible to
professional quarrels with each other
in order to attract students by luring them away from competitors (Ibid.:
28–35).
The central attack of Philostratus against the philosophers was a clever
reversal of Plato’s argument concerning
truth. Plato claimed that
philosophers were searching for the truth, while sophists were satisfied with
presenting flatteries, focusing on the teaching of rhetorical tricks.
Philostratus, however, claimed that these
were the philosophers who were
liars, as they pretended to utter the truth about reality, while the sophists
honestly admitted that they were only using words and language, which is
just a piece of convention and cannot be
identical with true reality. In this
way he managed to appropriate the central argument of philosophers and
turn
it against them (Anderson 1993: 142–3). Taking further this clever
piece of reasoning, he also claimed that truth
is solely connected to
historical facts, and thus the sophists combined their instruction in rhetoric
with
teaching a large quantity of historical facts (Brunschwig and Lloyd
2000: 973). Together with the sophists’
explicit interest in novels, in this
way the ‘paradigm of truth has thus been transformed’ (Ibid.: 973): the
unity of philosophical undertaking was broken into the schismogenic
doubles of seductive fantasy writing and boring fact-gathering, combined
with training in lifeless grammar and
logic.

Hermogenes of Tarsus
Hermogenes, who is credited with single-handedly developing the
methodological approach of the Second Sophistic,
is another enigmatic
figure. His activity falls into the reign of the Stoic philosopher Marcus
Aurelius as
emperor (ad 161–180), and supposedly he was something of an
enfant prodige. However, at the age of 25 he
developed a rare medical
condition, after which, though living for a long time, he was unable to teach
or write
(Monfasani 1976: 248–9). Still, some accounts question this story
line and even argue that Hermogenes was an
invented character.
The writings associated with the name of Hermogenes contain in outline
the methodological principles that
constitute the foundation of not only the
Second Sophistic but also official Byzantine teaching in grammar and
rhetoric. It was an approach radically different both from classical
philosophy and the central principles of
medieval western scholasticism
(Monfasani 1995, XIV: 175) yet having
astonishing parallels with neo-
Kantianism (Szakolczai 2011).
The approach of Hermogenes consisted of two interlocking aspects,
forming a tight system. The first, contained in
On Status, his most popular
work, was the method of division (diairesis), which had as its main
structuring device the breaking up of arguments into exhaustive, potentially
infinite series of dichotomies until
all possible states were exhausted,
resulting in a unified, interlocking system of division (Monfasani 1976:
250–1; 1995, XIV: 175–6). It was due to this singular emphasis on dividing
up that preoccupation with ‘method’
gained ascendancy in the Second
Sophistic, acquiring a quasi-religious veneration and becoming ‘such a
favorite
word in the Hermogenean corpus that the last piece of the corpus,
an apocryphal work, is even entitled “On the
Method of Awesomeness” ’
(Ibid.: 176; see also 1976: 251), which then ‘dominated the curriculum and
rhetorical
culture of Byzantium’ (Monfasani 1995, XIV: 175). We should
note here both the extreme closeness of this ‘method’
to the approach Plato
teasingly attributes to the sophists in the Sophist and in Philebus; and also
again the similar veneration of ‘method’ in modern-day neo-Kantianism
and neo-positivism. This easily suggests
the corollary that the reverence of
methodology by neo-Kantianism and neo-positivism simply represents the
Byzantinisation of modern European academic life, consummated with the
most recent neoliberal educational
policies, which increasingly replace the
classical terminology of education, words like ‘personality’,
‘character’ and
‘understanding’, with expressions like ‘training’, ‘customer’ and ‘learning
outcomes’. The second
main device of Hermogenes concerns his stylistics,
core aspect of his rhetoric, where he again developed an
exhaustive system
of classification, here consisting of twentyone categories (Monfasani 1995,
XIV: 176), with
emphasis being laid on the description of such types
(Brunschwig and Lloyd 2000: 972–3).
 The content of teaching focused on the ‘progymnasmata’ exercises,
which meant the systematic hammering of a
limited number of selected
texts in order to perform oratorical speeches targeting special occasions or
the
liminal moments of human life (epideictic oratory; Webb 2009: 15),
including explicit play with paradoxes. Such
techniques include ‘ekphrastic
description’, which implied learning how to speak vividly; the technique of
proofs
and refutations; and the encomium, rendered famous by Erasmus,
which meant the appropriation of the right
technique of flattery through
lavishing praise and blame, rendering it intellectually exciting through
paradoxes
and double meanings (Anderson 1993: 47–8). The Second
Sophistic also devoted particular attention to novels,
focusing in particular
on teaching ‘pleasurable’, erotic storytelling.

Methodological Exercises, or the Distant Roots of Neo-

Kantianism
The central focus of the sophists’ teaching was different from the main
topics of classical philosophy: beauty
(the central category of Plato’s
thinking, heart of his ontology), truth (epistemology), ethics (the question of
the proper conduct of life in order to reach the good life) or politics (the
good life in common). It rather
focused on matters of language; it would not
be an exaggeration to say that the Second Sophistic realised the
first
‘linguistic turn’ in thought. This was certainly connected to the provenience
of its main protagonists. The
central issue here was not so much that most
of them came from the ‘East’ but rather that all of them were
natives of
particularly liminal, in-between areas, like Tarsus, a port in southern Cilicia,
at the intersection
of the main roads leading from the south and the east
towards Europe, through what is now southern Turkey (see
Mitchell 1993);
Lemnos, an island in between northwestern Turkey and southeastern
Greece, with a long history of
interculturalism; Antioch on the Orontes, in
northern Syria, and Samosata in southeastern Turkey, both located at
main
intersections of roads between regions and continents, even in general
between East and West, and also
important trading centres.23
Concerning the emphasis on language, the sophists jointly propagated
two opposite excesses, using the tension
between them as the driving force
to dominate the intellectual life, instead of a balanced and harmonious
search
for beauty and understanding, characteristic of classical philosophy.
On the one hand, the emphasis was placed on
absolute clarity and vividness
(Anderson 1993: 145, Webb 2009). Language in this perspective served the
primary
purpose of description, and the value of description lay in the
closeness of its correspondence to reality. It is
due to this perspective that
for the sophists the value of art was in imitating reality; a characteristic that
was already present in the fourth century bc, particularly in anecdotes about
Alexander the Great and Apelles,
the most famous painter of the early
Hellenistic period—not surprisingly,
again a period of empire building. On
the other hand, faithfully following their own—absurd and
excessive—
preaching, the sophists were also keen to point out the independence of
language, or the autonomy of
discourse—another central sophist concern.
This meant first of all a conscious exploration of the playfulness of
language, already present in the descriptions which continuously moved,
imperceptibly but all the more
irresistibly, from exhaustive, complete,
truthful description as the primary aim to excessive verbal flowerings
and
unnecessary verbiage, with ‘[p]leonasm, antithesis and alliteration run
amok’, so writing a novel ‘has become
something of a performance’
(Anderson 1993: 157–8).24 Such plays with linguistic fantasy were
frequently combined
with a preference for paradoxes (Ibid.: 148–9). This
penchant could easily turn grotesque—for example, through
the frequent
use of allegories from the world of animals as a contrast to human
behaviour in mock moral tales,
like ‘the pathetic fallacy of demonstrating
the moral superiority of animals’, pushed to the extreme in Lucian’s
The Fly
(Ibid.: 188).
The most characteristic location of such inventive but vacuous and vain
interest in language for its own sake was
the sophists’ propagation of
novels. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries ad an entire genre of ‘Sophistic
romantic
novels’ (Anderson 1993: 158) developed, with Heliodorus,
Longinus and Achilles Tatius as its main protagonists.
Such novels,
especially those of Achilles Tatius, can be characterised as exemplary
illustrations of the
teachings of the rhetoricians, full of ‘self-indulgent
rhetorical mannerism’ (Ibid.: 165), where the borderline
between the story
line of a novel and ex tempore sophisticated discourses was repeatedly
violated, with
rhetorical exercises being ‘integrated—cynically—into the
plot’ (Ibid.: 162). Such rhetoric generated a grotesque
effect, with
intentional self-parody and indulgent excess impossible to distinguish.
The studied search for fantasy and playfulness characteristic of sophist
novels was particularly present in
erotic stories, written explicitly in order
to procure pleasure (Brunschwig and Lloyd 2000: 973), often moving
beyond the boundary of pornography, frequently playing with the
borderline between dreams and (in-story) reality,
while pushing such
fantasies into the absurd and the comic, thus smartly escaping the charges
of immorality and
pornography by turning the finger against their own
readers, whose sexual desires they skilfully aroused, in
order to—cynically
—make fun of them by failing to satisfy the desires they invested.
Throughout, the sophists
played clever games with badmouthing and
abusing Plato, in particular by presenting the Symposium as the
story of a
drunken philosophical orgy, particularly effective with the Church Fathers
in the 4th century. The
sophists were engaged in a skilful, foul and lethal
fight against philosophy, where on the one hand they
presented the
philosophers as not simply pagan but morally debased, while on the other
they gave of themselves
the image of being useful for the official
Christianity of the empire, by being non-religious, thus neutral, and
teaching only useful skills.
The Second Sophistic succeeded through its appropriation of the
classical
ideal of paideia, also explaining the tight connections between the
sophists and pantomime. An advance in
culture and civilisation, once it has
taken place, does not disappear without a trace. The Hellenistic and
post-
Hellenistic empires, while certainly acquired through sheer military might,
could not completely dispense
with the remains of Greek culture. Emperors
had to look cultivated, demonstrating their support for culture. The
sophists
filled this need, most cynically, and would time and again—during the later
period of Byzantium, in the
Renaissance, and in modernity, in successive
stages—hijack and appropriate the search for culture, knowledge and
wisdom. Yet, at the same time, this hijacking could never become complete,
and thus the very success of the
sophists in promoting a false understanding
and a fake culture would generate the possibility of a genuine
rebirth and
flourishing.
Ekphrastic Description
One of the central aspects of the Second Sophistic, which was to have a
particularly important impact on Europe
in the early Quattrocento, is the
technique of description called ‘ekphrasis’; a main part of the
progymnasmata
exercises. Ekphrasis was an old sophist technique; the idea
of speech being a force acting on the listener can be
traced back to Gorgias
(Webb 2009: 5). Its aim was to make an audience imagine a scene; thus it
could be defined
as a ‘speech that brings the subject matter vividly before
the eyes’ (Ibid.: 1). The purpose is to have an impact
or effect on listeners;
to convince them about the point the speaker was trying to make (Ibid.: 7–
8). In doing so
sophists made use of the ability of language to create an
illusion; to bring, through mere words, absent things
into presence (Ibid.:
10, 8). In order to increase its persuasive power, the sophists taught the use
of skilful
verbal techniques, focusing on altering the perception of the
listener so that the orators win assent (Ibid.:
10). This was done in two
opposite and yet closely related ways. The first could be called the
‘theatricalisation’ of speech: the aim being to ‘make listeners into
spectators’, or to transform those hearing a
speech into a theatre audience,
by spellbinding them, controlling their imagination (Ibid.: 8–9). The second
was
making the audience feel involved, thus eliciting their participation, by
describing a scene or a historical
event so vividly that they could imagine it
as if they were themselves present (Ibid.: 9–10). The central issue
was the
play with, and thus elimination of, the borderline between memory and
imagination. Within the history of
ekphrasis the Second Sophistic, in
particular Philostratos, effected a displacement by focusing more closely on
the description of works of art, which could be considered as a kind of
meta-ekphrasis (Ibid.: 31, 186–7), and
which would be (mis)taken, in
modern times, as its sole aim.
The exercises thus aimed at creating a ‘verbal picture’, a clear and
vivid, exhaustive description of the
theme—whether it was a natural
scenery or a work of art. Such descriptions often started with the words
‘picture
a scene’, as the idea was to put the object as clearly as possible
before the
eyes of the reader (Anderson 1993: 144–6). Yet this very call for
an exact imitation of nature was also absurd,
carrying the seeds of its own
destruction, as—if taken seriously—it imperceptibly but definitely shifted
emphasis
from the object to the impact on the reader or listener, thus
indirectly on the speaker, with the sophist slowly
but inexorably insinuating
himself into the centre of attention even in matters of art, by merely miming
real
beauty, whether of nature or of human art. In the more absurd versions
of such ekphrastic exercises, the real
worth of objects, their beauty, was not
only ignored but explicitly denigrated, as if this would detract
attention
from the performance of the spoken word (Ibid.: 148). The rhetorician in
this way often fell ‘victim to
the temptation of reducing the subject to a
prettified set-piece’ (Ibid.: 147). This development was evident even
for
those who were indulged in it. Thus the rise of the Second Sophistic almost
coincided with its immediate
parody in Lucian. Such parody, however, by
no means represents the end of the movement but rather a further step
in a
quasi-Hegelian ‘consciousness of itself’, thus generating an endless
reverberation between increasingly
excessive and indulgent exercises in
rhetoric and their similarly spiralling parodising, with the boundary
between serious exercise and its parody becoming increasingly porous, the
real victims being understanding,
knowledge, culture and art, with talented
students being seduced at once to indulgence in such clever exercises
and
their parody.
A further and closely connected feature of ekphrastic description was its
‘distinct penchant for the paradoxical’
(Ibid.: 148). Philostratus gave clear
preference to paradoxical figures like Dionysus and Pan; to monsters, in
particular to monstrous births; and also to small figures, like dwarves. It
was particularly popular to
accumulate such paradoxes or to elaborate the
unusual aspects of familiar scenes. In was in this context that
ekphrastic
descriptions turned to great works of art—but only in order to show them in
a ‘new’ light by bringing
them down to the level of the paradoxical—for
example, by showing aspects of incongruity in them, or shifting
attention to
minor figures, which at the next level led to the purposeful creation of
works of art that reverse
the emphasis, putting the central figures into the
background, and placing emphasis on insignificant details, so
that the clever
sophist performer of ekphrasis could observe and triumphantly put them
down into words.
In novels written under the guidance of ekphrastic descriptions a
particular emphasis was placed on portraying
extremes of cruelty and
suffering (Ibid.: 149). Thus Libanius, or the novelist Achilles Tatius, took
particular
pleasure in describing, in great graphic detail, the sufferings of
Prometheus, a main hero of the sophists (see
Plato’s Protagoras), focusing
on the manner in which the beak of the eagle enters the wound at the level
of the liver, repeatedly tearing it up. For all these reasons another favourite
subject matter, particularly for
Lucian, was the centaurs,25 which offered a
double paradox: being half-human and half-horse, they were clearly
monstrous; yet ekphrastic descriptions took particular pleasure in depicting
their intimate emotions, thus procuring particular thrills for their readers
who were invited to ‘empathise’, in
depth, with the emotions of a centaur—
thus coming to love the ‘monster’.
The ultimate game of ekphrastic description, completing the revaluation
of values, was to transform the artist
into a sophist by making images that
could readily become objects of ekphrastic exercises, thus completing the
reversal of values from beauty, the Platonic starting point, which could be
represented in images though hardly
in words, to mere language, the central
field of activity of the sophist, master of verbal eloquence, thus a mere
wordsmith (Anderson 1993: 35), annexing art into a part of rhetoric (Ibid.:
154). The sophist is thus revealed
‘here as elsewhere as the arch-illusionist’
(Ibid.), or a par excellence trickster; it would thus be no surprise
that, with
Alberti and Shakespeare, we’ll witness the return of the trickster at the
height of the European
Renaissance.

PRAISES FOR PANTOMIME IN THE SECOND SOPHISTIC

Among the main figures of the Second Sophistic, three are of particular
importance for a genealogy of comedy, as
they wrote the three famous
treatises in support of theatre—meaning pantomime (even mimes): Lucian,
Libanius and
Choricius. The three cover the entire history of the movement
and are among its main representatives.

Lucian of Samosata
Hardly anything is known about the life of Lucian (c. 120–180) which,
given the prominence he acquired in his own
lifetime and the fact that he is
among those few authors of the ancient world whose entire corpus has
survived,
cannot be taken as being without significance and has indeed been
reflected upon (Szilágyi 1974: 120–1). He was
from Samosata, a city from
the ancient kingdom of Commagene (now in extreme southeastern Turkey),
a border region
not only between Anatolia and the Levant but at the
intersection of roads between Asia, Europe and Africa. He
also passed a
considerable time in Antioch on the Orontes, another major transit city, in
northern Syria. He thus
definitely was not Greek, a significant fact, given
that he spent much of his career mocking Greek culture. As a
paradoxical
twist of fate, this is one of the main reasons why his writings would be held
in such a high esteem
in Byzantium, as his ridiculing of pagan cults helped
Christian apologists like Photius with their arguments; for
this reason it was
even forgiven, and forgotten, that Lucian also derided the customs of
Christianity. This fact
helps us gain an insight into Byzantine attitudes
towards classical philosophy. Sophists were non-religious,
while most
philosophers, with Plato and Aristotle in the first line, recognised the
existence and significance of the divine. Thus, sophists could argue, with
evident success,
that—being atheists—they did not promote pagan views,
while offering technical education related to grammar and
rhetoric,
rendering them useful for the rising state and church bureaucracy.
Lucian, possessing a series of unique characteristics, was not a straight-
forward sophist. He did not acquire a
full sophist training but was rather an
autodidact, ‘a hack and virtuoso at once’, who thus remained free from
the
standard sophist boredom and pedantry, as evident in the lighter style of his
writings—in their particularly
strong satirical tone—and also in his ‘taste
for the eccentric, absurd and incongruous’ (Anderson 1976: 176).
Given
that until the rise to prominence of Libanius, who partially eclipsed his
fame, he was also considered as a
model for rhetoric (Amato 2009: 302), he
evidently managed to turn the peculiarities of his career into
established
features of sophist thinking—no doubt owing to deep-seated elective
affinities between the nature of
sophist teachings, back to the classical age,
and his own peculiar ‘nomadic’ life experiences.
However, and for the same reasons, Lucian also developed a strongly
nihilistic vision of the world, bequeathing
it as his stamp on later sophist
thinking and method. This was recognised by Photius, who claimed that
Lucian was
‘one of those people who take nothing seriously; while
satirising and ridiculing the beliefs of others, he does
not state his own
creed, unless one is to say that his creed is to believe in nothing’ (Photius
1994: 56). This
is confirmed by the inscription in a surviving manuscript of
his works, evidently written in his own hand: ‘ “I,
Lucian, expert in ancient
follies, wrote these works;/What men deem wise is foolish,/And there is no
ideal in
humanity;/For what you admire is laughable to others” ’ (Ibid.).
The special importance of Lucian for this book lies in his dialogue On
Dancing, written in order to give
verbal support to pantomime and still
today considered one of the most important direct sources on the nature of
ancient pantomime performances (Webb 2005: 4; Petrides 2011). This text
provides an excellent illustration of
sophist methods. It is written as an
encomium, or eloquent praise, which, however, can imperceptibly turn into
satire and parody; thus experts still argue whether the text should be fully
taken seriously, a question that
probably will forever remain undecided.26
Whatever the exact intentions and seriousness of the author, his subject
matter was
certainly close to Lucian’s heart, as he ‘clearly wrote much of
his work for public recitation’ (Branham 1989:
18).
Lucian’s defence of pantomime dancing is a perfect illustration both of
sophist techniques and their trick-ful
character. The dialogue is between
Lukinos, alter-ego of the author, who defends pantomime dancing, and the
philosopher Craton, who is presented as an austere, world-alien puritan,
who supports his attack on dancing by
referring to Plato and Aristotle.27
Lukinos/Lucian starts the counterattack at two levels. At one level, he
gathers positive support for his position
by emphasising the evidently
pleasing, life-asserting aspects of dancing and the pleasures associated with
watching such spectacles. For authority, he immediately brings in Homer
(Lucian
1952, no. 4). At the other level, he directly attacks the position of
the philosopher, charging him with a lack
of personal experience, given that
the philosopher admits not frequenting theatrical spectacles—as if one
would
need to be a practiced guest at brothels in order to formulate a
negative opinion about them. At this point, he
starts his long and detailed
apology of dancing by evoking an entire series of classical authorities about
its
positive effects and importance (Ibid.: nos. 7–61). The reader, over-
whelmed by such avalanche of rhetorical
eloquence, could be excused for
failing to notice that Lucian shifted the
perspective of the dialogue from
modern pantomime theatre to the general practice of dancing, as a supposed
anthropological constant. Philosophers problematised dancing as a
spectacle, implying an audience that is
purely watching, from the outside, a
performance on stage, without participating in the experience of dancing.
Classical praises of dancing, however, assumed participation in a taken-for-
granted manner, whether in the sense
of actually partaking in the activity of
dancing or as being part of the feast or ritual in which dancing was
performed by selected people. The long disquisition is only interrupted by
one seemingly innocuous but highly
significant comment, where Lucian
remarks that dancing is a very difficult profession—a shrewd and tricky
remark,
as it cognitively makes the professionalisation of dancing look
obvious while emotionally evoking sympathy for
the performers of this
difficult trade, putting the reader’s attention further to sleep concerning the
jumps not
simply between the past and the present, between mythical and
historical times, but between participatory
experience and mere spectacle.
At the end of this long discussion, having completely confused classical
ideals and modern practices, Lucian is
ready to lead his bewildered and dis-
oriented readers into a new avenue, ever closer to his own home of sophist
rhetoric, by arguing that thus dancing is first of all an imitative art, whose
main task is to illustrate, by
movements, the writings of poets. Here we are
back to the present, considering the highly specific genre of
pantomime
dancing as somehow capturing the very essence of dancing as an art and a
practice—a perspective from
which, once accepted, one can apply for
dancing the central sophistic criterion concerning language: clarity
(Nos.
61–3). Lucian claims that ‘it is essentials for [dancers], as for the orators, to
cultivate clearness, so
that everything which he presents will be intelligible,
requiring no interpreter’ (No. 62); he directly cites the
Cynic philosopher
Demetrius, who praised a dancer in the following words ‘ “I hear the story
that you are acting,
man, I do not just see it; you seem to me to be talking
with your very hands!” ’ (No. 63).28 At this point, Lucian is ready to
present and impose a full-scale definition of dancing to his audience: ‘The
chief occupation and the aim of
dancing [ … ] is impersonating, which is
cultivated in the same way by the rhetoricians, particularly those who
recite
these pieces that they call “exercises” ’ (No. 66); and his flabbergasted
audience, represented in the
dialogue by the hapless philosopher Craton,
fails to notice that Lucian, the trickster-illusionist-sophist, was
skilfully
playing with a series of lifeless, decontextualised arguments, twisting the
words until every bit of
discourse is denatured and transformed, ready to
assume a position in his own, prefabricated system of ideas.
This leads to a
conclusive definition of dancing: ‘In general, the dancer undertakes to
present and enact
characters and emotions’ (No. 67).
Once this level of confusion is reached, Lucian is ready to turn
completely around the original argument
concerning the immoral aspects of
(theatrical pantomime) dancing—and this is also the point when one might
entertain doubts whether he really believed in what he was saying or he
only played with taking his own argument
to the extreme: Dancing is not
simply pleasurable, but also uniquely useful (No. 71), as—while providing
pleasure—it can also illustrate the various good or bad passions, thus
helping to test the intellect concerning
the proper form of behaviour, and
inculcating the right kind of hatred against sinful and despicable behaviour.
Thus, far from being reprehensible, pantomime is an instrument of moral
philosophy, while being also pleasurable;
it is therefore simply perfect (No.
72). Lucian’s position identifies pantomime as the perfect representation of
the ideal of paideia in its age.
By the end of the dialogue Lucian was so confident in managing to
convince his audience that he even afforded a
publicity stunt—a
characteristic feature of sophists—for the city in which he lived for a long
time, Antioch on
the Orontes, a city reputed for its particular appreciation
of dancing (No. 76). Thus Lucian, so ready to
ridicule Greek customs, was
praising the customs of his chosen home—an environment, however, that
had a
particularly problematic history concerning ecstatic rituals, as in the
classical world, and even for Old
Testament prophets, it was famous for its
particularly cruel and bloody rituals of sacrifice, the river Orontes
being
reportedly so full of the blood of sacrificial victims during the Adonis and
Melqart festivities that it
was turning black.

Libanius of Antioch
Libanius (314–393) was born in Antioch on the Orontes, and—apart from
his education in Constantinople—spent most
of his life there, where he set
up his own school. He was a typical representative of the sophist
movement, given
the nature and range of his activities, including the
importance of his students, as well as his personal
characteristics. Owing
the abundance of his writings, which are also full of information concerning
his life and
activities, his work ‘affords the most detailed view of sophistic
practice in any time or place’ (Anderson 1993:
25; see also Cribiore 2007).
His students include St. Basil, the single most important of the Cappadocian
Church
Fathers, and St. John Chrysostom, the most famous Christian
preacher of his time29 ; even the emperor Julian the Apostate
considered
himself as indirectly having been taught by Libanius (Cribiore 2007: 142–
3).
Libanius was an official sophist teacher, having a great reputation and
thus
an important function within the empire, yet he loved to present
himself as a persecuted victim, filling his
writings with imagined frictions
with officialdom (Anderson 1993: 26; Molloy 1996: 13). As his voluminous
writings are full of complaints against his students not appreciating his
teachings or not showing up in time for
his lectures, he was evidently a
pedant bore; his ‘Second Oration’ is even devoted to refuting allegations of
being ponderous—in a typically ponderous manner. He was superstitious
and a believer in magic (Bonner 1932: 36,
42).
Given that Libanius was not a great devotee of the theatre, it is puzzling
why he wrote an oration (No. 64) in
its defence. In contrast to Lucian’s, the
work is not enjoyable or interesting; most of it is devoted to refuting
the
alleged negative impact of pantomime (like its corrupting the spectators, or
inciting to prostitution),
emphasising rather its purported positive moral
impact by demonstrating the punishment of immoral behaviour. It
contains,
however, one revealing argument (No. 112), which is often reproduced in
the secondary literature (see
Jory 2004: 156; Garelli 2007: 321–2): the
claim that pantomime, by presenting to a wide audience elements from
classical tragedies and mythologies, actually contributed to the
revitalisation of the Greek ideal of
paideia, and doing so ‘throughout the
Roman world it could bridge the gap between the educated elite and
the
plebs’ (Jory 2004: 156). While such statement, justifying the most
problematic forms of public
entertainment in the name of ‘culture’, seems
‘democratic’, it is misleading. Culture is meaningless without an
experience
of participation. Greek paideia, in its heydays, was not a bookish
‘knowledge’ of mythology,
tragedy or poetry but rather an active,
existential participation in all aspects of this culture, where the
central issue
was not ‘belief’ in the existence of the gods and the factual truth of their
activities (Veyne
1983) as much as a sharing of a series of stories that
helped to illuminate everyday existence and promote
personal integrity.
Compared with this, sophist education was a mere palliative for the loss of
native
traditions, replacing them with bits and pieces from a narrative that
had no meaning whatsoever beyond
occasionally titillating the senses
through pain and pleasure, by violence or eroticism, justified by the
presumption that all this ‘elevated’ its audience and brought about social
cohesion.

Choricius of Gaza
The Gaza school of sophists, led by Procopius and then Choricius (c. 490–
543), flourished not long before the
Islamic conquest, and was particularly
renowned for its eloquence (Penella 2009: 1–2). This area, perhaps
para-
doxically given its closeness to the Holy Land, was one of the lasts in the
region to convert to
Christianity, and the extent to which its main figures
were Christian is still debated. While previously it was
widely accepted that
both Procopius and Choricius were Christians (Ibid.: 5),
T.D. Barnes (1996)
has argued to the contrary, as the account on which the conversion of Gaza
by the 5th century
was based, the ‘Life of Porphyry’ by Mark the Deacon,
turned out to be fraudulent, and thus Gaza was not largely
Christian by the
times of Procopius and Choricius. This has significance concerning the
possible reasons why this
defence of mimes, called in Latin shorthand
Apologia Mimorum, but having as a programmatic title ‘On
Behalf of
Those Who Represent Life in the Theatre of Dionysus’ (Barnes 1996: 178),
was written.
Choricius is a highly enigmatic figure, given that very little is known
concerning the details of his life
(Pummer 2002: 245) and as—for some
strange reasons—any reference to him is absent in the extant and extensive
correspondence of his teacher and predecessor as head of the Gaza School,
Procopius (Amato 2009: 261). His
‘Oration in Defence of Mimes’ is a most
paradoxical text, given that mimes were uniformly considered
dis-
reputable, and even Lucian or Libanius only defended the more acceptable
pantomime. The defence was based on
a standard model: on the one hand,
such shows were simple and trivial matters, harmless pastimes, and only
dry
pedants would find them objectionable; on the other, through a typical
twist of argument, they were declared as
having a positive educational
value, as the committers of moral faults are punished at the end. However,
in order
to understand the nature of the error, such acts had to be reproduced
on the stage, and in detail.30 This text was therefore possibly
written as a
deliberate provocation (Barnes 1996: 178).
Choricius exerted a particularly strong influence on the teaching of
rhetoric in the 10th and 11th centuries,
during the first stage of the
Byzantine ‘humanist renaissance’, when he was revered for the educational
value of
his writings (Amato 2009: 264). In the Florilegium Marcianum,
the earliest and widely used educational
compendium, he is the leading
authority with 92 citations, followed by famed Cappadocian Church fathers
like
Basil of Caesarea (74 citations), and Gregory of Nazianzus (70
citations), and then the Old Testament (63
citations) (Ibid.: 267).

BYZANTINE HUMANISM AS THE REBIRTH OF SOPHISM AND

ITS IMPACT ON EUROPE

The First Wave of Byzantine Humanism

The first major wave of Byzantine humanism (9th to 11th centuries), often
called a ‘renaissance’ (Lemerle 1986),
took place in the period when
Byzantium, after the series of tectonic shocks represented by the wars with
the
Sassanide Empire, the Islamic expansion, and the iconoclast
controversies, regained some harmony, composure and
spirit. While it was
by no means a golden age, it was a period of stability and prosperity,
creating the impression that the (Christian) empire had survived the
vicissitudes more or less
intact.
The recuperation of ancient culture was part of this climate, and the
effort yielded major results. It is widely
accepted that much of what we can
now read from the ancient world is due to the Byzantine scribes who
transcribed
them in this period. Yet this revival had its significant problems
as well. Inevitably, any late period that
looks with awe at the achievements
of an earlier, dynamic and flourishing age, especially when it has the
distinct feeling of being an epigone, has a tendency to consider the distant
past as a glorious, lost golden age,
in its entirety. Thus the fundamental
sense of discernment, distinction and discrimination is suspended, replaced
by a search for authentic antiquity. In the Byzantium of the 9th and 10th
centuries this was further complicated
by the specific context, the highly
orthodox, puritanical leaning of the Eastern Orthodox Church. This meant
that
the central measuring rod concerning ancient texts, apart from their
authenticity, was their compatibility with
Christian doctrine. It implied a
distinct though in a way paradoxical preference by the most orthodox
collectors
of ancient texts, like Photius (c. 810–893), who was the patriarch
of Constantinople, or Arethas (c. 850–944),
the archbishop of Caesarea, for
texts that were religiously neutral. They were not much interested in the
greatest ancient philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, or they approached them
through a limited optic—focusing, for
example, on Aristotle’s logic.
The problems of this humanist revival were further exacerbated by its
main predecessor, the 4th-century sophist
Themistius (c. 317–388), who
first launched the call to ‘save Hellenism’ (Lemerle 1986: 55–9). Being a
contemporary of Libanius and Julian the Apostate, the call had a distinctly
pro-sophist and anti-Christian angle.
While Themistius was not the most
influential figure in the first wave of Byzantine humanism, his legacy
distinctly impinged upon the selection and reading of texts. The preference
for sophists was also underlined by
the closeness of the Cappadocian
Church Fathers to sophist ideas, through St. Basil having been a student of
Libanius.
The texts of Hermogenes were transmitted with particular care by
Photius, a great preserver of the writings of
the classics and central figure in
Byzantine literary humanism (Lemerle 1986). Photius had little interest in
Plato (Duffy 2002: 144) but was strongly influenced by Hermogenes
(Lemerle 1986: 226–7), whose writings he knew
‘perfectly’. This was also
true of his most highly regarded contemporary, Arethas (Ibid.: 295), who
had a higher
respect for Plato and played an important role in preserving
and transmitting his work (Duffy 2002: 144).

The Second Wave

The second wave, however, happened in the Palaiologan period (13th to
15th centuries), the stage of the terminal
decadence of Byzantium, which by
no means could be called a renaissance. The carriers of this second
humanism were considerably different from those of the first. While in the
9th and
10th centuries, during the great recovery, churchmen dominated, in
this period of decay emphasis shifted to
secular intellectuals, the Byzantine
‘learned men’. Both the social composition and the basic attitudes of this
court intelligentsia are of exceptional interest. Here central is the work of
Alexander Kazhdan, a Soviet émigré
who had acute insight into the
phenomenon, developing the controversial and problematic, yet intriguing
concept
of homo Byzantinus, with evident allusions to homo sovieticus, just
as the homo economicus
of mainstream neoclassical economic theory.31
As applied to every single aspect of the Byzantine world, the
‘intellectuals’ were radically divided (Kazhdan
1993, XV: 90–7). Over half
of them (55 percent) were ecclesiastics, of which again half were monks. A
significant
part of them, due to the nature of church and monastic
organisation, lived in the countryside. Most of the lay
intellectuals,
however, lived around the imperial courts, especially in Constantinople
(about two thirds of all).
They were officials, courtiers or confidants of
emperors, fully immersed in the unhealthy, inbred atmosphere of
court
politics and intrigues, becoming hallucinatory in a shrinking and decaying
world empire. While philosophy,
and intellectual life in general, assumes
and requires a degree of independence from everyday political concerns,
the
absence of universities deprived Byzantine intellectuals of a possible
autonomy; thus, the ‘impact of court
ethics on the literati was particularly
strong’ (Ibid.: 90). The result was an extreme degree of
instability in their
situation, a life dominated by envy, hatred, resentment and phobias of all
kinds, being
forced to live continuously under the threat of immediate and
utter ruin.
The intellectuals, however, were by no means passive victims of a
pervasive court society atmosphere. They were
part of the game,
contributing to its stabilisation and proliferation. Given the pervasive
politicisation of all
aspects of court life, and in general life in the capital,
their every gesture and word became saturated with
second meaning,
mannered accents and hidden allusions, where ‘nothing was explicitly
affirmed, and yet everything
was still comprehensible’ (Kazhdan 1995: 55).
Well versed, since long centuries, in sophistic techniques of
flattery, praise
and blame, and pervasive double-talk, intellectuals used the technique of
loud praise to imply
hidden dissent, managing to read everything between
the lines and saturating every word and gesture with a double
sense, where
the clever hiding and decoding of political or politically inspired messages
gave enough, though
perverted, satisfaction for all those involved to
continue endlessly, and with passionate interest, this
involving and
dangerous, but from the outside trivial and infantile, and in the long run
completely fruitless
game.32 If the main
figures of the first ‘humanist
renaissance’ can be respected for their efforts in transmitting the legacy of
antiquity, the intellectual atmosphere of this second ‘secular humanism’ can
be captured in the following
assessment of Byzantine culture: ‘ “The
Byzantine Empire remains almost the unique example of a highly civilised
state, lasting for more than a millennium, which produced hardly any
educated
writing which can be read with pleasure for its literary merit
alone” ’ (Romilly Jenkins, as in Baldwyn 1982:
19).

The Question of Byzantine ‘Philosophy’

Given the pervasive importance of sophistic rhetoric in Byzantium, the
question whether there was any philosophy
in the Byzantine world must be
posed. The legitimacy of such a question has been recognised, though only
recently, and the entire topic still ‘remains an unknown field’ (Ierodiakonou
2002: 1). The problem is the
complicated and delicate relationship, in the
Byzantine world, between theology, philosophy and sophistic.
Medieval
scholasticism, with St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, combined
theology and philosophy; and it is
also evident that the philosophies of
Plato or even Aristotle had basic theological aspects. However, the
distinction between philosophy and sophistic, so central for Plato, became
blurred during the Roman Empire, and
as a consequence already in the
early period of the Byzantium theology, philosophy and sophistic became
hopelessly confused. The Cappadocian Church Fathers constitute a
particularly clear case of intermingling as,
apart from being first
fundamentally Christian theologians, they were also philosophers
(Ierodiakonou 2002: 3),
well versed in Plato and Aristotle, but—being
educated, directly or indirectly, by sophists—they were also
strongly
imbued in sophistic. It is then understandable that the Byzantine
‘humanistic renaissance’ of the 9th
and 10th centuries treated sophists as
philosophers, and philosophers like Plato often as decadent sophists.
The interest in the Byzantine world for Plato and Aristotle was limited:
among the writings of Aristotle, it was
restricted to logics, and it was this
Aristotle that was transmitted to the Paris scholastics, seriously
side-
tracking the European revival of thinking already in the 12th century,33
while Plato was even more neglected, given that his
metaphysics was
considered as a competitor of Christian orthodoxy, and that the Symposium
was widely (mis)
read as the propagation of some kind of drunken orgy as
the philosophical way of life (Anderson 1993: 178–9).
Interest in Plato was
only rekindled by Michael Psellos, by far the most important Byzantine
thinker, who
considered himself ‘ “a lone philosopher in an age without
philosophy” ’ (Duffy 2002: 148), bringing philosophy “
‘back to life” ’
(Ibid.: 155); but who, driven by his insatiable curiosity and thirst for
knowledge, mingled
Plato’s ideas with Chaldean oracles and Hermetic
writings (Ibid.: 147–8).

Thus, in trying to answer the question whether there was philosophy, or

there were philosophers, in the Byzantine
world, we enter into one of those
quagmires with which anthropologists and sociologists have become all too
familiar, but historians and philosophers often feel themselves at a loss: it
all depends on what we mean by
philosophy, religion, or rituals, or
practically any other technical terms
necessary for analysis and
understanding, and yet it is hopelessly misleading and confusing if we try to
develop
an abstract and supposedly comprehensive definition, capturing the
‘essence’ of the phenomenon, which then,
supposedly, can be
indiscriminately applied to any time and place. In the Byzantine world,
there were no
universities, either in the medieval or the modern sense, but
neither the modern or the medieval European concept
of philosophy can be
applied as a measuring rod for the Byzantine world, and not simply because
the two are
radically different (medieval philosophy was inseparably
connected to theology, while modern philosophy, as
codified by Kant,
understands (and arguably misunderstands) itself in radical opposition to
theology); but
because both fundamentally, and in ways that are still all but
completely ignored, came under the sway of very
confused and confusing
Byzantine positions.
Here we enter into the heart of the exchange of ideas between eastern
and western Christianity during the long
centuries of the schism: a
particularly clear and significant case of intercivilisational
misunderstanding. This
is another general theme of vital importance for
comparative sociology, hardly touched by any classic figure, yet
cannot be
ignored.

East-West Intercivilisational Misunderstandings: Stages in the

Latin Reception of Greek Ideas
The problematic nature of the idea of that the Renaissance was a return to
‘Greco-Roman’ antiquity can be best
understood by realising that
Latin/western European thinking developed, for not just centuries but well
over a
millennium, through waves of impact exerted by Greek/Byzantine
thinking. According to a recent survey by Ebbesen
(2002), the first such
wave took place in the first centuries, after the Roman conquest of Greece
and the rise of
the Roman Empire, while the second is connected to the shift
of imperial centre to Constantinople and the
collapse of the western empire
(c. 350–525). The third wave happened after the dark ages in both East and
West,
in the context of the first universities and the rise of scholasticism in
the West, with Paris as centre, due to
its being the point of intersection of
two roads by which the work of Aristotle was transmitted from the
Byzantium: the Arabic conquest of Spain, and the Frank-Norman Crusades.
The exchange of cultural influences between the eastern and western
parts of the Mediterranean, or between Greek
and Roman cultures, was
always a one-sided affair, but never a pure linear transmission. Greek
culture was
recognised as being more advanced; many Roman
philosophers, even emperors, for a long time wrote in Greek; but
Greek
culture was also considered to be decadent, by republican Romans just as
by St. Paul, and so this influence
was also resisted, by pagan Latins as by
Roman Christians. Paradoxically, but also understandably, the cultivated
sense of superiority of ‘Greeks’ (who in Byzantine times came to call
themselves ‘Romans’, rendering possible a
reassertion of Greek ethnic
identity in the late Byzantium) only increased with the decay of their own
Byzantine civilisation and the advancement of western thinking due to the
universities, which they simply pretended to ignore, for long (Ebbesen
2002: 21–2). This resulted in an extremely
confusing situation by the
second half of the 14th century: just when Byzantine civilisation entered a
state of
terminal decline, with its intellectual life becoming increasingly
dominated by a particularly repulsive kind of
court sophistic, western
scholars and humanist intellectuals, inspired by the Renaissance and no
longer satisfied
with the scholastic learning characteristic of the universities
—partly due to excessive church control, and
partly the to defective nature
of the Aristotelianism that was transmitted there, both through the
Byzantium and
the Arabic world—started to develop an irrepressible thirst
and desire for classical Greek scholarship,
especially the thinking of Plato.
Due both to a lack of knowledge in Greek and the absence of manuscript
sources,
they turned to the Byzantine world, considering—or rather
misrecognising, mis-construing—the cynical Byzantine
sophists as great
Greek sages, clinging on their boring, pedant, bookish knowledge as the
great wisdom coming
from the cradle of classical civilisation.
This misunderstanding had a fundamental impact on the Renaissance,
largely contributing to the schism of European
culture that took place with
Protestantism. In this development the link between humanism, comedy and
mime-play,
rooted in the ages-long connections between pantomime and
sophistic, played a major role.
It is this effective history that must now be reconstructed in some detail.
 Transmitting, Receiving and
Nurturing the Byzantine Spirit
5  

TRANSMITTING THE BYZANTINE SPIRIT: CHRYSOLORAS

AND THE HIJACKING OF RENAISSANCE ‘HUMANISM’

The figure who transmitted Byzantine humanism to Europe was Manuel

Chrysoloras (c. 1350–1415). While the
significance of his activity is widely
recognised, it is far more controversial to assess the exact nature and
especially the value of his contribution, and the reasons for such a
resounding effect.
For his acolytes, Chrysoloras’s arrival was a divine gift for Italy, close
to being credited for outright
sparking the Renaissance. Thus, for Leonardo
Bruni, his best student in Florence (Cammelli 1941: 50), a main
protagonist
of ‘civic humanism’ (Baron 1966, Gilbert 1965), he ‘had single-handedly
revived in Italy the study of
Greek letters which had been dead for seven
hundred years’ (Harris 1995: 120–1). His only surviving image was
compared to Aristotle (Rollo 2002: 31), though without reason. Coluccio
Salutati, another central figure of
Florentine civic humanism, who did
everything in order to secure the arrival of Chrysoloras in Florence
(Berschin
1988: 269–70; Geanakoplos 1976: 201), in his letters interpreted
the first name ‘Manuel’, derived from Hebrew
Immanuel (‘God with us’),
as alluding to the Messiah (Cammelli 1941: 31). The most eloquent praises
were heaped
on him by his closest disciple, Guarino da Verona, whose
veneration of Chrysoloras’s work and person bordered on
the fanatical
(Baxandall 1965: 190). According to him, Chrysoloras was comparable to
the wise men of antiquity
(Cammelli 1941: 134–5), even the seven sages
(Fera 2002: 11), being ‘ “the restorer of learning (lettere)
in Italy, which
previously was submerged (avvolta) into the darkness of ignorance” ’ (as in
Sabbadini
1896: 14–5).1 In the mind
of Guarino, Chrysoloras assumed
superhuman, quasi divine features (Cammelli 1941: 135).
Contemporary scholarship by no means shares this evaluation. Far from
lecturing on philosophy, as expected,
Chrysoloras’s interest was restricted
to teaching the Greek language, especially grammar, and translating works
from Greek to Latin (Fera 2002: 16); though even here the number of works
that are still recognised to have been
translated by him are steadily
dwindling (Ibid.: 15–6), given that his name
was insinuated in a number of
translations that turned out not to have been his (Rollo 2002: 83). His only
book,
entitled Erotemata (Questions), is a work of simplification, which,
according to James Hankins, can be
best characterised in terms of the
intentionally anachronistic and certainly unflattering acronym FAQ:
Frequently
Asked Questions (Hankins 2003: 248). Indicating the real
scholastic merit of Chrysoloras, his name is not
mentioned in an extensive
list of important thinkers in the Palaiologan period (13th–15th centuries)
(Ierodiakonou 2002: 5–6), assumed as being one of those unnamed
Byzantine ‘learned men’ whom Italian Renaissance
humanists mistook for
philosophers (Ebbesen 2002: 24).
In our day it is increasingly realised that there is a puzzle around
Chrysoloras; that his figure carries
an enigma (Fera 2002: 15–6; Rollo
2002: 34). The solution of this puzzle goes a long way in understanding the
most perplexing aspect of the Renaissance—the breaking of its spirit at its
highest moment. If Chrysoloras
certainly cannot be credited with having
sparked the Renaissance, maybe he should be charged with initiating its
end.

Enigmas surrounding Chrysoloras begin with the absence of any

information about his life before his coming to
Europe; in the rhetorical
terms used by his main biographer, we face the ‘void’ (vuoto), or ‘pitch
darkness’ (tenebre fitte) (Cammelli 1941: 25–6) concerning his life. All we
know is that he was a
high-ranking functionary in the Byzantine diplomatic
service, having the status of being a ‘friend of the
Emperor’ (Zorzi 2002:
91). However, he did not have a precise title: while in his later
correspondence he calls
himself a miles (meaning knight), earlier he simply
used the title dominus (sir) (Ibid.: 95–7).
Concerning his family background, there are more rumours and
disinformation than solid facts. Claims were
circulating in Renaissance
Italy—whose ultimate source could only have been Chrysoloras himself—
that he was
descended from an old noble family, even that on his mother’s
side he had royal blood, but there is not much
substance behind such claims
(Cammelli 1941: 21–2). The etymology of his name is instructive, as it
simply means
‘maker of golden belts’ (Zorzi 2002: 91), or goldsmith. One
of his ancestors managed to join the imperial
bureaucracy in the first half of
the 14th century (Ibid.), just shortly before he was born—which not only
fails
to represent a distinguished lineage (a fact that mattered a lot at the
given time and place) but indicates that
his family’s ascent was connected
to the single most disruptive period of Byzantine history.
The most important information concerning his early life is that—in
spite of allegations to the contrary—he did
not lead a school in
Constantinople and did not publish a book before his coming to Italy
(Ciccolella 2008: 108).
Thus, far from being a distinguished scholar who
decided to come to Italy in order to bring the enlightenment of
Greek
wisdom to the barbaric Latins, his status as a scholar was rather an outcome
of his visit.
This is further supported by evidence regarding his first visits.
Chrysoloras
first came to Venice in 1390/1 as member of an imperial
diplomatic mission, trying to secure western help against
the Turks (Ullman
1963: 122; Rollo 2002: 45). By accident he met Roberto Rossi, a student of
Coluccio Salutati,
who knew practically no Greek and who sent most
enthusiastic reports about Chrysoloras to his teacher. There are
a number of
reasons why Rossi could have been so much attracted to Chrysoloras: He
spoke Latin quite well
(Ciccolella 2008: 100–1), which is not surprising for
a diplomat; his speech was eloquent—later gaining the
reputation that he
‘enchanted anybody who listened to him’ (Sabbadini 1896: 14)—which is
not surprising for a
Byzantine functionary well versed in rhetoric; and,
according to a characterisation of Guarino—which in this
respect should
carry some weight—he had a sociable character, readily smiling and loving
to crack jokes, even to
the point of hilarity, though never at the expense of
the ‘natural dignity’ of his personality (Cammelli 1941:
134). All this
explains that he blew a relatively inexpert Florentine humanist off his feet,
projecting the aura
of a Greek sage.
Thus, when about five years later Chrysoloras returned to Venice, Rossi
and his fellow student Iacopo Angeli da
Scarperia (called Scarperia) were
running head over heels to Venice in order to invite Chrysoloras, in the
name
of their teacher, Coluccio Salutati, to Florence (Cammelli 1941: 127–
31). This led to an extended correspondence
between Chrysoloras and
Salutati about his possible visit to Florence, where the central point was that
Salutati,
who was chancellor of Florence in between 1375 and 1406, thus a
major authority figure, committed himself to
inviting Chrysoloras, whom he
had never personally met (Berschin 1988: 269). This implies that it became
impossible for a Florentine, or for an Italian in general, to recognise that
Chrysoloras was not the great Greek
sage he was presumed to be. In fact, a
reason why so little is known about his life, including his stay in Italy,
is
that contemporary accounts were dominated by what people wanted to see
and not what actually happened (Hankins
2002; see also Hankins 2003:
246), owing to the ‘incredible fascination’ which the Byzantine East had for
Italians in the period (Weiss 1977: 284).
In 1397 Chrysoloras accepted the invitation, after much solicitation and
prodding—and a significant raising of
his stipend, in order to defeat
counteroffers from Milan—agreeing to visit Florence in order to teach
Greek for
five years (Rollo 2002: 45). During the three effective years of
his teaching, he indeed instructed an entire
generation of scholars, who
would have a crucial impact on Florentine and Italian culture in the
Quattrocento—though this formation did not happen in the way it was
supposed to. The group included, apart from
Bruni, Rossi and Scarperia,
Pier Paolo Vergerio, who came from Padua, and Palla Strozzi, son of a most
illustrious Florentine patrician family (Cammelli 1941: 50–8). In the
enormous enthusiasm for the possibility of
learning Greek from a Byzantine
scholar, it was not realised that Chrysoloras was teaching something quite
different from what Italian humanists were hoping for.
The inter-cultural and inter-civilisational exchange of ideas is often an
exercise is systematic misunderstanding. The humanist revival in Greek
thinking and language was started by
Petrarch, and for a very specific
reason: he became disillusioned with the version of Aristotle taught in the
scholastic universities, seeing it as relying excessively on logic. As a
consequence of the Byzantine imprint on
medieval scholasticism, it came to
undermine religiosity at the universities (Hankins 2003: 83–4). Following
some
hints in St. Augustine, Petrarch arrived at the idea that Plato’s
philosophy could provide a more adequate source
of Christian theology. He
therefore started to search, in southern Italy, for a scholar who would be
competent in
Greek and ready to translate Plato.
This is where a comedy of errors began, as the person he found,
Barlaam of Seminara, while indeed an important
scholar (discussed, in
contrast to Chrysoloras, in Ierodiakonou 2002), was not Calabrian but was
rather formed in
Constantinople (Fyrigos 2002: 19–20). He therefore could
not precisely understand the intentions of Petrarch and
he partly had an
agenda of his own, including his conversion to western Christianity in 1341,
and therefore
Petrarch’s undertaking did not make much headway (Berschin
1988: 264–5). Barlaam suggested a student of his,
Leontius Pilates, to do
the work of translation, but Leontius was not competent enough.
Chrysoloras evidently became aware of this affair and pitched his own
teaching and attitudes accordingly, in
order to have a maximal impact—as
he too evidently had an agenda on his own. He started with a conscious
denigration of Petrarch’s undertaking (Fera 2002: 15), based on the idea
that knowledge of Greek language is
identical with competence in
philosophy—a meaningless and dogmatic position, yet one which, once
repeated enough,
did eventually become an irremovable cornerstone of
Renaissance thinking; on the other hand, he favoured the
imposition of a
method of translation radically different from the one followed by Barlaam
and Pilates. While
they chose to translate word by word, an idea then not
without its own reasons, Chrysoloras opted for the
rhetorically much more
satisfying model of free translation (Fera 2002: 16; Rollo 2002: 73). At
every level of
his activity Chrysoloras promulgated the image of an
absolute and radical break with the past (Berschin 1988:
274–6). Against
this effort, as a ‘rock of unshaken continuity’, stood Nicholas of Cusa
(Ibid.: 276); and while
the problem was eventually also perceived by
Alberti, it was then too late.

The imposition of a discontinuity with the programme of Petrarch helped to

divert the attention of Florentines
from the fact that what Chrysoloras
delivered was radically different from what they were looking for.
Humanists
in Italy wanted to learn Greek, to be sure, but only as a means
toward their central aim, which was to become
acquainted with the classics,
primarily, Plato. Chrysoloras, however, following the millennial sophist
tradition
to which he belonged, was interested in language for its own sake.2
Keenly aware of what was expected of him, he started a
translation of the
Republic, one of Plato’s most important and eagerly
awaited works, but
after 1400 left it for his Pavia students to complete, and further Plato
translations were not
forthcoming from him (Cammelli 1941: 121).
The history of translations of Plato’s works in the Quattrocento is a
most interesting and revealing one, though
the facts are little known and
their significance even less understood. Given that Chrysoloras was not
interested
in Plato, his best student, Leonardo Bruni stepped in, and—no
doubt under the guidance of his master—chose the
Symposium. Given that
this was the most controversial Platonic dialogue in Byzantium, on which
the
problems related to Plato’s reputation had been based for many
centuries, one might wonder about Bruni’s exact
reasons. At any rate, his
translation reveals two major problems. First, his Greek was far from being
perfect,
thus the translation was ‘free’ beyond the remit of Chrysoloras’s
methodology, with entire passages being omitted
or shortened (Hankins
1990). On the other hand, Bruni clearly and purposefully left out or
embellished all those
passages that alluded to homoerotic relations, which
were controversial. One might consider this a simple act of
prudence;
however, this also raises the distinct possibility that such sections might
have been translated and
then circulated privately, in a restricted and
confidential inner circle. While there in no information about
this point, we
should be careful in looking for traces where the effect of such a reading
could be
perceived, especially in connection with the rebirth of comedy.
The three years spent by Chrysoloras in Florence were not sufficient to
train competent Greek translators. Their
main impact was thus to raise
expectations about the Greek language, and the eventual translations of
Plato’s
works to an ever higher pitch. The next scholar who was expected to
fill the gap was George of Trebizond (1396–c.
1472), who indeed
completed, among others, a translation of Plato’s Laws. However, while his
competence in
Greek was beyond doubt, his translations proved to be
extremely problematic (Monfasani 1976: 76–9), particularly
as far as the
Laws were concerned (Hankins 1990, II: 429–32). It was not only a
‘careless condensation’ of
the text in many places but often the meaning of
the text was ‘maliciously distorted’, as the glaring errors
littering it were
‘doubtless intentional’ (Ibid.: 429). That is, Trebizond occasionally inserted
into the text
authoritarian overtones that were not there in the original—so
that he could then complain about Plato’s
excessive interference with
personal freedom (as, for example, in translating 643C; see Ibid.). In other
cases
the translation simply reversed Plato’s meaning. Thus where Plato
argued that pleasure should only be experienced
by degrees, so that one
could develop proper self-control with respect to such experiences,
Trebizond ‘absurdly’
translated this to say that citizens should immerse
themselves in excessive pleasures so that they could overcome
it (see 643A,
as in ibid.: 430), making Plato into a Gnostic.3 In his translation of Laws
656C, Trebizond went even
further in distorting the meaning, as he outright
‘reverses prohibition of cultural licence so that it becomes a
positive
exhortation to learn the ways of depravity through choric dancing’
(Ibid.:
431). The significance of the matter can hardly be exaggerated. The
thinkers and poets of the Italian
Renaissance had a naïve, child-like zeal for
knowledge, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to finally read Plato,
clinging
on the words of the Byzantine ‘sages’, looking for instruction, knowledge
and truth. They could have no
idea of how badly they were deceived, and
the impact of such distortions of Plato’s ideas, at the moment when
interest
in hearing them was greatest, with effects lasting up to the present day, was
immense. Over time
corrections were certainly noted, but by then the errors
had been disseminated and codified, spread and
multiplied, both openly and
secretly, and thus the genuine interest in the revitalisation of learning was
thoroughly compromised. The agenda was set for the schismatic
renunciation of all forms of ‘decadent’, ‘pagan’
knowledge characteristic of
the Reformation.
Trebizond first came to Italy in 1416, was teaching for long periods in
Venice, and in 1438 even came to Florence
but only stayed for a short time.
Florentines had to wait more than half a century to find somebody who
could
continue teaching the Greek language and thus to finally educate
proper translators of Plato. This person was
Marsilio Ficino, born in 1433,
who was raised from early childhood to become such a translator and who
would
eventually be taught by John Argyropoulos (1415–1487), chair of
Greek in Florence shortly after his coming to
Italy in 1456. However, at that
moment a further and fatal twist was added to the story. Just when Ficino’s
teaching of Greek had been completed, he was advised, still under the
inscrutable authority of the current
Byzantine sage, that before being
engaged in translating Plato, he should rather start with something even
more
important: the texts of Hermes Trismegistos, who lived before Moses.
These texts therefore supposedly contained
the oldest, most authoritative
and most important revelations to mankind. Thus, even before Plato’s
works were
translated, their placement on the horizon of Gnostic Neo-
platonism was secured.

While pretending to fulfil the expectations of his Florentine hosts,

Chrysoloras moved ahead with his own agenda,
the teaching of Greek
grammar for its own sake. This, however, given the enormous enthusiasm
for his arrival and
the significant commitment of the Florentine authorities,
was somehow never realised, with misunderstanding
persisting until our
own day: ‘Florence still fails to realise the significance of the operation
completed by the
Byzantine’ (Fera 2002: 17).
Still, such a failure of recognition is surprising, as the divergence
between the interests of Chrysoloras and
the Florentines could not have
been greater: Latin humanists had no interest in Byzantine literature, only in
classical Greek thought. Chrysoloras, on the other hand, was not interested
in the Tuscan Renaissance, only in
the type of Latin scholasticism Petrarch
and his allies wanted to escape (Monfasani 2004, I: 10). Chrysoloras was
not teaching philosophy at all, he was not even a thinker, as his instruction
was restricted to the ‘grey
quotidianity of the fundamental, but not
particularly exalting role of a
schoolmaster’ (Fera 2002: 17). The extremely
particular and limited nature of his agenda can be best seen in the
fact that,
just when Italian humanists were waiting to receive from him the translation
of Plato’s dialogues, he
spent his time instead in correcting the use of Greek
by classical Latin authors and instructed his students to
do the same. His
justification was always the same: Western scholars are simply worthless in
comparison to
Byzantines, owing to their deficient knowledge of Greek,
and tedious preliminaries are necessary. Thus, Guarino,
evoking
Chrysoloras, was arguing that, as the West lost the Greek language, ‘ “truly
learned men and the most
important sciences also disappeared among you
[Latins]” ’ (Hankins 2003: 81), as if thinking and philosophy could
be
reduced to mere linguistics (Cammelli 1941: 15). The first Italian to
challenge the authority of the Byzantine
dotti would be Poliziano, in his
inaugural lecture of 4 November 1485—the first time a ‘Latin’ would be
nominated to a chair of Greek ahead of Byzantines (Ibid.: 5ff). Poliziano
was the first Italian scholar who was
as good as the Byzantines (Hankins
2003: 85), but by then it was way too late. The entire discipline of philology
established by him was not a western form of knowledge but an instrument
to promote his own aims; and it was
this undertaking that was then further
transmitted by his students, Guarino, Vittorino da Feltre, and
Filelfo (Fera
2002: 17; see also Rollo 2002: 74). The person who would first attempt to
separate, consciously,
classical Greek from the Byzantine optic taught by
Chrysoloras would be Erasmus (Monfasani 2004, I: 12). It was
only ‘in the
late Renaissance, when direct Byzantine influence had ceased’, that
Aristotle’s Poetics would
be discovered, as it failed to fit ‘into the
Byzantine rhetorical curriculum dominated by Hermogenes’ (Ibid.:
12–3).
But by then the Reformation was already under way. It was this Byzantine
basis of philosophy and
hermeneutics that would be challenged, without full
success, by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Heidegger and also
by Nietzsche,
who also managed to intuit the connection between the problems of
philology and the rebirth of
theatre in Europe.
Instead of promoting the translation of Plato, Chrysoloras was rather
interested, both directly and through his
students, in translating the works of
Hellenistic prose writers, especially the texts of Lucian and Plutarch
(Hankins 2003: 247–8; Marsh 1994; Mattioli 1980: 39; Sabbadini 1896: 14;
Burke 1996: 259). His translations of
Plutarch, in particular, would remain
standard, up to the new project inaugurated by Jean Paul (Berschin 1988:
271).

Chrysoloras succeeded in hijacking, unperceived, the revival of learning in

the Renaissance, as he relied on a
positive motivation, inculcating in his
devotees the siege mentality of the chosen people, ingraining in them the
idea of ‘being a group of elect, the devotees of classical paideia, and the
only guardians of an ancient
and glorious heritage’ (Ciccolella 2008: 102).
In this light one might wonder about the ultimate motives of
Chrysoloras—
a question that has indeed recently been posed in the relevant literature. At
a simple level, the central interest of Chrysoloras might have been, at least
originally, to procure
western help for saving the Byzantine world (Hankins
2003: 244)—something easily compatible with his basic
occupation as a
diplomat. At a more fundamental level, given that the fate of the Byzantine
world by 1400 was
clearly hopeless—the first major Ottoman siege of
Constantinople taking place exactly in 1397, the year in which
Chrysoloras
started teaching in Florence—the aim might have rather been to try to save
at least Byzantine culture
(Hankins 2002). However, given the nature of the
entire configuration around Chrysoloras, taking together
personal, political
and cultural factors, one might wonder about an even more basic, and
problematic aim, which
may have been to transmit the spirit of the
Byzantine world to the West. Something similar has been argued
recently,
even if perhaps without realising its full sense: he ‘created the conditions in
which the Byzantium,
coming its inevitable end, could transpose
(trasfondesse) its spirit to the humanistic culture’ (Rollo
2002: 85).
Surveying the trajectory of Chrysoloras after he left Florence in 1400
from this angle, including the effects of
his activities, one indeed gains the
distinct impression that he was quite consciously working on transmitting
this spirit. In 1400, in spite of his hosts’ urging him to remain, he left
Florence to take up service under the
duke of Milan, and he was supposed
to teach at the University of Pavia (Cammelli 1941: 112–6). However, just
at
that time an epidemic of the plague broke out there, and the university
was transferred to Piacenza until 1403.
The records about the activities of
Chrysoloras in Pavia are extremely meagre, and he certainly did not teach
in
Piacenza (Cammelli 1941: 115). His only identified student in Pavia was
Uberto Decembrio, from Vigevano, with
whom he completed the
translation of Plato’s Republic and whose sons, Angelo and Pier Candido,
would be
Guarino’s main students in Ferrara (Ibid.: 116–23). Their works
also became central examples of extravagant
rhetoric (Burke 1996: 258–9).
In 1403 Chrysoloras went from Pavia to Venice, and after a short stay
he returned to Constantinople, where he
would remain until 1407. Yet this
short stay in Venice was sufficient for him to take on Guarino da Verona,
seemingly out of the blue, as his star student—even though Guarino was
then close to age thirty—whom he took
along to Constantinople.
Chrysoloras returned with his book, and soon converted to western
Christianity. Both
facts, and especially their conditions and characteristics,
are extremely puzzling and can be understood only as
being part of
‘spreading the Byzantine spirit’. Concerning the latter, the sincerity of such
a conversion, so
late in life and after so many back and forth movements, is
difficult to accept, especially as Chrysoloras would
spend much the rest of
his life accompanying the Emperor Manuel III of Trebizond on his various
visits to Europe.
Concerning the former, the book was by no means an
original piece of work but rather a freely adapted compendium
of a work by
Theodosius (Ciccolella 2008: 110), itself a compendium, and which would
then be used as a model for
a series of similar works, often with the same
title, used to teach Greek in
the Quattrocento. One of these was a
particularly simplistic version of this already simplified compendium, done
by Guarino, which would displace Chrysoloras’s ‘original’ in the teaching
of Greek in the universities of
northern Italy, resulting in a ‘complete tangle
(groviglio)’ (Rollo 2002: 78), where the ‘original’ and
its copies would be
hopelessly confused, and thus the western teaching of Greek language, the
foundation of
‘humanist’ culture in Europe for centuries to come, would be
based on the compendium of a compendium of a
compendium—with a
level of ‘scholarship’ and the ensuing amount of boredom that is anybody’s
guess.
The practice of using compendia of compendia was not limited to
Chrysoloras and his students. When Theodore Gaza
taught Greek in Ferrara
in the 1440s, he used the Hypotheses of Libanius, or the short summaries
Libanius
inserted at the beginning of his Orations.4

CAPTURING THE BYZANTINE SPIRIT: GUARINO AS

EDUCATOR

Chrysoloras was an elusive figure; literally a Byzantine ghost who roamed

through Italy, hardly leaving visible
traces. His fleeting impact was
transformed into solid reality by his students; first of all by Guarino da
Verona.

Guarino da Verona: educating the ‘educator’

By now it should not be surprising that hardly anything is known about
Guarino’s life prior to his emergence from
the shadows in 1403, when
Chrysoloras took him as his student to Constantinople. He was born around
1374, his
father being Bartolomeo Guarini, a blacksmith, and was orphaned
at the age of ten. He dropped his family name,
calling himself simply
Guarino da Verona, but his children and descendants, already in his
lifetime, returned to
the use of the family name. He moved to Venice in the
last years of the 14th century and somehow managed to forge
excellent
links with some of the main Venetian aristocratic houses, especially the
Giustinians, while also
networking well in Padua, where he began his
university studies relatively late in life. His main friends were
Pier Paolo
Vergerio (1370–1445), Sicco Polenton (c. 1376–c. 1448), and Ognibene
della Scola (c. 1370–1429). The
first two were students of Conversini da
Ravenna, and evidently Guarino, just like Vittorino da Feltre
(1373/8–
1446), became at some point a private student of Conversini, while all of
them were also influenced by
Gasparino Barzizza, who was associated with
the University of Padua in the 1390s, though he would assume a full
teaching position only in 1407.

Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna

Giovanni Conversini (or Conversino) da Ravenna (1343–1408)5 was a
‘famous vagrant teacher (maestro vagante)’ of the
Renaissance (Sabbadini
1896: 5), among ‘the most enigmatic and least studied
humanists of the
early Italian Renaissance’ (Eaker and Kohl 1989: 1), considered as the most
important Paduan
humanist with Vergerio (Kohl 1980: 39). His life history
(about which we have abundant knowledge, given that in
1400 he wrote an
autobiography, one of the first of the genre) is most extraordinary with
regard to both the
variety and character of its events (see Eaker 1989: 1–8;
Kohl 1980: 13–39). His father, Conversino da Frignano,
a native of the
mountainous area south of Modena, became court doctor of the king of
Hungary, and moved to Buda.
However, as his mother died soon after his
birth, the infant was moved back to Italy, where he was raised by
relatives,
helped mostly by his uncle, Tommaso dei Frignani. Tommaso was a
Franciscan, who was at first almost
excommunicated as a heretic owing to
his close ties to the radical wing of the order, the ‘Spirituals’ (Eaker and
Kohl 1989: vii–viii), but eventually becoming a high-ranking official of the
order. He repeatedly helped his
nephew out of the various messes into
which he had gotten himself. According to then established practice,
Conversini became engaged at the age of ten to Margherita Furlan, a girl
not much older than he (Kohl 1980: 14).
As his father-in-law died when he
was about 13, he and his young ‘wife’ started to live on their own, and in
1357/8 their only son was born. Not surprisingly, the couple lived miserably
and quarrelled often, so Conversini
used the help of his uncle to go to study
in Bologna, where he had a brilliant academic career and in 1363 passed
the
examination to qualify as a notary. Being talented as well as precocious, he
was charged with teaching
duties, becoming something like a go-between
of students and teachers and also a ‘guru’ of the goliardic student
life, part
and even instigator of all kind of pranks; thus he became a par excellence
liminal trickster figure.
However, as he lacked money, he could not
continue his studies and instead travelled extensively, supporting
himself
with odd jobs, including a notary position in Florence in 1368, which he left
after a few months (Kohl
1980: 16). During all this time his wife and son,
left back in Ravenna, remained in the most dire straits. In
1372 his wife
came after him but soon died from to exhaustion and illness. Her relatives
held Conversini
responsible for the utter neglect of his family, so much so
that Margherita’s uncle attempted to poison him. As
his verbose
autobiography intimates, this family tragedy caused him great remorse
(Conversini 1989: 97–9); it is
a recurrent feature of trickster figures that
they immediately use the consequences of the harm they have done to
others to indulge in excesses of self-pity, demanding that they should be
consoled, given their bad
feelings about their ill deeds. Eventually, after
repeated talks with his uncle, Conversini proclaimed a
conversion
experience in 1374, after which—allegedly—he lived a most chaste and
pious life. However, one has
every reason to doubt the sincerity and
effectiveness of this experience, as the facts of Conversini’s subsequent
life
belie its seriousness. He continued to father children with different partners,
moving continuously from
place to place, evidently always accepting the
best offer and being engaged in
continuous litigation with family members,
students, and employers. Thus, soon after his ‘conversion’, he married
a
rich widow and fathered a son called Israel, and, a few years later, in Udine
(1389–1391/2), he fathered two
children from a different relationship.
Udine was a city he would be obliged to leave soon, owing to conflicts
with
the parents of his students, thus—‘more by accident than by design’—in
April 1392 he ‘found himself in
Padua’ (Kohl 1980: 23).
At a certain point in his endless travels Conversini struck up friendships
with members of the Giustinian
family—a prestigious patrician family in
Venice. This might have been related to the writing of his first works,
a
1377 manuscript about suffering and the misery of the human condition (De
miseria humane vite) (Kohl
1975: 355), which has survived only in
fragments, and a 1378 dialogue. These drummed up sympathy and
compassion
for the sufferings he endured in his life, while they also
purported to proclaim a particularly austere and pious
morality, full of
misogyny (woman is an ‘untamed animal’, much ‘capable of trickery’, full
of disease; Conversini
1989: 99–103), hatred of children (whose worth is
shown by being ‘born of lust and carnal impurity’; Ibid.: 131),
and sexuality
(which is ‘shameful’; Ibid.: 141); in short, a philosophy of hostility to life
and thus
nihilism.6 In 1388, Marco
Giustinian would help him to a post in a
grammar school in Venice—a post he would lose within a year owing to
conflicts with his first son, which ended up in a tribunal; while in 1392
Giustinian procured a teaching position
for him in Padua, where Conversini
would stay until 1404.
This would be, in intellectual and academic terms, the most important
stage of his life, where he would have, as
students, Vergerio and Polenton,
and eventually, though probably only as private students, Vittorino da Feltre
and Guarino. He would also compose further books: in 1396 a collection of
ponderous moral fables about the vices
of court life, in 1399 a self-defence
(Apologia) against other courtiers, and in 1400 his autobiography.
Even
more importantly, from 1400 onwards he assumed diplomatic duties,
evidently profiting from the complicated
and highly conflict-ridden
relations between Padua and Venice, given that by then he had managed to
network
himself into the aristocratic elite of both cities. It might have been
because of such connections that
Conversini managed to introduce his
private student, Guarino, to Chrysoloras, helping to arrange his trip to
Constantinople.
In 1404, when Conversini’s remuneration was to be cut due to the war
between Padua and Venice, he left for Venice
and started to write his most
influential book, Dragmalogia, devoted to episodes in the history of Venice,
which is considered as one of the most important documents of Paduan
humanism (Kohl 1980: 39). The book is set up
as an answer to the
(rhetorical) question of whether it is better to live in Venice or in Padua,
surprisingly
coming out in favour of Padua. He would also have as students
Leonardo and Marco di Bernardo Giustinian and
Francesco Barbaro, who
would play central roles in the humanism of the Quattrocento.

Gasparino Barzizza
About the early life Barzizza (c. 1360–1431), just as in the case of
Chrysoloras and Guarino and in radical
contrast to Conversini, we know
next to nothing. He was born around 1360 near Bergamo; he would pretend
to belong
to the fringes of the nobility but was probably only faking it and
would start his educational career
surprisingly late (Mercer 1979: 4). He
began his university studies in Pavia in 1387, thus at the age of almost
thirty, graduating in 1392, and soon thereafter became associated with
Padua (Ibid.: 5–6). The time and place is
extremely significant, as this was
exactly the moment when, as part of his endless peregrinations, Conversini
happened to be there. Barzizza became closely associated with Conversini’s
students, just as he also became a
confidant of Conversini’s contacts among
the Paduan and Venetian nobility, evidently receiving from Conversini
some lessons concerning the way to move ahead in life and in the world. At
any rate, in the 1390s Barzizza took
up a notary career and married into the
nobility. He started to teach in Pavia in 1403/4, having as his student
Panormita (Mercer 1979: 133), who would gain considerable notoriety after
publishing in 1425 The
Hermaphrodite, arguably most obscene piece of
Latin poetry ever written,7 whose translation even in our times generates
considerable
difficulties owing to the absence of vernacular terms for his
Latin inventions. He returned to Padua in 1407,
taking up the void left by
Conversini’s previous move to Venice and becoming a patron and ally of
Conversini’
former students there while having as his own students Alberti
and Frulovisi (Cocco 2010: xiii–iv).8
The most significant innovation of Barzizza was the institution of the
boarding school (convitto), which
he developed in his own house
(Sabbadini 1896: 26–7).9 This model would be taken over both by Guarino
in Ferrara and by
Vittorino in Mantua,10
the two most important Quattro-
cento schools for the teaching of Greek (Hankins 2003: 85), establishing the
combination between philology and boarding school that would persist up
to the time of Nietzsche in Pforta. Given
the evident difficulties associated
with raising a group of young male students under the same roof, and
especially given the extremely boring aspects of the Chrysoloras/Guarino
curriculum, one might wonder how
enthusiasm and order were maintained.
Sabbadini here reproduces the old commonplaces spread by Guarino and
his
acolytes: students studying there had a burning passion (ardore) for
knowledge, living as a true family,
though also not lacking joyful jokes and
satire—referring to the authority of Janus Pannonius, who would study
there between 1447 and 1451, nominated as bishop of Pécs by Matthias
Corvinus soon after he acceded to throne in
1458 and becoming a major
figure in Hungarian Renaissance poetry (Sabbadini 1896: 9–10). However,
though
Sabbadini tries to downplay this aspect, the poems of Janus
Pannonius depict a very different environment.
The educational association between these two unconventional, even
freakish scholars, Conversini and Barzizza,
would have a tremendous
impact on the rise of comedy and Quattrocento humanism
in general. First,
all the major figures of early humanist comedy had some association with
Conversini or
Barzizza. Second, the next stage in this development would
take place in Ferrara, under Guarino. Third, it was
out of this association
between Conversini and Barzizza, reinforced by the activities of
Chrysoloras, that the
‘more thoroughly secular and militant classicism’
would develop in Italy, characteristic of figures like Guarino,
Vittorino da
Feltre, Polenton and Bruni (Kohl 1980: 39).

Guarino as Teacher: Humanist Educator or Corrupter of

Youth?
Out of almost complete obscurity, which would not be dispelled in spite of
his long life and great fame, in 1403
Guarino suddenly became the chosen
student of the famed Manuel Chrysoloras, accompanying him back to
Constantinople. From that moment the life of Guarino is well documented,
except for two gaps, which—interestingly
enough—are connected to the
two major moves of his life: to Florence in 1408/9, just after his return from
Constantinople (Sabbadini 1896: 7), and the move to Ferrara in 1429–1430,
where he would spend the rest of his
life (Ibid.: 21–2). He stayed for five
years as a house guest of Chrysoloras, gaining a good knowledge of Greek
and also of Byzantine theatricality (Villoresi 1994: 65ff). Upon his return,
he lived and taught in Florence
(1410–1414) and then in Venice (1414–
1419), after which he moved back to Verona, his hometown. In 1429 he
finally
accepted the call to Ferrara, where he died at the advanced age of 86.
Since then, his students and acolytes have
celebrated him as one of the
major figures of the Renaissance and certainly its greatest pedagogue.
However,
there are quite a few aspects of his life that require closer
scrutiny.
Concerning the activity of Guarino there are a number of facts and
myths that together add up to a quite peculiar
picture, requiring interpretive
understanding. These start with the fact that Guarino was almost thirty
when he
went with Chrysoloras to Constantinople; not exactly the age of a
choice student, especially then. How he got
into Chrysoloras’ entourage in
the first instance is even stranger. Chrysoloras was a high-level diplomat of
the
empire, while Guarino was not even a noble. Furthermore, given the
unique chance of spending five years in such a
special environment, it
simply defies belief that there is no record of his experiences apart from a
letter
containing some—quite tasteless—sentimental reminiscences. He also
gained an unmerited reputation, remaining
known into the 20th century for
things he did not do: that he alone brought humanistic culture to
Ferrara,11
that he
carried more than 50 manuscripts back from Constantinople, that he
was an expert on Plato.12 His moves after his return are
also perplexing.
Five years in Florence, five years in Venice, yet not settling in any of them,
and then
seemingly wasting ten years of his life in the backwaters of
Verona. What was Guarino waiting for? What was he up
to?
Guarino’s own account on his frequent moves blames the ‘enemies’ he
encountered in various places, who would render his life and teaching
difficult. In fact, his letters are
littered with venomous invectives about
these enemies, who seemingly sprang up everywhere, clearly evoking the
character of a paranoid personality—quite disturbing concerning somebody
who is supposed to have been the ‘great
educator’ of Renaissance Italy.
Thus, already in 1412 Guarino expressed unease concerning the hostility he
was
met with in Florence, even breaking with those who called him there—
the exact reasons being difficult to discern
out of trademark ‘Guarinian
invectives’ (Sabbadini 1896: 19). So in 1414 he moves back to Venice,
hoping to stay
among proven friends. Yet his enemies multiply even there,
prompting another return to his hometown, only to
become embroiled again
in conflicts and animosities (Ibid.: 19–21).
In all these travels, with hopes for idyllic conditions terminating in
permanent conflicts, the one persistent
aspect would remain his long-
standing hostility to Bologna. The university would repeatedly invite him,
yet he
would spend only a few days there in 1410, on his way to Florence,
and would reject an invitation as late as 1424
(Ibid.: 7). Both the reasons
and the effects invite speculation: concerning the former, one may
legitimately
wonder whether he was afraid that a longer stay in Bologna
could have fatally exposed the restricted range of his
intellectual skills,
focusing on Latin and Greek grammar and rhetoric but very limited in
philosophy; while
concerning the latter, given the enormous impact Guarino
exerted on the rebirth of comedy, through his students
and his general effect
on Ferrara, one might wonder whether the characteristics of a main new
figure, eventually
crystallised in commedia dell’arte as Graziano, the pedant
university professor speaking with a strong Bolognese
accent, might have
been influenced by Guarino’s strong hostility to Bologna. The fame and
efficiency of his
invective point in this direction, as does the need to avoid
being singled out in comedies as a pedant and bore.
At another level, and continuing the same perspective, the answer to this
question seems to be straightforward,
repeated endlessly by Guarino’s
students and acolytes ever since. Guarino was a great pedagogue; his only
aim was
to teach, to educate, instilling knowledge and virtue in every one of
his students. Yet the very characteristics
of such praises make one
suspicious. According to them, Guarino’s aim was not simply to teach but
to ‘form
“living souls” ’ (Garin, as quoted in Grafton and Jardine 1982: 51)
in order to ‘transform the world’. Thus
students were ‘ “altered” ’ in his
schools, literally transformed, so that they came out ‘reborn as “ ‘new men’
”
’ (as Ibid.).13
 At this point, it increasingly appears that in such an ambitious
undertaking Guarino had rather more partial,
quite strategic and less
evidently praiseworthy aims. His presumed promotion of ancient values had
a very
concrete and earthly target: ‘Guarino not only founded and
developed a premier
humanistic tradition in the city, he also tried to
disconnect Ferrara from traditional northern culture by
rejecting it as
obsolete and unacceptable’ (Bruscagli 2005: 31). This might still be
conceived of as merely
promoting the values in which he sincerely
believed, but—given the life experiences of Guarino—it makes one
wonder
whether Guarino’s aim was to reanimate the ancient glory of the Greco-
Roman world, or to ‘byzantinise’
Europe. Were this the case, one can by no
means rule out, given the importance the alchemic writings of the
hermetic
corpus had for the Byzantine dotti, that Guarino was well aware of the
‘need’ for an environment
where such Byzantine values could be incubated,
and that for such purposes Ferrara offered a better case that
Florence or
Venice—even that delay, in the proper manner, leaving the patient ‘cooked’
in his own sweat, might be
the best way to prepare for the opportunity.
Such a hypothesis receives some confirmation both from some events of
1429 and from Guarino’s well-known but
puzzling interest in theatre, in
particular comedies. The move is usually explained by the outbreak of
plague
that chased Guarino out of Verona, ready to accept the Ferrara offer.
But this was also that moment when a number
of new plays by Plautus were
discovered. Guarino was most keen to obtain them, and Ferrara seemed the
ideal place
both for procuring them and for turning them to use.
Throughout his career Guarino was adamant in his defence of comedies
and performances, using an old sophist
argument that became particularly
popular in Constantinople, according to which comedies are minefields of
admonishing examples, thus—pace Plato—having a positive moral value
(Villoresi 1994: 23–4). In this regard
he was in protracted dispute with the
Church, both in Venice and in Ferrara, being denounced in particular by
Lorenzo Giustinian (1381–1456), patriarch of Venice, who was canonised
(Padoan 1982: 20; Villoresi 1994: 15–9).
Guarino was also a populariser of
the myth of Hercules (Villaresi 1994: 47–8)14 and defender of Panormita.
In order to understand Guarino’s interest in the comedies of Plautus, we
must turn to the actual content of his
teachings—all the more as we need to
assess whether they met the vaunted high and lofty expectations.

Guarino’s Teaching
Guarino is usually presented as an erudite scholar, a true Renaissance man,
‘the greatest teacher in a century of
great teachers’ (Grafton and Jardine
1982: 52), at home in all areas of knowledge and wisdom, and making a
fundamental contribution to the revitalisation of interest in Plato. This
assessment is hugely off the mark.
Guarino was indeed competent, but only
in a very narrow field of knowledge, which by no means included Plato
(Thomson 1976) and which, moreover was closely based on monopolising
the advantage that he acquired by spending
five years in Constantinople.
This explains the lifelong hostility between himself and Filelfo, the only
other contemporary scholar who shared this monopoly of being the first,
last and
only one able to gain a first-hand knowledge of Greek.
Detailed studies show that between the lofty claims made by and on
behalf of Guarino and his actual teaching
practice there was a yawning gap.
It was pretended that his teaching would help to set ‘ “in order the impulses
of our souls, and reins in our desires” ’; to teach ‘ “faith, constancy, fairness
and liberality towards friends
and foreigners, and respect for all sorts of
men” ’; in sum the ‘ “very philosophy that once upon a time brought
men
from their wild life into this gentle and domesticated condition and which
gave them the laws that enabled
those assembled together to become a civil
society” ’ (as in Grafton and Jardine 1982: 54). In actual fact, the
lectures
were exclusively devoted, in painstaking, indeed grue-some detail, to the
hammering of linguistic,
grammatical and rhetorical skills (Ibid.: 52). The
core of the curriculum was the reading of epic poetry and
drama;
fundamentally the very same curriculum taught by the Greek sophists in
Athens in the transition from oral
to written culture, which then was taken
over by the Romans from Greece, then by the Byzantines, and now
re-
imported into Italy and adapted as the fountainhead of all wisdom (Ibid.:
55–8).
Yet even within these broad and rather unsatisfactory coordinates, the
insufficiencies of which were exposed by
Plato, Guarino followed a
particularly gruelling practice. His teaching had two main characteristics.
On the one
hand, the grammatical rules and rhetorical exercises were put
into short, rhythmic and rhyming, easily
memorisable verses. The silliness
of all this can be illustrated by four lines (Ibid.: 64):

A hill is a collis; a caules, I’m told,

Is a plant, and a caula keeps sheep in the fold.
A collum bows down with the weight of the head
That it holds, while a colum’s for spinning a thread.

Second, literally every single line read in the lectures was expanded upon
and illustrated with commentaries,
which in print usually run up to a full
page in length. The purported reason was to illustrate the need for
erudition,
and Guarino certainly did everything to show off his; but the effective
outcome was that students were
inundated with words, just as with an ‘as
comprehensive a catalogue as possible of disconnected “facts” ’ (Ibid.:
67).
Thus they became bewildered and lost in details, not being able even to
copy the flood of words pouring upon
them as a result of this ‘linguistic
drilling’ (Ibid.: 66).
The course on grammar was followed by a course on rhetoric, but the
method of teaching was the same. Instead of
providing living contact with
the subject matter, Guarino focused on a single text, which was not even an
important classic work but rather a forgery in Cicero’s style (Ibid.: 70),
which he again presented ‘slowly and
meticulously’, revealing an
‘overwhelming preoccupation with a profusion of
tiny details’ (Ibid.: 71).
He thus revealed himself to be a sophist, in the technical sense assigned to
the term
by Plato, who is quite able of dissecting and fragmenting every
piece of living reality but is not able to put it
back harmoniously together
(Sophist 259D–60E).
The result of attending such lectures, where no effort was made to elicit
genuine attention and give life to
great classic texts, was utter boredom.
Guarino justified his way of proceeding as the ‘price’ students had to
pay in
order to gain access to the ‘mysteries’ into which he was initiating them
(Grafton and Jardine 1982: 66).
That is, he was gravely pondering, as a true
pedant (Gundersheimer 1973: 105), the ‘heavy responsibility’ that
had
befallen him in directing the souls of youth in the right direction. Yet at the
same time and inevitably,
given the gruesome boredom to which he
subjected his students day by day, and pretending to be a ‘good father’,
he
also showed lenience and understanding towards them. This is best visible
in his interest in and support of
comedies.

Even his contemporaries were puzzled by the fact that Guarino, this
supposed great scholar and unmistakable
pedant, had a penchant for
comedies. Still in Constantinople, he translated three satirical dialogues of
the
‘irreverent prose satirist’ Lucian, whose writings exuded the ‘spirit of
hedonism and paradox’ (Marsh 1994:
419–21). His justification for this was
paradoxical, modelled on the paradoxical character of Lucian’s writings:
in
Guarino’s view, comedies, by staging ‘bad’ forms of conduct, actually
helped students (or readers or
listeners) to become aware of such errors, and
therefore to follow now ‘consciously’ the ‘good’ way of conduct.
The
source is again Chrysoloras: recent research by Ernesto Berti has shown
that already in 1397–1400, while
teaching in Florence, Chrysoloras used the
writings of Lucian as a pedagogical tool (Marsh 1994: 419; 1998: 13).
Beyond taking such an argument at face value, it is important to capture
the core of the pedagogical attitude
that lies at its heart. The central point
concerns the schismatic combination of utter boredom on the one hand
and
the need for ‘relaxation’ and ‘divertissement’ on the other. From this
perspective the support for lascivious
comedy is not an understandable
gesture towards the necessities of human nature but rather a pact of
complicity
between the ‘master’ and his students, who tolerate the dreadful
dregs of the lectures in compensation for the
master closing his eyes, or
even adding a complacent, self-gratulatory wink, over such
‘understandable’ pranks.
Education in this way is transformed into a
genuine corruption of the youth, in the etymological sense of
corruption as
a joint break, implying the ‘understanding’ and complicity of both sides in
sabotaging the true
Platonic aim of education, which is to elevate the soul
into the apprehension, perception and comprehension of
the true, the good,
and the beautiful. The effects of this educational policy are visible with
particular clarity
in as series of poems written by one of Guarino’s students,
Janus Pannonius (1434–1472), which offer a glimpse
into an astonishing
proliferation of debauched promiscuity. One of the more
striking of these
poems in entitled ‘To Guarino of Verona’; it is organised around the—
rhetorical—question
whether Guarino was truly oblivious of what was
going on around him or just faked ignorance.15
That this matter is not just a minor taint on the otherwise noble character of
Guarino’s educational programme is
best visible in the very core of the
education philosophy of Chrysoloras; a point where he deviated even from
the
basic principles of Byzantine culture, presenting a thoroughly anti-
Platonic argument. It concerns the nature of
beauty, and has fundamental
relevance for the Renaissance, or rather its decay.
According to Chrysoloras, ‘real’ beauty is not external but internal. It
does not reside in objects, whether
these are natural or works of art, but
only in the intellect that contemplates them, as it is only through such
activity that we come close to the maker of these objects, God. So the only ‘
“truly philosophical activity” ’ is
to think about the Mind that shaped all
these things; and this activity can only be acquired through
watching.
However, he immediately adds, in order to avoid misunderstanding, that he
by no means has in
mind some kind of voyeurism; quite on the contrary,
‘looking at the beauties of women [ … ] is licentious and
base’ (Baxandall
1965: 197–8).
This position is a shrewd piece of sophistry. It starts by distracting the
attention of the listener, as the
first point about ‘inner’ beauty seem just a
standard piece of Platonic or Christian orthodoxy. Its spirit,
however, is
opposite to that of the Timaeus, or the Itinerary of the Soul to God of St.
Bonaventure. For Plato, just as for Bonaventure, the pivotal point of the
ascent towards the divine is
recognition of beauty, thus leaving behind the
self. For Chrysoloras, however, the denigration of objective
beauty is
compounded with the elevation of the contemplating mind, the mind of the
pure theorist, thus presumably
his own mind, into some kind of direct
contact with the divine. At the same time, it propels the mere activity of
watching, or the position of the external spectator, the outsider who does
not participate, into the par
excellence philosophical position, while
transforming through misogyny the act of voyeurism into a secret mystery
and forbidden fruit.
All this further adds to, and justifies, the position taken before and its
effects, the investment and infection
of his students by the obligation of a
purely passive act of watching, prohibiting them the possibility of ever
reaching rightfully the objects of their desire, which is invested into them
by the very emphasis on the activity
of watching, while at the same time,
with smug complicity, showing an ‘understanding’ concerning ‘human
nature’
when they satisfy their evoked passion in any way they can—any
way except for the recognizing the true way
of elevated and elevating
graceful love.
Such a position, ignoring the qualities of grace and beauty, is eminently
alien to art yet conducive to promoting
a particular activity that, as we have
seen, lies in between art and reality—comedy.

Receiving the Byzantine Spirit: Early Humanist Comedies

Early humanist comedies are much neglected, even by historians of the
theatre. It was thought that such works,
written in Latin by humanist
scholars and hardly ever performed, were just imitations of Roman models,
themselves
imitations of the Greek new comedy, which was itself a pale
reflection of the classical comedies of Aristophanes,
thus having little
impact. However, without claiming that these works were masterpieces,
relatively recent
literature, following earlier hints, has brought about a
significant reinterpretation of these writings,
concerning both their
emergence and effect, leading to a genealogical valorisation. Concerning
the first point,
it is now recognised that these works were radically new in
their times and places and thus represented a
significant break; they were
actually perceived as such by their authors and those who read them (Brand
1995:
xxx; Radcliff-Umstead 1969: 21–2). Concerning the second point,
they had an important effect, pioneering some of
the themes that would
eventually come to play a major role in the commedia dell’arte (Radcliff-
Umstead 1969:
20–1, following here ideas explored by Mario Apollonio in
his classic 1930 work, which was often ignored in
subsequent literature on
the topic). For the purposes of this book, such ideas are of great
significance, as they
provide a privileged point in explaining the reasons for
the strange symbiosis between humanist education and the
resurgence of
comedy—a genre that, even on sight, especially concerning the themes it
discussed and the attitudes
it proliferated, seems to have a de-educational,
even de-civilising aspect.
It has already been pointed out that the link between the early
humanistic comedies and the educational circle
around Conversini,
Barzizza, Chrysoloras and Guarino was extremely strong. The first such
comedy, Paulus,
and the only one dated to the 14th century (Radcliff-
Umstead 1969: 23), was written by Vergerio, the single most
important
connection between all these figures. In Padua, he was student of
Conversini in the early 1390s and
then associated with Barzizza’s teaching,
later running to Florence to study with Chrysoloras. He composed one of
the most important works of humanist pedagogy (Stäuble 1968: 239) and
died in 1444 in Buda—where Conversini was
born in 1343. The next piece
is Poliscena by Bruni, the choice Florentine student of Chrysoloras, while
other early, un-staged comedies include Catinia, by Polenton (1419),
another of Conversini’s Padua
students, which was strongly influenced by
Guarino’s translation of Lucian’s Parasite, completed while
Guarino was
teaching in Venice in 1414–1419 (Marsh 1994: 420–1); Alberti’s
Philodoxeos; and
Cauteriaria by Antonio Barzizza (c. 1420–1425), who
was Gasparino Barzizza’s nephew and personally
educated by him.
Two further comedies are usually added to this list, both having
substantial interest. One is Chrysis (c.
1444), because this play, fully in line
with its predecessors, even in positively presenting adultery, was
composed
during his years of humanistic education by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, the
future Pope Pius II. The second is Fraudiphilia (c. 1442/3), composed by
Antonio Cornazzano,
who would be the third of the three famous dancing
masters (Stäuble 1968: 81–6).
While the early comedies were not and probably could not have been
performed–not only because knowledge about the
theatre was lost but also
because they were uneasy compromises between the few available plays
and fragments by
Terence and Plautus, used as models, and the novels of
Boccaccio–they did contain a number of radical novelties
as compared with
their predecessors, and similarly radical novelties in contrast to the
medieval/Renaissance
world view. First of all, Paulus already introduced a
new figure, Herotes, the evil servant, an infernal
figure that combined the
servant and the braggart figures of Roman comedy with the medieval devil,
thus
resurrecting the figure of the ‘trickster’ in a particularly problematic
key—a figure that was defeated in the
end, but only at the very end. This
immediately poses the central question of whether it is necessary for
didactic purposes to set loose, not only in the imagination but actually on
stage, an evil or corrupt figure in
order to give a ‘moral lesson’ to the
students or the broad public concerning the need to avoid such a way of
behaving; or whether such staging is actually corrupting in its actual effects,
irrespective of the eventual
‘happy end’. Second, and probably
unknowingly, these plays broke one of the fundamental rules of Roman
comedy,
the limit between ‘serious’ comedy and mere mime play, which
was that comedies, while representing sexual
licence, never actually
condoned adultery (Brand 1995: xxxiii), in contrast to mere mime plays.
The third
novelty, certainly connected with this and also the specifically
Christian motif of female saints (Ibid.: xxxvii)
was that—starting with
Poliscena—women became protagonists of the plays, lamenting the harsh
servitude
imposed on them by their husbands, and indirectly by the moral
codes of society, asserting the right for the free
pursuit of sensuous
gratification: something like an ‘end justifies the means’ ideology in the
name of love
(Ibid.: xl). This was again a deeply Christian theme, as in
Roman comedies women were always only matrons or
prostitutes, and the
theme was to poke fun at the sexual desires of old men, never to reassert
‘rights’ in the
name of ‘love’—both fundamentally Christian ideas, though
never meant in this particular sense before.

We can now reassume the break inaugurated by early humanistic comedies.

Their central purpose was negative: they
waged a systematic war against
the central principles of their own society, and—even more stunningly—far
from
promoting the revival of learning, they were undermining the
Renaissance (Ibid.: xxxvi). Yet this purpose,
whether intended or just
rolling out a scenario inherent in the revitalisation of Roman comedy as part
of the
‘classical heritage’ in a Byzantine key, was hidden under a number of
layers, both from their public and from
themselves. It was justified by the
claim that this was compatible with the most important European values,
truth
and love. ‘Love’, because trickery, lying, unfaithfulness and adultery
were
committed not in order to procure sensual gratification (the implied
meaning in Roman comedies), but in its name.
‘Truth’, because the plays
were unmasking hypocritical figures—tyrannical husbands and fathers,
immoral our even
outright pederast priests, incompetent teachers and
doctors. It also implied a further component, related to the
old sophist ideal
of imitation of reality, as the plays were not simply imitating Roman
models, but—insofar as
possible—representing scenes and figures from
contemporary life, though mostly as examples of excess and
depravity,
which then the comedies could rightfully unmask: presenting and
insinuating as ‘deep truth’ a world in
which nothing is as it seems; where
everything is loaded with trickery (Ibid.: xl). Taking up isolated negative
incidents of social life and presenting them as endemic, comedies
subliminally incited behaviour to imitate them
as models, in this way
further infecting social life.
These central characteristics—the in-depth explorations of domestic
relationships, the ideology of ‘love’, the
need to stay close to everyday life,
and the saturation of action with negative characters in order to ‘unmask’
them, a central predilection with ‘social criticism’—were the legacy that
early humanistic comedies transferred
to the rising theatre, setting it on a
particular course.
As early humanist comedies were not staged, this poses the question of
the first staged performances. These
consist of two different kind of
spectacles: goliardic student farces, staged in Pavia from the mid-1420s to
the
mid-1430s; and a series of theatrical performances in Venice in the mid-
1430s.

Pavia: Goliardic Farces

It is difficult to assess the exact nature and significance of the student farces
performed in Pavia. They
represent a mixture of what students regularly
performed during carnivals and a genuine—though amateur—theatrical
performance, but the nature of what exactly happened, and even the
authorship of the surviving manuscripts, is
problematic. These texts are
characterised by ‘disturbing scurillity’ (Perosa 1965: 23), demonstrating a
‘gross
and obscene comicity’ quite removed from the erudite Latin comedy
of the humanists (Stäuble 1968: 32). The first
such performance was
entitled Janus Sacerdotus, staged on 15 May 1427 (Perosa 1965: 32–3),
about a
pederast priest. The argument was made—though not widely
accepted—that it was composed by Panormita (de Panizza
Lorch 1968). A
very similar play was performed about a decade later, still in Pavia, on 14
April 1437, as On
the False Hypocrite, supposedly written by Mercurino
Ranzo, about whom nothing else is known (Stäuble 1968:
34). The most
important Pavese farces, however, Repetitio Magistri, or Zanini the Cook
(performed in 1435)
and Philogenia, written in 1437, probably not
performed at all, but considered as one of the best comedies
of the century,
were written by Ugolino Pisani da Parma (Perosa 1965: 24–5; Radcliff-
Umstead 1969: 34ff; Stäuble
1968: 39–48); a figure who merits a few
words.
Ugolino was ‘ “one of the most bizarre figures of his time, jurist, poet,
comedy writer, musician, soldier, and traveller” ’ (Sabbadini, as quoted in
Stäuble 1968: 39); closely recalling
Conversini but now considered an out-
dated medieval eccentric who met with less success. Having a respectable
family background, he studied in Pavia, eventually graduating in 1437, but
after his failure to be accepted at
the court of Ferrara in 1437, he led an
erratic life, travelling widely and even learning Hungarian. The
particular
interest of his first farce, performed in Pavia in 1435 and having as its
theme the mock defence (a
typical sophist technique) of a debauched cook,
is that the ‘Zanni’ would eventually become the standard stock
figure of
commedia dell’arte. Ugolino’s two farces resemble the humanist comedies
in demonstrating an interest in
the position of women (Radcliff-Umstead
1969: 34).
The interest instigated by Chrysoloras in Lucian exerted a great impact
on this resurgence of comedy. The same
students of Chrysoloras who
listened to his Florence lectures and composed comedies were also
interested in the
‘paradoxical rhetoric’ of Lucian; they included Leonardo
Bruni, Polenton and even Alberti, who composed a
particularly strange
‘mock oration’ entitled ‘The Speech of Elagabal to Prostitutes’, a perfect
example of the
way in which humanists defended ‘oratorial freedom’ as
opposed to academic freedom (Marsh 1994: 419–20).

The crucial event that sparked not only a huge upsurge of interest in
comedy writing but also the possibility of
actually staging theatrical
spectacles was the discovery in 1429 by—of all people—Nicholas of Cusa
of a
manuscript containing twelve more or less complete comedies by
Plautus. This strongly contributed to the move of
Guarino from Verona to
Ferrara (Cocco 2010: xxix; Gardner 1904: 45–6). The truly explosive
effects of these
magical writings can be seen in what they produced once
Guarino laid his hands on them. This happened in
September 1432, and
already in October 1432 his former student Tito Livio de’ Frulovisi staged a
comedy
performance in Venice. The evident inference is that somehow
Guarino must have shown the manuscript to his former
student (Cocco
2010: xxix).
Thus, after a millennial gap, a theatrical performance was staged in
Europe. This was a truly epochal event, so
we must inquire what exactly
happened and who performed such a feat.

Tito Livio de’ Frulovisi

Frulovisi was one of the most peculiar characters of Renaissance
humanism, yet exactly because of this he was
also most revealing of the
changes effected by Chrysoloras. This stands out with particular clarity
against the
background of Venetian Renaissance humanism as reconstructed
by Margaret King in her excellent 1986 study. Alone
among the Venetian
humanists of his age, Frulovisi rejected the central values of Venice, in
particular the idea of unanimitas,16 and rather made fun of these values in
his impudent comedies,
explicitly mocking and defying the uniqueness and
legitimacy of Venice (King 1986: 194–5).
Frulovisi was born in Ferrara around 1400, but in 1404 his father was
exiled from the city and came to live in
Venice (King 1986: 378). He
eventually became a resident there but was never fully settled. The younger
Frulovisi
was a student of Guarino in Venice in his late teens and also a
student of Barzizza, and by 1432/3, when Guarino
got hold of the Plautus
manuscripts, he was already teaching Greek (Previté Orton 1915: 77). In
this academic
year he offered to the public two different sorts of works,
each milestones in their own way: a humanist treatise
on politics, entitled
De Republica; and a series of humanist comedies. The first broke new
ground by
explicitly rejecting the authority of Aristotle, arguing that
political government is a purely human matter,
having nothing to do with
divine order, directly anticipating Machiavelli, while the latter inaugurated
modern
theatre. Frulovisi’s first spectacle was performed in October 1432,
followed by four others in the coming years,
all in Latin and presented
without any interlude (Padoan 1982: 12–6; Cocco 2010: xv). As a most
significant
detail, mimes were present in the first spectacle, but—though
announced in the prologue—were excluded from the
second (Padoan 1982:
16).
 Frulovisi was evidently searching for major recognition, as he dedicated
his political work to Leonello d’Este
and staged his comedies in the San
Basso Church, just off St. Mark’s Square, next to the cathedral, where he
had
been teaching since at least 1429 (Cocco 2010: xv). Such recognition,
however, and understandably, was not
granted; Ferrara ignored him, while
the Venetians felt insulted, so he eventually had to leave the
city.17 All this
reveals
what scholars working on him called a character fault: Frulovisi
evidently lacked both virtue and judgment. In
his first play he proclaimed
himself the proud author of the text, in contrast to the old, boring and trite
comedies of the ancients (Smith 1998: 232); but when he was charged with
plagiarism (see also Radcliff-Umstead
1969: 36), he retracted, arguing in
the Prologue of his second play that he and the author who accused him
were
using a common source, Plautus. He also adamantly defended his
sincere loyalty to the city, yet the fourth play
amounted to a generalised
attack on Venetian institutions and values, while his fifth and ultimate
Venetian play
contained a series of sharp personalised attacks, so he
evidently was burning bridges (Smith 1998: 232–3).
From Venice, as a genuine master stroke, he travelled to England, where
people had begun to take an interest in
Italian Renaissance humanism, in
particular Ferrarese music. There Frulovisi presented himself as a main
representative of the movement. He filled a vacuum, and nobody was there
to pull the plug, as genuine Venetian
humanists were not interested in
leaving their city. But his errors of judgment remained with him. His epic
poem
written to flatter his host, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, produced
the opposite result, as the story lingered
too close to some troubled
moments of the duke’s past (Saygin 2002: 256–7).
Frulovisi had to leave
again and eventually abandoned humanism, retraining himself as a medic.
However, his
legacy in England was considerable, as his biography of
Henry V, ‘the first officially sanctioned biography of an
English monarch’
(Wyatt 2005: 31), using sophist rhetoric learned from Guarino, served as a
model there, being
used, whether directly or through secondary sources,
even by Shakespeare. It is generally acknowledged as having
set the stage
for the ‘increasingly pervasive presence of Italians in England’ (Ibid.: 29).
The career of Frulovisi contains two issues of vital relevance from the
perspective of a Nietzschean genealogy:
the nature of his formative
influences and the lasting effect exerted by him. Concerning the first,
Frulovisi
evidently misunderstood Guarino, but this makes him only more
interesting. Guarino pitched his teaching to the
sons of the high aristocracy,
though it contained a fair amount of paradox and double play. Frulovisi
understood
this only too well but pursued the systematic undermining of
aristocratic values and virtues too explicitly and
was caught. Concerning the
effects, his work was epoch-setting: ‘[i]t was Frulovisi who launched the
classical
theatre in Venice’ (Radcliff-Umstead 1969: 39); and furthermore,
‘[a]s a technician Frulovisi stands as a pioneer
in the mechanics of the
stage’ (Ibid.: 40). The best way to see it is through Leon Battista Alberti’s
Momus, for which he might well have served as the model—perhaps
together with Conversini, whose exploits
Alberti came to know in Padua.18
The point is not an antiquarian concern with identifying the exact source
of Alberti’s work. But Momus has
been identified as a seminal work that
represents the reappearance of the trickster in the horizon of the
medieval
world (Horvath 2007, 2012), and the fact that this coincides with the
reappearance of theatre in Europe,
after an absence lasting for more than a
millennium, is of pivotal significance.
The connections between Alberti, Frulovisi and Guarino and his school
make such an idea most likely. Alberti also
got lured by Guarino’s version
of humanism, and in 1424 wrote Philodoxeos, modelled on Guarino’s
Lucian
translations.19 Alberti
imitated these models so well that
contemporaries thought that the play had been written in antiquity.
Frulovisi’s efforts were much modelled on this play (Previté Orton 1915:
76), even in its dedication to Leonello
(Lockwood 2009: 32). But Alberti
would eventually realise the corrupting influence exerted by Guarino, in
painting and beyond (concerning painting, see Baxandall 1965: 201), and
particularly the misogynous aspects of
Frulovisi’s plays; at least the latter
bitterly complained in 1435 that in Venice a certain ‘Leo Bestia’ (no
doubt
alluding to Leon Battista Alberti) had ‘excited the women against him’
(Previté Orton 1915:
76–7).20 Thus if
Guarino’s translation of Lucian’s
Parasite was a model for Alberti’s Momus (Marsh 1994: 421), it is
more
than reasonable to add that the figure of Frulovisi could have served as the
inspiration for the main
character of the work.
A significant though paradoxical consequence of these five performances
was an
absence: they failed to exert any impact in Venice. The first
theatrical performances staged after a gap of a
thousand years were not
followed up in Venice for almost another century. The host was still
resistant to the
virus; the spirit needed further nurturing. This was
accomplished in Ferrara, a city that came to play a unique
and vital role in
the rebirth of theatre.

NURTURING THE BYZANTINE SPIRIT: FERRARA THE

INCUBATOR

Ferrara today is a mid-sized city of about 135,000 inhabitants on the road

between Bologna and Padua or Venice,
having—especially by Italian
standards—few points of historical interest. Its outlook in the 19th century
was
even bleaker: surrounded by a swampy area, it was particularly
unhealthy, so in a widely used travel manual
Dickens called her ‘a city of
the dead’ (Bruscagli 2005: 22; Gundersheimer 2005: 409–10). Not
surprisingly, most
works on the Renaissance hardly even mention it.
However, in the collapse of the Renaissance, Ferrara’s role was
pivotal.
This was recognised by Jacob Burckhardt, who, in his classic book,
called Ferrara ‘the first really modern city
in Europe’ (Burckhardt 1995:
33). The claim, and the reasons given for it, deserve utmost attention.
Burckhardt
did not call Ferrara merely a major Renaissance centre but an
outright modern one. This was because it championed
a number of features
that we associate with ‘modern’ cities (and which Lewis Mumford
connected with the baroque):
it had large and well-built residential quarters;
it promoted capital formation through the concentration of
official classes
and the active promotion of trade and also by attracting, as a matter of
policy, wealthy
fugitives, much as the Switzerland would do later on. Its
power was based on an extensive and efficient taxation
system, as a result
of which state employees, soldiers and university professors were always
paid promptly
(Ibid.).
Such a well-ordered state, however, had to pay a price in a feature that
we don’t like to associate with the
adjective ‘modern’: it also represented
the most ruthless despotism in its own time (Gundersheimer 1973: 3). The
term is not an exercise in labelling but was the city’s self-definition. In the
12th century, during the
formation of the Italian city-states, Ferrara opted
not to be a republic but rather to adopt a despotic mode of
government,
offering the city to the Este family in a manner that almost anticipates the
Leviathan of
Hobbes. Despotism in Ferrara was therefore legitimate,
surviving until 1597 (when the city, for reasons of
succession, was yielded
to the Papal State), while the Este rule survived in Modena until 1797, to be
ended by
Napoleon—the same year in which Napoleon also terminated the
millennial Republic of Venice. The ‘modernity’ of
Ferrara therefore implied
pioneering the kind of absolutist ‘court society’ that became the rule in
Europe only
in the 17th century.
A crucial element of this modernity was a unique promoting of
humanist studies
and the arts, which Ferrara came to champion, both
literally (geographically and historically) and metaphorically
between
Florence and Venice. In this and in manifold other ways, theatre and
theatricality came to play a
prominent role.
This was because Ferrara not only ‘played’ a pioneering role in the
rebirth of theatre but itself was
theatrical: its promotion of the arts and
humanities ‘emanated from a theatrical Ferrara that was itself a stage,
a
protagonist, a producer and generator of theatre, an object of representation’
(Clubb 2005: 345). Perhaps the
best way to characterise such an
overwhelming theatricality is through the words of Torquato Tasso,
Ferrara’s
most famous poet, who in a dialogue (incidentally subtitled ‘On
Masks’) records his first impressions in the
following manner: ‘ “When I
first saw Ferrara [ … ] it seemed to me that the whole city was a
marvellous,
painted, shining stage never seen before, full of thousands of
shapes and apparitions. And the goings-on of that
time seemed similar to
those performed in theatres in different languages by various players” ’ (as
in Bruscagli
2005: 42–3). While this makes the later nondescript character
of the city all the more surprising, the
explanation is simple: while some of
the spectacular and magnificent imagery is ephemeral in nature (Ibid.: 28),
over the past centuries Ferrara was all but destroyed by acts of both God
and men. It suffered a series of
earthquakes and other natural disasters
(Colantuono 2010: 198), and its ‘heritage was pillaged to a degree
unequalled in any other centre of Italian Renaissance civilisation’
(Bruscagli 2005: 28). Given that its despots
felt the city to be their own,
they dismantled and sold whatever was movable, piece by piece (Ibid.: 29).

Just as putting a car into motion requires the use of several gears, the
launching of Ferrara as a major centre
of the humanities and the arts went
through a series of accelerating steps. It started under Alberto d’Este
(1388–
93), who founded the University in 1391 (Lockwood 2009: 11), and
continued with Niccolo III d’Este, who
ruled for almost half a century
(1393–1441) and built a library; he also used his long journeys abroad,
especially in France, to collect works of art and musical instruments (Ibid.:
13). The most important
developments in Ferrara, however, are connected
with Leonello d’Este.

The humanist ‘Court’ of Leonello d’Este

Leonello was younger brother and eventual heir of Niccolo III. He was
trained to be a commander, but after his
return to the court in 1424, he
found himself idle. Intriguingly, nothing is known of his life in between
1424
and 1429 (Gundersheimer 1973: 87), the year in which Guarino
arrived in Ferrara. Two events of 1425, however,
evidently left a profound
mark on him: his older brother and designated heir was executed, together
with a
consort of his father, on charges of adultery; and the humanist
Panormita published his much discussed poem Hermaphrodite. Guarino
was repeatedly called to Ferrara in
order to become Leonello’s tutor; and in
1429 he finally accepted. The result was the transformation of
Leonello’s
part of the court into the most famous humanist centre of Italy.
Apart from the educational impact, already discussed, Ferrara also
became a centre of art, in particular
painting, music and dancing, in spite of
the hostility of humanist sophists to beauty. This paradox can be
resolved
by taking a good look at the kind of art Guarino promoted in Ferrara.

Pisanello, or Ekphrastic Painting

Pisanello, the painter most closely associated with the Ferrara of Guarino, is
one of the most enigmatic figures
of Quattrocento painting. Details of his
life are little known even by the standards of the age, while his works
fared
particularly badly, with only three frescoes and four canvases surviving, and
not all in good condition.
But a large number of his drawings survived,
allowing a clear understanding of the mind of this extremely
particular and
in many respects all-too-modern painter.
The modernity of Pisanello can be shown by applying to his paintings a
term coined by Tom Wolfe for 20th-century
art: ‘painted words’. These
paintings put into practice the principles taught by Guarino about
‘ekphrastic
exercises’, best represented in the famous description given by
Lucian about Apelles’s Calumny. In such
descriptions emphasis was not on
the aesthetical qualities of the painting or the beauty to be impressed on the
souls of those contemplating it but rather on idiosyncratic connections that
existed among its elements and that
allowed themselves to be decoded and
described in a coherent and consistent manner by the initiate.
The ekphrastic aspect of Pisanello’s paintings can be reconstructed with
particular clarity though his drawings.
Their main characteristic features are
an interest in variety, though combined with a concern with structural
consistency and a focus on physiognomic expressiveness (Baxandall 1965:
194–5). Pisanello prepared every minute
detail on his frescoes through
pains-taking and minuscule drawing exercises. If he had to paint a horse, he
prepared a series of drawings of horses after nature that showed their
nostrils in minute detail, just as the
spur on the knight’s boot had to be
absolutely perfect (Syson and Gordon 2001). While this demonstrated his
true
craftsmanship and dedication as a professional artist, the overall
impression of his paintings is a profusion of
superfluous details that render
the viewer first lost and then disoriented. With all their undeniable
virtuosity,
Pisanello’s paintings are cold, even dead. They reflect the mind
of an anatomist who dissected every single
component with great precision,
but for this very reason the images assume, and reproduce, a frightening,
deadly
distance: the void that separated the artist from the beings he
dissected in his drawings. It is this experience
that is reproduced in the
viewer—not awe or marvelling, the Platonic thaumazein, or the
philosophical
counterpart of artistic experience.
This impression is reinforced by a second aspect of these paintings,
their
physiognomic expressiveness. The outcome of this, complementing
the first, is not the harmonious coexistence of
parts but rather a schismatic
tension between opposite extremes. Time and again the cold objectivity of
the
artist and of the viewer is changed into a kind of emotional
involvement, but one that is procured not by loving
care but by the
discovery of a protruding, ugly or disgusting, revolting yet strangely
attractive detail. In the
background of the Verona fresco Saint George and
the Princess of Silena, there are corpses of two hanged
men twisting around
just above the saint. For these Pisanello again carefully prepared drawings
‘after nature’,
which have nothing to do with the narrative. Pisanello is not
concerned with narrative coherence, central for
Latin as opposed to
Byzantine art, but rather with ekphrasis, where the painting is made only for
the clever
sophist smart enough to perceive all these minuscule details,
collecting them together in a poem celebrating the
‘fantasy’ and
‘inventiveness’ of the artist. Such wanton emotionality is raised to a new
pitch on the left side
of the image, where the dragon is very much alive: it
‘lurks on the shores of the lake’, and its effective
presence is marked ‘by a
grisly assortment of bones, lizards and a slain doe’. Pisanello even captures
‘a lion
[that] prepares to spring on to a frightened stag’ (Syson and Gordon
2001: 25). The description not just of
hunting scenes but the way in which
animals were captured and killed by dogs was favoured by Pisanello, just as
it was by the Limbourg brothers, his main sources, masters of miniatures,
who worked for the Burgundy court but
had the same Byzantine models.21
In the London National Gallery painting The Virgin and Child with Saints
Anthony Abbot
and George, the dragon is again alive and kicking, or rather
twisting and twirling around the legs of St.
George, and is snarling at the
boar—or perhaps at St. Anthony next to the boar (ibid.: 140–1, 143).
Moving from unsolicited scenes of violence to a different but not less
perplexing register, there is the
protruding back of a horse taking up centre
stage between the saint and the princess. One might wonder what the
horse,
and especially such an enormous back, has to do with the story, or in
general with aesthetic experience.
The solution lies in another painting,
again in the London National Gallery, The Vision of Saint Eustace,
which
has again a huge horse dominating it, and—even though this time it is not at
centre stage—it has its back
part open towards the viewer, depicted in
anatomical detail. The intentions of the artist are rendered clear by
the study
drawings in the Louvre, where not only the horse’s nose, eyes and hoofs are
coloured but also the
‘horse’s hindquarters’, specifically ‘the testicles and
the anus’ (Ibid.: 171, 4).
There is every reason to assume that Pisanello was initiated into
ekphratic painting by Guarino. The praises
heaped on him by Guarino are
widely quoted, and an allusion in a 1416 Guarino letter almost certainly
refers to
him. Circumstantial evidence indicates even longer and tighter
contacts. Pisanello was brought up in Verona,
Guarino’s native city, and at
the time Guarino was back from Constantinople
Pisanello was just about
sixteen to eighteen years old. Their stays coincided in Venice (1414/5–
1419, with
Guarino teaching there and Pisanello working with Gentile da
Fabriano) and again in Verona in the 1420s, when
both were living there;
while in the 1430s and especially the 1440s, Guarino was always in Ferrara
and Pisanello
was often there. If we add that Pisanello’s father, who died
when Pisanello was very young, was from Pisa, which
after Venice was the
most important port and community linked to the Byzantine world, it is not
too risky to
assume that there was a long-standing and thoroughly
Byzantine connection between Pisanello and
Guarino.22

The way in which Pisanello’s work relied upon and further promoted the
link between painting and rhetoric has
direct relevance to the history of
theatre. The central epistemological implication of this new attitude towards
painting, promoted by Byzantine humanists, was the creation of distance
between the beholder and the image.
Previously, in the Platonic vision of
the world, the beholder was supposed to obtain a participatory experience
by observing an image, with philosophical contemplation and the
devotional gaze coinciding (Phillips-Court 2011:
xi). Central to the new
idea of a ‘rational’ perspective was the fixation of the viewer at a particular
point,
the emphasis being placed on conscious awareness of the distance
between the observer and the work of art and
thus the creation of a new
kind of self-consciousness (Ibid.: 1–2). Thus the emotional impact exerted
by an image
became rationalised, while this new ‘rational’ subject was
propelled into the very centre of the universe, and
this same experience was
proclaimed, following the inspiration of Chrysoloras, as the highest possible
philosophical attitude: the observer as pure spectator. Somebody who
merely watches something, without
participating, was now considered to be
reaching a position identical to God’s. This rationalisation of the
inter-
subjective space occurred around 1420 (Ibid.: 2). It had extremely wide-
ranging effects. These include,
first of all, the displacing of the experience
of transcendence, through denying the viewer a symbolic spiritual
trajectory
by closing him into a specific frame, which for us seems ‘natural’ and
‘rational’, as we take for
granted the prior distancing (Ibid.: 9), and which
made a major contribution to secularisation. Furthermore, it
absolutised the
experience of the spectator (Ibid.: 2), representing a major step towards the
optic of Descartes
and Newton.23 Even
further, and more concretely, it
promoted the idea that theatrical space provides a privileged point for
arranging the knowledge accessible to the subject—any subject, but on
condition of being a pure
spectator—who places himself into the centre of
such a theatre. This idea of theatrum mundi, as Francis
Yates has shown,
was prior to, though promoting, the building of concrete theatres to stage
performances.24 The
connection is all the more likely as this new
epistemological position on perspective was central to the way in
which in
Florence—already in the middle of the 15th century, in particular in the
religious plays staged by Leo Belcari, such as The Sacrifice of Abraham—a
fusion was attempted
between the medieval rappresentazione sacra and the
humanist theatre, anticipating later developments in
Ferrara and Florence
(Ibid.: 6–7). The full implications of this perspective are drawn in Pico della
Mirandola’s
glorification of this humanist experience in his Dignity of Man
and its magnification into the titanic
vision of ‘man’ being the centre of the
universe, knowing no limits or bounds, as if existing outside the great
chain
of being (Ibid.: 1).

Another area of the arts where Ferrara played a pioneering role in the
Quattrocento and where the decisive
influence of humanist education, in
particular that of Guarino, was hardly recognised until now—except for
some
pioneering allusions by Michael Baxandall (1965, 1988: 77–8; see
Lockwood 2009: 78–9)—was court dancing. As
Jennifer Nevile argues in a
recent book, the ‘influence of humanism in fifteenth-century Italy did not
stop with
art and music: it had a profound effect upon dance as well’
(Nevile 2004: 140).

Domenico da Piacenza: The ‘Dancing Revolution’

In the 15th century Ferrara became the centre of dance music in Europe:
‘All of the best known masters of the
newly codified art of court dance in
Italy, down to the 1480s, are closely linked to Ferrara, in some cases for
long periods as members of the official entourage’ (Lockwood 2009: 76).
The three main figures were Domenico da
Piacenza (c. 1390–1470),
Giovanni Ambrosio (or Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, c. 1420–1484), and
Antonio Cornazzano
(c. 1430–1484), forming a kind of trinity (Arcangeli
2000: 26–7; Castelli 2005: 37–8). These developments,
started in Ferrara
and transmitted through the intermedi or intermezzi, culminated in the rise
of
the French ballet and English court masque.
According to Baxandall, the figures in Pisanello’s paintings are
arranged in groupings and patterns that recall
the arrangement of dances
characteristic of Ferrara court music (Baxandall 1988: 77). Even further,
these
paintings not only demonstrate a characteristically dance-like concern
with body movements and gestures but are
also preoccupied with
expressing, through such physical movements, the emotional states of the
soul as explicitly
propagated by dancing masters on the one hand and
theorists of painting like Alberti and Guarino on the other
(see also Nevile
2004: 133–6). The most important recognition of Baxandall, however,
concerns the ‘semi-dramatic’
character of some of the best-known Ferrara
dances, like those entitled ‘Cupido’, ‘Jealousy’ or ‘Phoebus’, each
capturing a particular scene related to erotic conquest, with their
movements being reminiscent of paintings by
Pisanello, following Guarino;
or Botticelli’s Primavera, which followed Alberti.
The most important impact of Guarino’s methodology, however, can be
shown in the character of Domenico da
Piacenza’s seminal book, which is
credited with having created, ex
nihilo, modern ‘academic’ dancing. That
the dire sophistic pedantry of Guarino could have contributed to the
foundation of modern dance music is such an extraordinary fact that it
remained unobserved until recently.

Nothing is known about the life of Domenico; the first signs of his activities
can be traced to Ferrara around
1430 (Lockwood 2009: 76; Nevile 2004:
131–2). Domenico started his treatise with a defence of dancing along lines
recalling Guarino’s (or Lucian’s) similar arguments (Tani 1957: 828). His
most important and properly sophistic
achievement, however, was the
classification of dancing steps, considered a capital moment in the history
of
dance. By such a classificatory scheme Domenico ‘created a vocabulary
of movements that could be used
independently of the figurative scheme of
individual dances, offering in this way “the possibility of extending
almost
to infinity the field of choreographic creation” ’ (Ibid.: 829, quoting
Ferdinando Reyna). This claim, and
the underlying achievement, is indeed
extraordinary—but we must carefully analyse its exact meaning.
Dancing is one of the most involving, participatory human activities,
which is highly mimetic. In any festivity,
once people start to dance—which
is often not easy to initiate—more or less everybody follows suit, and
dancing
skills are acquired by imitating the way others dance. Domenico’s
idea of breaking this overwhelming, involving
movement down into single
moves seems trivial and is indeed very simple to accomplish, almost
mechanically, once
one has acquired the idea; but it requires, in the first
instance, a frame of mind comparable to that of Newton
and the apple—of
disconnecting oneself, almost violently, from the impulse to take up the
smooth, rhythmic
movement and become part of it, concentrating instead
on its simple components. That is, one breaks up the
continuous movement
into its constitutive elements, comparable to the frames of a motion picture:
one step on the
left, two on the right; the hands here now, the head there
then. The suspension of rhythm and the fragmentation
of continuous
movement is not a natural act but rather highly counter-intuitive, requiring a
prior step: assuming
the position of the outsider—a position that one either
has or acquires but that always implies a substantial
price to pay: that of not
participating, of not belonging, of not being part of the game.
Yet this sacrifice, if properly executed, offers a high, almost infinite
reward. Once the movements are broken up
into small segments, identified
with specialised terms, leading to the development of a technical
vocabulary
(Nevile 2004: 77–82), they can be taught and learned, and more
or less everybody can acquire them, charming and
seducing the objects of
their desire. These segments can be combined in a variety of ways,
inventing ever new
steps and patterns of dancing. In this way, from a
participatory experience in which somebody is swept away by
the
movement, abandoning himself or herself to the experience of dancing and
eventually making a spiritual
contact with another human being of the
opposite gender who is similarly
abandoned to the swaying movements,
dancing becomes a carefully calculated art where certain movements are
skilfully or—which is much the same thing—trick-fully executed in order
to please, charm, hunt down and seduce.
This is still not the last word, as anybody who follows that logic to its
conclusion soon realises. Breaking up a
continuous movement into a series
of instrumentally conceived technical segments in order to
acquire a pre-
defined purpose indeed involves a great sacrifice, as it has the consequence
of losing forever the
meaning of the aim.25
Dancing performed in order to
seduce is a double-edged sword. It can be easily made to work: it is just as
easy
to seduce somebody as it is easy to make money; but it would never
produce a genuine result, a real, involving
feeling; it cannot lead to love.

Having broken movement down into segments, Domenico proceeded to a

meticulous interpretation of the differences
between the various types of
dance. The aim was to teach the steps, which—again closely recalling
Guarino—was
offered through a ‘mnemonic frame’ and a ‘rhythmic prose’
(Tani 1957: 829). In this way a genuine alchemic
transformation was
produced, as he could switch from one dance to another without breaking a
(mechanised) rhythm,
which procured a huge success for those who took up
his lessons, to the envy of all others watching. Not visible
was the
enormous internal emptying produced by such a trick-ful exteriorisation of
human emotions and movements.
Domenico’s innovations also implied a general change in the kind of
dances performed; a shift away from the
popular bassadanze, which
consisted of a limited number of similar movements—the emphasis being
on the
participatory aspect of common dancing, to balls, where the
movements were more varied but also more organised,
incorporating
extensive mimicking elements. This Domenico used to the full, on the one
hand by starting to
compose elaborate choreographies that mimicked the
goings-on of everyday social life, preparing the way to
theatrical
presentations, and eventually the ballet—a word whose first appearance can
indeed be traced to his
treatise—and on the other hand to more daring and
seductive, allusive and bodily moves, away from the noble
dances where
bodies were not supposed to touch each other, into patterns were males took
up carefully studied and
ever more aggressive positions, like purposefully
not letting go of the hands of the partner and making ever more
explicit
simulating movements. In sum, Domenico not only founded dance as a
technique but his work had a
‘definitely modern’ character, founding a ‘new
grammar of movements and steps’ and a ‘syntax of rigorously
defined
figurations’ (Tani 1957: 830).26

Nothing certain is known about personal connections between Domenico

and Guarino. However, given the evident
impact of humanist ideas on
Domenico’s work, they must have been in contact (Nevile 2004: 132); in
fact, it is rather the absence of such evidence that raises legitimate
suspicions.
This is further confirmed by the fact that dancing was not part
of the humanist curriculum except for Ferrara and
Mantua, through Guarino
and Vittorino Feltre (Nevile 2004: 20; Sparti 1996: 47–8). Furthermore, just
as in the
case of Pisanello, a few conjectures can be formulated, which
together produce a coherent picture. Historical
work must remain tied to the
evidence, any piece of available evidence, but it cannot remain bound by it,
as
events that for various reasons remained in the background, unregistered,
could have played a decisive role in
what happened and why, and with
proper care, affinity and the right bag of conceptual tools can be intuited.
Piacenza and Verona are mid-northern cities in Italy, not that far from each
other. Domenico was in Ferrara by
1430, and while he did not know Italian
well, he not only used humanist ideas but his writing had rhetorical
qualities
as well. So he quite probably had Byzantine origins, perhaps through his
father, who could have been
part of the first main spurt of Byzantine
migrations in the last decade of the 14th century (Geanakoplos 1976:
75),
the period associated with Domenico’s birth.

Masquerades and the Cult of Hercules

A central theme connecting the city of Ferrara with its humanists and artists
was the cult of Hercules. The
alchemic genius of Guarino was again at
work here: the patron saint of Ferrara was St. George, whom Guarino
connected with the myth of Hercules, in about 1430 helping Pietro Andrea
de’ Bassi to compose an epic poem that
combined the features of St. George
and Hercules. The figure became so ‘essential to Este image-making’ that
the
heir to the throne, born just in 1431, was named Ercole; the Este even
claimed descent from him (Bull 2004: 91;
Syson and Gordon 2001: 100).
Scenes taken from de’ Bassi’s epic poem became favourite themes of court
artists,
both in Ferrara and also Florence, and it was through the
representation of the naked Hercules in his various
exploits, especially his
struggle with Antaeus, that a central homoerotic theme of Renaissance art
was developed,
in particular by Pollaiuolo and Michelangelo (Simons
2008).
As is only proper to a city that, on the one hand, all but transformed
itself to a stage, and, on the other,
pretended to trace its origins back to
Hercules, the hero even appeared on Ferrara’s streets as part of the famed
1433 masquerade procession, ‘a parade of gods led by Apollo with
Hercules bringing up the rear’, dressed ‘wearing
the skin of a lion and
holding a club in his hand’ (Syson and Gordon 2001: 100). This was widely
remembered as
one of the first masked processions in Italy, a major step
towards the birth of theatre and the politics of
spectacle. In 1433 Cosimo
Medici was exiled to Padua, which gave him the opportunity to witness the
new
developments in Venice and Ferrara, helping to build up personal links,
but just as importantly gaining the ideas
that would lead to the highly
successful ‘politics of spectacle’ used by the Medicis (Doglio 1990: 230–1).

These developments were reinforced by another crucial event, contributing

to
the incubation of the Byzantine spirit in Ferrara from a perspective that
was radically different yet
fundamentally complementary: the ecumenical
council of 1438–1439, which began in Ferrara, owing to successful
politicking by the Este family, but was transferred to Florence because of
the Medicis’ interest in the new
‘politics of spectacle’.

The Ecumenical Council of Ferrara-Florence

The Council of 1438–1439 was an event of utmost significance at many
levels. At that moment, with Constantinople
in grave danger and indeed just
fifteen years before its eventual conquest, an effort was made to heal the
schism
between the two churches. The council gave the Byzantine world a
unique opportunity to show itself, for the last
time, in its full splendour, in
an effort to impress and captivate western audiences and convert them to
their
own orthodox ways. The refinement of Greek culture that became an
everyday spectacle during the council, with the
exotic and elegantly dressed
Greeks in lavish processions (Morolli 2006: 93), opened up a radically new
image of
atiquity, and vision of the world, first in Ferrara and then in
Florence, which—with the recent completion of the
cupola of its cathedral
—had just reached the height of its splendour.27
Already in the past decades, through the mediation of Venice, humanists
and statesmen had been aware of this
different vision of the Greek world,
but now it became everyday presence. As a result present and past, classical
(pagan and Christian) antiquity and contemporary (orthodox) Byzantium
became fused and confused in a new vision
of the world. Subsequently the
Greek world ‘no longer represented merely duty, virtue, and the love of the
homeland (patria), but also (and especially) the fairy-like reality of
pleasure, adventure, and escape
into the fantasy of myth’ (Morolli 2006:
93). A central word for this new and overwhelming experience, used by
modern commentators as well as by contemporaries of the events, like the
famous traveller and early archaeologist
Cyriacus of Ancona, was
seduction: if the Greeks and Romans of antiquity established seemingly
unsurpassable and inimitable models of conduct, competing with—and in a
way going beyond—the often excessively
negative and world-rejecting
medieval saints and ascetics, these Greeks of Byzantium were rather siren-
like. The
events of 1438 and especially 1439 established a new era of
sumptuous ceremonies followed by a series of famous
feasts and
celebrations, like Florence’s reception in 1459 of Pope Pius II, described by
the young Galeazzo
Sforza, future duke of Milan, as revealing pleasures
that could not be expressed in words (Smith 1995: xii, xix).
There were also
the famous jousts of Lorenzo Medici in 1469 and 1475, in which
spectacular programmes were
organised and decorated by Verrocchio and
Leonardo da Vinci.
During these decades religious and civic ceremony still dominated the
scene, as against secular, purely
spectator-oriented forms of entertainment,
and Ferrara and Florence, following
up on the splendour of the council,
took the prize. In the meanwhile, however, some boundaries were breached
that
probably could not have been healed, with a wedge starting to develop
between actors and public. This gap was
further deepened by the arrival of
the Byzantine mimes after 1453 and the ‘multiplier effect’ of a new
fad—
moresca dancing.
In explaining the rise of the theatre we need to specify the agents of the
process; but, more than anything else,
we need to identify the exact
modality of the breakthrough—the manner in which something that
previously was the
pastime of a fringe social or intellectual elite was
transformed, within a short period of time, into an
irresistible social force,
spreading like a forest fire. Concerning the first point, the gap between the
humanist
intellectual and the fairground mime was bridged by the arrival of
the Byzantine mime. Concerning the latter, a
central role was played by the
moresca dancing fad that swept through Europe in the decades surrounding
the
collapse of the Byzantine Empire.

ACUTE INFECTION: THE CLOWNS ARRIVE

While the transmission of Byzantine sophistic, through Chrysoloras and

Guarino, is a well-known historical
fact—though misidentified as
philosophical education—details regarding the transmission of the
Byzantine mime
spectacle are lacking.28
Given the unique nature of their
character and skills, it is highly unlikely that these performers perished or
stayed. Owing to their moral qualities and intellectual astuteness, they must
have been the first to jump the
walls, and because of their dexterity and
acrobatic skills, they were destined to succeed.
It is also not difficult to imagine where they were heading. A mime
cannot live without a public, and Hippodrome
mimes could find a proper
audience only in Venice, capital of Byzantine refugees. So we may safely
assume that
upon their arrival, perhaps through Cyprus, and not long after
1453, they started to perform their new shows.
Such performances were likely to remain unrecorded. They were
performed by and for immigrants, whose main concern
was survival and
adaptation, not the recording of their activities. Performances also remained
as if hidden from
‘western eyes’ for a series of reasons: lack of interest in
the everyday affairs of outsiders and the lack of
linguistic skills as well as
the evidently disgusting character of such shows, especially apart from
carnival
times. Furthermore, the very nature of these performances, for
those who happened to see them, must have brought
out a number of
contradictory feelings and impulses: revulsion at their indecent content, for
sure, but also pity
and understanding for suffering fellow Christians, which
was coupled with a sense of guilt (Runciman 1965: 181). Finally and
perhaps most importantly, a dominant impulse could have been
pleasure
derived from enjoying the forbidden fruit—a perfect counter-experience to
the Byzantine feeling of
having been expelled from the Garden of Eden.
Based on what we know about much earlier and later times, it is
possible to formulate a few hypotheses and
conjectures about the content of
these performances. The hilarious cynicism of the performances must have
been
given a further spin by the apocalyptic experiences the performers had
undergone, together with the experiences
of their new day-to-day existence.
Two elements deserve particular attention. The first is the presence, among
the refugees, of a considerable contingent of country folk who were forced
to live inside the city, in what must
have been a quite unpleasant and
crowded environment around the lagoons of Venice, lacking the large open
spaces
that were taken for granted in rural existence. Picturing Arlecchino
and Pedrolino in late-15th-century Venice,
one can understand how these
figures eventually became main characters of the commedia dell’arte.
Furthermore and
similarly, the other main targets had to come from the
authority figures of Venice, helping to explain the
emergence of Pantalone.
It must be added that Byzantines never had kind feelings towards ‘Latins’,
in particular
Venetians after 1204, and Hippodrome mimes possessed both
an acute sensitivity to the central values of a
particular culture and also an
almost visceral desire to ridicule them. The two most widely respected
secular
figures of medieval Europe, according to Huizinga, were the knight
and the scholar, ‘conceived as the sacred
forms of two superior functions,
that of courage and of knowledge’ (1990: 63). The reasons why the
Capitano and Dottore would become codified as standard stock figures of
commedia dell’arte might be
traced there, which was probably not
unintentional and even malicious.

THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT: MORESCA DANCING

The moresca was not unknown before the mid-15th century. Of eastern
origin, it was present in the Iberian
Peninsula already by the 13th century
and was danced in the French court as early as 1393 (Brainard 1981: 722).
However, from a sociological perspective, there is a major difference
between a geographically limited and
socially isolated practice and the
tempest-like emergence of an overwhelming social force. The moresca
became
such a force only after the mid-15th century through a process that
can be understood through the concept of the
‘spiral’.29 That term
captures
the manner in which a micro-level phenomenon, under liminal conditions,
through contagious imitation,
might break through and become a decisive
social force. In the breakthrough of moresca dancing the dancing
masters of
Ferrara, the Ferrara/Florence Council of 1438–1439, and the sack of
Constantinople all played a role.

Dancing
Dance is a common, universal accompaniment of feasts and ceremonies
(Salmen 2001: 162). It goes as far back in
history as human culture itself;
indeed, as is argued in a recent encyclopaedia article, it is ‘inextricably
bound up with all those aspects that constitute [ … ] culture’ (Royce 2008:
223). Its definition also involves
the claim that dance must have a ‘purpose
transcending utility’ (Ibid.); some even argue about the identity of
dance
and culture (Royce 1977: 13). This is because dancing is one of the most
involving kind of activities: it
expresses, and produces, experiences of joy
and devotion at the highest possible levels (Ibid.: 167). Dance is
such an
elementary force that, according to Maurice Bloch, it evokes only decisive
and extreme responses, liking
or disliking, there is ‘no dialogue possible’
(see Royce 2008: 223). While dancing, human beings experience
carefree
happiness in such an intense manner that it can only be compared with
erotic pleasure, to which it is
closely related. The difference is that dancing
can be shared and thus engaged in in public, which is the reason
why it has
such a central role in celebrations and feasts.
These characteristics of dancing were known since the earliest times;
they were reflected upon and purposefully
used. Dancing was linked to
magic, as is still perceptible in shamanistic rituals, which are widely
considered to
be survivals of the earliest religious practices, whether in
order to evoke spirits of to chase away demons.
Possession dance was
connected with the core of primitive religion already by Edward Tylor
(Royce 1977: 20). The
concern with demons became particularly important
in agricultural societies, where the mimicking of demons by
dancing played
a major part in apotropaic rituals.
The rhythmic movement of dancing and music is mirrored in poetic
language. Dancing, music and poetry were always
closely interconnected.
Yet, as always, the very qualities of an activity can reveal themselves as
being highly problematic. Spurred by
ecstatic dancing, thus losing their
self-control, human beings can be induced to do things, including acts of
mindless violence, that otherwise they would never consider. This is why
the performance of rituals, and
especially dancing, was carefully controlled
in every human community and also why, from another angle, Aristotle
was
hostile to the idea of the professional dancer (Royce 1977: 96).
The situation becomes even more problematic if we consider the
possibility that such activity can be stimulated
from the outside, with the
explicit purpose of seduction. Seduction through dancing, in a purely
technical sense,
involves bringing an external perspective into a deeply
involving activity, thus breaking up the experience of
participation that is
central to any feast or celebration, the explicit purpose being subjugation or
conquest.30 The dangers
of exciting emotions from an external perspective,
however, can go beyond the individualistic perspective of
erotic seduction,
involving a more general incitement through the ecstatic character of these
experiences. Feasts can go wrong; rituals can spin out of control; and one
should not exclude
the possibility that occasionally such developments
might be purposefully masterminded by individuals who for one
reason or
another do not belong to the community: disenchanted former members,
spies or allies of rival
communities, unconcerned outsiders looking for fun,
malevolent tricksters.
Dancing was part of medieval fairs and carnivals, though—given the
position of the church—it could not have been
part of religious
celebrations. Yet there was an important exception, a particular point of
contact, which would
play a major role in the rise of the theatre: this was
the dance of Salome in front of Herod in order to obtain
the head of St. John
the Baptist (Brainard 1981: 724; Mignatti 2007). The Baptist was one of the
most popular
medieval saints whose feast days coincided with crucial days
in the annual cycle, both agricultural and
liturgical. These include 24 June,
the nativity of the Baptist, and day of the the summer solstice (or
Midsummer
Night); and 6 January, or the Twelfth Day (meaning twelve
days from the winter solstice, 25 December, with the
birth of Jesus falling
on its eve), the day of the Epiphany, or the Baptism of Christ, but also of the
Adoration
of Magi, honouring this birth. It was thus a moment of high
intensity in the Christian calendar, which also
coincided with previous
pagan rituals, so much so that in Italy, still today, this is celebrated as
witches’ day
(befana). Thus it happened that festive celebrations eventually
included a quite realistic and seductive
‘dance of Salome’. In particular,
such festivities were staged in Florence on 25 June, the most important
civic
feast of Florence, given that the Baptist was the patron saint of the
city. The 1439 celebrations were intended
to be particularly attractive, in
order to enchant the Byzantine guests, but—as often happens with such
inter-cultural or inter-civilisational exchanges—this might well have
produced the opposite effect: the Byzantine
clergy were horrified by the
outrageous act of blasphemy that was evidently part of ‘Latin’ rituals, and
many
reached the momentous conclusion that being occupied by the Turks
would be better than yielding to heresy.
On the other hand, it was exactly owing to the impact exerted by the
‘seductive’ elegance of the Byzantine
visitors that the splendour of feasts
was to continuously increase in Italy, steadily spiralling out of all
balance
and measure, and that dancing played a crucial role in this process. The
result was a sudden demand for
dance masters in the main Renaissance
courts of Italy.

This happened in the broader context of a sudden rise of interest in the

translation of music from Latin to
vernacular around 1400 all over Europe
(Strohm 1993: 341). It was by no means a new start: wandering minstrels
were a common feature of the Middle Ages, often indistinguishable from
mimes, as the terminology used was quite
vague (histriones, ioculares,
mimes). Even further, a certain spiritualisation of this development
had
already taken place with the Provençal troubadours, who—through the
‘new
style’ of poetry—would have a major impact on Dante and Petrarch.
Meanwhile, in Germany, the music of the
minstrels would contribute to the
tradition of the Meistersinger (Strohm 1993: 345). Still, around 1430 a new
phase began in Italian musical life (Lockwood 2009: 3). After the first half
of the 15th century it was marked by
the development of a new feature—a
phenomenon whose novelty is unrecognisable today by being considered as
self-evident—a search for wide popularity, a ‘precarious and exceptional
idea’ (Strohm 1993: 341).31 Quite peculiarly, intelligible
only in the context
of the rise of the devotio moderna movement, the pioneers of this
movement were lay
monastic brothers (Strohm 1993: 341). Four main
collections contain the records of this development, of which the
most
popular were the love songs collected and sung by the Venetian Leonardo
Giustinian (c. 1390–1446) (Strohm
1993: 345–6) who was, paradoxically,
the brother of Lorenzo Giustinian, patriarch of Venice and a main opponent
of staging comedy performances (Padoan 1982: 20). The love songs of
Giustinian turned out to be exceptionally
popular, their vogue continuing
well into the second half of the century—so much so that such songs were
called
simply ‘Venetian tunes’ [aere venetiane] (see Strohm 1993: 103,
543). At the same time and as another
significant development in the
direction of breaking the unity of participation, such popular tunes were
exploited for comic effects (Ibid.: 347).
This was the context in which the ‘dancing revolution’ incubated in
Ferrara by Domenico da Piacenza encountered
the new fad of moresca
dancing.

Moresca
Moresca dancing became a fad in Europe around the 1450s (Fulchignoni
1990). More important than its oriental
character is its connection with
shamanistic rituals. It is performed almost exclusively by male dancers,
wearing
black leather masks, who mix their dancing with wild, grotesque
movements, evidently miming animals. Its central
feature is a combination
of violent, almost spasm-like movements and highly sophisticated acrobatic
leaps.
Dancers also had bells attached to their wrists and ankles in order to
chase away bad spirits (Brainard 1981:
727).32
Moresca dancing has a number of further special features. Its
performance requires a particular combination of
skill, even virtuosity, and
improvisation. It often involved a competitive game, with individual
dancers
attempting to outdo others in virtuosity and bravura, pushing efforts
to the limit and often beyond (Brainard
1981: 721). Such proneness to
exaggeration helps to explain the sudden and irresistible spread of moresca
dancing
through Europe in the mid-15th century, which renders its study
particularly difficult (Ibid.: 721).
The dance jumped borders not only between countries and cultures but
also between social classes. It became a
favourite of court festivities, just as
it was a secret pleasure of humanist
intellectuals,33 and was
performed in
city squares and at village fairs.
In order to exert a truly epochal impact, however, it also had to be
incubated in the humanist court of Ferrara.

Domenico’s Tricks with Moresca Dancing

It has been argued that dancing is a uniquely involving kind of activity
where no middle ground is possible—an
activity that is inseparable from
the inciting of emotions, in particular of an erotic kind, and that the
confusion between the symbolism of dancing and of language is to be
avoided. Furthermore, the moresca was one of
the most erotic kinds of
dances, which involved wild gestures that could easily spill into violent,
uncontrollable forms of behaviour.34 The truly revolutionary but most
perplexing innovations introduced by Domenico can be
diagnosed from this
perspective.
Domenico used humanist rhetoric, and in particular the Ethics of
Aristotle (Nevile 2004: 89–90, 132–3), to
justify his innovations. The
authority of Aristotle evidently gave him the convincing power he needed;
however,
the work of the Philosopher was used in a most improper manner.
The concept of ‘measure’, or the middle way, is
indeed central for
Aristotle’s ethic, but dancing is an activity—perhaps the only one—where it
is not applicable,
for reasons given above. Such an inappropriate use of
ethical concepts was rendered worse by the suggestion that
dancing could
be a privileged way of procuring ‘noble’ conduct; a nobility that was
supposed to lie in ignoring
the erotic component inherent in dancing, by
considering such emotions as signs of a lack of culture, as dancing
is
connected with sensual pleasures only for ‘those who are uneducated and
ignorant of its true qualities’
(Nevile 2004: 71). The model is the humanist
intellectual who is only ‘watching’, from a distance, not ‘moved’ to
sexual
desire in the slightest manner—which, of course, is impossible and
unnatural. The central thrust of
Domenico’s dancing revolution was to
inject incitement and the immediate repression of sexual desire into the
heart of court life.35
Such pretence about the ennobling aspect of dancing, if combined with
the position of the ‘pure spectator’, was
given a further spin by applying
such ideas to the moresca, the most erotic and violent kind of dancing,
where dancers had to perform the sorts of violent gestures that Domenico
considered ‘not noble’ but rather
ugly (Ibid.: 92–8). Such moresca dancing
thus had to be strictly formalised, done through performances by a group
of
dancers who—again following humanist ideals about art being the
‘imitation of nature’—were literally and
directly mimicking human
behaviour such as armed combat, agricultural work, exotic characters like
wild men, or
mythological figures, in particular Hercules and the centaurs,
in pantomimic dancing (Ibid.: 33–4; see also
Sparti 1996: 44). Particularly
renowned were the 1475 wedding festivities of Costanzo Sforza and
Camilla of
Aragon, where a group of twelve dancers, from Pesaro were
doing ‘a pantomime
of agricultural pursuits’ in the form of a moresca; they
hoed and mowed the ground with mock-gold tools, in
mechanical quasi-
military mimic manner, always ‘in time with the music’—a central
imperative of Domenico—thus ‘
“dancing continuously with the most
beautiful order” ’ (as in Nevile 2004: 37; also Sparti 1996: 45). Ever more
astonishingly, the dancing masters taught moresca even to young children,
particularly future queens or dukes
(Ibid.: 23), no doubt to prove the point
that there is nothing ‘wrong’ with such dancing if it is done with the
‘proper’ care—as ugly gestures simply reveal an ugly soul (Ibid.: 98).
However, as moresca gestures were by
definition violent body contortions,
such dancing inculcated, at the very heart of the European aristocracy, a
split consciousness, where one’s strongest emotions were on the one hand
purposefully incited and then connected
with feelings of guilt and bad
conscience.

Further Steps by Giovanni Ambrosio

In integrating the explosive force of the moresca, a main role was played by
Domenico’s student and follower
Giovanni Ambrosio da Pesaro. He is
documented to have worked in Ferrara since 1444, when he took part in
preparing the choreography of two wedding feasts (Gallo 1983: 191). In the
following decades he worked in most of
the main courts of northern Italy,
including Milan, Bologna, Ravenna, Mantua, Florence and Urbino, having
commissions even in Naples (Gallo 1983: 191–2). In Florence in 1469 he
became the dancing master of Clarice
Orsini, wife of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Such commissions were highly lucrative: dancing masters were among the
most
highly paid employees of Renaissance courts (Lockwood 2009: 198).
The dominant significance of Ambrosio in the
period is demonstrated by
the fact that the two cities whose names figure most among the named
dances were
Ferrara and Pesaro (Smith 1995: xxi).
The professionalisation of dancing implied a great contradiction, hinted
at above: dancing is a highly involving,
participatory activity, thus the
professional teaching of dancing can be considered as equivalent to the art
of
seduction. Not surprisingly, the dancing masters energetically defended
themselves against such innuendo. Yet the
strange kind of double entendre
played out between Ambrosio and Cornazzano, the two main students of
Domenico,
indicates cynical complicity and awareness: while the former
indignantly refused the idea that dancing could have
any salacious aspect,
not being concerned with such ‘trivial’ and ‘plebeian’ vices, Cornazzano
described in great
detail the manner in which such ‘trivial’ acts of seduction
were to be executed, illustrating it with a story of
seduction—though for a
purportedly ethical aim, as the seducer loses in the end (Castelli 2005).
Similarly, while
Ambrosio solemnly referred to Aristotle’s theory of
measure and harmony as being applicable particularly to the
dance, making
use of Aristotle’s Ethics, translated recently by Leonardo Bruni, the same
word ‘measure’
became an object of satire for Cornazzano, in whose
writings the term acquired
a ‘unequivocally indecent sexual meaning’
(Ibid.: 38–40).36 Furthermore, the inciting of passions, and those not the
best
kind, was an explicit concern for the dancing masters, as is also evident
in the fact that one of the most famous
compositions of Domenico was
called ‘Jealousy’ (Arcangeli 2000: 29).37
Ambrosio’s writings capture a crucial semantic change that reveals the
breakthrough force in the history of
theatre that became effective through
dancing. While earlier he applied general terms like ‘balls’ (balli)
or
‘dancing’ (danzare) to the performances, from about the late 1460s he
started to use the word
moresche and ‘masked dances’ (Gallo 1983: 193).
By incorporating moresca dancing into court festivities, a possibility
opened up of extending the influence of
dance masters from the private and
closed world of court life into the open field of public festivities.

Making Use of Interludes: The Virus Jumps

The question now concerns the manner in which this new type of dancing
and the classical comedy resurrected by
the humanists happened to meet,
bridging the gap between learned humanist efforts, written and staged in
Latin,
and the buffooneries of jesters and clowns. An important step in this
regard was the staging of the ‘hybrid
dramas’, which were presented in
vernacular, thus combining aspects of erudite comedy and popular religious
theatre during the period between 1480 and 1520 (Pirrotta and Povoledo
1982: 37).38 The mode of presentation was increasingly
standardised, with a
prologue, the presentation of the plot, and the division of the performance
in five acts.
The term intermedi (interludes) was used for the music
performed between the acts, first associated with a
21 January 1487 Ferrara
festivity (Ibid.: 46). The significance of this interlude—out of which both
ballet and
opera would develop—quickly grew, and a description of four
performances staged in 1499 contain detailed
information about sixteen
such interludes (Ibid.: 49–50). This also documents a first encounter
between moresca
dancers and buffoons in the context of a theatrical
performance. These interludes, which represented a kind of
masked ballet,
called mascara, momaria or outright, moresca, were more important
occasions
than social dancing, often having a grotesque or exotic character,
involving the fool and fantastic monsters
(Sparti 1996: 44). Such a meeting
between two increasingly professional and in their effect similarly
contagious
performers helped to fracture the still stubbornly surviving
ceremonial and participatory aspects of humanist
theatrical performances,
creating the distant, uninvolved position of the spectator, on which the
people as
‘public’ were fixated.39
 The Rise of Theatre in Venice
 
6

This chapter marks a crucial juncture of this book, tackling the vital
question of the developments leading to
the emergence of the most
important late Renaissance-early modern form of theatre, the commedia
dell’arte,
insofar as it contributed to the shaping of the modern public
sphere—an influence which, this book argues, was
huge and mostly
overlooked. At the beginning of Chapter 4 it was mentioned that the best
figures in the field
have recognised that this rebirth of theatre is shrouded in
mystery. We are now in a better position to
understand the nature of this
mystery, piecing together elements of the puzzle and moving towards its
solution.
The central elements of the mystery are the appearance of the
professional actor, out of the ‘shadows’, the
manner in which these actors
were organised into theatrical groups, the transformation of participatory
festivities into crowd spectacles and the long time that elapsed between the
first humanist comedies and the
emergence of ‘real’ theatre.
This happened in Venice in the first decades of the 16th century. The
involvement of Venice in the rebirth of
theatre makes a particularly
fascinating story, showing the tight connections, of a spiralling nature,
between
the socio-political environment inside and outside the city and
developments specific to performances. While it
might seem evident that
the theatre would be reborn in Venice, the actual development is by no
means a simple
boring linear one—it is instead liminal and quite
fascinating.
Venice clearly had a head start in almost every one of the elements that
played a substantial role in the rebirth
of theatre. It was the place where the
mimes of Constantinople arrived and, in 1441, where the first recorded
large–scale masked festivity or mummery (momarie) took place (Padoan
1982: 24; Vianello 2005: 45),
establishing the uniqueness of the carnival
tradition, which marks the city up to our own day. Furthermore, it
was in
Venice that, in 1432, the first staged comedy was performed in Europe.
Venice was also famed for its
particularly numerous and sumptuous public
festivities (Royce 1986: 69–70), where the use of masks is documented
from the 13th century. Venice was the centre for printing Greek works
(Geanakoplos 1976), a fact relevant for the
rise of the theatre (Pieri 1989:
180). All these developments were closely related to the fact that Venice for
many centuries was the primary point of contact between Italy, even Europe
in
general, and the Byzantium, while after 1453 it became home of so many
Byzantine refugees that in 1468 Bessarion
called it ‘ “quasi another
Byzantium” ’ (as in Geanakoplos 1976: 177). Because of Leonardo
Giustinian, it also
became renowned for its love songs. Finally, charlatans
were also present, in particularly high numbers, with
city edicts recurrently
complaining about St. Mark’s Square being ‘infested’ with charlatans and
tumblers
(saltimbanchi) (Royce 1986: 69).
Yet Venice evidently lacked something, as, in spite of a head start,
theatrical productions were suspended for
many decades, early theatrical
experiments being staged elsewhere; also, the famous dancing masters did
not work
in Venice. The reason was quite specific and extremely important.
Venice was a real republic, much more so than
Florence; thus it had no
court. Public festivities therefore preserved their jointly civic and religious
character, and were not amenable to theatrical performances that would
fixate participants into the separate
roles of actors and audience.
However, and for the very same reasons, there was also a unique
potential in Venice for the rebirth of comedy
concerning the ‘public’. As
Venice was a republic, there and only there existed ‘a public that considered
itself
as holder of political and economic power’ (Povoledo 1975: 253).
However, and most paradoxically, this public
(now in the sense of a
‘people’) could constitute itself as audience only if it detached itself from
the
constitutive participatory experience, transforming itself into a
disempowered mass, comparable to the audience
of Roman amphitheatre or
circus games.1 This was because in the civilisational and religious context
in which Venice was operating,
it was not possible to resurrect the religious
connotations and experiences of ancient tragedy. It thus required
a
genuinely ‘alchemic’ transformation, rendering respectable what was
previously unacceptable—an operation with
enormous and thus far almost
completely ignored significance for the rise of the modern world.

VENETIAN ‘THEATRICALITY’

Venice was also destined to pioneer the rebirth of theatre as—more than any
other Italian city—it was
characterised by a high and continuously growing
sense of ‘theatricality’.2 This aspect of the city is extensively discussed in a
recent
work by Iain Fenlon who, as a historian of music, in particular the
rise of opera in Italy, has a special flair
for this often neglected aspect of
Venetian history.
According to Fenlon, Venice was the most theatrical city in Italy, where
there developed a ‘complex urban theatre
that functioned as the principal
arena [ … ] for the enactment of symbolic ritual’ (Fenlon 2007: xi). This
aspect
of the city goes back as far as the 12th century (Ibid.: 86) and was
deepened and underlined by every major
effort of public construction, in
particular by the two main project of
renovatio: the first effected in the 14th
century by Andrea Dandolo, a friend of Petrarch and supporter of
early
humanism (Ibid.: 53), and the second, started in the 1530s by Sansovino,
who just escaped from the 1527
sack of Rome (Ibid.: 59). This focused on
St. Mark’s Square, and it ‘heightened its already considerable sense of
theatricality’ (Ibid.). The central element of these building projects was the
shaping of the main double square
of the city, consisting of Piazza San
Marco and the Piazzetta. This fact involves a double paradox of utmost
importance for the rise of the modern public arena. It is a paradox first
because a square is not a building but
an empty space, thus a kind of
nothingness—a void that has its own functions but which nevertheless and
still is
just emptiness, thus a form of the nulla, of which philosophers must
be very careful, as Plato explicitly
said in his discussion of khora in the
Timaeus. Second, creating an empty space was particularly
paradoxical in
Venice, alone of all cities in the world, as the city was built not on land but
on water, and thus
an open public area literally had to be built. The building
of the main square became the single most
important aspect of the stages in
which the city was built and ornamented, resulting in the fact that St.
Mark’s
Square, together with the Piazzetta, ended up as the largest public
square in Italy (Ibid.: 88).
The primary reason for creating such a large open space was to enable
the celebration of elaborate public
festivities, which accompanied every
significant episode of the ever-expanding Venetian religious and civic
calendar. As ‘[t]he conception [of the squares] is fundamentally theatrical’
(Ibid.: 109), it is not surprising
that already by the 12th century they
‘developed into theatrical arenas suitable for the enactment of [ … ]
spectacular rituals’ (Ibid.: 83). A particularly significant acceleration
happened under the doge-ship of
Francesco Foscari (1423–1457), one of the
most controversial figures of Venetian history, and the various
transformations by the middle of the 16th century ‘created a unique theatre,
based on a keen sense of tradition
and history, for the expression of
Venice’s own self-image’ (Ibid.: 82). The ceremonies staged on this arena,
in
particular long, unending processions that regularly included practically
the whole city,3 were partly connected to the feast
days of the patron saints
of the city, a list that was in a continuous process of expansion, as it
incorporated
the celebrations of the main historical and political events of
the city, thus reinforcing the particularly
strong interpenetration of religious
and civic rituals. The aim of these processions was partly to keep alive the
memory of historical events, celebrating Venetian victories and
remembering past crises, but they were also used,
quite similarly to the
rituals staged in small-scale tribal societies, to keep off-dangers, thus
performing an
apotropaic function—for example, by warding offpestilence
(Ibid.: 62–3; Muir 1981: 250). Closing the circle, this
was made possible by
the buildings around the square, with their shape, form, decoration, and
very being, which
were constructed in order to arrange, ‘as if on a display,
the different archaeological layers of [Venetian]
history [ … ] visible for all
to see’, thus being ‘a conscious attempt to
evolve, in architectural terms, the
Myth of Venice’ (Fenlon 2007: xi).

Given that theatricality is connected to ritual while rituals are intrinsically

linked to myths, it is not
surprising to see a ‘myth’ being evoked behind the
heightened theatricality of Venice. The ‘myth of Venice’,
indeed, is ‘surely
the concept most strenuously discussed by modern students of the period’
(King 1986: 174, fn.
231).

THE ‘MYTH OF VENICE’

The ‘myth of Venice’ is a term coined by modern historians for the image
Venice had of itself and which was
largely shared by contemporaries from
medieval times up to the early modern period. It was a vision of Venice as
an ‘ideal amalgam of freedom, justice, and stability’ (Finlay 2008, I: 931),
capturing ‘Venice’s historical
reputation for beauty, religiosity, liberty,
peacefulness, and republicanism’ (Muir 1981: 21), focusing on
‘[t]hat
perfect harmony of parts, that tranquillity, [which] is a quality unique to
Venice’ (King 1986: 181).
This vision combined elements from various
aspects of social life, including religion, cosmology, politics,
social and
family life, which nevertheless formed a coherent whole. At the most basic
level, it was animated by a
hierarchical view of the universe, with the
cosmos as part of divine order (Ibid.: 179–80) and taking the indeed
unique
and incomparable beauty presented by the landscape of the city—
considered second only to Paradise—as proof
of this order and of the
belongingness of the city to this order (Muir 1981: 14). It is this same
eternal order,
which was taken over from Constantinople and its Neo-
platonic vision of the link between Heaven and Earth, that
manifested itself
in the unique tranquillity and stability or calm serenity of Venice, as
captured in the title
La Serenissima. This was best rendered visible by two
characteristics: that the city was impregnable—and
indeed for over a
millennium no enemy army violated it—and it was believed that it would
persist eternally.
The myth had closely connected political aspects. Venice pioneered in
Europe not only in republican rule,
politics being subordinated to the
common good, but also in a specific kind of constitutional government.
Venice
persisted because it developed a type of constitutional rule that
managed to eliminate politics in the sense of
continuous rivalries between
various factions (Finlay 1980: 32, based on a classic point by Burckhardt).
The
central aspect of this constitution was defined, already by the 16th
century, using Aristotelian terms, as ‘mixed
government’, and was
considered for a long time, until the modern ideal of ‘majority rule’, to be
the best
political system. ‘Mixed government’ meant a particular
combination of the three ‘good forms’ of Aristotelian
government:
monarchy, aristocracy and republic (or polity). Venice was a republic, in the
sense that it was a
self-governing entity, not paying tribute to any other
states, and was not
governed by a hereditary ruler. Yet it incorporated an
aspect of monarchy, as the Doge was elected for life.
Finally, it also
contained strong elements of aristocratic rule, as its main offices, like the
Senate, were
reserved for members of a hereditary aristocracy, a group
whose membership was closed in 1297. Into these ranks
only exceptional
persons could enter, under exceptional circumstances, having been
responsible for a special
service to the republic.
The constitutional arrangement guaranteed, in the eyes of Venetians,
that the state would be governed by the
principles of justice. This was
assured, on the one hand, by collective decision making: decisions were
made in
the council, after deliberation, where individuals were not acting in
their own interest but rather in the
interest of the republic. It was further
supported by the power vested in the figure of the doge, which secured
the
proper functioning of communal deliberation. In order to prevent an
excessive concentration of power in one
individual, special care was taken
to secure the selection of the right kind of person, who was furthermore
constitutionally prevented from accumulating excessive power. This was
secured first by a complicated system of
multi-layered elections, combining
the repeated selection of small groups with the repeated drawing of lots, so
that nobody could build up support and influence voters. Second, Venetians
had a most particular idea about the
person who could become a doge.
Apart from being member of the patriciate who had already performed,
successfully, various civic duties, the candidate also had to possess very
definite characteristics: considerable
age and no male offspring. Concerning
the first point, Venice was not simply a patriarchy but a
gerontocracy. In the
15th to 17th centuries the average age of doges at the time of election was
seventy-two years (Finlay 2008, IV: 165–9). Statistics about earlier periods
are not complete and reliable, but
evidently even then age was a major
factor in elections; anybody under age sixty-six was not considered a
possible candidate. Venetian government concentrated a substantial power
in the hands of the doge, so it was
necessary to ensure that this person
would not able to use it in an excessive manner. For much the same reason,
candidates with male offspring were also all but excluded, so that they
could not transmit power directly to
their sons.
This political constitution was complemented by a social constitution,
securing the character formation of the
ruling patriciate. It consisted of
three main elements: noble birth, liberal education, and rich experience,
matured by time (King 1986: 176). Matters of birth were important for the
Venetian Republic, as care was taken to
breed a ruling class that, given its
long-term existential commitment to the city and its ways, would be ready
to
sacrifice itself to the requirements of public service (Finlay 2008, I: 938–
9). Such sacrifices were indeed
considerable, and it would be one of the
main concerns of humanist intellectuals in the late 15th century to
challenge
such sacrifices and find ways to escape these, which were seen as
impediments to individual
self-realisation. Education was also important;
many Venetian aristocrats were
highly literate well before the humanism of
the 15th century took hold, Venice being a city that gave support and
refuge
to Petrarch during his exile from Florence; but it was always emphasised
that bookish education had to be
complemented by life experiences.
Finally, complementing this otherwise strongly patriarchal order, the
central image of Venice, symbol of justice,
was female, modelled on the
figure of the Virgin, main patron of the city well before the cult of the
Virgin
began in Florence or Siena. This was due—just as in Pisa—to the
strong Byzantine influence.

But did this image, the ‘myth’ of Venice, correspond to the facts? This
question is endlessly debated in the
relevant literature, and in order to
approach it one again must realise—as it is argued in the best existing
treatments—that the question is badly posed in this way (Finlay 2008, I:
931–9; Muir 1981: 13–44). In fact, the
expression ‘myth of Venice’ is
highly problematic, indeed a misnomer, a construct of modern historians,
and fails
to render justice both to the self-understanding of Venetians and
the image outsiders had of Venice during the
millennial existence of the
republic. This is because ‘myth’ for us is associated with pure invention, if
not a
lie, thus setting up the search for the ‘real truth’ behind such accounts.
It is this search for some kind of
sordid reality behind the ‘lie’ of the myth
of Venice that motivated the work of Queller (1986), the main
reference
point of the ‘critical’ literature about the ‘myth of Venice’, and whose
perspective, as he made
explicit, was the gutter (Queller 1988: 694).
However, this does not seem to be the right sociological
perspective for
understanding any human community and is positively misleading for
Venice. By spending sufficient
time in the archives, one can of course
substantiate almost any fixed idea. Venice was certainly not a paradise
and
its aristocracy was not flawless, but there are simple and incontrovertible
facts about its existence that
remain unexplained if one sticks to the trivial
and cynical perspective that there is nothing new under the sun.
That is, the
ruling citizens of Venice were just like that of any other human community.
The word ‘myth’ is misleading also because it was primarily not an
account of the foundations of Venice but
rather had the main purpose of
governing conduct. It is for this reason that Edward Muir suggested
replacing
‘myth’ with ‘ideology’ (Muir 1981: 22). This term, however, is
equally misleading, owing both to its similarly
negative connotation and its
constructivist rationalism. The ‘myth of Venice’ was not a discourse
formulated to
‘represent’ certain facts or to manipulate behaviour but rather
was based on a conviction deeply held by
Venetians as well as foreigners
about the unique nature of the republic and the means by which this state of
affairs was renewed and transmitted from one generation to the next. It is
better to talk about the
reputation of Venice (Finlay 1980: 30; Muir 1981:
13, 21).4
The contribution of 15th-century humanism was to formulate, within its
limits, this reputation and its reasons in
a coherent picture.

THE HUMANISTS’ VISION OF VENICE

According to Margaret King ‘[t]he vision of Venice presented in the works

of Venetian humanism is their most
striking feature’ (King 1986: 174).
While humanists put this self-image of Venice into words, it was not of
their
making. A central feature of this self-image was that it secured,
without the use of external force, the
harmonious coordination of action,
centring on the ideal of unanimitas, or the idea that political order
requires a
shared system of belief in which all members of the community participate.
 Central to this vision was the idea that political participation, or
participation in promoting the common good,
first of all requires a close
guard over emotional life (Ibid.: 176). This implied an attitude to individual
freedom that was not only radically different from modern values but also
contrasted with the Florentine
perspective. Insofar as public life is
concerned, individuals should be first of all prevented ‘from destroying
the
community’ (Ibid.: 175), as they belong not to themselves but to the
community: ‘a member, not a body’
(Ibid.: 177). This implies that a central
goal of education was stemming the ‘tide of adolescent passions’
(Ibid.:
176).
Consequently Venetian humanists considered as their main task ‘to
affirm, not challenge, Venetian culture’
(Ibid.: 187). In the entire corpus of
Venetian Quattrocento humanism, one hardly finds any works attacking the
religious or philosophical traditions or even the ecclesiastic or political
authorities of the city (Ibid.: 172).
Just as Venetians were not interested in
political or social criticism, neither did they promote an overall
intellectual
vision of the human being outside the arrangement of the Venetian
‘constitution’, and in contrast to
their Florentine contemporaries, they were
not interested in a titanic glorification of singular human
achievements—as
embodied, for example, in Michelangelo’s David—in the purportedly
‘heroic struggle of the
individual against the malicious whims of fortune, or
contrasting human freedom and creativity with the passive
and
circumscribed natures of beast, stone, or angel’ (Ibid.).
There were some exceptions; and they are extremely interesting. The
most singular was Tito Livio Frulovisi,
discussed in Chapter 5. The second,
more moderate but still significant source of dissent emerged among a
group
of humanist friends associated with the new approach of Chrysoloras:
Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454), Pietro
Marcello the Older (c.1376–1428),
and Zaccaria Trevisan the Older (c.1370–1414). Barbaro was member of an
old and
distinguished family and had the unique privilege of having been
the student of the three main problematic
figures of early humanist
education, Conversini, Barzizza and Guarino. He was ‘the intellectual giant
certainly
of his generation’ (King 1986: 223), one of the most important
Venetian humanist of the entire period. His De
re uxoria (On Marriage) was
considered the most important humanist treatise legitimating the patriarchal
order (King 1986: 324–5). Zaccaria Trevisan belonged to a family that had
only recently been ennobled owing to
extraordinary service to Venice in the
Battle of Chioggia, which established
the dominance of Venice over Genoa
(King 1986: 436). Having studied in Padua in the 1390s, he became a
particularly ardent classicist, arguably because of an ‘arriviste’ emphasis on
learning. Through his friendship
with Vergerio, he established close ties
with the circle of Chrysoloras,5 introducing the new genre of oratorical
speech into Venice. A
series of such speeches made his fame but also
secured his place, according to Margaret King, among the few
dissenters
among the Venetian humanists. This is because in a 1413 speech, delivered
on the occasion of his old
friend Pietro Marcello receiving his doctorate in
Padua (the two of them studied together, in Bologna, in the
1390s), used
terms that were highly unusual, even inappropriate according to Venice
standards, characterising the
human being as a ‘divine animal’, granted by
God a ‘divine mind’ so that he could admire the splendid works of
creation
(a typical topos of Chrysoloras)—a type of excess that had no following
among Venetian humanists
(King 1986: 192). The probably implied and
certainly excessive flattery was particularly problematic in this
case, as
Trevisan was married to a close relative of Marcello’s, who was
furthermore bishop of Padua, where he
was granted this quite late doctorate.
The last remaining case, that of Ermolao Barbaro the Younger (1453/4–
1492), indeed concludes the argument.
Grandson of Francesco Barbaro and
son of Ermolao Barbaro the Older, also a humanist, and having received a
humanist education since 1462 (at the tender age of eight or nine in Rome
under Pomponio Leto and Theodore Gaza),
he was literally born and bred
into humanism. Yet, at the age of eighteen, and to the great consternation of
his
relatives, he composed a treatise in defence of celibacy, thus in direct
dissent from the combination of marital
and civic duties expected of a
Venetian patrician. His hostility to marriage and the female gender in
general
might have been inculcated in him by Pomponio Leto.6 Far from
being a libertine, Ermolao was repulsed by sexuality, being interested only
in
pursuing the pleasures of study without being distracted by family or
civic duties (King 1986: 197–9; 322–3). His
end was tragic: under rather
unfortunate circumstances he accepted the bishopric of Aquileia without
waiting for
approval from Venice and thus was forced to remain in Rome, a
prey to anguish and resentment concerning his
hometown and in despair for
having betrayed his family’s hopes. He died of the plague before he reached
the age
of forty (King 1986: 204–5).

The lesson from this conflict of generations can be drawn through Eut-
hyphro, a much neglected early
Socratic dialogue, in some traditions
considered Plato’s first work. It takes place when Socrates is on his way
to
the tribunal to give a preliminary response to the charges. The reason for its
modern neglect can be
attributed to two aspects. The first is its general
theme, piety; while second is Plato’s argument that a son
could never be
moved to denounce his father at a tribunal. The point is subtler than mere
blind obedience; it is
that a grown-up son has a choice: either to stay at
home with the father or to
move away. The prohibition of dissent is
conditional upon the existential choice of staying, and the reason is
that
family as an institution is based on the acceptance of legitimate authority,
which simply cannot be
undermined.
The existence of Venice was based on a series of shared values that
Venetians did not want to challenge. This was
not because they supported
blind obedience to an ‘unexamined life’; quite the contrary, Venetian
Christian
Aristotelianism was very much a life informed by philosophical
ethics. But for Venetians the justness of
Venetians rule and the Venetian
way of life did not require further proof.
The humanists, by providing a systematic presentation and analysis of
this constitution and way of life, provided
such an (unnecessary)
justification. One needs to examine what is problematic; it is not necessary
to mend what
is not broken. By justifying Venice, and especially by doing
so through rhetorical exercises—without being aware
that this was sophistic
—they opened up a Pandora’s box, and already by the third generation of
humanist ‘wisdom’,
they managed to breed a figure of dissent among
themselves.
The problem of humanist origins must be now revisited. The difference
between the background and agenda of
Chrysoloras and his Florentine hosts
has already been noted, and the situation was similar concerning Venice and
its humanistic teachers. Most students were members of the Venetian
patriciate, including some of the most
important and prestigious families of
the city, while humanist teachers were mostly non-noble and non-Venetian,
transient foreigners who never took up residence in the city (King 1986:
31–2, 70, 90). Thus their agendas could
become significantly divergent
under liminal conditions, when the attachment of migrant teachers to the
broad
cultural order is weakened. The young aristocrats were interested in
and even passionate about knowledge, to be
sure, but for them and for the
families of the young aristocrats, such humanist studies were only a vehicle
for
acquiring a proper patrician consciousness—to develop the austere
morality and piety necessary to serve the
common good and honour the
duty towards their dynasty and patria—and thus to inculcate in the young
the
Venetian ideal of unanimitas, of which a key element was ‘a precocious
moral and intellectual achievement
spurred by paternal and ancestral
expectations’ (King 1986: 29–30). Having foreign, ‘cosmopolitan’ teachers
can
be twice problematic: if they accept the local order, they might justify
what needs no justification; if they
fail to accept it, they become nihilist
critics.

THE REAL VENICE AND HOW IT WAS MADE

The singular uniqueness of Venice is still there for all to see—and visitors
are never lacking. Venice has two
features that are still strange and most
singular but that, in the past—five,
eight or ten centuries ago—were
absolutely astonishing: it had no walls or any fortifications to defend it, and
it was built on water. This feature in particular looked like a permanent
miracle, a kind of reverse
adynaton experience (King 1986: xii).7 These
simple facts were not just quiddities, in the sense of a Guinness book of
records, but
were coupled with a series of impressive features: Venice’s
visual beauty, unparalleled by any other city; its
size, which in medieval
times hardly found a like, as by the 15th century Venice had around 120,000
inhabitants,
more than twice the population of Constantinople; and its
unique strength and force. The classic figures of
comparative history and
art, back to the 19th century, considered Venice to be a stunning and
mysterious case, as
close to a real-world utopia as possible. While
contemporary scholarship often likes to ignore or even mock these
figures,
it is foolish to ignore their insights. Jacob Burckhardt, the founder of
modern historiography and
friend of Nietzsche, had a peculiar—and
particularly German—interest in the rise of the modern state and was by
no
means oblivious to the intricacies of Renaissance politics in Italy, at the
time of Machiavelli and the
Borgias. But he did not shy away from
considering the very existence of Venice in terms of ‘a strange and
mysterious creation’, being the ‘fruit of a higher power than human
ingenuity’ (Burckhardt 1995: 44). Lewis
Mumford, the most important
classic in the history of city and technology, argued that Venice was an even
more
perfect representation of the medieval ideal than Florence (Mumford
1966: 368–9), one of its most significant
innovations being, and carrying
still untapped utopian potentials, the realisation of a city without limits,
‘marked by the etherialisation of the wall’ (Ibid.: 372). John Ruskin also
had a number of insightful and still
valid ideas about Venice. In particular, a
most controversial claim, which locates the start of Venice’s decay
surprisingly early, around the years 1418–1423, associating it with the rise
of the Renaissance (thus connecting
the Renaissance not with renewal but
with decadence), could be given confirmation and mutual clarification
through this book by connecting this time with the aftermath of the activity
of Guarino (in Venice 1415–1419) and
thus associating this decay not with
the Renaissance (which arguably started in the Duecento and not the
Quattrocento; see Szakolczai 2007a) but rather with a—Byzantine-inspired
—secular and classicising humanism.

Concerning the real meaning of the ‘myth’ of Venice, the city possessed
stability, harmony, persistence and force
against all the odds; built on the
water and without relying on violence. It seemed to be a living testimony to
the old claim, often considered mere rhetoric, that the force of any city lies
in its people and not in its
walls. Even the assertion about its ancient
patriciate can be assigned a real meaning. The argument of Edward
Muir,
that the creation of the ‘myth’ of Venice was an act of communal genius
(1981: 13), must be extended to the
people who constructed it. The
dynamics of history can be understood not by revering, slavishly, the
accomplishments of the past, in the manner of classicism, but by intuiting
the
kind of effort that went into creating them. Venice was invincible as it
was built on the borderline zone
between the land and the sea. Thus, from
the land, it was impossible to reach, as it was on the sea; while
from the sea,
it was similarly unreachable, as it was something of a sheltered island. Yet
the effective creation
of such a hybrid required first an act of creative
genius and then an organising effort and persistence, over
generations, to
execute the plan. Finally, an astonishingly clear perception was required
that such a project
would be not only feasible to execute but also possible to
complete, in the sense of doing so without having to
fear attacks. This was a
quite astonishing insight, as Venice was built during the worst centuries of
the Dark
Ages, when all cities were repeatedly sacked and plundered and
thus when the previously rich cities of the former
Roman Empire were
reduced to poverty. Yet this was exactly the situation when Venice was built
and perhaps could
only have been built. The founders of the city had the
idea and will power to build something new when everybody
else was
desperately trying to save what they had, and when Europe and the
Mediterranean were ravaged by
warlords, pirates and robbers. If the force
of Venice was due to its in-between position, it was totally
vulnerable when
it was actually being built: a minimal force could have destroyed the small
boats of the
builders, moving back and force between the mainland and the
small islands. But as the Venetians did not yet own
anything, nobody had an
interest, under the chaotic conditions of the Dark Ages, in destroying what
they had just
started to build. Thus the builders understood the meaning of
liminality even better than the warlords and the
pirates: the confusing
character of liminal conditions, the absence of stability and structure can be
reversed,
turned to an advantage, building the kind of ‘ideal’ city without
limits identified by Mumford, which means
permanent liminality.
It is also here that one can locate eventual problems with the city; the
seeds of its own destruction, beyond
Byzantine humanism and comedy.
This is because—being without limits—it was particularly prone to the
imitation of
external models once its internal driving force became
weakened, opening up the possibility of compulsive
imitation. For a long
time, while Venice was being built and was satisfied with and in itself,
reaching as
complete an autonomy and autarchy as possible,8 it had no need
of external models, and indeed no other city was comparable to it. But,
once
its success had become evident and recognised, it needed models in
comparison with which it could
demonstrate it excellence. Three such cities
were particularly pertinent as models: Rome, Jerusalem and
Constantinople.
Thus from about the 11th to 12th centuries onwards, Venice started to
model itself as a second
Constantinople, Rome, or Jerusalem.
 In between these various model cities there was a specific, shifting
relationship. The original reference point,
quite naturally, was
Constantinople. Constantinople was the surviving imperial capital and also
a port, having a
similarly liminal situation, though in an exactly opposite
manner: it was a
natural crossing point between continents, not a cul-de-sac
lagoon. The great building works of Venice, which
from the 11th century
focused on St. Mark’s Square, took the arrangements even particular
buildings of
Constantinople as models (Fenlon 2007: ix–x). Even the sack
of Constantinople can be understood only through this
prism: Venice
capitalised on the chance to assert its own superiority over its own eternal
‘big brother’ and even
captured some of the most prized objects of that city
in order to adorn its central places. Constantinople was
itself a second
Rome and, furthermore, a second Jerusalem. This was central to the identity
of the Byzantine
capital: while Rome was only Rome, Constantinople could
fancy itself as both Rome and Jerusalem. This is
the source of the particular
fascination Venice had with St. Mark, the evangelist clearly associated with
the
first Christian ecclesiastic community in Jerusalem. Such imitation
explains why, around this period, the old
ecclesiastic centre, St. Peter’s
Church, lost its significance. All new glory was invested in the former ducal
chapel, the new St. Mark’s Cathedral: through its modelling on
Constantinople, Venice fancied itself as more of a
second Jerusalem than a
second Rome; it was in this manner that the city hoped to overcome its
main rival,
Constantinople.

The splendour and ‘theatricality’ of Venice emulated Constantinople in

every way in the sense of a genuine desire
for excellence. The question is
how this experience was transformed into pure theatre—which went hand
in hand
with the radical corruption of Venetian civic and personal morals.

THE RE-MATERIALISATION OF THE THEATRE IN VENICE

For a review of this historical process, the year 1480 is almost naturally
given as the starting point. This was
the moment at which Venice reached
the height of its splendour (Finlay 1980: 4); yet for Ruskin, it also revealed
corruption in the very spirit of Venice at a time when the clouds of a
devastating storm were already gathering
for Italy—and soon enough for
Europe as well. Failing to heed the warning of 1453, the Italian city-states
were
engaged in internecine warfare, which eventually resulted in the
traumatic French invasion of 1494 (Gilbert
1965). The gathering Turkish
menace only increased and was most perceptible for the Venetians.
The threat became a reality for Venice at the end of the 15th century,
culminating in the Ottoman-Venetian war of
1503. In the Battle of Zonchio
of August 1499, also called the First Battle of Lepanto, which was the first
time
cannons were used aboard ships, the Venetians led by Antonio
Grimani were defeated. As a consequence, in 1503
Venice was forced to
negotiate a particularly humiliating peace treaty with the Turks. The
perception of the
sudden vulnerability of Venice led to the formation of the
League of Cambrai in December 1508 in order to put an
end to Venetian
dominance. This soon led to the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–
1517), a vital liminal event between the Renaissance and the Reformation.
For Venice, the crucial moment of
this war was its crushing defeat at the
Battle of Agnadello (14 May 1509), after which the city braced itself for
a
siege. Though this did not happen, the impact was momentous, and ‘many
Venetians would never recapture the
faith that La Serenissima could rule a
great empire or be the mistress of the seas’ (Muir 1979: 31). As a
result of
the closing of trade routes to the East and the ensuing shift to the Atlantic,
highlighted by the
discovery of the Americas and the rise of the
‘gunpowder empires’ (McNeill), the power of Venice started to
decline, just
when it had reached its height and soon after the fall of Byzantium.
As a result of these historical events, the ‘malaise [that] affected the
noblemen of Venice at the turn of the
century’ (King 1986: 237) by the first
two decades of the 16th century became transformed into a more general
social and political malaise (Povoledo 1975: 257). The Turkish threat would
end only with the Battle of Lepanto
in 1571, the enormous significance of
which was immediately realised—though by that time not only the Balkans
but
much of Hungary too was lost, forced to undergo, in Eliasian terms, a
traumatic ‘decivilising
process’.9
This is the general background to the developments that, during these
two decades, proved to be vital for the
birth of modern theatre, suddenly
propelling the city, so far lagging behind, into to forefront of ‘progress’.
The distant roots reach back the 1440s, under the much discussed dogeship
of Francesco Foscari, a unique
exception to the rule of gerontocracy (Finlay
2008, IV: 169). This was identified by Ruskin as the period in
which the
decay of Venice began (Ruskin 1981: 35). The city started to gain notoriety
for particularly sumptuous
masked festivities, called momarie
(mummeries). A number of elements are significant concerning these
festivities. First, as the name indicates, the participants wore masks (though
then no distinction was made
between facial disguise and festive clothing;
both still denoted with the word maschera). The wearing of
masks
eventually played a major role in the explosion of the carnival. Second, in
these festivities, almost
surreptitiously, certain limits came to be ignored, or
transgressed, like the limit between the civic festivities
and the carnival
season; or the public and the private (a most significant instance here
concerns the wedding of
Lucrezia Contarini and Jacopo, son of Doge
Foscari, in January 1441, the occasion of the first famous Venice
mummery;
see Mancini, Muraro and Povoledo 1985: iv). The single most important
development was the emergence of
the Compagnie della Calza (stocking
companies) in the middle of the 15th century (Povoledo 1975: 254;
Mancini, Muraro and Povoledo 1985: i). These were private associations of
young aristocrats who wore distinctive
hose and gained increasing
prominence in organizing carnivals and other festivities under the
‘responsibility of
the dancing schools and their masters’ (Vianello 2005:
93).
Events picked up speed right from the start of the 16th century. Here the
account, in order to be genealogical,
must become chronological in the
strict sense of the term. This means that one
cannot be satisfied with simply
telling a story, staying as close as possible to the reconstruction of the
facts
—which is the proper task of historians. Rather, one must try to understand
what is going on, why and with
what effects. Why do the main agents of a
historical process behave in a certain manner? What is the underlying
logic,
script or scenario their actions follow, whether explicitly and consciously
intended or not? What might
motivate them, to the extent that their motives
can be reconstructed and are relevant?
Concerning the first decades of the 16th century in Venice, the dominant
phenomenon leaving a stamp on every
aspect of social life was the sudden
recognition of the city’s vulnerability. In the past, the city’s response
had
been to pull itself together, tightening its ranks through civic processions in
order to demonstrate and
further underline its singular unity. Similar efforts
were also made now, as ‘[D]emoralization gave way after
Cambrai to a new
unity, a stern discipline, that accompanied and informed post-war recovery’
(King 1986: 237). In
these decades, however, something else and quite
singular was also happening, leaving an indelible mark: an
increasingly
significant kind of dissent was appearing in the form of comic
performances.
This response relied on the previously rare and meagre kind of humanist
dissent, just as the court of Caterina
Cornaro, who became insinuated into
the role of the enlightened, emancipated heroine of Quattrocento humanist
comedies. The single most important role, however, was played by the
buffoons.

The Venetian Buffoons

The role played by buffoons in theatre was a phenomenon peculiar to
Venice; their ‘presence in the theatrical
panorama of the Venetian
Renaissance should be considered as a singular and significant fact’
(Vianello 2005:
45). Jesters were part of the medieval landscape, but they
were restricted to courts and thus absent from Venice.
They were
vagabonds, moving from one court or one city to another (Pandolfi 1957:
24), just as later commedia
dell’arte ‘actors were rootless vagabonds’
(Andrews 2008: xxxi). Thus the motif of travel was a central element
in
their shows (Vianello 2005: 36, 8). They were ‘omnipresent and mysterious
figures’, possessing both
‘irregularity and disquieting power’, evoking both
prestige and maledictions’; qualities that ‘in some manner
would be
inherited by the professional actors of the 16th and 17th centuries’ (Pieri
1989: 68). Yet in a highly
paradoxical contrast to their omnipresence, they
were also hardly visible, suddenly appearing in courts and then
mysteriously disappearing again (Pieri 1989: 180). The paradox can be
resolved by recognising that buffoons were
par excellent liminal figures:
appearing, capturing attention, even stealing the show at liminal moments,
times
or places and then fading into the background as soon as things
returned to normality.10
 The occasions when the buffoons escaped their safe confinement in
courts,
suddenly becoming visible to the broad populace, were the
festivities, when they not only irrupted into daily
life but occasionally
threatened to take over the celebrations, evoking the danger of a ‘feast gone
wrong’
scenario. This occurred with increased frequency towards the end of
the 15th century, when buffoons spoiled the
final dances of the carnival,
leading to a general breakdown, in Naples in 1492, or fractured with their
obscene
facetiousness the allegorical procession, as in Mainz in 1495 and in
Ferrara in 1499 (Pieri 1989: 68–9). The
threat they represented was all the
more unpredictable as they had everywhere a special link to the monarch,
who
usually absolved them from their wrongdoings, though they took their
own risks as well, time and again going
beyond the limits with their jokes,
literally playing—and sometimes paying—with their heads.

The Venetian buffoons who made such a decisive contribution to the rebirth
of theatre in the form of commedia
dell’arte, as they ‘infiltrated and
influenced [it] in conflictual but generative ways’ (Henke 2002: 53), were a
very few and select group of individuals, as the same three or four names
are mentioned almost exclusively in the
relevant literature (R. Guarino
1995: 185–6; Henke 2002: 50–1; Katritzky 2006: 34–5; Mancini, Murano
and Povoledo
1994: iv; Pieri 1989: 183; Povoledo 1975; Vianello 2005: 45–
9). The two main figures were Tagliacalze (died 1513)
and Zuan Polo
Liompardi (c.1454–1540). The available information about their lives is
extremely meagre. The
former supposedly was an artisan, as his name
means ‘cutter of hoses’; however, given the virtuoso character of
his
performances, this is unlikely, and it might be that his name plays with the
name Compagnie della
Calza, with whom he was in intimate contact. Zuan
Polo, whose name in plain English is John Paul, was
supposed to have been
educated by a Constantinople mime, Alexes Karabias (Reich 1903: 680). A
third figure was
Cimador, while pre’ Stefano was a buffoon of the Ferrara
court (R. Guarino 1995: 186), implying the close links
between the Venice
and Ferrara festive scenes.
While Tagliacalze and Zuan Polo often performed together, the basic
character of their figures was quite
different, pointing towards the stock
figures that would eventually represent the core of commedia dell’arte.
Tagliacalze was a sordid figure, mediating between different realms,
including the evocation of the dark, even
demonic aspects of human life,
being associated with travesty and even sodomy,11 thus outright called ‘the
ambassador of infernal lands’
(R. Guarino 1995: 190–1). Zuan Polo, on the
other hand, also called the ‘prince of Italian buffoons’ (Vianello
2005: 47),
had charismatic qualities, representing the ‘voice of the people’ (R. Guarino
1995: 200). For their
continuing and effective presence, their close contact
with the patriciate through the Compagnie della
Calza was fundamental: it
was through such familiarity with the great families (of Venice) that ‘such
limited
number of performers could transfigure themselves into the demons
of the place’ (Ibid.: 183).12 Buffoons were liminal figures,
captured in a
chapter title of Vianello’s book that reproduced an expression
as used in his
influential 2002 article entitled ‘Between Hell and Paradise: The Limbo
State of Buffoons’ (see
Vianello 2005: 111).
Their acts were of ‘astonishing variety’, including parodies of civic
rituals, improvisations, music and dancing,
acrobatics, piazza tricks, even
trick horse riding (Henke 2002: 51), thus closely recalling the Byzantine
spectacles. They also painted their face as a mask (Graf 1916: 369–70,
based on Tommaso Garzoni’s 1588 book).
Among their most important and
effective acts—both concerning a direct impact on the audience and their
eventual
role in forming early modern theatre—were improvisations, which
included grimaces, gestures and movement,
focusing in particular on
impersonating various figures. Especially popular, as lively, fresh and
natural, were
the parodies of living personalities, establishing a direct link
between the Venetian buffoons and the first
actors of commedia dell’arte
(Pandolfi 1957: 12–3). Such performances were helped by the buffons’
manifold and
virtuoso capacities, such as their ability to perform stunning
acrobatics (Vianello 2005: 38) or the combining of
virtuoso mimicking
body movements with multi-dialect word games (Pieri 1989: 182; see also
Padoan 1982: 52–3).
The Venetian buffoons had a striking capacity for
linguistic parody (Pandolfi1957: 32),13 imitating with particular vehemence
and success
the accents of immigrant groups (Henke 2002: 51), and
peasants.14
The effect these buffoon performances exerted is only now being
realised. In the past their impact, even for the
rise of the theatre, was often
denigrated by an exclusively aesthetic argument, voiced, for example, by
Benedetto
Croce, and ignoring the sociological: focusing on the meagre
artistic merits of buffoons and neglecting their
social effectiveness. The
latter concerns two aspects: the irresistibility of buffoon performances and
the
spiralling imitations they generated. Concerning the first, recent studies
emphasise two points: performances
were literally irresistible in the sense
that no matter how impudent, obscene or disgusting the humour was, it
could not fail to produce hilarity—a central word regarding buffoon
performances (Pandolfi 1957: 15), which
played on a simple Pavlovian
reflex of human nature. Second, and connected to this fact, buffoon, clown
or mime
performances proved impossible to repress in Renaissance Italy,
just as they had been under the Byzantine Empire
(Pieri 1989: 182). This
proved to be a problem owing to the second aspect mentioned, the long-
term impact of such
performances due to the combination of imitation and
modelling they generated.
The peculiar character of the changes Venice was undergoing under the
impact of the buffoons in the first years
of the new century comes to us
through a unique document, the letters written by Albrecht Dürer to
Willibald
Pirck-heimer in 1506 from Venice. A crucial passage must be
quoted at length:

I wish you could be here in Venice. There are so many nice fellows
among the Italians who are increasingly
accompanying me, showing
characteristics that should warm up the heart: they are studious,
intelligent, good players of the lute and the flute, connoisseurs of
painting, and many noble
minds, men of true virtue, who show
towards me much honour and friendship. But there are the most
treacherous,
lying and thieving ruffians around here, who have no
equals anywhere in the world. And if one hadn’t known them,
one
could think that they are the most gentle persons who exist on earth. I
myself must laugh with them when they
are talking with me. They
know that people know their malice, but it does not bother them.
(Dürer 2007: 32)

Before going into further detail about buffoon performances, another major
player in the rise of Venetian theatre
must be introduced, a maieutic figure
with a demonic touch, Cherea.
Cherea (Francesco de’ Nobili)
While Cherea was only a semi-professional actor, in a world without
professional theatre the emphasis was on the
positive side of this half, and
his other pursuits and undertakings helped him to move in circles that
otherwise
were not open to actors. Cherea was another crucial liminal
figure, making maximal use of the liminal times in
which he was living and
having a vital role in the genesis of modern theatre.
Cherea was ‘the identified bringer of dramatic forms characteristic of
courts, including the vulgarisation of
classical comedy, to Venice’ (R.
Guarino 1995: 159). He was by no means a marginal, like the buffoons, but
rather
a man of courts, having the astonishing multiple identities of ‘a
chancellor, a diplomat, a spy, and an actor’
(Ibid.). Biographical data about
him are very scarce, neither his date of birth, nor the conditions of his death
being known; his last notice is from Buda in 1532/3.15 ‘Cherea’ is the
protagonist of Terence’s play The
Eunuch, who dresses up as a eunuch in
order to make forceful love to the woman he lusts after. He was from
Lucca, a city near Pisa, which was the second port in Italy and offered a
way from Tuscany to Byzantium. Cherea’s
activities, focusing on the
introduction of theatre to Venice, breaking down the long-standing
resistance of the
city, followed a consistent, well-thought-out strategic plan
emphasising ‘infiltration’—the term used by Raimondo
Guarino—of
aristocratic houses (R. Guarino 1995: 159; see also Lust 2000: 38).
Cherea started his activities in the courts of Ferrara and Mantua, central
locations both for court theatre and
court music in the late 15th century and
also main centres of humanist philology through Guarino da Verona and
Vittorino da Feltre.16 In
1506 he was involved, through Ferrara and Mantua,
in the organisation of carnival activities, establishing links
with the
Compagnie della Calza (R. Guarino 1995: 159–60). In 1508 he made his
move to Venice, setting up
residence in the periphery, in San Canciano, a
place for the ‘initial penetration’ of court entertainment in
Venice, planning
for a takeover of the centre (Ibid.: 163).
Both time and space are of particular importance. The place was very
carefully
selected, because—while at the margins, so that he could move in
relative obscurity, thus in the ‘shadow’ (title
word of Tessari 1981)—it was
also close to the villa of Caterina Cornaro in San Cassiano, with which
Cherea,
during the last years of Caterina Cornaro, established a close tie (R.
Guarino 1995: 175). The ‘court’ of
Caterina Cornaro was a singular liminal
space that turned out to have a vital role in the birth of theatre. As
Venice
was a republic, it did not have a court, not even anything comparable to the
Medici ‘court’, which impeded
the activities of both theatre organisers and
‘dancing masters’. The unique exception was the ‘court’ of Caterina
Cornaro. She was queen of Cyprus—an island hosting many refugees from
Constantinople after its fall—from 1474,
after the death of her husband, but
in 1489 she was forced to abdicate (Brion 1942: 292–3). Upon her return
she
was not allowed to settle permanently in the city but had to take up
residence in the terraferma, building
a villa at Barco d’Asolo in Altivole,
some thirty miles from Venice, near Treviso, but where she maintained her
court as a recognised exception in Venice (R. Guarino 1995: 151);
something like a state within a state. She
furthermore had access to the
family villa in San Cassiano, organising splendid private feasts (Brion
1942: 247,
267–8). Owing to their no-man’s-land status, and the unique
experiences she had undergone, her palaces ‘had a
light ambiance,
sometimes libertine’ (Ibid.: 272), contributing in the decades around 1500
to the rebirth of
theatre (Mancini, Muraro and Povoledo 1985: ii). This was
helped by the fact that some mimes who escaped the fall
of Constantinople
ended up in Cyprus (Reich 1903: 679–80) and, through the ‘court’ of
Caterina Cornaro, pioneered
the kind of buffoon performances that would
become most influential later on (see also Padoan 1982: 41).
Through his diplomatic missions, Cherea gained important contacts in
Milan, becoming informed about Leonardo’s
experiments with theatrical
machinery and interventions in the Sforza court, which he transmitted to
Venice (R.
Guarino 1995: 170–1). The moment was liminal, the juncture
being when the League of Cambrai was formed on 10
December 1508, and
the war would indeed start in 1509, with utmost consequences for Venice.
Really ‘good’
tricksters have a particular flair for intuiting and anticipating
events and making their moves accordingly. Thus
Cherea comes to Venice
in 1508, submits a request to print a number of plays, tragedies and
comedies;
participates directly in the organisation of the 1508 carnival; and
asks permission to stage a theatrical
performance in the Rialto (Ferrone
1989: 43), already then an important market and second centre of the city,
after Piazza San Marco. His request, however, is refused, and—as the late
December 1508 carnival festivities
included some comedy-like
performances organised by Cherea, which produced unprecedented
obscenity and vulgarity,
and also involved ‘Byzantine mimes’ (Reich 1903:
780)—the staging of any comedy was prohibited by the Council of
Ten on
29 December 1508 owing to the risk of transgression and promiscuity,
applying a law already in force
against the schools of dance (R. Guarino
1995: 161–2). As in these 1508
carnival events Tagliacalze and Zuan Polo
both played a central role, the two threads can now be joined
together—all
the more so as the connections of Cherea would greatly improve the
efficiency of the Venice buffoon
performances, leading to a ‘leap in quality’
(Padoan 1982: 35–6).

The years 1509–1511, as discussed above, were the worst for Venice in the
War of the League of Cambrai. This
unprecedented political and military
situation came to be combined with a similarly unprecedented erosion of
the
ethic and spirit of Venice, where Byzantine-inspired humanism made a
major impact, both directly and indirectly.
A central role was played here by
comedies—not surprisingly, given that already Roman comedies targeted
the
patrician class with particular vehemence, having the senex (a lustful
elderly patrician) as their main
protagonist, thus undermining parental, in
particular paternal authority. A particularly important connection
between
buffoonery and humanist description happened already during the 1500
festivities, where ekphrasis was
explicitly catered for (R. Guarino 1995:
136). After 1509, the politics of the elders, evidently for the first
time in a
millennium, seem to have failed, pushing the republic on the brink of defeat
and conjuring up the
unprecedented spectre of invasion. As a result, some
‘young titans’ evidently felt that the time was ripe for an
attack on the heart
of Venetian power. They found allies for this purpose in the buffoons, as
mediated and
organised by Cherea.
During 1509 and 1510, because of the war, there was no carnival; but it
was only an ‘apparent stasis’ (R. Guarino
1995: 168–9). Cherea continued
his activities by organising private festivities, working himself ever more
solidly into the Venetian aristocracy, persisting with his primary aim of
generating an ‘interference between
spheres that are and should stay
separate’, in particular private feasts and civic ceremonies (R. Guarino
1995:
164–5). It was in this private circle that he diffused copies of the
comedies he had printed before the
prohibition (Ibid.: 166–7).17 In
February–March 1511, the carnival ‘spirit’ returned, and with a vengeance
(Padoan 1982:
42). The festivities were the most spectacular and sumptuous
in living memory and also the most libertine,
even—as a significant
innovation—involving buffoons dressed as women (R. Guarino 1995: 177).
Yet given the threat
of invasion and the dire realities of war, nothing could
have been done to harness the spiral.
From here, events in Venetian entertainment kept speeding up, helped
by further external events and internal
coincidences. On 11 April 1512 the
Battle of Ravenna was fought, which involved for the first time the
systematic
use of artillery and thus produced many Venetian casualties,
representing a magnitude leap toward the
transformation of battles into
systematic butchery. In 1512 a play by Plautus was performed in Venice for
first
time, in a private villa, under the patronage of Cherea (Padoan 1982:
48). In January 1513 Tagliacalze died. This
offered the occasion for writing
one of the most extraordinary documents in
the birth of theatre, a major
event in an otherwise extraordinary year when, just a few years before
Luther’s
act, Machiavelli started to write The Prince, Thomas More Utopia,
Raphael painted the Sistine
Madonna and Leonardo da Vinci was making
his ‘Deluge’ drawings. Entitled L’Historia bellissima
(Beautiful History), it
narrated Tagliacalze’s trip to the otherworld (Vianello 2005). Everything
about this book
is positively astonishing and highly significant: it was
geared to produce maximal effect, and did so
successfully; and while the
transformation operated on the world was momentous, it was not perceived.
The effect-mechanism starts with the title. The word ‘history’ still has a
double meaning, but at that moment it
had particularly broad connotation.
Italy, and Europe itself, was indeed living in historical times. This was
felt
by everybody; the epochal books of More and Machiavelli were based on
historical works they were writing or
preparing to write, while the writing
of memoirs and diaries became a major practice, particularly so in Venice.
The massacre of 1512 was a resounding historical event—though by no
means ‘beautiful’. The play with words,
certainly intended, was most
tasteles, yet highly effective in producing the kind of adynaton experience
of a world turned upside down that is at the centre of the effect mechanism
of any clown act. Furthermore, the
theme of descent into the underworld
directly evoked the single most important work having ‘comedy’ as its title,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, thus making the title a pun, and raising its effect to
another pitch. Its language
in this sense also gave further affirmation of its
extraordinary character, as—in contrast to vulgar or popular
comedies, or
the usual style of the buffoons—it was written in impeccable Tuscan
(Vianello 2005: 83), rendering
probable the assistance of the Tuscan Cherea
or an associate of his.
The parodic character of the work was problematic in itself, given the
link to death at that moment of collective
mourning; but this was combined
with two further aspects that raised the morbid hilarity of the entire
‘happening’ to a level that produced tectonic effects. First, it had the form
of a vision, thus making fun not
only of Dante but of visions of the afterlife
in general as well—strangely enough at the very moment when Raphael
was painting his series of visionary tableaus, from the 1512 Foligno
Madonna through the 1513 Sistine
Madonna up to the 1514 Vision of St.
Cecilia. Second, as this vision was, after all, connected to
death, the
narrative was also littered with laments about death and the dead—situated
in a comic context and thus
establishing the link between visions, laments
and dreams, which according to Vianello defines the specifically
Venetian
comedy (Vianello 2005: 67).

Just after the lament was published and staged in February 1513 (Vianello
2005: 91), Cherea, as somebody who had
accomplished his mission, left
Venice in March 1513 and, passing through Urbino, another important court
centre,
where Baldassare Castiglione was just about to start writing another
of the
seminal works of 1513, The Book of the Courtier, went to Rome as
secretary of Gasparo Sanseverino, also
called Fracasso (Marotti-Romei
1991: xxxv), whose distinguished family name opened the door to the papal
court.18 This was the
moment when, on 11 March 1513, Giovanni di
Lorenzo de’ Medici was elected pope as Leo X. Leo X is one of the most
absurd of the many amazing characters of his age: not maintaining even a
semblance of faith, invoking loudly the
devil when sick, he not only had a
court buffoon, which happened before with Renaissance popes, but this
buffoon
was a monk, called Fra’ Mariano; he was the pope’s closest friend,
quite a competent buffoon and the only person
assisting the pope in 1521,
when he died without taking the sacraments (Graf 1916: 371–7).19
 Cherea’s infiltration of the papal court was also helped through a
singular Venetian connection with the
Grimanis; another weak link in the
Venetian unanimitas. Antonio Grimani, held responsible for the naval
defeat of 1499, was exiled and lived in Rome with his son Domenico, who
excelled in humanistic studies, until
1509. They were connected with the
Loggia Cornaro in the Farnesina in Rome and also had links with the
Sienese
banker Chigi, who also financed works by Raphael. As Raphael
built and decorated the Chigi Chapel in the Santa
Maria del Popolo Church
in Rome, which was the Augustinian church where Luther was staying in
1510 in Rome, the
statement of Arturo Graf that Luther and Fra’ Mariano
represent two sides of the same medal, coined by Leo X, is
particularly
fitting (Graf 1916: 390).
The rhythm of festivities kept accelerating alongside a spiral spun by
the buffoons. According to the diaries of
Marcantonio Michiel, the
celebrations of 1515 were the most festive of the entire wartime, including
masks,
jesters and buffoons, some of whom were ‘ “not honest but
impudent” ’, everything being accepted because of the
wartime emergency
(as in R. Guarino 1995: 180–1).

After the death of Leo X on 1 December 1521, Cherea returned to Venice to

complete his ‘job’. While during his
first arrival he was still considered an
anomaly, in the decade that followed ‘the buffoons dissolved
institutional
resistance’ (R. Guarino 1995: 187). Cherea was also helped by another
striking play of
circumstance: on 6 July, to considerable surprise, and in his
88th year, Antonio Grimani was elected Doge. At
that time the playing of
comedies was still prohibited, yet Cherea managed to complete a
breakthrough, during the
short dogeship of the aged Grimani, who would
die in May 1523. Cherea would convince the Doge to open the Sala
d’Oro,
the Golden Room of the Ducal Palace, to stage a tragedy in 1522, and then
permission was granted for
playing a comedy in a convent. In both cases, in
the intermission the buffoon Zuan Polo entertained the
distinguished guests
(R. Guarino 1995: 233–4; Henke 2002: 63). The time for the theatre in
Venice has arrived.
Cherea also played a fundamental role in the reorganisation of the
carnivals
(R. Guarino 1995: 238) and in securing the arrival of Andrea
Beolco, called Ruzante, in Venice (Ibid.: 247).
Ruzante, the most important
figure of popular theatre in his times, would perform in 1529–1530 in the
villa of
Caterina Cornaro. Ruzante was also supported by Alvise Cornaro
(1484–1566), son of a Padua innkeeper,20 who strenuously maintained that
he was connected to the Venetian Cornaro family. While there are no proofs
of this, it helped them to secure the
Cornaro villa for performances. Alvise
Cornaro would eventually build, in 1560, the first stable theatre in
Venice
(Mancini, Muraro and Povoledo 1985) and also instigated the connections
between theatre and hunting (R.
Guarino 1995: 247)—a quite striking fact,
given that this was a special characteristic of the Byzantine court.

Having established the chronology of the main events and introduced their
protagonists, it is now possible to
assess the exact dynamics of the process.
Standard narrative, going back to at least to the 19th century and
following
evolutionistic and rationalistic perspectives, placed the emphasis on gradual
professionalisation. More
recent scholarship recognised the key role played
by buffoons, ignored by those scholars who attempted to
maintain a ‘pure’
and internal descent of modern theatre, based on the illusion of a direct link
between Greek
and Roman ‘classical’ theatre, humanist and erudite
comedies, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Molière.
However, the
consequences of this discovery were not fully realised, as if scholars were
frightened by the
implications of their own ideas. Given that the buffoons
were already fully professional, the question concerns
the exact stamp they
gave to the re-emergent theatre, and this stamp can only be understood
through the
roots buffoons had in Byzantine court society, and its spirit.
Thus, instead of a ‘professionalisation’ of
aristocratic, court, humanist or
popular theatre, we should rather establish the main ‘stages and
directions’—using a Weberian terminology (see Weber 1948)—in the
transformation of European culture through the
rise of comedy; in the
concrete case discussed in this chapter, the comic rejection of the Venetian
view of the
world: a genuine ‘revolution’ in the original sense of turning
around.
In terms of changes in the activity of buffoons over time, the central
issue was not professionalism but
spiralling increases in effects, in two
directions in particular: eroticism and hilarity (Pandolfi1957: 15;
Vianello
2005: 38, 49).
 Concerning the latter, the technical skills in procuring laughter are very
similar and stable over time, covering
not just decades but centuries, even
millennia; changes are related to the gradually increasing effects of
the
show. The jokes, the puns, the terminology become more and more daring,
from one presentation to the next,
slowly attacking and eroding the
standards of decency; and when authorities react, as we have seen
repeatedly
in Venice, this is inefficient or even counterproductive:
inefficient, as laws
and rules are ignored or circumvented, as already
happened during late republican Rome, given that such forms of
entertainment, once established, simply cannot be rooted out except for
apocalyptic events such as the sacking of
Rome, and counterproductive, as
a temporary setback only builds up expectations for a new and sudden
outburst, as
if ‘recuperating’ the foregone ‘progress’ due to years of
‘repression’. This is where eroticism joins in as
sexual libertinism, playing a
major part in this gradual progression towards ever more hilarious effects.
Just as
had already happened in Greek and Roman comedy, it was
especially in this area that ever more hilarious effects
were produced,
increasingly directing the attention of viewers to the ‘lower parts of the
body’ (Vianello 2005:
38).
There was, however, an ever more important issue involved here than
the play with sexual desire. The activity and
performance of Venetian
buffoons increasingly targeted any limit of social life (Ibid.: 49). It focused
not so much on the law but rather on the most basic dividing lines and
limits of social life, those without which
life becomes meaningless, even
simply impossible to live, resulting in a ‘contamination of forms’ that
questioned
all borderlines, thus destroying the boundaries between civic
and private, natural and supernatural, sacred and
profane, miraculous and
demonic, normal and grotesque, divine and satanic, recalling that the
buffoon is a close
relative of the diabolical (Ibid.: 37). Such play with limits
was particularly easy and thus dangerous in Venice,
which had no walls,
whose existence on the sea was paradoxical in itself, having a relative
independence from the
agricultural seasonal patterns, and where it was thus
easy to extend the carnival season beyond its normal
limits.
Because of the manifold links between the buffoons and some young
members of prominent aristocratic houses,
involving even emigrant
communities, a complicated, intricate entanglement developed between
artistic
representation, social membership and exclusivity, where ‘the
complicity of buffoons alimented a dimension of
permanent
metamorphosis’ (R. Guarino 1995: 187), encouraging a move towards
‘permanent liminality’. A good
example for this play with boundaries
concerns the fact that the buffoons and the early zannis wore two different
kind of clothes: the typical jester clothing, including a tight-fitting shirt, and
another everyday garment. By
the end of the 16th century the specific jester
clothing had disappeared and only the ordinary garment remained
(Povoledo 1975: 258–64).
The most important element of this continuous play with limits was a
grotesque, painful dimension in buffoon
presentations, beyond the comic or
parodic, implying a strange, alien element: a distant, cold eye that went
beyond observing one’s own world from a reversed angle (Pandolfi1957:
31). In his classic account on the rise of
commedia dell’arte, Vito
Pandolfisees here both the continuity between the buffoons and the Zanni
and also the
difference of both with the work of Ruzante, the most
important figure of
Italian popular theatre. Ruzante observed his own
world, participating in it even when making fun out of its
aspects, and used
a realistic language, while the novelty of the commedia dell’arte
performances, as contained in
their first surviving scripts, was ‘a
mechanical-farcical (posciadistico) type of humour of the light,
farce-like
kind’ (Ibid.), recalling both the hilarity of the buffoon performances and,
strikingly, the definition
of laughter by Bergson. The Zanni was an émigré
servant, different from Ruzante’s peasant. It is in this sense
that Robert
Henke talks about an ‘exilic consciousness’ to characterise buffoons and
early commedia dell’arte
actors (Henke 2008a: 9), while Ferruccio Marotti
argues that the integration of the new theatre into Renaissance
culture had
to be done by outsiders (Marotti 2008: 94).

This poses the question of motivations, in particular the significance of

Byzantine origins. A romanticised or
Marxist vision of a carnival does not
stand up to scrutiny: they don’t show ‘even a shade (ombra) of
social
conscience or protest’ (Pandolfi 1957: 16). Far from being attacks on the
established order of things,
carnivals maintained order by providing relief
and leeway from everyday routine and anxieties (Burke 1978).
Buffoons,
however, played a radically different and much more sinister game. Being
‘professionalists of reversal
(rovesciamento), laughter and the grotesque’,
their aim was not simply to show up the image of a ‘world
turned upside
down’ (mondo alla rovescia) but to perpetuate it (Vianello 2005: 38). It is in
a wholesale
destruction of normality and perpetuation of a reversed world
that the activity of buffoons assumed a
revolutionary character, whether
intended or not (Pandolfi1957: 16). To this destructive aspect at its most
cynical and grotesque, Venetian buffoons also joined a utopian component,
represented by the paesi di
cucagna (Nowhere land) (Vianello 2005),
contemporaneously to Thomas More’s Utopia.

Was such destruction intended? And what does it mean? These questions
are difficult to answer, but given the
experiences of the 20th century, it does
not mean that they should not be posed. Raimondo Guarino entitled a
section of his book, devoted to the mid-1510s, ‘The Limit of the Feast’, and
its starting sentences clearly
identify this problem as developments moving
towards the ‘breaking of the equilibrium’, owing to a deliberate
‘subversion
of the institutional time’ (R. Guarino 1995: 177), meaning the extension of
the carnival beyond its
season, a way of making the liminal permanent.
There is a further, weighty indication that destruction and the
perpetuation of confusion were intentional. In
1523/4, at a crucial juncture
of the Reformation, as Huldrych Zwingli started his preaching in 1523 in
Zurich,
which was even more radical than Luther’s, a group of buffoons
travelled to Geneva presenting two farces, similar
to the L’Historia
Bellissima (Ibid.: 205–6). We can and must imagine the effects this
produced.

THE ORGANISING POWER: THE CHARLATANS

Today the word ‘charlatan’, just like ‘sophist’, is used only as a term of
abuse. However, the word has a strict
technical sense, relevant for the
argument of this book. Yet both terms also have a broader significance, as
‘charlatan’ and ‘sophist’ are special cases of the general category of the
trickster, as developed by
anthropologists (Horvath 2008).
Charlatans, defined as ‘wondering quacks who traded in remedies’
(Gambaccini 2004: 5), can be characterised
through three main features
(Gentilcore 2006: 13–4). A charlatan is first of all is somebody selling
things in
the marketplace solely in order to make money, his ‘goods’ being
trifles, so he deceives and cheats his costumers
in every possible way. For
such purposes he uses a number of tricks, which include his mode of
clothing: he often
wears a mask or special costume (maschera); he stages
shows in order to sell his products or hires mimes
and jesters for this
purpose. Because such presentations are often made on a small elevated
‘stage’, he is also
called a ‘mountebank’. Second, most of the things he sells
have some connection with medication, though his
supposed elixirs are
worthless. He is thus a kind of medicine man, having affinities with
wandering magicians and
shamans. Third, he has a special skill in verbal
eloquence,21 this being a main reason why he succeeds in selling his
trifles,
though again he is only telling lies. These three features capture three
aspects of the trickster: the
merchant, the magician, and the sophist. They
are jointly impersonated by Hermes, a major trickster figure of
Greek
mythology, renowned as the god of commerce but also a thief, the god who
accompanies the soul of the
deceased to the underworld but also steals
souls, and finally the god of communication but also a liar.
Given these features, it is not surprising that, since the moment of their
sudden appearance and rapid
multiplication, charlatans were met with great
hostility on the part of all authorities, religious or civic,
professional or
philanthropic (Gentilcore 2006: 11–3; Gambaccini 2004: 167; see also
Foucault 1963: 52–4, 78–80),
and yet they were invincible, impossible to
eliminate or even constrain properly. Charlatans are comparable to
buffoons: once they appear and gain a minimal place and attention, their
appeal becomes infectious and cannot be
handled through legal or
administrative means. They become the parasites of the social body,
proliferating in the
wide open ‘public sphere’, where a gullible audience
can always be assumed. This is because ‘[t]hose who practice
the art of
quackery had learned that it is impossible to fool a man without first
pleasing him; any form of
amusement or entertainment was helpful to
attract the public’ (Gambaccini 2004: 178). This is why the main
topos for
their activity is the crowded public square, with Jacques Callot’s engraving
of the fair at
Impruneta, near Florence, being considered a classic image
(Gentilcore 2006: 46–7, 280).
 In Renaissance and early modern Europe three major types of charlatan
can be identified: the ‘remedy seller’, the
‘tooth drawer’, and the ‘snake
handler’ (Gentilcore 2006: 20–46). Strikingly,
the ‘golden age’ for
charlatans was the Enlightenment: ‘[n]o other time in European history had
seen such an
invasion of quacks, nor had a similar degree of arrogance and
pushiness been displayed by hordes of peddlers,
secretists, medicaters,
alchemists, adventurers and pseudo-scientists’ (Gambaccini 2004: 178).22
The rise of the charlatans, as a phenomenon and a problem, can be
located with considerable precision to the last
decades of the 15th century.
The first occurrence of the word is traced to 1498, while the first image of a
charlatan is from 1483 (Gentilcore 2006: 54, 40). A burgeoning of
discussions about the new plague of charlatans,
suddenly inundating the
squares of the main cities in Italy, can be traced to the early decades of the
16th
century. While of course false beggars and cheating merchants have
existed at all times and places and figures
exactly recalling the charlatan
were also widespread in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it is evident
that
something strikingly new was happening in the last decades of the 15th
century. Charlatans also appeared at the
same time as buffoons and mimes,
and often together.

Even more importantly, the appearance of charlatans was not only a new
phenomenon but it foreshadowed, centuries
before their presumed
invention, some central features of the modern world. As genuine
‘Hermetic’ tricksters,
charlatans made use of and promoted communication,
marketing and advertising, so that they sparked a genuine
‘commercial
revolution’ (Ibid.: 244).23 In particular, charlatans pioneered marketing
techniques like brand names (Ibid.: 245),
though the use of more modern
techniques like newspaper ads, only took place in the next stage of the
revolution,
in France and England, where the narrative of Habermas begins
(Ibid.: 246). Charlatans, just like buffoons, used
the printing press in order
to publicise their activities (Ibid.: 93, 335–66). The central concern of
charlatans
was to capture the attention of the public, particularly the
‘common people’, at any cost (Ibid.: 84–5). This is
why they used all
available means and media, buffoons and jesters, illusionism and magical
tricks (Ibid.: 317–8),
music and dancing (Ibid.: 318–9), printed leaflets and
images, making full use and moving forward, alongside a
spiral, the ‘public
sphere’ and the ‘media system’. Their distinct mark, in contrast to other
peddlers, was that
they ‘made a conscious and original use of entertainment
and spectacle’ (Ibid.: 301–2).
Furthermore, being nomadic travellers, they profited from their
extensive knowledge of roads and also the places
and times of major fairs
(Ibid.: 236, 293).24 Charlatans incorporated these fairs into their
trajectories, planning their itineraries
around them and using the medieval
system of local fairs that developed around the cult of patron saints (Ibid.:
279–80).25 These events
were organised in such a way that pilgrims could
attend them one after the other. Thus the charlatans
infiltrated, corrupted
and overtook the pilgrimage roads, much contributing to the negative views
Erasmus and
Luther would have about pilgrimages.
Charlatans had a particularly trickful attitude with respect to women. On
the
one hand, they employed prostitutes to lure costumers (Ibid.: 13); on the
other, they also used women mimes and
actors in their advertising shows,
thus placing themselves in the lineage of humanistic comedies as
champions of
female liberation.26
The connection between charlatans and buffoons was always close
(Ibid.: 20, 312). They had special affinities:
the charlatan was not just any
peddler but one who pretended to heal the sick; even more particularly,
‘their
most defining characteristic was their use of performance of some
sort’ (Ibid.: 93). Thus, a contract made in
Foligno in 1484 between an
itinerant herbalist and a ballad singer stipulated that the latter would mount
a bank
in order to help selling products (Ibid.: 91). The original ‘
“dramaturgic model” ’ of commedia dell’arte, the
fight between Pantalone
and Zanni (Mario Apollonio, as in Marotti and Romei 1991: xxxvi), the
master and his
servant, was explored and perfected by charlatans and
buffoons in fairground booths, where the techniques of
improvised acting,
which romantics thought came ‘naturally’, were slowly and consciously
developed and planned
over decades (Gentilcore 2006: 322–3), while the
charlatan as ‘alchemist’ would be a cherished protagonist of
early
commedia dell’arte plays. Their interest, at its most macabre, also involved
the buttock, whose movements
buffoons loved to mime, while charlatans
were often depicted as administering an enema (Gambaccini 2004: 57, 89).
The marketing and selling techniques of charlatans and commedia dell’arte
developed hand in hand, thus
transforming humanistic literary and courtly
comedies, with special help from the most famed Venetian buffoons,
into a
commercially viable form of enterprise (Gentilcore 2006: 322). This helped
to transform audience
expectations, in contrast to the demanding erudite
comedy, towards simple and seductive pleasure (Katritzky 2006:
31–2),
thus solving the problem identified by Peter Burke.
The decisive encounter of charlatans and buffoons, out of which
commedia dell’arte and thus early modern comedy
developed and then
modern theatre was born, took place in Venice, first in their joint
performances, during
carnivals, in the Piazza San Marco, of which the first
notice in Sanudo’s diary goes back to 1504 (Henke 2002:
55). There
charlatans and buffoons appeared in the intervals between festive rituals.
The main role of
charlatans, over time, was to help organise the buffoons
into regular theatrical groups (Tessari 1981: 43–4). It
was certainly no
coincidence that the first law against charlatans passed in Venice (in 1540,
see Gentilcore
2006: 105) almost coincides with the famous first
registration of a theatrical group (1545 in nearby Padua; see
Marotti and
Romei 1991: xxxvii), just as their decline also happened around the same
time, the 1770s (Gentilcore
2006: 149; Cuppone 1999).

The years around 1520 were not only vital for religion (Luther), politics and
political thought (the War of the
League of Cambrai, the Battle of Mohács,
Machiavelli and More) and for art (the death of Leonardo and Raphael) but
also for the birth of the theatre. These were also the years in which,
in the
classic account of Mario Apollonio, ‘ “the buffoons went up, and the
gentlemen went down” ’ (as quoted in
R. Guarino 1995: 183). This
represented, in a sense whose significance we can only begin to discern,
given our
experience with the politics of the ‘demonic clown’, the victory
of the buffoons (Padoan 1982: 55).

BUFFOONS AND MORESCA DANCERS

The close connection between developments in moresca dancing and

buffoon performance can also be perceived around
1520, a central moment
of transition (thus a liminal period) for the rise of the theatre. By 1518,
‘moresca’ had
become a general term for dancing (McGowan 2008: 134)
and also all but identical to ‘masquerade’ (Ibid.: 231).
Letters written by
Federico Gonzaga on his return to France from Italy in the crucial liminal
period 1516–1518
demonstrated both the frequency and peculiarity of
moresca performances in northern Italy (Ibid.: 231). The time
was
momentous, encompassing Luther’s act of 31 October 1517. According to
these letters, Gonzaga was simply
dumbfounded by what he saw: dancers
who, with blackened faces, performed ‘wild’ and ‘diabolical’ movements
(Ibid.: 231). This was also the moment when, in July 1518, the famous and
well-documented dancing mania broke out
in Strasbourg (Backman 1952:
235–8; Waller 2008).27 One might wonder about the extent to which
Luther’s increasing conviction about the
lack of free will was motivated by
his reading of St. Paul and Augustine or by the sight of moresca dancers
gyrating unconsciously in the streets; all the more so as the events were
recorded by Sebastian Brant, local
alderman, author of the famed Ship of
Fools, illustrated by Dürer as his first main commission, and a main
preacher of apocalypse and crusader against vice (Backman 1952: 236;
Waller 2008: 20–2, 35–6, 134–5). The
similarity between moresca dancers
and the jumps of the lazzi were recognised by McGowan (2008: 234). The
appearance of the Bergamask porter on the scene of Venice can also be
dated to 1518–1519 (Padoan 1982: 54–5), a
development that rendered the
victory of the lazzi inevitable.28

CONCLUDING COMMENTS: ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE

RENAISSANCE SPIRIT

The collapse of the Renaissance was marked by the close coincidence of a

series of events in politics, religion
and art, some of the most important
being the war of the League of Cambrai (1508/9–1517), the papacy of Leo
X
(1513–1521), the act of Luther (1517), the sack of Rome (1527) and the
deaths of Leonardo da Vinci (1519) and
Raphael (1520). A key aspect of
this process at the level of intellectual and
cultural life and a central
moment in the rise of secularisation, advancing both towards the
Enlightenment and
the emerging separation between ‘high’ and ‘low’
culture, was the founding of academies, concentrated in the
1520s and
1530s, which ‘sprang up like mushrooms’, in pursuit of knowledge, with
various level of seriousness
(Santosuosso 2008: 281; see also Yates 1947).
Outside Rome, among others, fourteen such academies were
established in
Florence and twenty-three in Siena.
The academies had four main features: they had an obsessive interest in
their emblem, used as a symbol; clothed
everything in comic; had ‘an innate
sense of the theatricality of life’; and inaugurated a genuine worship of
antiquity (Ibid.: 381–2). Members belonged to the upper echelons of social
life, many being patricians or
aristocrats (with painters having somewhat
more humble backgrounds); most had humanist educations or were at
least
exposed to humanist influences. They were not all young, their average age
being around thirty-five, but
they belonged to the same generation, being
born in the years around 1500 and thus coming to maturity in the
later
1510s (Ibid.: 283, 292–3). The poets, whose basic principles were defined
in a 1526 book by Francesco
Berni, mocking classical poetry, were
characterised by the renowned literary historian Francesco De Sanctis as ‘
“the most degenerate product of a disintegrating civilization” ’, portraying a
world that was ‘empty, banal, and
futile’ (as in Ibid.: 283). The poems
varied between the extremes of obscenity and debauchery, always
suggesting
a ‘mask of fear’ and often formulated as attacks on destitute
friars and clergy. They also tended to include
incomprehensible fits of
melancholy (Ibid.: 286–9) and tended to be strongly misogynous and
expressive of
self-disgust (Ibid.: 290–1).
In painting, the 1520–1540 period saw the rise of mannerism, identified
by Arnold Hauser in a classic book as the
origin of modern painting
(Hauser 1965). Just like the poets, the painters had a tendency to eroticism,
culminating in the infamous I Modi series designed by Giulio Romano,
Raphael’s favourite disciple,
combined with frequent portrayal of sinister
figures and, most importantly, an obsession with the ‘inner
torments’ of the
self (Santosuosso 2008: 295–7). In their works, space disintegrated,
heightening certain
peculiarities of the earlier masters and resulting in
works that look ‘like a Leonardo gone mad’ (Ibid.: 294–5).
As a result,
‘[u]tter despair is the keynote of the first Mannerist generation’, with the
figures of Pontormo
being ‘torn by a deep seated anxiety’, their ‘eyes stare
as if into a vacuum’, recalling the desperate sadness of
Modigliani.
Pontormo was a hypochondriac living in utter fear of death, while
Parmigianino ended up as an
alchemist, trying to freeze mercury (Ibid.:
297–9).
These poets and painters alike were signs of the ‘tragic last act of
alienation for a civilization that had
reached its highest point a few years
earlier’ (Ibid.: 286)—mere symptoms of liminality, whose ability to
maintain integrity had been tragically dissolved.
Part III
The Effect Mechanism of Commedia
dell’Arte
Visions and Realities of Commedification
 Commedia dell’Arte
Schismogenic Sub-plots and Irresistible Stock
7 Types

Part II introduced a number of threads fundamental to reconstructing the

rebirth of theatre in the late
Renaissance. These include the buffoons, the
charlatans and the humanist comedy writers and also the Byzantine
dotti
and their impact not only on comedy writing but also on painting and
dancing, apart from their
general ‘educational’ mission, where classical
sophists-satirists like Lucian played a central role. Several of
these (like
moresca dancing and painting) were connected with the past history or pre-
history of theatre, while
the connection between some others and the
theatre, like the special interest of early humanists in the comedies,
remained mysterious. Common and central to all was the strong role played
by the Byzantine connections. The
actors in these developments were
therefore identified as carriers of a Byzantine ‘spirit’.
The decisive and widespread stamping of this spirit on the entire
population of Europe, however, only happened
through the theatre from the
16th century onwards, where the main carriers of this spirit were the Italian
theatrical troupes, through the genre that came to be called commedia
dell’arte. It has been argued that ‘[i]t
would be difficult to think of an
historical style that has affected twentieth-century performance more than
the
Italian Commedia dell’Arte’ (Gordon 1983: 3); but the impact exerted
went well beyond the constrained
space of theatre. The aim of this chapter
is to present the central aspects of these performances insofar as they
were
instrumental in propagating the Byzantine spirit. While the various
components presented in the previous
chapters were instrumental in cutting
down the Renaissance at its vital roots, so that after the 1420s the
so-called
High Renaissance was nothing but flowers growing out of this dead body,
recalling Baudelaire’s
modernité, with popular theatrical performances
giving positive shape to the modern world. As some of the
best historians of
theatre are starting to realise, these developments in the performing arts
were just as vital
for the rise of the modern world as better-known, more
‘serious’ developments, like the Reformation, both in its
Protestantism and
puritanism, as analysed by Max Weber and Eric Voegelin, following up
hints by Tocqueville and
Dilthey; the rise of the modern state and the
disciplinary network, as analysed by Foucault or Oestreich; or the
court
society, as envisioned by Norbert Elias—which indeed was, already in the
15th century, a central breeding ground for the theatre, being a privileged
‘host’ for the Byzantine ‘virus’.
The individual of modern liberalism is not simply a secularised version
of the Protestant ethic, as Weber argues;
neither is it the unchaining of the
internalised normalisation produced by the disciplinary network, as
Foucault
claims; nor even is the consequence of the functional
democratisation of the ritualised etiquette and strategic
games characteristic
of the absolutist court society, which is the perspective of Norbert Elias. It
has its flip
side, thanks to a theatre that grew out of comedy, which was just
as significant in producing major and lasting
effects on the social body and
was not less sordid or macabre either. Instead of simply denouncing the
repressive, or even productive, effects of political control, social discipline
or the centralised state,
celebrating the subversive and liberating potential of
comedy, we should consider Puritanism and theatricality,
commodification
and ‘commedification’, transparency and hypocrisy, as twin aspects of the
same schismogenic
development. What was lost, in consequence, was the
potential harmony and discrete charm of ordinary, day-to-day
sociability
(Simmel), based on the ‘total social fact’ of gift relations (Mauss), and
playful con-testing
(Huizinga).
Thus, following the logic of a genealogical inquiry, there is no point in
continuing with a historical narrative.
The central emphasis will be on the
effect mechanism of theatre as commedia dell’arte. For this, we need to
identify the central forms of action, modes of conduct and types of
subjectivity proliferated, disseminated,
invested and infected into the social
body by early modern comedy.
The features of the genre can be captured in two sets of three interconnected
terms: improvisation, masks and
stock types; and commercialisation,
professionalisation, and respectability (Andrews 2008: xviii–xxi; Katritzky
2006: 27–39; Tessari 1989). In contrast to ancient or humanistic comedy,
commedia dell’arte was based on
improvised acting. While the presumed
spontaneity of improvisation was exaggerated by romantic interpretations,
this was still its central distinguishing feature. Most actors also wore masks,
which was also a novelty in late
Renaissance Europe, as in the Middle Ages
the use of mask was very limited in time and place.
These masks, furthermore, had a singular feature. Ancient masks
covered the entire face and were often larger
than life, which meant that
facial expression was fixed, frozen into conveying a single mood, tragic or
comic,
and also—as actors spoke through an opening for the mouth—their
voices were hollow, impersonal. This was because
classical theatre was
staged in the open air, in front of a huge public, which perceived symbolic
faces and
voices, not individual actors. However, as buffoons, mountebanks
and charlatans originally performed in fairs and
carnivals, or inside courts,
close to the audience, they developed a mask that covered only the upper
part of
the face, leaving the mouth open—a type of mask still technically
called
‘Venetian’. This granted great versatility for actors to change their
facial expressions and voice as part of
generating a comic effect, which
further enhanced the improvised character of comedies: the recitation of
fixed
lines was replaced by the free interaction between half-masked actors,
which resulted in the emergence stock
types. Actors kept wearing the same
masks and thus eventually became identified with their roles, or their
‘masks’, so much so that the ‘mask’ became identified with them as well.
Such a fluid combination between improvised acting and half-masked
stock types rendered possible character
development, another innovation of
commedia dell’arte, which could indeed be called the ‘Christianisation’ of
comedy. Ever since Aristotle, theoreticians of theatre have agreed that
tragedy is concerned with individual
character and fate while comedy is
about general types. However, while this also applies to modern comedies,
up
to Shakespeare and Molière and beyond, commedia dell’arte added
something new: actors did not simply ‘wear’ a
mask as an identity; rather,
the stock type became identical with the concrete actor, who developed it in
a
particular direction. Thus, far from different actors mechanically repeating
the same stock characters and scenes
over the decades and centuries, the
history of commedia dell’arte can be described as the history of the actors
who came to impersonate, literally, the various ‘masks’—a development
that would have a central role in the
effective socio-political impact of
commedia dell’arte through the broad intellectual and cultural respect
gained, for the genre, by the best such actor personalities.
It also leads directly to the second trio of concepts. What came to be
called from the 18th century onward
‘commedia dell’arte’ was an
assortment of mountebanks, jesters and buffoons organised by charlatans,
failed
intellectuals, and disempowered patricians and courtiers (Tessari
1981) into a commercially viable form of
professional entertainment. The
term ‘commercialisation’ is pivotal, as this marks the way in which theatre
played a fundamental role in the genesis of capitalism, an argument
elaborated convincingly and at great length
by Agnew (1986), explicitly
focusing on the protean and thus culturally liminal rather than socially
marginal
character of actors.1
Professionalisation, however, is slightly
problematic, as Venetian buffoons were already fully professional, and
an
excessive emphasis on this aspect has tended to overlook the Byzantine
connection. Thus, concerning the
organisation of troupes, the focus should
be on commercialisation rather than professionalisation, while at the
social
level the central issue was the search for respectability, a point emphasised
by Richard Andrews (2008) in
his introduction to the English translation of
the plot lines of the fifty commedia dell’arte scenarios published
in 1611 by
Flaminio Scala (1552–1624), a major figure of the early period. Publication
was an attempt to gain
respect for the genre, showing that it also used
literary works, beyond the scurrility and obscenity associated
with earlier
farces and fairground shows. Such a search for respectability already
characterised some earlier troupes, in particular the Gelosi of the Andreinis,
first registered
in Milan in 1569 but gaining reputation in Florence, where
their features, as recently identified by Margaret
Katritzky (2006), were
immortalised on the walls of the Santissima Annunziata Church.
Marking a gap between commedia dell’arte performances and low-level
comedy was part of a wholesale ‘propaganda
campaign by which actors
aimed to build bridges with high literary culture’ (Andrews 2008: xxii).
Given that
charlatans pioneered marketing techniques, such campaigns did
achieve their aim and no doubt contributed to
increased respectability, but at
a significant price. At a concrete level, such efforts opened a gap between
‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture that simply did not exist in the medieval world
(Ibid.). Thus, after a distance was
created between works of art and their
appreciation through the imposition of ‘rational’ perspective, around
1420,
destroying devotional gaze, and the wedging of a gap between actors and
audience in the early 16th century
in Venice, destroying the experience of
participation in religious and civic rituals, now a third gap was
generated
through theatricality, moving towards modern thinking as codified by
Descartes, Newton, Adam Smith and
Kant, which identifies the detached
spectator as the highest possible ethical and intellectual standpoint human
beings can achieve. This is the central core of modernist and progressivist
orthodoxy.

THE PLOT: ROMANTIC LOVE

The central plot of comedy—just as in Roman comedy or its source, Greek

new comedy—was extremely simple, though
its concrete versions can be
quite complicated: it is about satisfying the natural urge of young people to
give
free reign to their desire to possess the beloved. Still, far from simply
imitating Roman comedy, commedia
dell’arte radically transformed this
basic plot. This was partly because of the difference between Greek, Roman
and Christian ideas about ‘love’. In Roman comedy the object of desire was
often a ‘prostitute’, with happy
ending being produced by marrying the girl
who was previously seduced, or rather raped. In a Christian setting,
love
had to be mutual, which led to the idea of ‘romantic love’—and not merely
purely sexual desire—at first
sight, already present in medieval troubadour
literature, which—through its effect on Italian poetry and the
novel, in
particular Petrarch and Boccaccio, central figures of the first stage of
Renaissance humanism—was
incorporated into comedies.
Such differences were further accentuated by commedia dell’arte sub-
plots, where the Roman aspects, transmitted
in a Byzantine key, displaced
the focus from the young lovers of troubadour-inspired narratives like
‘Abelard and
Heloise’. Emphasis shifted to authority figures who interfered
with the free reign of love, like the inflexible
father who wanted to marry
his daughter against her will, and—even more—the servant who was
conspiring against
the father in order to help the young couple. The basic
actions, both along
the main plot-line and the sub-plot, were simple and
often vulgar (Andrews 1993: 199–201), focusing on the comic
and the
obscene and especially their connections (Ferrone 2008: 111). In this way
‘professional comedians broke
away from the learned tradition, and its
attempt to censor them, in order to permit themselves greater vulgarity,
more comic subversion, and the continued use of dialects’ (Andrews 1993:
200). Central to this was the image of a
world turned upside down.
The issue concerns the complicated relationship between reality and art,
as confused by Byzantine humanism. In
classical philosophy, the role of art,
just like that of political philosophy, was to serve as a ‘mirror’, not by
mechanically reflecting social and political life but rather by offering the
possibility of meditation,
contemplation and reflection. The humanists, by
focusing on a ‘perfect’ match with reality, at a first level
misdirected
attention, so that at a second level, once their naïve interlocutors became
convinced, could show up
insignificant or misleading aspects of reality with
full, minute, unnecessary precision, so that at a third level
the very mirror
could distorted, just as in a convex mirror the objects appear upside down.
Finally this
distorted image, through theatre, could be shown and
disseminated to the populace. Comedies, of course, never
simply ‘reflected’
the real world: it could even be argued that commedia dell’arte is ‘only
minimally a theatre
about social reality’ (Andrews 2008: xlvi); yet in order
to function, its characters and plot lines had to be
recognisable. The central
element in this regard was the purported preoccupation with showing
scenes from the
life of an ‘ordinary respectable family’ (Ibid.: xlviii), in
particular concerning sexual virtue, focusing on
honour and virginity. In
practice, the plots revealed lust, immorality, and debauchery, not only at the
level of
the servants—where sexual laxity was taken for granted, but which
now became radiated from the cultural centre as
captivating and titillating
model—but even more in figures of authority, in particular the Venetian
patrician,
the university professor and the knight: the three core figures of
respect of European, in particular Venetian
culture. Thus, while—in
contrast to the romantic revolutionary predilection, which captivated even
important
figures like Bakhtin—they had no revolutionary intentions; at
least in the modern sense, their shows in fact
assumed a revolutionary value
(Pandolfi 1957: 16).
Central to this ‘subplot’ was a duel between the master and his servant,
built on the ‘experiments’ by charlatans
and mountebanks in fairgrounds
and marketplaces, which eventually became a central feature of commedia
dell’arte,
its ‘life blood’ (Henke 2002: 24–5). In significant contrast to
Roman comedy, the entire action of commedia
dell’arte was dominated by
dualistic confrontations, whether between rival lovers, parents and children
or
parents and parents (Andrews 2008: xliii–iv), instilling at the very heart
of European society the idea that
human behaviour is fundamentally
conflictual. The Venetian origins of this duel are shown by its main figures
becoming identified as the Venetian merchant (Magnifico, then Pantalone)
and the Bergamask porter (Zanni, then
Arlecchino).

SUB-PLOTS: MASTER-SERVANT SCHISMOGENESIS

Thus, commedia dell’arte not only had subplots but one of these would
become the central focus of the entire
show. Still, this is only the beginning,
as once emphasis was displaced from the already problematic ‘love at
first
sight’ to the conflict between master and servant, a series of further
developments took place. In a second
shift, the emphasis was displaced
between the two figures, from ‘master’ to ‘slave’. The centre of
performance
became the servant (zanni), who literally stole the show. Then,
even more strikingly, at this point a
further shift or rather duplication
followed, as if following Bateson’s rule (Bateson 1972: 379ff):2 once an
error component emerges in a
process, it would immediately be split,
producing its own double. This rule was discovered by Gregory Bateson’s
father, based on the realisation that when insects, owing to a genetic error,
develop a faulty leg, this
immediately splits into two. In our case, the
genetic rule must be supplanted by a mimetic rule: once the
attention of a
theatrical performance shifts to its lowest character, this is accompanied by
the duplication of
the character: the one Zanni suddenly metamorphoses
into two lazzi,3 and so the conflict is further transposed from a
master-slave
dialectics into the antics of the two servant-buffoons, who again steal the
show.
 Once processes of schismatic splitting and mimetic doubling are set in
motion, they keep proliferating, lowering
the resistance of rock-solid
objective reality. Once the lazzis stole the show, the authority figure also
split into two. Magnifico gained a friend, or rival, as in such processes the
two meta-morphose into each other
and back in a nick of time, a fellow
father with another daughter, or father of a young man—whether of the one
who was in love with the daughter or of the one who Magnifico wanted his
daughter to marry, or even the
bridegroom himself. This is where the
Dottore enters the scene—a university professor, usually from Bologna, a
figure not present in Roman or Greek models, doubled further up as the
Capitano—which had its famous models, like
the protagonist of a most
popular comedy by Plautus, Miles Gloriosus.
Of course, as we have seen, dualistic agonism was vital for the very
structure of comedy and tragedy, and even
the twin motive was used, for
example, in the Menaechme, another of the most popular plays of Plautus,
source of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Still, the rise and effect
mechanism of commedia dell’arte can
by understood only by realising—in
the spirit of recent research emphasising the local, modern and not imitative
character of early Italian theatrical performances—that the development of
the plot, subplots and characters of
commedia dell’arte follows this logic of
internal displacement, splitting and doubling.
The spiraling process of continuous doubling and metamorphosis does
not end even here, as the relationship over
time between the two lazzi itself
follows the same logic of displaced emphasis and revaluation of values
that
characterised the antagonism between master and servant. First a hierarchy
was established between the two lazzi, with the first lazzi being the clever
one, a shrewd manipulator, while the second was just a lumpish dumb-head;
however, time and again the second
lazzi would take over and become the
dominating figure. Thus the second Bergamask lazzi,
Arlecchino, would
displace the first, Brighella, so much so that by today nobody knows about
Brighella, while
Arlecchino or Harlequin are widely recognised. Then
Arlecchino would have a second lazzi, Pierrot (again
the lumpish one,
developed in France from Pulcinella/Pedrolino), who would eventually
outdo Harlequin in
popularity, so thoroughly that, after the French
Revolution, in Paris, Pierrot became a solo act, as the poor
unhappy victim,
representing suffering mankind and preceding Charlie Chaplin in
representing the proletariat as
dreamed up by romantic revolutionaries.
These points will be revisited in Part IV. The argument here turns to the
presentation, in minimal detail, of the
main protagonists of the shows: so
many shadowy, underground models for the ‘modern type of man’.

THE MAIN BUFFOON STOCK TYPES

Zanni
While for a long time the origin of the Zanni character proved elusive, a
recent book by Alessandra Mignatti gave
a solution that is gaining wide-
spread acceptance (Mignatti 2007, Katritzky 2008). According to her, Zanni
is
simply a northern dialect version of Gianni, or Johnny (Mignatti 2007:
39–43), and the reason is that the feasts
of St. John the Baptist coincided
with two major fairs, the Twelfth Day and especially Midsummer Night
(Ibid.:
65–78)—these being by no means accidentally the titles of two
comedies by Shakespeare, arguably even his most
important ones. During
these carnival periods celebrations often evoked practices from the remote
past, involving
masked performers and mimes and having clear shamanistic
allusions (Ibid.: 124). The Zanni, just like the
Baptist, was a ‘messenger’
figure, but a different kind, from a more distant, wild, and demonic realm
connected
with ancient apotropaic and fertility rituals (Ibid.: 153). This
evoked associations with the legendary ‘wild
man’ or ‘ape man’ (Ibid.:
124–5, see also Lust 2000, Horvath 2009, Welsford 1966), and the bear,4
whose name in many dialects in Italy
was identical with the term for
’mask’, while surviving black masks clearly evoke both the ‘wild man’
figure and
the shape of a bear (Mignatti 2007: 120–5). But they also evoked
more sinister associations: the Zanni had
bestial aspects, which included his
long plumes,5 the enormous phallic nose, the elongated and pointed, goat-
like beard, and tufts of
hair that inclined back on his head like the horns of a
goat. Indeed, the animals most associated with the Zanni
were the donkey
and the goat, both considered in diverse traditions as diabolical, evoking the
primordial chaos
(Ibid.: 165–73).
 Furthermore, the wild man was also called moro, having affinities with
the moresca dance (Ibid.: 144–8). This dance was performed at fairs as
early as the 13th century, in particular
in the form of the dance of Salome,
which was closely connected to the figure of the Baptist. The very
particular
features of the Baptist—his long beard, ragged cloths, aspects of
a desert hermit, thus a highly liminal
figure—closely evoked the ‘wild man’
figure; thus, in carnivalesque celebrations, the two figures became fused.
The Zanni emerged when the carnival figure, which combined a variety of
archaic and Christian meanings, left the
rite and entered the theatre as
magical assistant (Ibid.: 223).6

Pantalone
The main protagonist of commedia dell’arte was Pantalone, always leading
Scala’s cast of characters (Andrews
2008: xxi). He was a Venetian
merchant, in earlier times often called Magnifico (Nicoll 1963a: 253–6,
1963b: 44),
which, especially in Venetian dialect, was ‘a generic title of
respect’ (Andrews 2008: xxi); thus its use reveals
the intended attack
against figures of respect. His costume remained unchanged over time,
including his trademark
trousers—which eventually would give its name to
the pantaloon—a characteristic pair of Turkish slippers, and in
the early
period a dangling leather phallus, later replaced by a wooden sword. He
wore a tall, red and pointed
woolen cap, that was characteristic of Venetian
merchants; but his most important feature was the aquiline mask:
‘[i]t was
enough to see him flap across the stage to receive the vivid impression of a
bird of prey, forever
seeking carrion, restless and alert’ (Niklaus 1956: 37).7
This impression was only reinforced by ‘a protruding codpiece
advertising
claims to virility which the audience would assume were exaggerated’; a
long, beak-like and crooked
phallic nose; and a ‘thin pointed beard’
(Andrews 2008: xxii). These features clearly identify the Zanni of the
medieval fairground as a source of this figure as well.
Pantalone was the nominal protagonist of the action, though not a hero;
rather, he was the butt of the jokes, in
itself a major revaluation of values
(Nicoll 1963b: 44). While representing the Venetian merchant of his times,
on stage he was uncharacteristically unlucky: cuckolded if married,
deceived by his valet or friends, ‘he always
saw the ruin of all his plans,
amorous, matrimonial, and monetary’ (Niklaus 1956: 37). He was a
‘debased
citizen-merchant whose gravitas has suffered from the ravages of
time’ (Henke 2002: 19). In spite of all
this, he was not a mere caricature but
rather a serious figure, genuinely worried about the marriage of his
daughter, which usually provided the central plot line; and though elderly
he was not decrepit, as seen by his
chasing of women but also by his
readiness to pull a sword to defend his honour and especially that of his
daughter (Nicoll 1963b: 49–51). Finally, in spite of all its realism, through
the costume and especially the
mask, the figure was suddenly transfigured:
it ceased to be a commonplace and became fantastic. It was as if a
fusion of
elements had taken place, resulting in his emergence as a fixed
figure—
ageless, timeless, and extraordinary. Once this fusion was achieved through
the wearing of the mask, the
more he maintained his normal human
qualities in his role, the more inhuman and fantastic he appeared. (Niklaus
1956: 37–8)

The Dottore
Usually called Graziano, the Dottore wore the standard black academic
dress and a black mask with a nose and a
forehead, to similarly sinister
effect (Niklaus 1956: 38). In spite of his Bolognese accent, alluding to the
oldest university town in Europe, his descent is customarily traced to
Francolino, a small river-crossing and
customs post between Ferrara and
Venice (Henke 2002: 19), thus strikingly capturing a liminal point between
the
two cities that were most important (along with Florence) both for the
rise of comedy, and the spread of
Byzantine humanism in Italy. Such
connections are further underlined by the fact that the main source of the
figure was the Pedant in early humanist comedy, representing ‘a kind of
fallen humanist’ (Ibid.). Occasionally,
especially by the 17th century, he
became a medical and not legal doctor, but only as a charlatan. His features
therefore represent a combination of the most delicate professions:
fundamental for helping the victims and the
sick but easily becoming
abusive. Apart from using a Bolognese accent, the Dottore’s talk was so full
of garbage
Latin legal terminology that it was practically impossible to
understand (Nicoll 1963b: 55–9); it was a flight of
‘verbal fantasy’, where
‘every other word was a distortion’ (Andrews 2008: xxii). The effect
mechanism of his
speech ‘was cumulative: it was the unending relentless
flow of inappropriate verbiage which was reputed to make
spectators sick
with laughter’ (Ibid.).
As a character the Dottore, who is usually the complementary elder
figure to Pantalone, especially in the
northern and central Italian
performances, is a ‘pompous bore, the hollow pedant who lays claim to
learning he
does not possess’, having a bad Latin, a medical knowledge that
is ‘extremely dangerous to his patients, while
his earlier acquaintance with
the Law was so misguided that his clients invariably lost their cases’
(Niklaus
1956: 38). He was just as amorous as Pantalone but even less
fortunate: his flirting is as boring as his speeches
in court. ‘Dottori in
popular comic theatre spoke manifest and total nonsense’ (Andrews 2008:
xxii).

The Capitano
The source of this character was clearly the ‘braggart soldier’ of Plautus
and Terence, though—given the
situation of Italy—it became Spanish. A
boasting braggart who flees any battle in terror (Niklaus 1956: 40), he
took
on many features of the classical intruder: ‘[H]e always came on to the
stage with a mighty battle cry, and
his sword drawn. He always left it
limping, after the thorough beating he endured from the rest of the troupe,
without ever lifting a finger to defend himself’ (Niklaus 1956: 40). His
pretentions are indicated by the various exaggerated names the type took
up: Matamoros, or ‘the
Moorslayer’; Coccodrillo, or ‘the crocodile’; or, the
perhaps most famous of all, Capitano
Spavento, or ‘Captain Terror’,
developed by Francesco Andreini, who even wrote the preface to Scala’s
1611
book (Andrews 2008: xxxii).
The two central forms of his boastings were exaggerated importance,
characterised by sentences like ‘I have
killed seven with one blow’, and
simple fantasizing, where his military exploits are confounded with figures
from
classical mythology (Andrews 2008: xlii). Thus, over time, his serious
aspect was increasingly submerged in
farce, taking on ever more fantastic
qualities (Nicoll 1963b: 101–3) and giving birth to literary figures like
Baron Munchausen, or Capitan Uncino. By the 18th century, the Capitano
had disappeared from the theatre (Andrews
2008: xxxii).

Columbine
Columbine, the ‘light-minded sex object’ (Green 1986: 3), was a strange
character of commedia dell’arte, distant
source of the operetta soubrette:
certainly not one of the lovers, though also not a mere servant; not a
virtuous
lady but neither a simple prostitute. She also assumed a whole
gamut of names, like Franceschina (predominant in
the early stages) or
Smeraldina (Nicoll 1963b: 95–6), which eventually crystallised in
Colombina or Columbine.
Originally she was mainly a female servant, but
then assumed roles like innkeeper or adulterous (lower-class)
wife
(Andrews 2008: xxviii). She was never a focal point of attention, her main
stage role being to assist the
lovers to reach their aim, against the wishes of
the elderly protagonists, and she would spin various intrigues
for this
purpose. This identifies a singular feature of commedia dell’arte: while
classical comedy, just like
Dionysian ritual, kept its character of a wedding
celebration, modern comedy since its start was—more than
anything else—
a frontal assault on the institution of marriage. Though lover of Harlequin
and then of Pierrot,
Columbine generously offers and distributes her favors
to many other stage characters, though only to those who
deserve it (which
excludes the elderly ‘protagonists’). Her main feature, inherited from her
ancient
predecessors, ‘was an infinite capacity to take love lightly, a joyous
wantonness’ (Niklaus 1956: 47). Columbine
wore no special dress or mask,
though she ‘was often led by the necessity of her many intrigues to assume
disguises, nearly always designed to hide the fact that she was a woman’
(Ibid.: 49).

Brighella
In the original northern version Brighella was the first lazzi, but he so
quickly lost this role that he
does not even appear among Scala’s 1611 stock
types. Brighella was a complex character, a genuine, demonic
trickster
figure:
 His mask, of a dingy yellowish-green, gave him the cynical expression
of a man
for whom life holds no more surprises. His slanting eyes,
great hooked nose, thick and sensual lips, ferocious
beard and
upturned moustaches made a fearsome, if raffish, figure of him,
powerful and unpleasant. His brazen
assurance carried him
victoriously through his career of confidence trickster and hired bully.
He was the
interloper, the braggart, the eavesdropper, stealthy and
sinister in his comings and goings, boding no good for
anyone who
came in contact with him, and always ready to sell his honour, his
master, or his mother’s coffin for
the price of a drink. (Niklaus 1956:
33–4)

Both Brighella and Arlecchino were acrobats: Arlecchino ‘with the

suppleness of a cat’; while Brighella ‘with the
antics of a monkey’ (Ibid.:
34). The difference between the two is captured by Niklaus with her usual
perception
and wit:

[B]oth were always ready to scheme, lie, trick, cheat, and seduce. The
difference between them was in their
intentions. Arlecchino was too
simple to know what he did, too stupid to realise where his actions
would lead
him. Brighella always knew exactly what he was doing,
and what the result of his action would be. He took a
savage delight in
scoring off a friend or an enemy, in making trouble, in committing
crimes. While Arlecchino was
always amazed at the consequences of
his own blunders, Brighella’s villainy was conscious and purposeful.
(Ibid.)

Given these, it might seem surprising that it was Arlecchino who eventually
stole the show, while Brighella would
soon be forgotten. The reason is a
strange kind of ‘Gresham’s law’ in the history of comedy: the more stupid
fool
always pushes out the smarter one. Once this happened, however,
Arlecchino would soon assume the smart tricks of
Brighella, calling forth in
late-17th-century France the emergence of a new figure,
Pierrot. The same
would happen again in late-18th-century England, where Harlequin,
becoming too sophisticated, would be eclipsed by Grimaldi’s Clown.
Arlecchino
Arlecchino/Harlequin has liminal origins between France and Italy
(Andrews 2008: xxvi); he was brought to the
stage by the Mantuan actor
Tristano Martinelli, evidently a genuine trickster character in real life
(Andrews
2008: xxvii; Ferrone 2006). Gaining popularity only gradually,
the role captures central aspects of the Zanni
figure as incorporated
originally in the second lazzi, which produced a tremendous capacity of
jumping
borders: ‘from Mantuan made itself French, then again Bergamask,
and then again French, Russian, and naturally
Venetian, surrealist, bio-
mechanical, and postmodern’ (Ferrone 2006: ix).
Given that her book is devoted to Harlequin, Thelma Niklaus’s
characterisation
serves as a perfect starting point. Apart from being the
stupid valet, Arlecchino possessed a fully developed
personality from the
beginning:

Beneath his half-witted gropings to understand the wily schemes of his

half-brother Brighella or his other
sharper companions, beneath his
evident terror of almost everyone and everything, beneath his greed,
his
lewdness, and his animal humour, there lurked an insolent and
mocking spirit, so far held in check, but waiting
for release. (Niklaus
1956: 31)

Like the proverbial spirit enclosed in a bottle, Harlequin was waiting to be

liberated, recalling the jinn of the
Thousand and One Nights. The exact
nature of this spirit is well captured by Niklaus:

[g]luttonous, cowardly, amoral, ready to stick a finger in any pie, run

from any danger, compound any felony,
undertake any imposture, and
lie with any woman who would let him, he was not a likeable fellow;
yet one drawn to
an eternal and universal pattern, and thereby rousing
echoes in the minds of average men. (Ibid.: 32)

He possessed one redeeming feature—acrobatic dancing: ‘His body was as

civilised as his mind was primitive’, this
being ‘part of his enigma’ (Ibid.).
This can be condensed in one word capturing the character of Harlequin’s
movements, the exact opposite of anything ever associated with his
eventual competitor Pulcinella: grace.
Concerning Arlecchino’s appearance, the trademark costume originally
consisted of an irregularly coloured and
shaped (‘motley’) patchwork,
which eventually evolved into a regular pattern (Nicoll 1963a: 271).
According to
the classical description of Riccoboni, Arlecchino’s dress ‘
“consists of pieces red, blue, and green cloth cut
in triangles and arranged
one above the other from top to bottom” ’ (as in Ibid.). His head was
shaved, and he
wore an old-fashioned cap, ‘with a rabbit’s scut in front,
while his whole face is masked in black’, producing
the dual effect of
‘jaunty poverty, combined with dramatic strangeness’ (Niklaus 1956: 32).
He also carried with
him a bat (Nicoll 1963a: 269), originally in order to
beat up his opponents, which eventually, in the English
pantomime, would
be deployed for far more ingenious use.
Still, as is true for most other stock types, Arlecchino wore his most
important identifying feature on his face:
‘his mask, without which he was a
clown like any other. There is something undeniably sinister and terrifying
about his mask, even as it lies quiescent under the glass of a museum table’.
Most descriptions fail to ‘convey
the effect, at once sub-human and super-
human’, which gives a ‘vivid impression of sensuality and cunning, of
diabolism and bestiality. It is repulsive and attractive. It takes us far beyond
the Satyrs [ … ] into the
darkness of mankind’s primal imagination’
(Niklaus 1956: 32–3).

Two other most important figures of commedia dell’arte were Pulcinella

and
Pierrot. Given that they rose to fame later, their description will be
incorporated in the coming chapters.
Attention will now turn towards
Shakespeare’s little known but fundamental involvement with commedia
dell’arte.
In the concluding section of this chapter the similarities between
Harlequin and Hamlet will be explored, while
the next chapter will argue
that not only was Shakespeare’s theatre strongly influenced by commedia
dell’arte but
that Shakespeare was the first theoretician who realised the
nature, effect mechanism, and danger of Italian
theatre.
FROM COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE TO SHAKESPEARE: NICOLL
AND HAMVAS

Given the immense popularity of Harlequin, it is of particular interest to

make sense of this popularity; to
explain the fascination exerted by this
simpleton. This is exactly the question to which Allardyce Nicoll has
explicitly devoted a book: ‘what was the basic force that kept this particular
kind of theatrical presentation
vital for more than two centuries and which,
even after it had vanished, has caused many of its characters to
live in our
memories?’ (Nicoll 1963a: v).

Nicoll on Harlequin and Hamlet

Nicoll was a historian of the theatre and a Shakespeare scholar who also
wrote a classic work on mimes and masks.
His book thus promises
exceptional relevance, and while it does not fully deliver, it does offer three
crucial
insights. First, Nicoll hints that Harlequin’s power is somehow
connected to the ability to pass beyond
boundaries. He all but sketches a
theory evoking the dynamics of atomic particles, suggesting that the
trespassing of limits liberates energies that the being who managed to break
through—in our case
Harlequin—absorbs into itself. Second, this power is
also connected to his wearing of a mask. Here Nicoll relies
on a long quote
from Jacques Copeau:

‘The person who performs under a mask receives from this papier-
maché object the reality of his part. He is
controlled by it and has to
obey it unreservedly. Hardly has he put it on when he feels a new
being flowing into
himself, a being the existence of which he had
before never even suspected. It is not only his face that has
changed, it
is all his personality, it is the very nature of his reactions, so that he
experiences emotions he
could neither have felt nor feigned without its
aid.’ (as in Nicoll 1963b: 41)

Nicoll thus complements his physics of transgression with a metaphysic of

possession. With the third point Nicoll
returns to the context of Harlequin’s
birth, arguing that the rise and
dominance of Harlequin can be best
understood by comparing it to the case of Hamlet.

Harlequin and Hamlet belong to different worlds, and up to Nicoll’s book

were rarely brought together. Yet, the
two share features, starting from their
first public appearance: the first available illustration of Harlequin is
from
1601, the year in which Shakespeare’s play was first performed. Second,
both came to be extremely popular,
being the most widely recognised
figures of their respective genres, so much so that Nicoll outright claimed
that
‘the two theatrical characters most universally known today are
Harlequin and Hamlet’ (Nicoll 1963b: 2).
Furthermore, apart from such
external similarities, they also ‘possess certain salient qualities in common’,
most
importantly ‘the almost unaccountable power of passing over all
frontiers’ (Ibid.). This includes the borders of
both time and place, as over
the centuries both figures were interpreted and revived in the most diverse
manners,
managing to say something close to many people in many
different times and places (Ibid.: 2–3). In one phrase,
and already moving
beyond the terms used by Nicoll, they both seem to capture something
particularly significant
about the modern condition—which perhaps lies
exactly in their ability to transgress boundaries.
This is where the Hungarian philosopher and essayist Béla Hamvas
helps us to move further.

Hamvas on Harlequin and Hamlet

Hamvas’s 1947–1948 essay, first published in Hungarian in 1987, shows a
number of striking parallels with
Nicoll’s 1963 book.8 His
basic reference
point for understanding Harlequin is Shakespeare, in particular Romeo and
Hamlet; the central
theme bringing together Harlequin and Hamlet is
power; and Hamvas’s treatment is just as inconclusive as
Nicoll’s. The
essay is devoted to anthropological foundations (Hamvas 2000: 164, 168,
171) focusing on the
paradoxical nature of human existence.
In order to demonstrate how Harlequin touches upon elementary aspects
of human existence, Hamvas discusses
central works of the philosophical
and spiritual tradition. From the western tradition his main sources are
Plato, the Gospels, and Nietzsche. From Plato’s ideas, he focuses on divine
madness. Concerning the Gospels, he
refers in particular the Sermon on the
Mount, especially two of its best-known passages, whose importance is
underlined by their location, about the ‘poor in spirit’ (Matthew 5:3), at its
start, and about not worrying
about ‘the morrow: for the morrow shall take
thought for the things of itself’ (Matthew 6:34), the last verse of
its second
chapter. Finally, in Nietzsche’s works, the focus is on The Birth of Tragedy,
concerning the
links between life, art and science. But Hamvas also
incorporates the spiritual traditions of Egypt, India and
China, among
others.9
For Hamvas, just as for Plato, divine madness is a natural state of
human life
(Hamvas 2000: 171). Anything valuable in human existence is
product of such passionate enthusiasm. Enthusiasm in
itself, however, is
blind; it must be given a proper direction and form; it must be pacified and
transfigured,
which is the task of art. The problem is that not all artists live
up to this task, even among the greatest; many
are satisfied with
reproducing or inciting passions. Here Hamvas contrasts the art of Raphael,
Mozart and Dante,
concerned with obtaining a crystal or a pearl, with the
‘magical’ art of Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Beethoven,
Dostoevsky or
Goethe, determined to provoke a maelstrom and thus playing dangerous
games.
Such a dual aspect is well captured in the paradox of Dionysian rituals.
In Hamvas’s essay, the problem is
thematised, not through imitative
processes unleashed by ritual activities but rather in political terms: the
deviation of holy madness to the satisfaction of personal goals—in
Shakespearean terminology, the problem of
‘vaulting ambition’ (Macbeth),
a kind of ‘madness from which all figures of [Shakespeare’s] historical
plays suffer, but none more than Richard III’ (Ibid.: 164). Once this
overtakes politics, the normal business of
everyday life is suspended and
eventually destroyed, and—as Hamvas repeatedly evokes—‘time is out of
joint’
(Ibid.: 159, 160, 163). This is the joint dilemma of Hamlet and
Harlequin.
Concerning the problem of Hamlet, two major claims are made. First,
for the protagonists of the plays, Romeo and
Hamlet talk foolishly and are
even identified as mad; yet readers know that ‘they are in the right, and it is
the
rest who only waffle about’ (Ibid.: 159). This is because once the
fundamental conditions of existence have been
altered, and ‘time’ has gone
‘out of joint’, it is the acceptance of this situation that is ‘mad’, as it makes
us
take the confused state for granted as normal. Second, in a short section,
Hamvas identifies Shakespeare,
together with Rabelais, as the ‘two great
harlequins’ of European culture (Ibid.: 174)—‘cosmic babies’ who simply
fail to take seriously the logic of the world around them, which has
tragically, and comically, turned mad. One
of the most striking—and
certainly most Shakespearean—ideas presented in this essay by Hamvas is
the
identification of world history as a comedy. Hamvas presents Harlequin
as a figure who manages ‘to laugh at this
entire world comedy’ (Ibid.: 171).
Harlequin thus gives a response different from Hamlet’s to the dilemma
that ‘time is out of joint’, though it
also tempted Hamlet. Hamlet’s mode of
problematisation is defined in the passage immediately following the
diagnosis: ‘O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right’ (I.v.189–90).
As Hamvas makes evident, the
problem with Hamlet is not that he did not
have the strength for the task but in the way that he posed it in the
first
instance: it is not within the realm of human possibility to ‘set right’ the
‘course of the world’. So we
need to take seriously the option of Harlequin:
simply move outside of the out-of-joint world and laugh at the
mad
ambitions shaking it. Such an existential choice, while sounding foolish to
those inside the ‘world’, does
hint at genuine wisdom: in an out-of-joint
world, the fool is sage, and the
(worldly) sage is fool (Hamvas 2000: 171).
Hamvas compares Harlequin to the holy fools of sacred traditions,
placing a
special emphasis on St. Francis of Assisi but also mentioning Socrates and
even Diogenes. The holy
fools only laugh at the strivings of mankind: it is
pointles to pursue the impossible goal of restoring order to
the world, as
they know that ‘as long as God lives above in the sky, there can be no
problems in the world’
(Hamvas 2000: 186, last sentence of the essay).
While the idea is attractive, there is a problem: Harlequin is not a holy
fool; his basic attitude is profoundly
different and quite disturbing. Ham-vas
reads too much into Harlequin, and placing oneself outside the game and
laugh at those still inside is anyway not enough. Hamvas moves closer to a
genuine diagnosis in a short section
on Picasso’s Harlequin paintings.
According to Hamvas, their central feature is not the melancholic
expression of
the face, but that the eyes are lost in the nothingness; their
gaze is empty as they contemplate the void, the
nulla: in these images
Picasso captured the ‘fixation into the nothing’ (Ibid.: 181). This indeed
identifies the paradox of Harlequin, the ambivalence of his laughter, as
gazing into the emptiness transforms a
human face into a mask itself,
opposite of the serene and calm, relaxed and relaxing smile of the holy
fools/sages. Hamvas escapes the dilemma with a genuine somersault,
claiming that serenity (derű), which is ‘the greatest miracle in the world’, is
actually born out of melancholy, and that
this fact is ‘the most enchanting
paradox of existence’ (Ibid.: 183).
This cannot be accepted; yet, helped by the insights of Nicoll and
Hamvas, it is now possible to capture the
exact power of Harlequin and its
singular paradox. Hamlet posed the problem badly, so could not find a
proper way
of action; while Harlequin opted for the opposite extreme,
leaping into nothingness. This is indeed the ultimate
trespass, as
nothingness is formlessness, the original chaos where all boundaries are
eliminated, reflecting the
identity of infinity and zero, in the sense that they
are mirror images of each other. A leap into nothingness is
a ‘negative
conversion’ (Agnes Horvath) from which there is no return—a desperate
situation reflected in the
empty gaze of Picasso’s Harlequin; the great
challenge of Europe since the collapse of the Renaissance and the
rise to
prominence of the modern power/knowledge/sexuality complex (Szakolczai
2006, 2007a). Every single
material feature of Harlequin’s figure turns
around this negative conversion: his mask, a well-known
transformative
device, which is completely black and explicitly demonic and animalesque;
his bat, which would be
turned into a transfigurative device; his cloths,
which are not just motley but zig-zag-like (Lewis-Williams
2002); finally
and most importantly, his trademark jump literally and materially represents
a leap into the void.
Harlequin’s power lies in the repulsive attraction of this negative
conversion—the appeal of leaving this great
circus of modern
power/knowledge and to laugh at anything and everything, taking it easy,
taking it as is comes.
The greatest paradox is that this leap is just the flip
side of the precondition for entering the ‘ideal speech
situation’ of the
‘public arena’.
 Shakespeare
The Tragedy of World History Being a Comedy
8

There can be no question that Shakespeare and Molière are the two most
important playwrights of European culture.
In standing, only Goethe’s
Faust is comparable, but Goethe was not primarily a playwright. Strikingly,
both Shakespeare and Molière were comedy writers by profession and lived
in crucial liminal periods of European
history: during the reign of Elizabeth
I in England, with the consolidation of the Reformation, and that of Louis
XIV in France, with the consolidation of absolutist rule. This chapter argues
that Shakespeare was not only a
playwright but a sociologist as well, as his
work provides, from the inside, a razor-sharp analysis of the social
effect
mechanism of Italian style theatre.
The central dilemma of Elizabethan England was the conflict between
Catholics and Protestants, in which
Shakespeare was personally involved
(Greenblatt 2001). But it was also the moment at which, as if following
Bateson’s rule, the Reformation was further split, with the rise of
Puritanism—and a central enemy of the
Puritans was the theatre (Agnew
1986). Shakespeare as man of the theatre could be expected to pour scorn
on the
Puritans; however, uniquely, he rather problematised the theatre,
coming up with a strikingly original
understanding of the manner in which
theatre produced its own ugly reverse image of Puritanism.
This point can only be substantiated by reconstructing the dynamics of
his work—an effort that requires a sound
methodological background and
particularly good guides. As guides, two special books are selected,
outcomes of a
lifetime familiarisation with the work: Ted Hughes’s
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and
René Girard’s
Shakespeare: A Theatre of Envy. As methodological perspective, I’ll rely on
the approach
developed in my previous books for studying life works,
developed for social theorists (Szakolczai 1998, 2009)
and extended to
major Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and
Raphael (Szakolczai 2007).
Ted Hughes is a poet; and it takes a great poet to understand another.
His book, which reconstructs the dynamics
of Shakespeare’s entire mature
work, is based on a striking claim: that Shakespeare had, in 1592, a vision
experience comparable to a shamanistic initiatory dream.1 The direct impact
of this experience can be reconstructed from
two epic poems: Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the
first works Shakespeare ever
published, in 1593 and 1594, while the full impact was the development of
the
‘Mythic Equation’ and then the ‘Tragic Equation’, which defined the
dynamics of the rest of the work. These two
epic poems capture ‘the two
fundamental myths of Christianity’ (Hughes 1992: xii), referring to the
unity of
Christianity before the schism and even perceiving the affinity
between Christianity and the previous
Mediterranean culture. These myths
are concerned with the ‘fate of love’ (Ibid.: 128) after the sin committed
against ‘Divine Love’, as represented by the Goddess, from two opposite
and yet tightly connected sides:
‘archaic, matriarchal religious emotions’,
culminating in ‘blood sacrifice’, and Puritanism, as represented by
the ‘new,
Utopian, militant, rational morality’ (Ibid.: 161). This ‘Mythic Equation’
would be transformed into
the ‘Tragic Equation’ at the end of Troilus and
Cressida, making it the ‘first Tragedy of Divine Love’
(Hughes 1992: 205),
which then produced the series of main tragedies in an extraordinary
outburst of creativity.
The Tragic Equation has two basic ‘compounds’ and one ‘catalytic
additional ingredient’, which creates a spark
between these two compounds,
producing the tragedies (Ibid.: 214). The first compound is Divine Love as
portrayed
in various figures of the Divine Bride or Sacred Mother, while the
second is the loving divine consort of the
Great Goddess, as represented by
the ‘pre-Puritan Adonis’, whose main characteristic is a ‘ “total,
unconditional
love” at all costs, corresponding to that of the Goddess’
(Ibid.). The catalyst is the provocation of jealousy.
Girard’s book is based on his theory of mimetic desire, developed on the
basis of his comparative study of
Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky (Girard
1961), to which he adds a twist. Beyond merely analysing the works of
Shakespeare, Girard recognises in him his predecessor: ‘Shakespeare is not
merely a dramatic illustrator of
mimetic desire but its prime theoretician’
(Girard 1991: 121).

These works, through the methodological prism of my previous books,

suggest that Shakespeare’s life work can be
divided into three periods: the
early works up to June 1592; the transitory (liminal) middle period,
1593/4–
1599/1600; and the mature works from about 1600 onwards. The passage
from the early to the middle and from
the middle to mature works itself
involves two liminal moments, central for Hughes and closely
corresponding to
the analysis of rites of passage by Victor Turner: the first
was the vision/dream experience, while the second
was a reflexive moment
in which, around 1600, Shakespeare was systematically reconsidering his
own life and work.
Reflecting on his experiences, Shakespeare realised that the kind of
Italian comedy that had enchanted him in his
childhood (Greenblatt 2004)
produced a quite problematic impact on social life, deeply contributing to
the rifts
tearing apart English and European society.

ITALIAN COMEDY IN TUDOR ENGLAND

The occasional presence of Italian actors in England is documented from

the middle of the 16th century, connected
to the court (Barasch 2011: 106;
Henke 2008b: 227). The breakthrough can be connected to 1574, when they
gave a
performance in front of the queen, at Windsor (Barasch 2011: 106).
The context is significant, as this took place
right after the famous visit of
Henry III, who had just become king of France, to Venice, in order to see
Venetian theatre, on his way from Cracow to Lyons (Fenlon 2007: 193–
215). Thus it was mediated from France and
resulted in a flurry of visits to
the English court by Italian players in 1574–1578 (Henke 2008b: 227). The
virus
only needed a short period of incubation, as soon complaints were
flooding in about the Zanni figures
disseminated by the Italians (Barasch
2011: 106). This resulted in the extinction of the local English trickster
species, the ‘vice’ figure of medieval morality plays, a stage version of the
singing minstrel figure, which was
also related to the fools of medieval folk
play and the ‘Lord of Misrule’. During the 16th century this ‘vice’
started
‘to crowd the figure of Good out of the morality plays, leaving the stage
free for the exercise of the
character’s dazzling versatility’ (Agnew 1986:
114–5). By 1600 it became ‘a resonant dramatic relic’
(Giles-Watson 2009:
64), though resurrected by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night and even more
particularly
through Iago, the last ‘singing vice’ figure (see Othello
II.iii.64–93). The next big spurt of renewed
interest in Italy would happen
in 1588–1594 (Henke 2008b: 232–3), the moment in which Shakespeare
would enter the
world of theatre, so it is not surprising that he would show,
together with Ben Jonson,2 the greatest affinity with Italian theatre among
English playwrights.
Tracing the impact of commedia dell’arte in Shakespeare’s work is an
old but controversial pastime owing to the
imperative of restricting
attention to local, national sources of theatre. This central 19th-century
aspect of
national identity, combined with high-brow disdain for popular
theatre, confuses aesthetic judgment with socially
relevant effect. Still,
already in a series of 1925–1932 studies, Oscar Campbell demonstrated the
presence of
commedia dell’arte elements in Shakespeare (Henke 2008b:
229).3 Examples include Don Armado in Love’s Labours Lost;
Falstaff; the
mimetic love triangle of Orsino, Olivia and Viola in the Twelfth Night,
recalling the
innamorati (Perlman 2008: 236); and various figures from the
other early comedies. However, and
strikingly, Hamlet, ‘perhaps more than
any of the tragedies, reveals the commedia roots of
Shakespeare’s
creativity’ (Barasch 2011: 108). These include Polonius with his entire
family, which is modelled
on Pantalone’s; the hiding of Polonius behind the
curtain, recalling the famous image of Pantalone spying on
Franceschina
and Arlecchino; the modelling of Laertes on the Capitano; and Ophelia’s
mad scene, which recalls the
similarly famous madness duel between
Isabella Andreini and Vittoria Piissimi in Florence in 1589, at a Medici
wedding, in a play entitled The Gypsy Woman (Ibid.; see also Henke
2002:
13). It has even been argued that Polonius as a name combines Bologna (the
home of Graziano) and Pantalone
(Perlman 2008: 231). The matter is not
merely a game of infinite analogy and interpretation but rather goes into
the
heart of Hamlet’s message; it is part of Shakespeare’s account of his own
activity and works, combined
‘with a new purpose: to undermine their
popular appeal to the “barren spectators” of his audience and to expose
the
perils inherent in their unexamined lives’ (Barasch 2011: 117). Thus, while
Shakespeare is no Puritan, he is
no apologist for popular theatre and its
‘public sphere’ either: the serpent is biting its tail. With
Shakespeare, this
most un-Platonic genre becomes a vehicle of the Socratic way of life.

THE EARLY WORKS

Shakespeare started by writing two very different kinds of work, based on

different aspects of his own life
experiences. One kind were the historical
plays, interpretations of the tempestuous experience of England before
the
Tudors, which provided an occasion for cathartic reflection and education
in England, comparable to the role
of classical Athenian tragedy, with the
difference that since its beginnings it was based not on myths but on
actual
history. The other part of his work consisted of comedies, written for the
light entertainment of the
court and the general public but also drawing on
his childhood experiences. The two types were kept separate—up
to a point.
Given that Shakespeare did not publish anything before 1593, any
hypothesis about his early work is conjecture.
However, the insight of
Hughes concerning the experience of 1592, together with the additional
idea that a
central outcome of this experience was the problematisation of
the effect mechanism of comedy, gives a
perspective from which one can
start to make sense of available information that would otherwise remain
elusive.

MIDDLE WORKS: THE TRANSITION PERIOD

Marking the Operator of Transition: A Midsummer Night’s

Dream
According to Hughes, Shakespeare had his initiatory dream shortly after the
closing of theatres in London, due to
plague, on 20 June 1592. Mid-summer
Night, associated in many cultures with shamanistic rituals and initiatory
dreams, was just a few days off, so it is reasonable to assume that
Shakespeare’s play, dated 1594/5, has
something to do with the content of
this dream.
While A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND) is perhaps the most care-
free and joyous of Shakespeare’s
comedies, it does have a serious message,
concerning the power of images.4 In the play, whoever has his or her eyes
touched with a magic ointment by Puck, an English folk-tale trickster
figure, would fall in love with
the first person he or she lays eyes on. In the
play, everything turns to good; but Shakespeare leaves open the
question of
the real-life equivalent of such a ‘love-at-first-sight’ motif.

Re-writing Comedies
The starting hypothesis is a presumed difference between comedies written
before and after 1592. Given that
Shakespeare started his work as a comedy
writer, motivated by his childhood fascination with Italian comedies, he
must have written some early pieces in a ‘naïve’ comedy style. However,
after 1592, this was bound to create
problems for him. The question is
whether such a scenario could be supported by evidence.
Luckily, the problematic relationship between the five ‘early comedies’
can be clarified through this
perspective. Traditionally the earliest comedy
was Comedy of Errors (CE), closest to the spirit and
word of classical
comedy, which is also by far the shortest (TNS 684).5 Modern research,
based on stylistic argument, considers it later
than some of the others. This,
however, might be because of later revision. So we must first look for
evidence
concerning possible reworking of the other three. Such evidence
exists and concerns some of the most problematic
aspects of their dating,
for which a joint hypothesis will be suggested.
Two of the three other early plays involve a ‘mystery’ (TNS 140;
Hibbard 1998: 81), which has to do with the
existence of a twin play.6
There are two versions of TTS—Taming of The Shrew and Taming of A
Shrew, the relationship
between the two being unresolved, most scholars
leaning to the idea that ‘A Shrew’ is a ‘bad quarto’ version of
‘The Shrew’,
meaning that it was put together by actors, after the performances. This,
however, fails to explain
the radical difference in the role played by Sly,
especially in the ending. In ‘A Shrew’, Sly keeps commenting on
the play
and at the end promises to heed the lesson and tame his own wife, while in
‘The Shrew’ all this is
omitted (TNS 133–9; Morris 2003: 12–6).
Concerning Love’s Labours Lost (LLL), there as a ‘ghost
play’ lurking
behind it (Hibbard 1990: 81), Love’s Labours Won, of which for long there
was only a single
1598 notice, but in 1953 proof was found that copies of
such title were sold in 1603; thus today there is general
agreement
regarding its existence (TNS 803; Woudhuysen 2001: 76–80).
These mysteries surrounding the early plays can be solved by focusing
on the common problem concerning their
endings. Comedy is supposed to
restore normality with a happy ending, a feature that survived in the Middle
Ages,
causing Dante to call his epic poem a ‘comedy’, and also in the
central Hollywood requirement of a ‘happy
end’—showing that modern
film, just like modern theatre, is fundamentally comedy. Already in each of
his
four early plays, however, Shakespeare problematises the ending. In CE
the closing gestures of the play
restore normality, though not quite (TNS
684). In Two Gentlemen of
Verona (TGV), there is first a shocking twist,
with an attempted rape, then an ending considered weak
(Thompson 2003:
4–5). This is even more emphatic in LLL and TTS, where there are twists in
an end
otherwise ambivalent and open: in LLL, alone of Shakespeare’s
comedies, there is no concluding marriage;
while in TTS, there is no return
to the starting induction, which set in motion the play within a play.
The joint solution is that in each of the four cases Shakespeare radically
altered the ending after 1592; for
LLL he even changed the title. A final
point substantiating this claim is made by bringing in another
early play,
and a particularly problematic one, Titus Andronicus (TA). Throughout
history, opinion
about it was univocally low. Just recently, however,
Jonathan Bate, considered an authoritative new voice on
Shakespeare, came
up with a radical reassessment according to which the play, first performed
in 1594, thus
probably written after 1592, is not a youthful blunder but
rather ‘emerges as the pivotal play in
Shakespeare’s early career’ (Bate
1995: 79). This is shown by its having no source, comparable to MND,
with
which it was written closely together—quite an odd couple; its particularly
expressive and inventive
language; or its central figure, Aaron the Moor,
hero and villain at the same time, ‘an extreme embodiment of the
Renaissance self-made man’: an outsider who nevertheless aspires to all
height until his fall (Ibid.: 87), thus
advancing, jointly, Othello and Iago,
while also close to Marlowe’s Faustus, pointing forward to Goethe’s
Faust.
However, the most important aspect, for our purposes is the striking fact
that the two central
activities of the play, moving forward its plot line, are
reading and rape (Ibid.: 2).
The combination is just as astonishing, and visionary, as Weber’s
connection of capitalism and asceticism. It
captures the manner in which
humanists, by their indiscriminate cult of antiquity, were promoting
violence,
visible in particular in the destructive and nihilistic plays of
Plautus. A particularly intriguing aspect
concerns a famous section in TA,
judged by Jonathan Bate so interesting that he devoted the last pages of
his
introduction to it, where the text moans about the killing of a fly, and the
purported emotions of the father
and mother (Bate 1995: 120; see TA
III.ii.60–1). Bate leaves it open whether this is an extreme instance
of the
piety characterising Jesus or Hamlet, or ‘a glorious comic parody of tragic
empathy’ (Ibid.: 121). Through
Guarino’s translation of Lucian, it cannot be
doubted that Shakespeare comments ironically on the satire of the
humanist
educator, especially given that in TTS humanist educators turn out to be
simple seducers.

Thus, through TA, read with the help of Jonathan Bate, the pieces of the
puzzle fit together. The author
of The Rape of Lucrece could no longer
accept a light take on rape, characteristic of Roman comedy.
TA and TGV
belong together as direct effects produced by this recognition. But TGV and
Romeo and Juliet (RJ) also belong together as the two ‘Verona plays’
(Laroque 2011)—TGV by
pointing out the direct link between unilateral
and obsessive ‘love at first
sight’ and rape, while RJ by demonstrating how
even quasi-courtly flirting can gain existential and thus
truly human and
potentially tragic dimensions.7 It also explains the shifting scenery in
between TAS and TTS: before
1592, when Shakespeare still wrote for the
public, ‘as you like it’ and not as he came to like it, he
shifted the scenery of
TAS from Ferrara to the better-known Athens, just as he moved CE from the
Epidamnus of Plautus to Ephesus;8 but in the updated version he moved it
back to Italy, to Padua, most associated with humanist
education.9
TGV is fully devoted to mimetic love. Its main protagonist is Proteus,
the Greek mythical figure of
transfiguration, tailor-made for the ‘character
who literally personifies mimetic desire’.10 RJ, however, isn’t.
Romeo’s
love for Juliet starts as mere court entertainment, romantic love at first
sight. But then something else
happens, moving the soul of Romeo (and
also of Juliet), and thus their madness in love is no longer the madness
of a
Tarquin, fuelled by a mirage, but a real burning, divine passion that might
blind them, and eventually cause
their death in a mad world, but with which
they and we are deeply and passionately involved.

THE MID-TRANSITION PERIOD: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

AS THE LIMINAL CENTRE OF SHAKESPEARE’S OEUVRE

MV is a play of exceptional significance in all kinds of ways, in particular

by going right to the bottom
of Shakespeare’s commedia dell’arte
experience. It takes place in Venice, birthplace of commedia dell’arte, the
genre that diffused a corrupted mimetic love throughout Europe.
Shakespeare’s Venice captures the heart of the city as a liminal site par
excellence, where paradox and
liminality are explicitly reflected upon
(Laroque 2011; Platt 2001). Its opening scene is dominated by a
particularly
heavy atmosphere of unease, with discourses about sea trade bordering on
fantasy, as if exuding the
fragility and decay of the still powerful city, with
its frivolous and parasitic leisure class (Mulryne 1993:
87–90). The shifting
location, between Venice and Belmont, where the main heroine Portia is
living, also evokes
an even deeper source of unease, though this would
become visible only through its companion Venetian piece,
Othello. The
disquieting mood is reinforced by the circularity of the plot (Kerrigan 1999:
93), as if to
reflect the circularity of money,11 which replaced civic and
religious virtue at the fundamental level, thus transforming the
haunting
beauty of a city built on water into a liminal nightmare of permanently
twisting circular movements.
After the ‘gentlemen’ of Verona, this play is about the ‘merchant’ of
Venice, which should be the same thing, as
merchants are supposed to be
gentlemen. But the ‘gentlemen’ of Venice are as little gentlemen-like as the
‘gentlemen’ of Verona: fully entangled in mimetic love affairs and money-
making. This is the meaning of
Shakespeare’s much discussed non-anti-
Semitism: the ‘merchant’ of
Venice is Shylock, mask of Pantalone,12 who
behaves almost exactly like the other ‘gentlemen’ merchants. We are about
a century
later than Dürer’s letter quoted earlier, and the ‘Byzantine spirit’
has evidently won—and not only in Venice.
The play contains a stunning combination of Shakespearean themes,
with an extraordinary intuition concerning the
internal logic of not only
classical theatre but the ritual underlying this theatre. This is the first work
in
which Shakespeare introduces the visionary, Dürerian theme of
melancholy, and here, in opposition to As You
Like It, right at the beginning.
Antonio, hero of the play, thus ‘the’ merchant of Venice, is sad and bored,
though he does not know why (I.i.1–5). His state is both identified with
‘melancholy’ (I.i.101)13 and connected to a general
feeling about the
‘world’. This sadness, boredom and melancholy evokes 18th-century
England or 19th-century
France, and the reasons are no doubt identical:
having been seduced by the ideology of easy happiness, through
universal
merry-making and money-making as a ‘right’, in opposition to the medieval
order of checks and balances,
the new, cynical, Byzantine combination of
entertainment and life led not to a state of blissful happiness but
rather to
generalised lethargy. The parallel scene in Belmont introduces the heroine
Portia, who is similarly
weary and tired, though due to a more concrete
reason: her getting married was thwarted by the strange will of
her father.
The general state of sad melancholy, shared by both protagonists, sets
the background against which the action of
the play unfolds. There is
betting for money, concerning the success of Antonio’s ships, which
includes a
calculation on life, and in a most extreme way, because the
counter-weight is a pound of real human flesh. There
is then an intellectual
puzzle, a guessing game, combined with an agonistic marriage ritual, where
the winner of
the bride must solve a riddle. The scenes of this guessing
ritual are staged in a play-within-a-play manner, with
the curtain—within
the stage—being drawn after the contestants enter, once they have taken an
oath. There is an
alazon who manages to steal the show by snatching the
title role, Shylock. There is even a ritual of
sacrifice, as cutting out a pound
of flesh from a living human being cannot be interpreted in any other way.
Finally, there is an agonistic ritual at the conclusion, the staging of a trial, a
most extreme combination of
the main elements of play and ritual: it is
highly ceremonial yet still agonistic, and furthermore another play
within a
play.
With all these devices, MV could easily have become navel-gazing
about the activity of theatre, recalling
the tedium of Fellini’s 8 and 1/2 and
similar contemporary undertakings. Yet while it is about the meaning
of
theatrical representation, it concerns the most essential things in life, as if
Shakespeare had anticipated
Huizinga’s idea that culture is based on
playfulness and not on sacrifice; that the heart of playfulness is a
human
predisposition different from the schismatic extremes of convulsive
happiness and sad melancholy, which can
be best described as ‘sense of
humour’; and that at the core of any play
aesthetic and social aspects are
united, as represented by grace, the centre of Portia’s famous speech
(IV.i.179–82).
This is where the alazon of the play, the mask of Pantalone, which is the
mask of the ‘Venetian
gentlemen’, fails most, bringing out, in Shakespeare’s
visionary work, the hidden essence of the Byzantine demon
unleashed on
Europe through Venetian commedia dell’arte: he lacks playfulness, as he
has lost his sense of humour
(see in particular III.i) owing to long centuries
of closed court society existence and the deep-seated cynical
sophistry to
which this leads, in spite of the hilarious laughter generated by Byzantine
mimes, and to which a
sad and weary state of melancholy is an introductory
step. Finally, as a last consequence, this is why he cannot
show mercy or
pardon, remaining fully enclosed in his own hatred and resentment against
the entire world. Portia
wins the case at the point of intersection between
life and law, demonstrating that the more exactly the law
tries to mimic life,
searching for perfect exactness, the more the logic of grace, the true logic of
life,
wins, as life and play can never be fully encapsulated into lifeless,
mechanical, technico-legal formulas.

MV is the eye of the needle through which Shakespeare’s entire work had to
pass. It was a relay piece in
between 1594–1595 and 1599–1600, resuming
the work done so far and pondering upon the way to move forward.

MARKING THE END OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD: AS YOU

LIKE IT AND TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
As You Like It
According to Hughes, in working on this play, Shakespeare intensively and
systematically reflected on his life,
which liberated psychic energies in him
that helped to put the Mythic Equation in motion, culminating in the
autobiographical figure of Jaques. It can be best understood by realising
that Jaques is a mask; and not just in
the sense of Shakespeare hiding
behind it but a real mask, the mask of Harlequin, capturing the ‘essence’ of
the
figure in a most striking way. This identity between Jaques, Harlequin
and what Shakespeare has overcome is
contained in one of the very first
words uttered by Jaques, recalling the first words of Antonio and Portia in
MV: melancholy. Jaques’s entry in the play is of paramount importance. It is
much delayed, taking place
only in the fifth scene of Act II, making him the
last protagonist to be introduced. It is also spectacular,
marked by the term
‘melancholy’ (II.v.10–1), and of a particularly strange kind: Jaques is
outright happy
to be sad. It is an evident paradox, introducing the series of
paradoxes in which the figure of Jaques is
shrouded.
The parallels with MV, however, have limits: Antonio is a gentleman
merchant, while Jaques is a ‘motley
fool’ (II.vii.13). The term ‘motley fool’
is repeated twice (II.vii.17, 29),
while wearing a ‘motley coat’ is also
mentioned three times (II.vii.34, 43, 58) in the same scene, so is
extremely
emphatic.14 It
leaves no room for doubt that Jaques is Harlequin; not the
Venice merchant but rather his valet. The strange game
of identity is best
visible through Jaques’s definition of this coat as his ‘ambition’ (II.vii.43).
‘Ambition’ is
not a word usually linked to clowns but rather to figures of
authority, like merchants, whose ambition is to make
money. Being thus
identified as not simply a fool but rather a person whose ambition it is to
become a
fool, Jaques is also identified as a ‘former’ ambitious gentleman
who simply turned this ambition as if against
himself—or Pantalone.15
The two masks are radically different; yet Shakespeare establishes
between them a kind of identity. This
indicates a major state of confusion,
evoked by Shakespeare in one of his most famous lines: ‘All the world’s a
stage/And all the men and women merely players’ (II.vii.138–9). The
central source of this state, identified
through the entry of Jaques, is
confusion between sadness and happiness; and indeed, just before the
famous
passage, this state is re-evoked, and in a particularly striking
manner: ‘Thou seest we are not all alone
unhappy’ (II.vii.135).16
A world identical to a stage is a world turned upside down, an inference
frequently drawn in the play, connected
back to the central motif of
melancholy (see IV.i.10–8). Yet there is something more: the world is
upside down
because it has been infected, and Jaques’s aim with his motley
coat is to alter this state of affairs:
‘Give me leave/To speak my mind, and I
will through and through/Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world’ (II.
vii.58–60). This is a very curious word to use, having two major meanings:
the standard, medical meaning and a
metaphorical meaning, related to
imitative processes like laughter, crying or violence. The most important
epidemic disease of the period was plague, and plagues were not only
frequent but the reason why theatres were
closed down in 1592.
Thus in identifying the world as infected, Shakespeare argues that only
a fool can restore its health—a fool that
at the same time is a sage: the fool
who infected it in the first place but came to realise his mistake. This
assigns to Shakespeare a particular task, and by recognising this task, he
leaves behind his identity as sad,
melancholy Jaques. This is why he could
write the play and give it such an ironic title.
The identities and differences between Jaques and Shakespeare are
illuminated through a series of further
identity games. Jaques on stage is
still suspended between an act of recognition and genuine action; as a
result,
he is not only sad and melancholic but, because of this boredom with
the world, he becomes boring to others—the
worst fate for a playwright.
The final identification of Jaques as a mask is contained in one of the most
puzzling scenes in the work (III.ii). Having become outcasts, both Jaques
and Orlando live in the forest; but
while Orlando got there by pursuing an
active life and was done wrong, Jaques is there by choice. The scene is
mostly about a series of playful but not irrelevant insults being traded
between the two, who are boring each other, Orlando with his falling in love
and Jaques with his
melancholy. Eventually Orlando suggests that Jaques
look into the brook in order to recognise his true figure,
which is nothing
but a zero (cipher; III.ii.264–5), a point that will become intelligible only
through
Othello.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

Troilus and Cressida (TC) is the last of the ‘problem plays’, a much
neglected and even more
misunderstood piece yet recognised as central
both by Hughes and by Girard—though in their own ways. For Girard,
the
play is the best demonstration that Shakespeare is a theoretician of mimetic
desire (Girard 1991: 121). Its
central novelty is that while so far the analysis
of ‘[m]imetic manipulation’ was restricted to private
relations, now ‘it turns
into a veritable technique of politics and government’ (Ibid.). The
significance of this
Shakespearean insight can hardly be exaggerated: while
in As You Like It the identity of the world and
theatre was stated only in
general terms by the lethargic, resigned, melancholy Jaques, here the
identity is
restricted to comedy and its exact effect mechanism is analysed.
With this play, after giving up writing both
comedies and historical plays,
Shakespeare bluntly states that they are one.
He gives a detailed, comprehensive and convincing analysis of the exact
reasons why and manner in which politics
and government can regress into
theatre. At the phenomenological level, the problem is a lack of authority, a
diagnosis delivered by Ulysses concerning the reason why the war cannot
be brought to a conclusion (Girard 1991:
121, 160–1, referring to TC I.iii.9–
29, 77–83). This is because of a universal proliferation of mimetic
rivalries
and strategic games in all areas of human life. Comedies are about private
love affairs while wars
about public conflicts; yet both are based on the
same mechanism. The corollary is that the slogan ‘make love,
not war’ is
genuinely farcical (Girard 1991: 149).
The figure representing the mimetic principle in the play is Pandarus;
for Girard, he is its real protagonist.
Pandarus is a go-between who brings
together Troilus and Cressida, literally procuring the bed where they unite.
More generally, he stands for eliciting desire, kindling it where it does not
exist, and then whipping it up
continuously, in ever-increasing spirals, until
the ‘subjects’ of this desire lose all control of themselves. In
this role
Pandarus becomes ‘the midwife and engineer of desire’ (Girard 1991: 123).
Moving way beyond a simple
pimp, he ‘takes a giant step forward’ and, like
Renaissance charlatans, ‘[i]nstead of waiting for his customers
to show up,
he generates them through advertising, creat[ing] his own markets’ (Girard
1991: 152). The language
used is not accidental, as Girard considers
Pandarus ‘a prophet of modern advertising’, who recognised the
effectiveness of spin control or ‘sexiness by proxy’ (Ibid.: 123). Lines in the
play recall modern-day media advisors addressing politicians, or even ‘the
way popular hosts handle their
guests on TV shows’ (Ibid.: 148); an
observation that leads Girard to introduce terms like ‘pandaric methods’
(Ibid.: 149), or the ‘pandarisation’ of social life: ‘At the end of the play
everybody is turning into a
Pandarus, everybody is trying to control the
contagious forces that rule the world of warfare, politics and sex
through
the same mimetic strategies’ (Ibid.: 157). Girard singles out for attention
one particular aspect of the
‘Pandaric method’, the technique of repetition:
‘Constant harping on the same theme will trigger imitation more
or less
automatically’ (Ibid.: 125); this is the same method identified by Alberti in
Momus.17 In sum, ‘[i]f the industry needs
a patron saint, it should select
Pandarus’ (Ibid.: 123).
Shakespeare drives his argument to its conclusion, reaching the basic
level of philosophical anthropology and
formulating Platonic insights. The
Jaques-ian ‘infected world’ receives a proper diagnosis as a ‘crisis of
degree’ (Girard 1991: 160–84): ‘O when degree is shaked,/Which is the
ladder of all high designs,/The enterprise
is sick.’ (I.iii.101–3). This speech
is placed in the mouth of Ulysses, a main trickster figure in the play,
which
further indicates that Shakespeare was aware of being implicated, as a
playwright, in proliferating mimetic
infection. Taking this point further,
Hughes offers one of the most stunning claims in his entire book: he
identifies the exact scene in which something was as if clicking in
Shakespeare, with his work taking a huge leap
forward, so that modern
tragedy was born. This is where Troilus accidentally glimpses Cressida
embracing Diomede;
thus his world—the world of romantic love—
collapses (V.ii). It is with this ‘entry of the Boar’ (Hughes 1992:
174) that
the Tragic Equation has suddenly emerged, fully born (Ibid.: 187).

THE EXPLOSION OF SHAKESPEARE AS A WRITER OF

TRAGEDY: OTHELLO AND HAMLET

Hughes analyses the four great tragedies as two pairs that belong tightly
together. The first pair is
Othello and Hamlet, which corresponds to the
standard order; but according to the logic of the
Tragic Equation, Othello
must come first, reversing the accepted sequence. This is such a serious
matter
that Hughes qualifies his point: it might well be that Hamlet, as a
play, was finished first; but the plot
of Othello had to be conceived after
Troilus and Cressida, and before Hamlet.

Othello
Othello, as its full title shows, is the twin Venice play; however, reaching
the height of his evocative
and reflexive powers, Shakespeare moves to a
further level of visionary liminality, illuminating MV from a
new angle.
While the play starts in Venice, it moves to Cyprus, a ‘hyper-liminal’
frontier place (Platt 2001: 138), from which Venice, embodiment of
liminality, becomes something like
a rock-solid background. Cyprus is an
island between Europe, Asia and Africa; even today it is divided between
Greeks and Turks. However, in Othello, Cyprus gains a symbolic meaning
(Platt 2001: 137–8, referring to
Kernan’s classic study), going beyond
physical and cultural geography and history. Its full meaning can be
understood only in the context of the previous genealogical reconstruction
and by referring back to MV.
It has been noticed that Cyprus as second location of the play to Venice
has parallels with Belmont in MV
(Lombardo 1993: 155). Furthermore, in
trying to identify the exact location of Belmont and following up various
cues like its identification as a Palladio Villa, it was compared to Catherina
Cornaro’s villa at Altivole
(Jeffery 1932: 28), or Villa Foscari, also called
Malcontenta, on the river Brenta, where Henry III was lodged
during his
famous 1573 visit (Magri 2003: 3–5). Both places have fundamental
significance for the birth and
spread of Italian-style comedy, and in closely
connected ways: the ‘court’ of Catherine Cornaro was the place
through
which the virus, incubated in Ferrara, was transplanted into Venice, while
the visit of Henry III was
fundamental for its spread to the courts of the
rising absolute monarchies.
In the play, the central figure spreading the virus is Iago.

Iago embodies the paradox and ambiguity at the heart of Venice in an

extreme form, and ‘at its most dangerous’
(Platt 2001: 140–1). He is
identified as the paradox of nothingness and a manipulator of non-being, as
his words
transform reality by making ‘something insubstantial into
something of utmost weight, fashion the trivial into
the undeniably true’
(Ibid.: 140, referring to III.iii.326–8), as if bringing fully out the dangerous
power of
words, already the theme of ‘improved’ comedies like LLL. This
results in the use of ‘paradox as method’
and a continuous play with double
entendres, amounting to a ‘rhetorical maneuvering [with] a demonic,
duplicitous
quality’ (Ibid.: 141). The words ‘demonic’ and ‘duplicity’ are
identical insofar as demonic is what undermines
harmonious unity by
transforming virtue (like the innocent naïveté of Othello) into evil, creating
a split mind
(Ibid.: 143).
This is where Othello’s background—which, by the way, is not
specified: he could be a Moor, a Turk, a Saracen or
an Egyptian (Ibid.: 145,
fn. 66)—comes to play a role, and it is here that we start to approach the
full
ambivalence captured in the figure. What happens is not a reversion to
some kind of primitive state;
rather, Iago manages to set in motion
schismogenic processes because Othello is a not only a marginal but a
liminal figure (Ibid.: 143–5, explicitly citing Victor Turner).
Iago thus ‘sums up the qualities of man as a man of theatre’, including
both actors and directors and in
particular the actor as director (Lombardo
1993: 154). Even a concrete figure is offered as the closest model for
this
stage personality: Iago is plotting the play, just like Pedrolino, the stock
type who would become Pierrot in France, while Pulcinella first in Italy and
then gained fame as
Polichinelle, Punch, or Casper throughout Europe
(Paërl 2002).
Taking this argument further, in the direction already indicated by Platt,
who argues that demonic duplicity
recalls the rhetorician and the poet at the
same time (Platt 2001: 141), making use of Girard and especially
Hughes, it
will now be argued that Iago is also the alter ego of Shakespeare,
representing Shakespeare’s
problematisation of Italian-style comedy at its
limit.

Concerning the identity of Iago, Hughes argues that Iago is Spanish for
James = Jacob = Jaques and thus another
mask for the playwright. Because
Iago is the most negative character in Shakespeare, this claim defies belief.
Paradox is raised to new heights through two explicit self-identifications by
Iago: ‘I am not what I am’
(I.i.65); and ‘I am nothing if not critical’
(II.i.122). Taken together they offer a stunning combination of
self-critique
as playwright and a diagnosis of the modern condition that would have to
wait for Goethe,
Hölderlin and Nietzsche to be understood. Concerning the
first, the definition is the reverse of Yahweh’s
revelation to Moses in the
Old Testament: ‘I am that I am’ (Exodus 6: 2–3). Because the opposite of
God is
the Devil, Iago-Jaques-Shakespeare is identified with the latter. So,
while for Baudelaire laughter is satanic,
for Shakespeare comedy (the type
of theatre that disseminates not only contagious laughter but similarly
contagious jealousy) is diabolical. Concerning the second, the definition is
negative as it mimics the
doubt-generating character of critical intelligence,
the foundation of the ‘scientific method’, associating
‘pure’, non-
participatory and ice-cold rationality with the devil: ‘loveless intelligence’
is truly satanic, as
it ‘destroys love’ (Hughes 1992: 230). Here, at this
crucial moment of his oeuvre, we can grasp the depth of the
dilemma with
which Shakespeare as playwright was grappling: by writing and performing
theatrical plays,
whether comedies or violent historical dramas, he was on
the side of the devil; but using plays to criticise his
own activity, as if
splitting himself, through some kind of ironic laughter, is just as diabolical.
There seems
to be no way out.
The analysis is reinforced by the other hero, Othello. Analysts were
evidently just as reluctant to ponder this
problem as that regarding the
identity of the merchant of Venice, given that Othello is black, seemingly
reinforcing racial prejudices. The solution is identical to that of the previous
case: Othello is a mask,
and for its identity two clear hints are offered: it is a
Venetian mask, so we must search among the characters
of Venetian
commedia dell’arte; and it is a black mask. The evident answer is that
Othello is another mask of
Harlequin.18
This analysis also makes it clear that Othello is also a mask for
Shakespeare. The split represented in Act V,
Scene ii of Troilus and
Cressida, producing the ‘double vision’ central for the Tragic Equation, also
produced a split at the deepest level of Shakespeare’s identity: a split
between the playwright who has become conscious of the disastrous impact
he is producing through his seemingly
innocuous, happy, mimetic
comedies, or Shakespeare the perpetrator, and Shakespeare the human
being, who has been
profoundly shaped in his own identity by comedies, or
Shakespeare the victim, product of childhood theatre
experiences that
seduced him for life.
Such a tragic dilemma and dark self-assessment hardly leaves a way
out. This is the context for the depth of
despair represented by Hamlet.

HAMLET
Hamlet is the best-known of Shakespeare’s plays, offering infinite material
for interpretation, so we must
restrict our attention to whatever is most
essential for the line of analysis pursued so far.19 Surprisingly, both Girard
and
Hughes have precious little to offer here. The split at the level of
Shakespeare’s identity is alluded to by the
ghost of Hamlet’s father, a
supernatural force whose appearance is placed beyond doubt. The vision
gave Hamlet a
task; and the entire play is a meditation on the possibility of
fulfilling this task. At a trivial level the
dilemma is refusing to enter the
logic of vengeance (Girard 1991: 271–89)—a dilemma, however, that
Shakespeare
has already resolved in Julius Caesar and TC. So the issue at
stake must be different, and he hints
at it in the most explicit manner: it is
not only that the world is ‘out of joint’ (I.v.189) but also that he,
Hamlet,
‘was born to set it right’ (I.v.190). This dilemma can be read as cowardice, a
refusal of the task given.
If one’s task is to set the world right, one should
start acting; and if violence cannot be accepted, then one
must act in a non-
violent way. Why can’t Hamlet find a solution?
While Hamlet’s most famous line is about the problem of being or non-
being, Shakespearean interpreters as
important as Goethe or Nietzsche have
argued that the play is rather about acting or not acting. However, both
failed to realise that the main problem with Hamlet is not his failure to act
but Shakespeare’s recognition that
there is a genuine problem with acting,
especially concerning a time being ‘out of joint’. Under such
conditions,
first of all one should not ‘act’ in the theatrical sense, implying a radical
problematisation of the
highly liminal activity of ‘doing theatre’; but, even
further, one should not even act in the sense of a
rational, autonomous
subject—a fiction revealed as being surprisingly close to mimetic play-
acting. So the
central dilemma posed by Shakespeare, through Hamlet—
representing, in analogy to Jaques, the way in which
Shakespeare was
moving beyond the ‘mask’ of Hamlet in writing the tragedy—is the
following question: What should
one do about the ‘out of joint’ state of the
world if one should not ‘act’? This cannot mean ‘doing
nothing’.
Nothingness has already been assigned to critical intelligence as diabolical.
It can rather lie only
around the third, original meaning of ‘acting’, the
position of the ‘holy fool’: let the divine act; let’s
restore meaning to our
lives not by ‘acting’, but by letting ourselves
be overcome (transcended),
beyond the schism represented by the self-conscious actor, with the Platonic
‘awe of
existence’ (thaumazein) or the unity with divine love characteristic
of archaic, pre-sacrificial
Mediterranean/European religiosity to which pre-
Puritan Christianity attempted to return.20
At the deepest level the problem is that ‘changing the world’ is not a
possible course of action for human
beings, who should realise their limits
and do only what is assigned to them in the order of the world.
Because the
world order (cosmos) was upset by acts of hubris against divine love, it
cannot be restored by
further acts of hubris.

THE TEMPEST: A FAREWELL TO THEATRE, AND ITS REASONS

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s final masterpiece. Both words carry

considerable weight. It is another
indisputable masterpiece, the first after
King Lear, so an explanation must be given regarding what
rendered it
possible. Second, it was Shakespeare’s last masterpiece, even last play. The
third part of
Shakespeare’s work, running from about 1599 up to 1612 and
containing 15 plays, does not form a single,
consistent hierarchical rank
order to be arranged along a straight line; instead, it includes, first, four
significant but complex and not fully ‘theatrical’ problems plays; the four
greatest tragedies of world theatre;
three more tragedies of somewhat
problematic value; three romances that are overtly intellectual and
speculative;
and finally a masterpiece that is also a final work, dismantling
his entire theatre.
A promising way to approach its content is by recognising another
curious paradox. The Tempest was
considered Shakespeare’s most
important work by 19th-century ‘romantic’ interpreters, who emphasised
the
enchanting character of his plays in contrast to the ruling rationalist,
empiricist and materialist orthodoxies.
On the other hand, according to
Girard, the play is remarkable with regard to Shakespeare’s awareness
about the
dangers of his own activity. Thus the creation of stage monsters is
itself monstrous, while Shakespeare
identifies himself not only with
Prospero but also with Caliban (Girard 1991: 343–4). Just as Prospero’s real
victory is triumph over himself, Shakespeare’s dismantling of his theatre
represents a similar victory over his
own engagement. So we must explain
why exactly Shakespeare’s most magical play happens to be at the same
time his
most disinvolving, exteriorising one as well.
Hughes solves this dilemma, without ever posing it, in a stunning and
convincing feat of poetic interpretation.
Shakespeare started to write The
Tempest as a direct continuation of his previous plays, part of a Gnostic
speculation, and its culmination was supposed to be the masque in Act IV,
Scene i—a genre that had been gaining
particular popularity at the court
and which Shakespeare, in his last works, incorporated into the very
substance of his plays.21 Instead, at the moment Shakespeare was writing
this masque,
something happened to him, as the effect of writing—and he
suddenly changed his mind. According to Hughes,
the play ‘gives the
impression of being the final product of long alchemical labour’,
particularly in its most
famous lines, to which the play tends, and ‘which in
spiritual tone, in resonance within the oeuvre, seems like
Shakespeare’s
ultimate word’ (Hughes 1992: 447). In working on this play, Shakespeare
intensively and
systematically reflected on his own life, which ‘released in
him some inexplicable power’ (Hughes 1992: 448),
leading to the famous
lines: ‘We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is
rounded with a
sleep’ (IV.i.156–8).

The statement is uttered in a vital moment of stage play, when imminent

action is needed in order to thwart
off-danger. Instead, Prospero breaks into
a long monologue. This is very much unlike Shakespeare: suspending
action in an almost operetta-like manner. It requires a justification.
Hughes calls attention to three aspects of Prospero’s monologue. First,
when he suddenly remembers Caliban and
his crew, he becomes unusually
and extremely angry: ‘Never till this day/Saw I him touched with anger so
distempered’ (IV.i.144–5), says Miranda, his daughter. Second, he quickly
recovers, making it evident that
Caliban does not represent much of a
danger to him; he even attributes, unjustly, the suddenly tense atmosphere
to those surrounding him—who merely reflect his own anger. Finally, he
starts his speech by stating that ‘Our
revels now are ended’ (IV.i.148). But
what were these ‘revels’? Who was revelling? And why?
As always, Shakespeare offers every opportunity to avoid even
recognising a problem here, as the ‘revels’ could
be taken as referring to the
masque; but an attentive reading reveals this to be untenable. The ending of
the
masque was consequence and not cause, and certainly not something to
be cheerful about. Whatever ended the
‘revels’ has to do with the reasons
why Prospero got so angry and regained his serenity so quickly.
Central for Hughes’s argument is the contrast between the qualities of
these lines, ‘one of the high moments in
all poetic literature’, and the text of
the masque, ‘written in the equivalent of puppet language’ (Hughes 1992:
448). As Hughes refers back to the two epic poems and also to
Shakespeare’s ‘shamanistic mission’, he clearly
considers that this writing
was a ‘spiritual exercise’. The question of why and how, however, remains,
and Hughes
does not give a fully convincing answer.
Problems start by his not playing enough attention to the phrase ‘our
revels’. ‘Revel’ is a particularly
interesting word. On one hand, it means a
kind of ‘dream vision’, and in its form it is close to ‘revelation’,
the highest
form of truth, so the word might suggest a revelatory vision. However, the
etymology is the exact
opposite: the root word is ‘rebel’ or ‘revolt’. Here
we must pay close attention to context, in particular the
figure of Caliban
and the type of menace he represents. Caliban is a ‘goblin’, an ‘elemental
lump of sangsara that has somersaulted in, like a clown through a paper
hoop’ (Hughes
1992: 454). Using the terms developed in Chapter 2, he is an
intruder, and one that is about to disrupt a
wedding feast. The scene is very
similar to the structure of Aristophanes’ comedies, with a very
significant
exception. In The Tempest, the disruptions belong to different levels: the
masque is a play
within a play, while the intruder appears at the ‘plain’ level
of the play. Thus the scene moves extremely close
to the original ritual,
capturing the moment in which the logic of the archaic celebratory feast
was hijacked, by
an ‘intruder’, into escalating mimetic rivalry, ending with
the sacrificial mechanism.
This helps to clarify the content of the masque and the kind of identity
recognised there by Hughes. The ritual
performed in the masque is a
marriage ceremony combined with the birth of a ‘divine child’, or the same
ritual
that was part of the Dionysus cult (Jung and Kerényi 1951; Kerényi
1976). Elements of this ritual, however, are
also close to another divine
nativity ritual that is connected to a cave: the birth of Jesus. The
fundamental
difference concerns the nature of the intruder and the
sacrificial mechanism. The Dionysus cult could not
incorporate the intruder
and his possible sidetracking of the feast, so the masque as a secret, Gnostic
resurrection of the archaic hieros gamos is a nonsensical undertaking,
regressing before the historical
moment in which the sacrificial mechanism,
a product of the intruding outsider, has not yet been unmasked: a mere
revel.
The end of revels also implies a recognition of truth. This concerns the
mimetic nature of human beings.
Shakespeare follows Plato and Aristotle
and forecasts Tocqueville, Tarde or Girard in considering humans as
fundamentally imitative, who follow the images that have been imprinted
on them, just as much when they are awake
as when they dream. So
Shakespeare, with a great deal of regret—comparable to Leonardo da
Vinci’s—recognised the
problem posed by the fact that he had spent his life
imprinting images on his audiences, and he became reluctant
to keep on
doing so. With this recognition, he says good-bye to his public, inviting us
to dismiss the chimera of
‘the public’ as an open space for individual,
‘rational’ spectators and actors, driven by their ‘needs’ and
‘desires’.
 Representing Representation
Visionary Images of Commedia dell’Arte
9

Given that texts and verbal accounts about the early period of commedia
dell’arte are rare and that theatrical
presentation is in any case difficult to
capture in words, images of theatre were always much sought for. This
interest recently gained additional emphasis through the work of Margaret
Katritzky (2006), who developed a new
approach to the identification of
figures of commedia dell’arte in pictures. However, the aim of this chapter
will be different from a social or cultural history of theatre. The focus will
be on a few images created by the
best artists of the period that capture in a
visionary manner the very ‘spirit’ of commedia dell’arte.
These include the Balls of Sfessania series by Jacques Callot, for long
considered the first images
documenting commedia dell’arte; the paintings
about Italian theatre by Antoine Watteau, in particular his
Gilles/Pierrot;
and the recurring fascination with the figure of Pulcinella by the Tiepolos.
Taken
together, these images capture—anticipating recent scholar-ship—the
conditions out of which commedia dell’arte
emerged, provide an in-depth
understanding of such performances, and contain genuinely prophetic
insights about
their lasting effect. They also provide glimpses into the
nature of artistic activity, even the ‘self’ of the
artist, that are comparable to
Shakespeare’s.

JACQUES CALLOT: GUESSING AT THE ROOTS, REGRESSING

Callot (1592–1635) was a major classic in the history of engraving, a

practice having tremendous though much
ignored social impact,
comparable to the printing press, to which it was intimately linked. About
Callot’s early
life typically romantic stories were circulated, perhaps
invented by the artist. Though born in Nancy as the son
of a royal herald,1
he
allegedly escaped from home in his early teens and travelled to Italy with
a gypsy caravan (Rossier 1970: 11);
while at the age of sixteen he left his
apprentice-ship and went to Rome. There he met Israël Henriet, who would
become his lifelong friend and printer, but he found stability only in
Florence in the Medici court.
While there can be no question concerning the quality of his work,
Callot the
person that comes through them is quite disturbing. Far from
showing the serenity necessary to compose harmonious
works, he is
revealed as an artist torn between excesses. One the one hand, he developed
a ‘taste for frontality
and symmetry’ (Calvesi 1971: 1), giving a full-scale
representation of events depicted from a distance, searching
for a neutral
viewpoint; but such objectivity was not ‘scientific’, rather lacking empathy.
Themes chosen from
court life were combined with vulgar popular
entertainments, religious scenes depicted in the Dutch style, and
scenes
from the Thirty Years’ War. On the other hand, many of the themes
selected, and especially their way of
depiction, were also highly whimsical
and subjective, depicting human deformities like those of dwarfs, or having
a merciless focus on human suffering, like The Miseries and Misfortunes of
the War, the Massacre of the
Innocents or The Temptation of St. Anthony.
One of his most famous series was entitled Capricci
(Caprices)—a term he
is credited to have taken over from music.

The schismatic and whimsical nature of Callot’s personality is perfectly

illustrated by reconstructing the
creative process that culminated in his chef
d’oeuvre, the Balls of Sfessania.2 The series was etched in 1621, once
Callot had
come back from Florence to his native Nancy and was preparing
his Capricci series for publication.
According to Posner, while working,
Callot brought memories back from his Florence experiences, which
somehow
came to focus on the Two Pantaloons (Posner 1977: 215). The
series was an unintended digression away from
his other work—a product
of reminiscences. As they were not based on drawings made after
observation, they are
images springing from memory, reaching directly into
the distant roots of commedia dell’arte performances and
intuiting their
original spirit. These dualistic encounters capture the fairground
mountebank charlatan origins,
in the form of moresca dancing, instead of
depicting early-17th-century theatre.
While the printed numbering of the twenty-four images was arbitrary,
Posner made an ingenious attempt to
reconstruct the serial order. I will also
rely upon a recent interpretation by Agnes Horvath (2013), which
focuses
on its cosmological implications. According to this, the starting picture
represents an initiation scene,
inviting or rather seducing the audience into
Callot’s world, as if a magical vacuum would literally ‘suck’ the
viewers
into a parallel universe, following the central figure there who—though
dancing—is in evident fright and
is being aggressively pushed towards a
box.3 The second image shows him in a duplicated version, with two
figures standing apart, frozen
into a fixed pose, measuring each other. Here
as in all the other images, the faces are identical masks, without
human
expression. One figure is distorted into an obscene and aggressive pose, as
if offering up his behind,
while the other is fully erect, as a soldier in stand-
to, but with every muscle in tension, as if ready to
pounce. Both figures
stick out their tongues and have fully erect penises.
From the third image
they start slow dancing movements around each other, gradually picking up
the pace. In the
middle images a lady is introduced; she eventually joins the
dancing but does not alter its nature substantially.
In the most elaborate late
images, where the series was completed for the cosmic twenty-four, the
number of hours
in a day, the woman disappears, musical instruments spur
an ever more frenetic pace, and the central movement
becomes the thrusting
of a wooden sword, replacing the penis, towards the behind of the other
figure who is
leaning forward, as if on all fours.
It must kept in mind that Callot had a talent for drawing, not etching, so
he had to develop a new technique,
combining his skills with the
requirements of the genre. He forced himself to etch as he wanted to have
mass effect. According to Horvath, Callot is the artist of liminality. His
work does not ‘reflect’ social life,
in the reductivist, mimetic version of art
characteristics of Marxist or Durkheimian social history; rather, it
projects
the unstable, liminal conditions of his time into a cosmic dance of death and
chaos.

If Callot depicted the archetypal figure of the demonic clown, so pivotal for
the modern world, Watteau did so
with the similarly crucial sad clown.
ANTOINE WATTEAU: SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS
PIERROT

Watteau (1684–1721) was the most important painter of his times, while his
Pierrot, a main attraction at
the Louvre, is considered one of the most
exquisite paintings of all time. While the neglect of Watteau during
his
lifetime was a romantic myth, his fame plummeted during the
Enlightenment and his interest in Italian comedy
not received proper
attention.
The times of Watteau were opposite to Callot’s: the apparent eternity of
consolidated absolutism under Louis XIV,
not the liminal uncertainty
leading up to the Thirty Years’ War. Yet something was lurking behind the
surface,
and Watteau captured just this. If Callot embodied, half
mythologically, carefree romantic sociability,
approaching dissoluteness,
Watteau foresaw an opposite romantic archetype: the reserved, solitary,
self-contained, un-adapted, misanthrope, consumptive, self-tormenting
romantic genius (Lauterbach 2010: 7, 21;
Moureau 2011: 103; Panofsky
1952: 334). Even his premature death recalled the archetype as codified by
Mozart
(see Elias 1993). Thus, not being close to but as distant from the
everyday ramblings of his times as possible,
neither academy nor court
painter, he managed to capture, with his ‘hyper-sensible premonitions’, the
crisis of
his times beyond their façade of harmony, including the coming
French Revolution (Lauterbach 2010: 9) and even
the spirit of modernity
(Ibid.: 7, 68).
Capturing this spirit still required special life experiences. Watteau was
not French but Flemish, having moved
to Paris in 1702 and taken up
residence in Saint-Germain, central place of the
fairs, with Momus as their
patron ‘god’ (Cuppone 1999: 47; Quéro 1998: 95). There—after its closing
down in 1697,
because it had offended Louis XIV—Italian theatre reverted
to its roots, and the figure of Pierrot acquired its
overwhelming popularity.
Watteau’s interest in the fair and its protagonists was further sparked by
his training: he entered the workshop
of Claude Gillot (1673–1722), who
specialised in painting the comic theatre and grotesque masquerades
(Lauterbach
2010: 24), under conditions that are not known (Posner 1984:
47). Gillot was the first artist who represented in
paintings, thus in a
respectful genre, actual scenes of commedia dell’arte performances
(Lauterbach 2010: 81). He
took inspiration from Callot (Ibid.: 24), all the
more so as he was an engraver rather than a painter (Ibid.:
83); but moving
further, he created a myth around the figures, their free and easygoing
character, replacing
mythological, historical or religious sources of
inspiration with legend and myth-making by the protagonists of
theatre.
Gillot was therefore the founder and first priest of this new religion, ‘the
modern mythology derived
from theatre’ (Ibid.).
This new attention was further developed by Watteau, leading the spirit
of Callot in a different direction. Just
like Callot, Watteau would not paint
real theatrical scenes, only being inspired by them. Instead of Harlequin,
the
favourite theme of Gillot, Watteau depicted his more lighthearted rivals,
Mezzettino and especially Pierrot.
Pierrot developed out of Pedrolino,
origin of the Pulcinella figure as well, in the late 17th century, as a
second
valet once Arlecchino became first valet. The preoccupation of Watteau for
Italian theatre is puzzling as
he had never been to Italy. He composed eerie
images of theatrical troupes, displacing them into the countryside,
with
aspects strangely exaggerated and mythologised, where Pierrot always had
an uneasy relationship to other
members, being an outcast in a group
already out of place, often looking out of the frame directly at the
viewer—
another Watteau trademark.
This ‘obsessive’ (Moureau 2011: 103–4) interest in Pierrot culminated
in Watteau’s most famous image.

Gilles/Pierrot is one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre; almost as

famous as Mona Lisa, and
just as enigmatic.
Such enigmas start with the provenance and commission of a work.
Given its current fame and Watteau’s reputation
in his lifetime, it is
astonishing that the painting’s whereabouts during the 18th century are
ignored (Posner
1984: 266–7). Discovered in 1812, it gained sudden
prominence through the romantics in the 1820s and has been on
display at
the Louvre since 1870. Puzzles continue with the figure represented.
Historians of art and theatre are
perennially divided as to whether it was
Pierrot or Gilles, his main fairground rival, who emerged from the
fairground in the 1640s (Panofsky 1952: 24–5). He was a popular version of
the Zanni: tightrope walker and vulgar
entertainer, close to the buffoon; but
also, as if renewing the old affinity with charlatans, he advertised products,
on a porch, as a mountebank, performing his antics in order to
attract people
to buy. Watteau’s image contains aspects of both Pierrot and Gilles: his
clothing is Pierrot’s
(Moureau 2011), while not only his attitude but the use
of the image as a signboard alludes to Gilles, as does
the presence of the
donkey, emblematic animal of Gilles. The problem can be solved only by
realising that the
debate is misplaced, the consequence of a failure to
understand Watteau’s work on theatre: he was not depicting
‘real’ theatre or
creating a myth à la Gillot (for which correspondence to actual shows was
vital) but rather
capturing the spirit of Italian comedy, where Pierrot and
Gilles are one, and even more.
For understanding this a few central features of the image must be
reviewed closely. The first is its frontality
(Moureau 2011: 104), a technique
Watteau took from Callot, just like the entire composition, increasing its
suggestive power (Panofsky 1952: 330) but transposing it to a different
genre: instead of a relatively small
etching, we have a life-size figure, the
only one in Watteau’s oeuvre (Grasselli and Rosenberg 1984: 434), making
Gilles/Pierrot not just a central metaphorical figure but a strikingly naked
and defenceless one. This is
combined with its enigmatic face, containing
an expression that cannot be defined (Ibid.), showing a ‘mysterious
absence
of gaze’ (Moureau 2011: 104).

Such facelessness is particularly paradoxical as the image, since its

discovery, was considered a self-portrait
of Watteau as artist—though
probably it was the only way to convey Watteau’s ideas about the nature of
his
art. The emphasis on the exposed, naked character of the artist led
commentators to compare it to Rembrandt’s
Ecce Homo; Rembrandt having
been an artist with evident affinities to Watteau.4 This brings out the radical
contrast with Callot:
if Callot was tied down to the earth, Watteau looked
upwards to heavenly aspects (Panofsky 1952: 330–1). However,
Callot was
not just realistic but rather evoked the subterranean, demonic aspects of the
original fairground
source. Thus Callot and Watteau capture two opposite
archetypes, the demonic and the sad clown, with Watteau
depicting, using
Callot’s technique, Shakespeare’s Jaques.
This can be supported by reconsidering, with cues from Posner’s
analysis of Callot, Watteau’s creative process.
Watteau started his career by
doing signboard posters, and he finished it by painting, in 1719–1720, after
a trip
to England that only worsened his illness, Gersaint’s Signboard, as a
gift to the shop owner who
magnanimously took care of him in his last
month (Plax 2000: 154–83; Posner 1984: 271–2). Widely considered his
other chef d’oeuvre, it was a paradoxical undertaking, as signboard posters
have low prestige. Arguably, in this
context Watteau started to reminisce
about his early Paris experiences, fusing his identity as signboard painter
with the identity of the clown who was performing such marketing
gimmicks, which produced as an offshoot the
apotheosis of the artist as the
‘suffering servant’ of mankind.
The genius of Watteau lay in rendering the most fleeting aspect of an
otherwise fleeting figure, the fairground mountebank, into an eternal image
‘outside human time’ (Moureau 2011:
104–5). In the terminology of
Bernhard Giesen, if Callot depicted the archetypal source of the modern
actor as
perpetrator, Watteau did the same with modern actor as victim. The
switch between these extremes defines the
anthropological condition of
modernity.

THE TIEPOLOS AND PULCINELLA: PERMANENT CARNIVAL

IN VENICE AND BEYOND

Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770) was only a few years younger than

Watteau. However, while Watteau died in 1721,
childless, at the age of
thirty-seven, the life of Tiepolo, together with his most important follower
and son,
Giandomenico (1727–1804), would cover the entire 18th century.
Tiepolo’s art has many parallels to Shakespeare’s. The first concerns
quality: Giambattista was not just the
greatest painter of his age but is
increasingly recognised as one of the greatest geniuses of painting.
Furthermore, the work of both is in a way final: Shakespeare bid farewell to
theatre, which would never again
reach his height; while with Tiepolo, it
has been argued, painting itself ended. Even further, both of them
systematically reflected on their art and thus were philosophers in the sense
of Pierre Hadot, more than academic
philosophers; and while doing so, they
also reflected on the impact of their art on society, in particular the
troubled
times in which they were living, so their work had sociological qualities as
well, focusing jointly on
the effect mechanism of Italian theatre. Such
reflections by Giambattista Tiepolo have two added assets: he was
Venetian, with a keen knowledge of local theatre and carnival, and he also
educated his sons as painters, where a
profound connection developed
between his reflections on his own activity and the teaching of this art to his
sons.5
Still, Tiepolo is not as well known as Shakespeare, and his reception
suffered long periods of neglect. He fared
particularly badly in the 19th
century, when he was considered an obsolete court painter.6 However, two
major works have
recently attempted to assign Tiepolo his rightful place.
One is Tiepolo Pink by Roberto Calasso, referring
to the colour associated
with Giambattista’s painting since Proust’s remarks (Mariuz 1996: 3).
Calasso is a major
contemporary Italian thinker and Nietzsche expert,
disseminator of Girard’s ideas in Italy and editor of the
Biblioteca Adelphi
series, where the book appeared as the 500th volume, thus intended to be a
landmark.
The other, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, was written by
Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall,
two professors of art history at
Berkeley, representing a rare work of genuine intellectual collaboration with
a
programmatic title.
According to them, the neglect of Tiepolo’s work was not due to its
deficiencies but to its main asset: a unique investigation of the nature of
painting and the effect an image has
on its viewer. Giambattista attempted
to break away from a mistaken view of pictorial work, rooted in
Renaissance
ideas of perspective and the ‘imitation’ of nature, reasserted in
a most dogmatic way, at the moment Tiepolo was
working, by the aesthetics
of Lessing.
Lessing, identified as ‘immortal leader [unsterbliche Führer] of the
modern German spirit’ (Dilthey 1921:
174), established a separation
between painting and literature that was almost instantaneously codified as
a
dogma in Winckelmann’s Byzantine classicism.7 Based on a prior
separation between ends and means, this proclaims that painting and
literature each try to do the same things, only through different means. This
end is to represent a single
instance: not the climax of action but the
‘pregnant’ moment before it, so that the task of both literature and
painting
is to tell or enact a tale. The ‘pictorial unity’ of a work of art lies in
capturing this single moment.
This model, however, does not apply for
Tiepolo—not surprisingly, as Lessing had no interest in the visual arts.
He
rather reverted to the theories of Byzantine humanists about the primacy of
literal description over depicted
beauty, finding its model in empty
theatrical gestures. Even more strikingly, this was combined with Lessing’s
championing of Shakespeare, sparking the romantic cult of Shakespeare.
What Lessing discovered as the essence of
Shakespeare was nothing else
than the commedia dell’arte inspiration Shakespeare was trying to leave
behind.
Thus, in a striking manner, Lessing literally killed two birds with
one stone: destroying the radical novelty of
Tiepolo’s painting, and securing
the romantic misreading of Shakespeare.

The focus in this section will be on the recurrent, almost obsessive interest
both Giambattista and Giandomenico
Tiepolo had in the figure of
Pulcinella, which became in 18th-century Venice the main embodiment of
both commedia
dell’arte and the Venetian carnival. More than any other
character of commedia dell’arte, Pulcinella captures
ambiguity and
ambivalence: being a simpleton, this character was without qualities,
embodying nothingness, even
the number zero (Horvath 2010); yet, he was
associated with the magical powers of death and fertility. He
performed on
stage, in a grossly distorted manner, pushing to their very limits the basic
bodily functions,
eating, drinking and sexuality; while a male, his name
ended with an ‘a’, characteristic of females in Italian;
and he also frequently
gave birth, even to an infinite number of children—which, however, came
out of his behind.
Even here the description offered by Thelma Niklaus
captures the figure particularly well:

He was the supreme egotist, determined to secure for himself riches,

fame, women, and fat living, at whatever
cost to others. Beneath an
apparent good humour lurked a cynical depravity and the smouldering
volcano of his brutal personality. His megalomania was wonderfully
exposed in his song: ‘When I
march along the whole earth trembles. I
am master of the sun.’ He delighted in sowing seeds of dissension
among
his fellows, fomenting discord, provoking violence. (Niklaus
1956: 39)
The interest in Pulcinella will be considered in the context of the Tiepolos’
reflections on their own
activity—two undertakings that mutually
illuminate each other, with great philosophical and sociological
significance. Such connections are particularly tight between Giambattista’s
Treppenhaus frescoes in Würzburg,
his masterpiece, and the series of
drawings etched for the education of his sons, especially Giandomenico.
Given
that the Treppenhaus frescoes are little known outside the specialty
of 18th-century Venetian painting and that
they contain reflections on the
nature of painting that are vitally connected to the problem of theatricality,
they must be discussed in some detail.

The Treppenhaus Frescoes

The Treppenhaus frescoes at the Würzburg Residenz in Bavaria are not only
unique treasures of European painting
but also represent the work with
which the Tiepolos, these deeply Platonic painters, set out to renew
European
thinking. They comprise an enormous (19- by 30.5-meter) ceiling
decorated by Giambattista with the help of his
assistants, primarily his sons
Giandomenico and Lorenzo, depicting the four continents at its four sides
and
Apollo in the centre. The frescoes are above not a room but an
enormous staircase with corridors—places of
passage, thus liminal—whose
sheer size is awe-inspiring.
Such painting evidently cannot be reproduced in any meaningful way; it
must be experienced. Three points are
helpful in capturing this experience,
following Alpers and Baxandall. First, there is no privileged point from
which the frescoes can be seen and thus ‘faithfully’ reproduced. One must
be continuously on the move in order to
perceive and absorb them (Alpers
and Baxandall 1994: 7), and not only horizontally but vertically as well, up
and
down the stairs, as from every angle this work offers a different view
and vision. Viewing the Treppenhaus
frescoes is a genuine peripatetic
experience, immediately suggesting affinities with Plato.
Second, viewing such a piece of work requires special illumination.
Tiepolo fully used existing lighting effects.
There is no ‘best weather’ for
viewing the frescoes, as any external light brings out something new. As an
extreme example, even the lighting of a cloudy December day brings out
something unique (Ibid.: 118). Thus, the
frescoes not only cannot be
experienced and ‘consumed’ in a single viewing but must be visited and
contemplated
throughout the year. Finally, contemplating them always
leaves a peculiar after-the-fact sensation, a ‘tart sort
of moral after-taste’:
whenever leaving the place, viewers may have had a
sense of failing to
attend to something there; and yet, upon their hurried return, ‘it again
becomes elusive on
site: the moral still cannot quite be seen or located’
(Ibid.: 160). Yet this experience is never disturbing,
shocking or even just
unsettling for its own sake: contemplation rather generates a deep and
unique sense of
graceful pleasure, complementing the Platonic experience
with a Nietzschean one: ‘[o]n a bright day the
Treppenhaus almost calls for
dancing’ (Ibid.: 166).
The frescoes are also about painting; the very meaning of the activity
and its effects, producing an
entire analytics of painting (Ibid.: 17)—high
praise for a contemporary of Kant. The difference from Lessing’s
aesthetics
again could not be greater. Tiepolo is not interested in producing an effect
or generating an illusion
but in the question of how such an effect is
generated. The stunning experience produced by beholding
Tiepolo’s work
is ‘not evidence of a taste for illusion, but of a taste for pictorial artifice’
(Ibid.: 17).

The self-reflexive dimension of Tiepolo’s paintings is most present in the

Capricci and the
Scherzi. These exercises, through their very repetitiveness
—by which they ‘entertained and sustained’
indeterminacy—enabled him
to systematically ‘defamiliarise’ himself with his own work (Ibid.), an
experience that
is indirectly transmitted to the contemporary viewer and
that was no doubt directly transmitted to his son. The
education of Gian-
domenico thus became part of Tiepolo’s own self-overcoming.
Giambattista mapped the experiences connected to the activity of
painting alongside a threefold thematisation:
the act of painting, the act of
looking, and the fact of having an impact on those who are looking. In the
tradition where the task of art is to ‘imitate nature’, the three are considered
all but identical. Tiepolo’s aim
was to problematise this identity, shedding
light on the problematicity of each these activities.
The oddness, even absurdity of painting is rendered evident through his
famous early self-portrait in the figure
of Apelles (Ibid.: 10), a ‘true
manifesto’ (Mariuz 1996: 10). Apelles is trying to look simultaneously both
at
the model he is depicting and at the picture he is painting, which is
bewilderingly difficult to do. Making
things even more complex, the model
also watches what he is doing, while a series of other persons in the room
alternately are looking at the model, the painter, and what he is painting.
This results in a ‘circular gaze’,
with the head twisting like a periscope,
adding a touch of the bizarre to the image—a feature already associated
with Tiepolo by his contemporaries (Ibid.: 6, 10). The bedazzled face of
Apelles/Tiepolo captures the cacophony
in which all this results (Alpers and
Baxandall 1994: 10).8 Thus, in a single piece of work, Giambattista
managed to
transform painting from a simple craft into a thorny
philosophical problem. Similarly, watching is also
problematic. Tiepolo
realised that there is something regressive in the activity of looking at
something, which
in adults comes close to voyeurism; this is why he is so
much interested in the way children look at the world, with fresh and
innocent eyes (Ibid.: 15, 46). A sustained attention to
the act of watching, of
course, itself becomes a kind of watching, and for this Alpers and
Baxandall repeatedly
and emphatically use the term ‘regard’, in
contradistinction to ‘glance’ or even ‘gaze’; though their preferred
term is
‘behold’. This term, which identifies perceiving through the eyes as a
mental activity and also implying
sustained attention, has now become
obsolete, rendering us incapable of understanding the stake involved in
watching images. In order to capture human beings in such a state of
beholding, Tiepolo selected as subjects of
his paintings acts of discovery (in
particular in the Scherzi series) or epiphany visions (characteristic
of his
larger paintings).
A further aspect of strangeness, vital for social scientists, concerns the
impact exerted by images. While Alpers
and Baxandall don’t mention
Lessing, it is just amazing how closely this is connected with the effect
exerted by
Lessing on German art and aesthetics, in particular through the
reception of Shakespeare championed by Tieck and
the emphasis on dreams
shared by Tieck and Jean-Paul. The section where this is discussed bears
the title
Incantesimo (enchantment), purposefully not translated, which is
defined as ‘the shaping power of fancy’
(Ibid.: 45). The central experience,
helping to ‘unfamiliarise’ the all-too-natural effects of images and thus to
perceive properly their problematicity is dreaming. Alpers and Baxandall
here compare the Treppenhaus ceiling
with the dream sequences of modern
cineasts, which work ‘as if we are enabled to dream by taking as our own
the
notation of someone else’s dream’ (Ibid.). The point here is not to
consider everyday dreaming as revealing some
kind of truth; Tiepolo is no
Freud. Quite on the contrary; ‘it is dreaming as an activity of the visual
mind
rather than as the manifestation of censored desires that provides the
relevant frame for Tiepolo’ (Ibid.: 46).
Such a creative activity is at once an
asset and a liability: an asset because a study of dreaming can reveal the
image-making activity of the mind, or the manner in which the mind in this
particular sense literally
‘constructs’ our experiences; but it is also a
problem, as it indicates how the evocation of such images by
careless
image-mongering can contribute to the actual ‘spellbinding’ of those who
watch them, mixing together and
thus confusing actual, experienced life
and a dream world.
This is why Giambattista’s meta-philosophical exercises on his own
activity are of utmost significance. They
concern responsibility. This is
rendered evident in the way Giambattista is captured in the lower left
corner
of the fresco depicting Europe: not looking at us, but out of the frame, with
an extremely tense,
sustained regard; an intensity indicating a belief that ‘if
he relaxed his concentration the spell would break
and everything would
vanish’ (Ibid.: 48). The concluding sentence of the chapter captures
Giambattista in a
manner that can only recall Shakespeare, and in particular
the Shakespeare of The Tempest: ‘Like a
magician concluding a
performance, he takes credit for the wizardry by revealing, fleetingly, that
he is
responsible for us all’ (Ibid.: 49).
Given the intensity of the eyes, one might wonder whether they actually
capture and behold something. Insofar as one can make out, their gaze
seems to be oriented towards the opposite
corner of the room. There, on the
right hand side of Asia, there appears Giambattista’s signature, under a
group
that closely recalls the Scherzi (Ibid.: 162), as if his gaze would
identify the source that rendered
possible such intensity.

Giambattista’s Scherzi di Fantasia

Both the theme and the dating of the Scherzi di fantasia (‘Jokes of Fantasy’)
are enigmatic and
controversial. They are connected to the ten Capricci,
prepared in 1740–1742 and published in 1743 but
involved a much longer
time span of preparation; a project to which Giambattista continuously
returned in his
spare time, at least until 1757 and that, according to some
accounts, was started even before the Capricci
(Christiansen 1996: 275ff).
Saying that the Scherzi are enigmatic is not sufficient: it is all too
evident that they are
enigmatic. This recalls a guessing game, where the
solution is quite easy yet requires escaping the taken for
granted. The most
trivial yet puzzling detail concerns the number of etchings, twenty-three,
especially as the
title page promises twenty-four. Capricci is a genre
invented by Jacques Callot, and even the
Scherzi are associated with his
inspiration. Pulcinella first appeared in print in the Balls of
Sfessania,
containing twenty-four etchings. The incompleteness is thus intentional and
must be emphatic. What
should the last, missing image of the series
contain? And who is to complete it? The significance of numbers, and
the
Callot/Pulcinella link, is further underlined by Pulcinella appearing on
Plates 9 and 17. They are the first
of the second and third series of eight
etchings—confirming that the reference point for twenty-four is the hours
of the day, divided into three eight-hour segments.
Further hints concerning meaning are contained in some strange,
recurrent, even obsessive themes in the series.
Calasso emphasises four of
these: owls, especially the nine owls populating the frontispiece; trees and
poles,
used throughout as structuring devices; Orientals, present in every
image, except number 17; and similarly
omnipresent serpents.
Starting with the owls, they are nocturnal birds, but the scenery on the
frontispiece belongs to daytime. Apart
from further linking the series to the
circle of a day, they also evoke a confusion between day and night,
light and
darkness, thus a world being turned upside down. The strangely liminal
nature of time is combined with
similarly paradoxically liminal spatial
coordinates: the scenes are not just in the open air but in an elevated
place,
yet the atmosphere evoked is claustrophobic (Calasso 2006).
Trees and poles gain their significance in this context. They are
regularly used by Tiepolo as trademark devices.
The Scherzi and the
monumental paintings again explain each other: Giambattista uses these
devices in
order to give a stable, coherent, imposing structure to his
paintings, as if otherwise the image would dissolve into pure fancy; and the
presence of these trademarks in the Scherzi
indicates that his concern will
be about the source of confusion and the need to restore structure, order,
normality and solidity. Minor figures of the Scherzi like satyresses and
ephebes, associated with
sexuality, might allude to some of the factors
undermining this solidity.
It is also here that the motive of serpents becomes intelligible;
especially as the most characteristic trademark
of Giambattista is the
serpent around a pole, present above his signature in the Treppenhaus
frescoes. Calasso’s
analysis of the serpent motif is particularly incisive. The
serpent is nothing but a bite and an eye—no ears, no
nose, no hands or even
feet; only eating and seeing (Calasso 2006: 187ff). It is also much present in
the Old
Testament, including—apart from the Garden of Eden episode—the
brass serpent in the desert, a particularly
important theme in Venice, also
present in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel—not
surprising, given the great interest of Michelangelo in ‘watching’ (Ibid.:
173–81). Both points are fundamental
for Pulcinella, whose main
characteristics are an insatiable appetite, and—being a figure of theatre—he
is also
much being watched all the time. The brass serpent is not less
relevant, as Moses used it in the desert
during battle, where those seeing it
became invincible, alluding to the magical power of image.
The presence of Orientals, the most enigmatic figures of the Scherzi, is
a problem comparable to that
posed by Shakespeare’s Othello and Merchant
of Venice. Calasso’s analysis can be further
illuminated through liminality,
as every feature analysed by him is liminal—and of a particular kind.
Firstly,
they concern temporal and spatial liminality: Orientals exist here as
if outside time and space; freely roaming,
as if unleashed; fully corporeal
and yet very much symbolic (Ibid.: 107). They also jointly manifest
opposite
features: their facial expression is severe, much contributing to the
utmost gravity exuded by the etchings, yet
also seductive; they are solemn
yet terrorizing; they laugh while being grave yet instil utter fear through
laughter (Ibid.: 108). This generates not only a sense of unease but genuine
terror, and the scenes contain much
that further supports this feeling. Thus,
on Plate 2 a serpent is burned on an altar—something that is
excruciatingly
revolting but also practically impossible to perform and which, furthermore
is connected with a
major scene in the Mahabharata (Ibid.: 132). At the
centre of Plate 4 there is again a fire, to which an
Oriental is pointing, but
now a human head is burning on it.
 Plates 13 and 14, situated halfway between the two appearances of
Pulcinella, illustrate the points particularly
well. Both are considered as
being of central importance by Calasso. Number 13 is characterised by a
particularly
heavy atmosphere, with all participants exuding gravity, as if
animated by a ‘sacred awe (timore)’ (Ibid.:
141–2). Calasso seems to
suggest that this should be taken fully seriously, yet the next image
somewhat betrays
that intention—though not the seriousness of the entire
situation. At its centre, an Oriental shows something to
a boy with his
pointed finger, so he is depicted in the act of teaching;
behind him,
however, close to a serpent on a pole and unseen by the boy, another
Oriental is shown, caught with
his face contorted in rictus-like laughter.
Number 23 ends the series but does not close it. It perpetuates the circle,
‘emanating a sense of stasis and
silence’ (Calasso 2006: 143). The three
strange central figures, a bacchant, a satyr—with a grimace—and a
satyresse, extremely close to each other, are fixated on something that is
happening outside the frame.

The solution to the enigma is not difficult if we pay proper attention to the
context, starting with the fact
that the scene was depicted by a Venetian
painter much concerned about the nature of image making,
even image
magic, in the context of the education of his own son.
First of all, the series is evidently about an event; something has
happened, though we do not know what, as it
is not shown; it is as if a
football game were shown exclusively through audience reaction. Yet this
gives us a
precious clue: ‘audience’ is something we associate with mere
spectacle; however, the event was evidently of
utmost significance in a both
religious and world-historical sense. Religious events that leave those
witnessing
them speechless are the epiphany visions which otherwise
populate Tiepolo’s ceilings; but this is clearly not the
case here.
Furthermore, the strong emphasis on watching indicates that the event itself
might be connected with
the act of watching, intimating that the theme of
the Scherzi is therefore ‘watching’ in itself—as if the
event that happened
should not matter. This, however, would make the entire series too self-
referential, even
cynical and not particularly conducive to education. The
question concerns a particular form of spectacle, or its
emergence, to be
considered an event of world historical significance, in the sense of altering
the relationship
to watching, and thus evoking the power of images.
Commedia dell’arte was indeed a genre that spread, after the fall of
Constantinople, through Venice; and
Pulcinella was a main figure of this
type of popular theatre, both at its origins and the actual moment in
Venice.
We therefore need to review very carefully the two etchings where
Pulcinella appears. Calasso analyses
the figure in Plate 9 as part of a game
of identities and differences. On the one hand, Pulcinella here does not
seem to differ from the Orientals (Ibid.: 139); on the other, he presents a
striking contrast—with his enormous,
particularly ugly and thoroughly
exaggerated hooked nose—to the beauty of the two ephebes. Calasso
emphasises
their ‘noble and regular’ features, which ‘contrast with the
mask’ (Ibid.: 140). Even further, Pulcinella’s hand
is particularly rigid, like
that of a marionette—which is anyway ‘his natural attitude’ (Ibid.).
This is a crucial point, as Pulcinella was often represented as a puppet
or a marionette, and a marionette is not
a living being. It is the perspective
from which Plate 17 can be revisited. There Pulcinella appears dead—
though
even on Plate 9 he was not fully alive. Plate 17 gives another
precious hint
in this regard, as there the dead Pulcinella is practically one
with a large block of stone, which most resembles
a tombstone—so the
dead Pulcinella’s body is at the same time his own tomb.
Thus, the grave event must be connected to the death of Pulcinella, just
like to the act of watching something
as a member of an audience; but this
death is not the event itself. In order to find the plain and simple
solution to
the enigma, we must now consider one feature of Pulcinella that has by now
become so evident that
this very fact rendered it invisible: that Pulcinella in
Tiepolo, and only in Tiepolo, wears a Turkish
type of hat (fez). The Turks,
however, only have to do with this commedia dell’arte character through
the
conquest of Constantinople, thus, the ‘death’ of the Byzantine Empire,
indeed at the origins of the entire genre.
The birth of Pulcinella can therefore be attributed to that particular
death. So what kind of birth could be
attributed to the death of Pulcinella?
Whatever answer we give to this question, this will be the solution
to the
enigma. It consists of two parts. The first concerns the impact that watching
Pulcinella, while
alive, had on the audience, or the effective history of
commedia dell’arte. Giambattista increasingly came to
perceive that the age
in which he was living was approaching its end, and not only in Venice; but
he also
intuited, being from Venice and preoccupied with the effects of
images, that this theatrical practice had much to
do with this coming end. It
was this event towards which his works, at the very limit of his creative
powers,
pointed—the world to come after the death of Pulcinella, and
which would also became a world of
Pulcinellas.
This world indeed came with the American and French Revolutions,
which Giambattista did not live to witness, only
his son Giandomenico. The
most important part of the work of the latter was nothing else but an attempt
to
capture the missing Plate 24 of these extremely grave ‘jokes’. The first is
the apotheosis of Pulcinella, as
depicted in the frescoes of Villa Zianigo;
while the is latter the pullulating proliferation of Pulcinella in the
103
drawings of the ‘Ragazzi’, where both their number and their circular
nature—incorporating Pulcinella’s
birth, death and rebirth—indicate the
evident links to the Scherzi. In this way the works of the father
and the son
indeed form an indivisible whole.

Giandomenico’s Villa Zianigo Pulcinella Frescoes

Giambattista bought Villa Zianigo in Mirano, near Venice, in 1757. It was
intended to be a seat for the
family-dynasty and a place of retreat, and in
1759 Giandomenico duly started to paint its decoration. In 1762,
however,
the Tiepolos were called to Spain, and Giambattista would never see his
Venice again.
In 1771, shortly upon his return to Venice after his father’s death,
Giandomenico took up the project of
decorating the villa, but following a
quite different approach. Instead of peaceful and idyllic landscapes and
stories from Rome, the walls of the rooms were filled with satyrs and
centaurs
engaged in endless scenes of sacrifice and battle. A large
bacchanal scene, depicting a golden calf, is dated
1771, with evident
associations to the sacrificial scenes of the Scherzi; while the most striking
image of
these series is a satyr on a swing. The change of mood is clearly
marked by a fresco of Rinaldo’s farewell to
Armida, a popular theme from
Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, depicted here in an ironic key. Does
all this demonstrate only Giandomenico’s disillusion? Regretting the
coming end of an age? These frescoes clearly
give us a snapshot of his
mood as he returned from Spain; but their full meaning would become
apparent only
later.
Giandomenico would finish the decoration two decades later, with a
series of images from everyday life, along
with some other seemingly
unconnected frescoes. The former are among his most popular images. Far
from being the
haphazard scrambling of a disappointed old man, they rather
reveal a ‘singular acumen of perception on
contemporary historical reality’
(Mariuz 1971: 81). Two capture courtiers as marionette figures, while by far
the
most important is Il Mondo Novo (‘The New World’). Terse attention
and presence of the sacred are replaced
by enervation and boredom,
revealing ‘a discreet irony, an acute and melancholic gaze that perceived the
decadence and even suspected a touch of misery beyond the feast, as if even
the most elegant “toilettes” were
worn out at some points and the joy of life
would get entangled in distress’ (Pavanello 2004: 32). A similar
image with
the same title was already depicted in 1757 in the Villa Valmarana, but there
Giandomenico simply
captured a carnival scene. Here, however, the mood
changes completely. The atmosphere is filled with nervous
fore-boding, an
atmosphere recalling the Scherzi, though the modality is different. The
target of the
caricature is not an error of nature, to be corrected by the
painter, but rather a society that is not so much
decadent as fallen
(decaduta) (Mariuz 1971: 83). The figures represent various social types,
not as actors
conscious of our presence but rather as ignoramuses who are
easily fooled:

overtaken by a frenzy of escapism and waiting for the “magic lantern”

to dispense their portion of dreams to be
enjoyed with open eyes, these
individuals reveal themselves as marionettes that every charlatan can
manoeuvre.
They are rather poor, stolid skittles that even a minimal
pushing would make crash down one upon the other
(Ibid.)

The mood evokes Becket’s Waiting for Godot.

Dated to the same period are two particularly captivating and famous birds:
a parrot and a falcon chasing a
number of sparrows. The two paintings
illuminate each other. The parrot is the most imitative of birds, repeating
everything told him. The falcon, on the other hand, is a bird of prey, the
opposite of the harmless parrot, who
mercilessly attacks and unfailingly
captures its prey; while sparrows are
proverbially stupid and cheeky. Taken
together, the images capture schismogenic developments. Their full
meaning
is given in the context of the three everyday scenes and in
particular another major fresco dated to 1791,
originally on the ceiling of a
main room in the first floor: the image of a rhapsode. This image,
occupying a
prominent place, symmetrically to the most famous image of
the villa, Pulcinella’s Swing, not only holds a
key to the decoration but
identifies Plato as Tiepolo’s source of inspiration.
Plato’s Ion is a key transitory Socratic dialogue that links the image
magic of rhapsodes to the
persuasive power of sophists as gained through
rhetoric. It therefore not only advances the argument of the
Republic and
Laws about the dangers of art but also closely connects it to the impact
made by the
sophists on knowledge and politics, the theme of the Sophist
and the Statesman. Through these
dialogues, every element in the
decoration project gains its precise meaning: the human beings transformed
into
marionette figures, either pulled by the divine golden strings (see
Laws), or by the machinations of
tricksters and charlatans (see Statesman);
the mechanism of imitation, central for human life, especially
education,
but when degenerated into mere miming, transforms human beings into
parrots, who mechanically imitate
anything that has been presented to them
in a captivating manner; the sophist, main instrument of such a social
transformation, characterised as a hunter in the Statesman and the Sophist,
is represented here as
a falcon unleashed; while the satyrs and centaurs,
evoked twice in crucial passages of the Statesman
(291A–B, 303C–D),
populating a city that has become the hunting ground of sophists, are
mythical figures
associated with the unbridled pursuit of sensual pleasures,
being also quite violent.
After Leonardo and Raphael, the Tiepolos were the most Platonic artists
in Europe, and arguably not just among
painters; they were comparable
only to Shakespeare. However, while Raphael could still depict Leonardo as
Plato,
with the Timaeus in his hand, the vision of the Tiepolos turned much
more sour and diagnostic, following
Plato the sociologist of the collapse of
democracy in Athens and not Plato the philosopher of cosmic beauty.
Already earlier in the 18th century a work by Pier Leone Ghezzi
depicted a Pulcinella schoolmaster as ‘the Plato
of the Pulcinellas’. Exactly
such a ‘Platonic Pulcinella’ would take centre stage in the last and most
famous
series of decorations in Villa Zianigo.

The Stanza dei Pulcinella

This room is to the east of the central hall that contained the scenes from
everyday life, while the room with
the rhapsode and the satyrs and centaurs
is to the west. It is dominated by a huge Pulcinella with an enormous
hooked nose, looking down from the ceiling, sitting on a swing in the exact
pose of the satyr in the northwestern
room of satyrs and centaurs. His
posture is pretentious, even preposterous, exuding victory and pride; an
‘eternal’ and ‘sinister’ Pulcinella, expropriating the place where angels and
other solar creatures can be found in the many ceilings painted by the
Tiepolos, thus providing ‘a quasi
blasphemous paroxy, announcing that the
gods are dead’ (Pavanello 2004: 50). The ceiling around this dominant and
dominating image as well as the walls are full of Pulcinellas, representing
the ‘new barbarians’ who—despite
‘talk about Liberté, Égalité,
Fraternité’—are only ‘the new faceless people of Pulcinellas, all equal and
brothers among themselves, free to behave in a feral way, just as their
instincts require, who took up the place
of real human beings’ (Pedrocco
2000: 54). The images on the wall contain such masterpieces as Pulcinella
in
Love, capturing the lewd gestures of drunkards, or The Farewell of
Pulcinella, a somewhat melancholic
image, where one Pulcinella takes
leave, with a bottle under his arm, another points a finger at something in
the
distance, still another makes a smug, nasty grimace, and—while a
number of Pulcinellas sit in the background—one
with an enormous hooked
nose takes up the foreground in deep drunken sleep.
The most characteristic wall decoration is the Pulcinella and the
Acrobats (saltimbanchi) fresco.
In the foreground, exuding total
detachment, two acrobats are standing on their hands, evidently since
forever,
in a pose that most clearly represents the image of a world turned
upside down. It gains full meaning from its
direct context, the images above
the two doors that open on the sides of the fresco. On the left side a number
of
Pulcinellas are depicted from behind, taking a stroll under an umbrella,
thus ‘constituting an authentic parody
of the nobles’ in the main room
(Ibid.: 57). On the right side, three Pulcinellas in unison are sending away a
young noble-woman, with a very characteristic and particularly repulsive
grimace. The message of these two small
images is ‘particularly important
for understanding the underlying logic of the decoration of the entire room,
and in particular the meaning of the Pulcinella figures’ (Ibid.). They are
both agents and symptoms, thus true
representatives of the radical changes
amounting to a wholesale revaluation of values—aspects of a world that has
become a mad, permanent carnival, and which only a uniquely talented
Venetian artist, son of the greatest
Venetian artist, preoccupied with the
nature and meaning of his own activity, could have understood and
depicted.

The Divertimenti per li Ragazzi

This same message is carried further, at the same time completing the
Scherzi and thus Giambattista’s
personal work, in Giandomenico’s
Divertimenti per li ragazzi (‘Fun for Boys’) (Gealt 1986). This is again
indicated by the number of drawings: 103, though the title promised 104,
twice the number of weeks in a year
minus one, alluding to the cosmic
circle, but also to acceleration. Ignored until 1920, they were suddenly
discovered but immediately dismembered and sold separately. As a result,
some drawings are now latent and their
sequential order is not known,
though the internal logic can be more or less
reconstructed. At one level, the
drawings accompany Pulcinella through his life, from birth to death; at
another,
they combine such an individual perspective with the emergence of
an entire society of Pulcinellas. In the
language of Elias, Giandomenico
offers a joint psycho-genesis and socio-genesis of a society of Pulcinellas;
while using the terminology of Koselleck, it offers a visionary on-the-spot
pathogenesis of modernity.
These two concerns are particularly closely integrated here. Pulcinella’s
life is not linear but circular; it
does not end with his death, as in the last
image a skeleton Pulcinella is creeping out of his tomb, with raised
arms,
frightening the wits out of an entire army of Pulcinellas, fleeing with hands
similarly thrown up in the
air. The reference to the Resurrection is not a
frivolous play; Pulcinella’s resurrection at the collective level
is
accomplished through the same mechanism of mimetic proliferation that
already underlay the entire series: the
principal effect mechanism of vulgar
comedy. Once Pulcinella escaped the confined space of theatrical stage and
became a model for everyday life—an inevitable development, given the
nature of popular entertainment—his
unlimited proliferation could not be
contained. Even more, as already intuited by Giambattista, the execution of
Pulcinella would only increase his power—perhaps this was the event
alluded to by the Scherzi.
Jacobin revolutionaries and their Napoleonic
followers, just as the coming revolutionaries of the 20th century,
cannot
tolerate watching Pulcinella in the theatre, as this would render evident that
their world, brought about
by ‘glorious’ popular revolutions, only projects
on a large scale the world of Pulcinellas previously confined to
the theatre.
Through Pulcinella, zero and infinity become identical; the killing of
Pulcinella leads to an
infinite proliferation of Pulcinellas; and a world
inhabited by Pulcinellas is nothing else but the world of
nihilism.
Or, in the words with which Jean Starobinski concluded his classic,
magisterial study, ‘when social order is
dissolved, the presence of the clown
becomes less provocative on the stage or on the canvas; thus the clown goes
down to the street; he’ll be one of us. There are no more limits, thus no
more transgression. Remains the
derision (Subsiste la dérision)’
(Starobinski 1970: 144).
This is strikingly illustrated by one of Giandomenico’s ultimate
drawings that ‘seems to have the meaning of a
definite farewell’ (Mariuz
1971: 88). In this a group of figures, including a Pulcinella, are ‘moving
away,
tottering, turning their backs, under the rain’—at least, they are
holding umbrellas, and the sky is full of
storm clouds; but then their
shadows are clearly visible, so the sun must also be out—‘towards an
indefinite
horizon, creating the pathos of a Chaplinian finale’ (Ibid.). Such
an evocation of Chaplin, in tandem with the
return of Pulcinella as
protagonist of a famous ballet created and staged by Picasso, Stravinsky
and Diaghilev in
1920, just when Chaplin’s fame was at its height,
immediately brings out Pulcinella’s relevance for the present.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS: JEAN-PAUL, OR THE WILL TO BE

A MASK
By the last decades of the 18th century the art of the Tiepolos had gone out
of fashion. Throughout the 19th
century they were considered obsolete
figures belonging to a bygone era; even Nietzsche ignored them. The spirit
of the times belonged to characters like Johannes Paulus Richter or Jean-
Paul (1763–1825).
Jean-Paul was a crucial threshold figure between the Enlightenment,
romanticism and modernity who stood
‘patiently at the gate of the twentieth
century and wait[ed] with a smile for his sluggish countrymen to follow’
(Ludwig Börne as in Casey 1992: 42). His greatest claim to fame came
from developing a method for forced
dreaming: instead of waiting for a
dream to come, he felt that an artist should actively provoke dreaming, even
orienting it in particular directions at the moment when waking up—a
genuine technique of image magic.9 His most famous, genuinely
terrifying
images were conceived in such manner: the vision of Christ on the Cross
who delivers a speech to an
audience of children that there is no god, and
the vision of a sphinx with the head of the Madonna.
A first draft of the former is dated 3 August 1789, less than three weeks
after the storming of the Bastille. At
one stage, it was re-drafted with
Shakespeare as protagonist, but all reference to Shakespeare was left out of
the final version, published in 1797. This version ends with rumors of an
apocalyptic shattering after Christ’s
final proclamation, the moment at
which the writer wakes up, so that presumably everything returns to normal
—a
standard trickster technique. What Jean-Paul was engaged in here,
under the guise of a play with imagination, was
no joking matter. At the
polar opposite to Giambattista’s responsibility, with the Rede ‘a borderline
was
violated, the constellation of the nulla has menacingly arisen on the
horizon, and it is not without
significance that this immolation of God at the
darkness of a frightening liberty was accomplished by a “dreaming
heart”
[träumendes Herz]’ (Masini 1967: 70). Significantly, the translation by
Mme. de Stäel, which was to
have a vital impact on French romanticism
through Nodier and Nerval, would leave out the ‘playful’ ending.
The second image, contained in his 1800–1803 novel Titan, illustrates at
a crucial juncture of the story
line the radical negation of being and the
destructive fury of feigning. The idea is that within every human
being
there is a monster with the face of a Madonna—implying that deep in our
hearts we all are monsters who
nevertheless wear the mask of a deceptive
seductive and angelic face.
This same novel features Roquairol, an unforgettable figure of absolute
evil (Citati 2000), who ‘accumulated in
himself in a summary form all
figures of malevolence in European literature, from Shakespeare onwards’
(Spedicato
1997: 480)—not the protagonist, yet pivotal, just as Iago is at
the centre of Othello. It embodies the
exalted and malefic genius, an
‘excessive but inevitable’ product of the
radical Enlightenment and its cult
of ‘pure rationalism’ (Ibid.: 49). Courtesy of a spoiled childhood, Roquairol
is profoundly bored with life, having only contempt even for sex and thus
giving up his identity in order to
deliver himself over to a ‘totalitarianism of
fantasy, his only interest being to produce effects in others, for
which he did
not shy away from violence’ (Ibid.). This philosophy of life culminates in a
vision of the world as
a theatre, the entire universe being nothing but a
mask (Ibid.: 52), a tragic farce, or a ‘sad marionette
spectacle’ (Ibid.: 49).
Roquairol wants to exist as a mask, rendering him similar to the devil, who
likes to wear
masks, and he takes a special pleasure in lying (Ibid.: 56). He
was an able actor, possessing a ‘diabolical
talent’ for mimicking the voices
of others, but he failed in all his undertakings, living in a ‘permanent fiction
world’ and developing a ‘destructive fury’ to feign (fingere) (Ibid.: 54).
The crucial scene of the novel takes place at a masked ball where
Roquairol—in a moment of hurt narcissistic
pride—attempts to take his
own life but fails (Ibid.: 50), leaving us with a truly emblematic image of
modern
culture at its threshold: a mask that during a carnival tries to kill
itself but fails.
Part IV
The Rebirth of Commedia dell’Arte as
the Avant-Garde
 The Rebirth of Pierrot as Suffering
Victim
10  

THE ABSURD CLEAR-SIGHTEDNESS OF THE NEW

ROMANTICISM

Theatre was reborn in the 15th to 16th centuries in Italy, and for a long time
it was all but identical with
Italian troupes playing all around Europe.
Elizabethan England with Shakespeare and absolutist France with
Molière
were two striking local flowers grown from this foreign seed. Not
surprisingly, both ended, and
relatively soon, in an environment of Puritan-
absolutist prohibition (1642 in England, 1697 in France), which
lasted for
decades and destroyed the possibility of significant art. The theatre returned
as mere entertainment.
In the late 18th century, however, quite mysteriously, it ran out of steam
on the continent—an event whose
significance has not yet been realised by
historical sociologists. The trail-blazer, not surprisingly, was again
Venice,
where Goldoni’s entire life work was connected to a recognition of this
collapse and an attempt to move
beyond it, which was followed soon in
Paris.
Yet at this very moment the spirit of comedy gained a new life, and at
two places. One was England, where Italian
actors, migrating through Paris,
sparked a renewal of harlequinade and pantomime in the second half of the
18th
century, culminating in the antics of Lun and the invention of the
figure of the Clown by Joey Grimaldi (Cuppone
1999: 41–9). This implied
a radical reduction of theatre to pure mime acting and buffoonery, focusing
on
slapstick and the unabashedly violent provocation of primitive humour;
a kind of return to the pre-commedia
dell’arte origins of the genre. Given
that at the time England was increasingly transforming itself into a world
empire, one might argue that this development represented a
‘byzantinisation’ of public entertainment in England.
The other and in many ways opposite development took place in
Germany, with the rise of romanticism. The
contrasts between England,
France and Germany in the period in terms of world politics, revolutions,
and
expansionism are well known, but the significance of theatre as not
simply a mirror of but an opérateur
(Foucault) in the process thus far has
not received much attention. In Germany, far from ‘world historical’
action,
the focus, with Lessing, Jean-Paul and Tieck came to be on the theatre as
creator of a dream world, with
the central role being attributed to the
fantasy of the playwright and not the antics of the actor.
Romanticism is the schismogenic counterpart of puritan rationalism,
whether in
its Protestant or Enlightenment-inspired versions, being itself
radically schismatic. Romantic love at first
sight is the schismogenic
counterpart of puritan lovelessness, as already diagnosed by Shakespeare.
Romanticism
around 1800 in this respect represents a further schismatic rift
within anti-puritanism. It is rooted in the
utter fascination romantics had for
theatre, and its schismatic nature can be best captured through the contrast
between the profound poetic insights and ludicrous nonsense that jointly
characterised, in various mixes, all
major figures of romanticism.
Romantics perceived the profound transformation in which everyday life in
Europe
was increasingly caught, down to the minute level of human
gestures, through the mimetic theatrification of
social life and intimate
human motivation, realising that any objectivistic approach to reality misses
the point,
only contributing to a further reification as real and true of what
had been merely invested by theatre. On the
other hand, however, instead of
recognising, in the spirit of Plato and the manner of Shakespeare or Tiepolo,
the
responsibility this implied for genuine artists, they chose the opposite
road of further promoting
theatricalisation by giving free reign in their art to
their own infected fantasy, while often letting their
lives slip into
debauchery as an absurd protest against puritanical, bourgeois, utilitarian, or
formalistic-rational orderliness.
British actor-centred clown pantomime encountered German romantic
author-centred dream theatre in Paris in the
1820s, producing a tremendous
spark whose political and cultural significance is still to be recognised and
assessed. It took place in a new theatre, called Funambule (tightrope
walker), founded around 1811–1813
but becoming a major attraction only
once the Laurent brothers returned from England (Cuppone 1999). The
name has
striking symbolic value, connecting Tiepolo’s Pulcinella to the
tightrope walker in Zarathustra’s Prologue—two
visions of modern
nihilism. The context is of prime importance: in general terms, this was the
moment at which
the lethargy following the failed promises of the
Revolution was transformed into a new kind of romantic zeal,
well captured
by Girard (1961); more concretely, it was provided by the lifting of the
prohibition against pure
mime performance in theatre in the liminal moment
of 1815 (Cuppone 1999: 75), at the end of the Napoleonic wars,
rendering
possible the performance first of English pantomime and then the rebirth of
Pierrot.
The English clown, animated by the spirit of German romanticism, was
resurrected in post-revolutionary Paris
through the figure of Pierrot as
played by Jean-Gaspard Debureau.

DEBUREAU: A SCHISMATIC ACTOR FOR SCHISMOGENIC

TIMES

Debureau (or Deburau) was born in 1796 in Bohemia. He came to call

himself Baptiste, which is not without
significance given that the Zanni
figure he resurrected in post-Revolutionary
France was traced to medieval
carnival representations of St. John the Baptist and that the image of a
decapitated Pierrot would obsess fin-de-siècle decadents. His father, native
of Amiens, was a vagabond, having
served in the Austrian army and then
leading a theatrical troupe consisting mostly of his own sons, born of
different relationships, thus combining post-modern and nomadic features.
Debureau duly performed his first shows
as a clown of the public square
(Storey 1985: 5–6). It was this troupe of nomadic tumblers and rope-
dancers that
appeared in Paris in 1814 and would in 1819 join the
Funambule theatre (Cuppone 1999: 76–8; Storey 1978: 94).
 For a considerable time this theatre had nothing to do with the rebirth of
romanticism. German romanticism was
transplanted into France by the
problematic figure of Mme. de Staël, remaining a phenomenon of the
salons, light
years away from the suburban popular circus-like Funambule.
The encounter was helped by the increasing affinity
between the general
mood by the late 1820s and the spirit of German romanticism, which was
suddenly championed by
poets of the emerging literary avant-garde, such as
Nerval and Nodier. Following the lead of de Staël, they were
particularly
interested in theatre, especially Goethe’s Faust and the new approach to
Shakespeare
pioneered by Lessing and Tieck, as alternative to the French
classicism preferred by Voltaire and in the related
obsession with dreams
characteristic again of Tieck and especially Jean-Paul. Central to this
romanticism was
escapism from the crisis of their times, marked by
disillusionment about the promises of the Revolution and a
cult of the
precocious romantic genius, which in the cases of both Tieck and Nerval
resulted in the immature
assumption of major projects that literally crippled
their careers and lives. Tieck started to write a book on
Shakespeare when
he was nineteen, translating first Shakespeare’s last work, The Tempest, and
propagating
a misreading of Shakespeare as its deep truth; while Nerval
similarly published his translation of the first part
of Goethe’s Faust when
he was twenty, ignoring the facts that Goethe spent decades finalising the
first
part and allowed publication of the second only after his death. Driven
by romantic hubris, Tieck and Nerval
thought themselves superior to
Shakespeare and Goethe; thus, instead of sparking a new renaissance,
which was
indeed promised by the work of Schleiermacher and Schlegel
(Gadamer, in Girgenti 1998: 89–90), they instead
became forerunners of
decadence and the politics of miming, which would culminate in the
‘revolutions’ of the
20th century.
This romantic spirit encountered the new mime Pierrot by accident in
July 1828 when, pressed by his daughter,
Nodier entered the Funambule to
see a show entitled Le Boeuf enragé (‘The Furious Bullock’; Cuppone
1999:
84). The review he published about his experience represents the
apotheosis of Debureau’s Pierrot among the
literary avant-garde,
culminating in the mime-play The Golden Dream, which Nodier wrote and
had it
performed in the same year. Significantly, he failed to own both the
first review and the play, published anonymously, though his authorship,
then as now, was generally acknowledged.
Nodier’s review contains two points of exceptional interest. First, he
captured the figure with striking
precision, using a highly peculiar and
revealing language, though without realising the significance of what he
was actually saying. According to this, Debureau’s Pierrot was ‘ “a
character whose infinite nuances are
difficult to render. Ingenuous like a
child, cowardly, crafty, lazy, mischievous by instinct, obliging, jeering,
gluttonous, thieving, blustering, greedy, clumsy, ingenious in the arts that
tend to the satisfaction of his
tastes: he is a naïve and clownish Satan” ’ (as
in Storey 1978: 97), while what he enjoyed most in Debureau’s
Pierrot was
its ‘broad polichinellesque streak of perversity’ (Storey 1985: 75). It was
the embodiment of the
‘demonic clown’ archetype—and Nodier loved it all
the more. Second, in his concluding sentences, Nodier
formulated the
black-mail hook that would become a trademark of the radical avant-garde:
this theatre is not yet
fashionable, and ‘intellectuals’ would need to resist
their own reservations to go and watch it; however, he
promised that those
who gathered the courage to enter would return.
A central aspect of Nodier’s infatuation with mime theatre was his
personal obsession with Columbine (Storey
1985: 74). Nodier was certainly
an extremely peculiar human being, with morbid longings for his daughter,
considering her wedding as his own death and wishing to be buried in her
wedding veil (Ibid.: 80), while being
also attracted to the ‘mystery’ of
Pulcinella, devoting his most obsessive stories like ‘Idiot’ and
‘Polichinelle’
to him, which were fully serious, not meant as parodies (Ibid.: 80–8).
Similarly to Tieck, his
entire life was lived in a fantasmagoria of dreams,
especially erotic dreams, while his best-known novel,
La Fée aux miettes,
was devoted to the theme of the ‘forbidden fruit’, claiming that morality
and chastity
are only hypo-critical masks, and finishing in a full-scale
confusion of dream and reality (Béguin 1939: 336–45).
Still, the obsession
with Columbine was by no means limited to him but encompassed such
giants of European art as
Dickens and Baudelaire (Cuppone 1999: 48–9),
arguably the most important artists in the 19th century in
their respective
countries; artists whose lives cannot be fully understood without
considering this obsession.
Shakespeare and Tiepolo again proved right:
comedy remodelled European society from top to bottom; and the
central
question any artist and academic must pose concerning to this fact, touching
the heart of one’s own
being, is responsibility. The Debureau cult possibly
reached its height in an 1842 review of Théophile Gautier,
‘Shakespeare at
the Funambules’, which compared the pantomime The Old Cloths Peddler
to Hamlet and
Macbeth (Borowitz 1984: 24), calling Debureau ‘another
Hamlet’ (as in Starobinski 1970: 20). While the
perception of an affinity
between Shakespeare and commedia dell’arte was correct, revealing the
sensitivity of
romantics, the interpretation was radically faulty: Shakespeare
tried to spiritualise and transcend the mime
origins of theatre, while the
French romantics regressed from Shakespeare into the glorification of mere
buffoonery.
Such romantic exaltation would not have been effective without its
twin: the
glorification of Debureau’s Pierrot as representative of the
‘people’ (Lehmann 1967: 212–3; Storey 1985: 4–5).
This was
accomplished contemporaneously in a 1832 book by Jules Janine, ‘that
most fashionable of critics’, which
became the ancestor of the cult of
popular genres by high-brow critics, though its ‘self-conscious “camp”
attitude to its subject, revealing the critic’s self-satisfied daring in shocking
conventional opinion [ … which]
caused a furore of indignation and turned
Debureau into the idol of the fashionable avantgarde’ (Haskell 1972:
7).
Thus the figure, lifted from its original rustic setting, became representative
of the revolutionary dream on
its way towards symbolising the proletarian.
The point of intersection between these two poles, the diabolical
trickster
and the suffering victim, captures the heart of Debureau’s Pierrot: the
glorification of the outsider
as outsider—the absurd apotheosis of the
‘pathetic moon-struck outcast’ (Lehmann 1967: 210). This is again
captured
in a piece by Gautier, who in 1847 argued that ‘Debureau’s Pierrot had a
timeless and universal meaning,
embodying “the ancient slave, the modern
proletarian, the pariah, the passive and disinherited being” ’ (as in
Borowitz
1984: 24).
Performing such a feat, keeping together such different exigencies,
required an actor of capacity; and Debureau
was indeed described by
Gautier, with the understatement so characteristic of romantics, as ‘the most
perfect
actor who ever lived’ (as in Storey 1978: 94). Still, Gautier was no
small figure in the history of art; he
invented of the term l’art pour l’art and
was the best friend of Baudelaire, who dedicated his Flowers
of Evil, the
inaugural book of modern poetry, to him.
So what kind of actor, and person, was ‘Baptiste’?

Given that Debureau was evidently an able performer and that actors in any
case only enact roles, questions
related to his personality would seem
inappropriate. Yet even his contemporaries became deeply aware that ‘the
violent and sometimes sinister cruelty that Debureau brought to his role had
at least part of its source in the
brooding rancor of his own temperament’
(Storey 1978: 104–5). This became particularly evident in a famous
incident of spring 1836, when he killed a young street boy who mocked
him. He was acquitted in what was probably
the first case of intellectual
mobilisation for an avant-garde ‘hero’ presumed to exist beyond the law.
The
significance of the case merits a long quote from his biographer,
Tristan Rémy: while on stage, Debureau was
‘neither gay, nor sinister,’ he
concedes that

‘[T]he face and gestures of Jean-Gaspard [Debureau] showed, each

time a scene gave him the occasion, that he was
reckoning with a
world that he made laugh at will, he whom the world had never made
laugh. His liberated rancor
burst out on stage especially when, under
his floured mask, he expressed his whole personality. Only in this way
could he reveal those parts of himself that he kept contained. The
bottle whose label [Laudanum] he smilingly
revealed after Cassandre
had drained it, the back of the razor he passed over
the old man’s neck,
were toys which he could not be allowed to take seriously and thus put
to the test his
patience, his reserve, his sang-froid…. When he
powdered his face, his nature, in fact, took the upper hand. He
stood
then at the measure of his life—bitter, vindictive, unhappy.’ (as in
Storey 1978: 105)

Concerning the nature of the character, both on and off the stage, two
famous episodes shed new light on the
argument of this book. First, in a
probably apocryphal though personally diffused story, Debureau claimed
that
the first happy event of his life, awakening him to his own identity,
happened as he was playing in
Constantinople before the curtained harem,
when he climbed on the ‘perilous ladder’ and managed to spy on the
seminude odalisques (Storey 1985: 6). Both the place, Constantinople and
the act of voyeuristic watching as a key
to happiness are emblematic. The
second episode concerns the invention of the figure. Here again it is
necessary
to insert a longer quote, this time from the classic book of
Séverin:

‘Without letting fall a word, one evening, for himself alone,

[Debureau] powdered the shine of his white grease
paint to a perfect
whiteness and dullness. Something was lacking in this mask. What?
The eyebrows and eyes
accentuated with black. That was better
already. What more? Some rouge on the lips to offset the white. Better
and better, already captivating, and yet it wasn’t complete. What had to
be added? Ah! the black skullcap of
Yacomo’s Harlequin. And oh!
miracle! Pierrot was born. The spirit of the mimus albus of Rome had
passed
into Debureau.’ (as in Storey 1978: 95)

This anecdote underlines the possessive aspects of wearing a mask, even of

a painted face.

Thus Debureau the actor and Debureau the human being can’t be separated,
as Pierrot on stage was Debureau,
more true to his self than the mask he
wore in ordinary life to cover the ugly deficiencies of his personality,
while
the real Debureau was the stage Pierrot. Such blending together of real
person and stage
personality, combined with the glorification of victimhood
and suffering, of the outcast outsider, of the
perpetrator who is also a
victim, had tremendous consequences. The most direct was the fascination
with the
possible staging of a ‘real’ Debureau. Debureau could not
completely make his own character appear on stage,
playing ‘ “a character
who embodied an all too personal truth” ’ (Rémy, as in Storey 1978: 105–
6); but this was
done in the 1840 play Marrrchand d’habits, by the next
great Pierrot actor Dominique Legrand, who staged
Debureau, capturing
‘the undispelled shadows of Baptiste’s cruelty and daring, the mélange of
macabre and
melodramatic knockabout’, thus miming a mime (Ibid.: 106).
Such vertiginous self-referentiality and multiple
imitation, probably the first
ever theatre play about an actor, was spun
further in a comedy of errors
around a review by Gautier, who actually missed the first act but read into it
his
own fixed ideas, and with his ‘fine, ironic intelligence’ made it into a
‘coherent and arresting synthesis’
(Ibid.). This review so ‘skillfully …
transmute[d the] worn puerilities’ of the play, trivialising, for example,
the
murder committed in it, that when in 1896 Séverin revived it, the
programme identified Gautier as its author
(Ibid.: 108).

Yet a truly great actor also had to be a personality. As Debureau lacked it,
he used a simple yet ingenuous
trick: he stylised his performance to the
extreme, reducing the character to a formula (Clayton 1993: 34),
performing on stage as a marionette figure. This would have vital
consequences for avant-garde theatre, just like
his playing with his radical
shifts of mood.
After the decline of Baptiste, his son Charles took up the figure, who
did not only continue it but rather
created a schismatic double. Lacking the
brutal vitality of Baptiste, Charles was—on stage just as in real
life—
nervous, slender and sickly, a typical neurotic with suicidal tendencies, for
whom life was a nightmare,
lived as an ‘endless protest and threats of
revenge against the careless malice of the world’ (Lehmann 1967:
214). He
moved the figure away from the ‘people’ and close to a Hamlet interpreted
as image of the ‘precarious
outcast’ (Ibid.). The figure, however, already
with Charles, and especially the other imitators and epigones of
Baptiste,
became excessively sentimental, moving towards decadence and triviality.
Debureau’s literary
immortality was led by Théodore de Banville’s 1857
‘Funambulesque Odes’, a codification of the new ‘myth’ (Rizzo
2003: 13),
based on his fascination with the world of masks and the Venetian carnival
atmosphere (Ibid.: 137),
already a theme of his 1846 poem ‘The
Stalactites’, about the ‘divine lunar night’ in Watteau, where Arlecchino
dreams about Columbine, thus radically misinterpreting Watteau as a
painter of Arlecchino, confusing him with
Gillot (see Rizzo 2003: 96).
In a crucial remark Storey argues that the key role played by Debureau
‘in the transmission of the type from the
popular to the literary world’, and
‘in the transformation from naïf to neurasthenic pariah’ is still not
understood (Storey 1978: 94). The history of miming presented so far
already demonstrates the validity of the
comedy version of Einstein’s law
that demonic energy never disappears but only alters its shape, finding ever
new
vehicles. The rest of Part IV explores these metamorphoses.

1860–1863 AS A LIMINAL MOMENT IN THE NEW RECEPTION

OF PIERROT

The years around 1860 represent an end and a new beginning for Pierrot
(Cuppone 1999: 27). In 1862, the year
after Maurice Sand, son of George
Sand, published his influential Masks and Buffoons, the Funambule closed
down. This signaled that the Pierrot phenomenon was about to transmute,
shifting its focus from theatre as spectacle to book. In 1828 the cultural
‘elite’ was central in taking up the
mime theatre; now the new Pierrot image
would be sparked and dominated by the literary avant-garde.
This is captured in Captain Fracasse by Gautier, based on Gautier’s
obsession with the idea of ‘total
spectacle’, best represented by the English
clowns (Rizzo 2003: 116). Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs,
with
English clowns as protagonists, also belongs here, even though Hugo was
no supporter of the Funambule, as
does the novel of the Goncourt Brothers,
The Zemganno Brothers, though published only in 1879. The most
central
documents and operators of this new Pierrot, however, were a curious 1860
novel by Henri Rivière,
Pierrot: Cain, influenced by Gautier’s account of
Marrrchand d’habits; and Gaspard of the Night:
Fantasies in the Manner of
Rembrandt and Callot by Aloysius Bertrand, first published posthumously
in 1842
but becoming influential after 1860.
Rivière’s book marks a new primacy of the written word over not only
theatre but also mime play. It is the story
of a young mime who ‘conceives
of Pierrot as the “fallen angel” ’, as he became ‘struck by the audacity and
sinister gaiety of Baptiste’s performance’ (Storey 1978: 111–2), continuing
the line of development of the
previous decades, when the dying popular
theatre became increasingly preoccupied with the macabre (Starobinski
1970: 24), but in a different key. Thus, ‘as he later explains to his friend,
“there began to take shape slowly
in my brain a genius of evil, grandiose
and melancholic, of an irresistible seductiveness, cynical one instant
and
clownish the next—in order to raise himself up still higher after having
fallen” ’ (as in Storey 1978: 112).
This is followed by a love affair with
Columbine and the decapitation of a rival during a performance,
culminating in a self-confession before the public that what he brought to
the role was ‘the genius of madness’
(Ibid.).
Bertrand is credited as the inventor of the prose poem, and his life
(including the authorship a posthumous
masterpiece) contained everything
needed for a romantic myth. He was a typical representative of the
mid-
19th-century state of spirit: an ‘errant mind, fantasising, melancholic,
theatrical and ironic’ (Rizzo 2003:
128). His bizarre, labyrinthine
imagination mixed contemporary themes with medieval architecture, where
even
flâneurs are lost. For him Rembrandt was a romantic genius, ‘an
alchemist of the colour, and a magician of the
light’, while Callot’s works
are remarkable for depicting ‘a clown-like, grotesque, fantastic and purely
theatrical world’ (Ibid.: 128–9). In the book commedia dell’arte gestures are
pushed to their extreme, including
a play with a book within a book, written
by the devil under the threat of Pulcinella (Ibid.: 131) and the
crowning of a
mad king during a grotesque masked ball (Ibid.: 136).

The same fascination with masked balls is also evident in a series of images
depicting Pierrot. Two of them,
Sequel to a Masked Ball by Jean-Léon
Gérôme and Duel after the
Masked Ball by Thomas Couture, were painted
for the 1857 salon, based on the same real-life event (Borowitz
1984: 28–
30; Haskell 1972: 2–4), thus representing a stunning ‘coincidence of theatre
and everyday life’ (Rizzo
2003: 171). The images, though not masterpieces
and of different quality, still provoke a harrowing effect, with
their
visionary association of carnival atmosphere and death (which would later
animate Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice). For the same salon, Couture also
submitted a painting entitled The Two Politicians, showing a
dandified
Pierrot, with moustache, scarf and hat, discussing the newspaper with a
similarly out-of-character
Harlequin.
The period was the golden age of caricature in France. One of its
protagonists, Paul Gavarni, devoted an entire
series to Pierrot as
emblematic of Paris as the new capital of carnival, bypassing Venice with
its ‘ “infernal
gallop—a regular round of the Sabbath of Pleasure” ’
(Borowitz 1984: 27, quoting Gautier), centring on masked
balls that became
especially sensual with the introduction of the cancan from Algeria in 1831
(Ibid.: 25–6);
images that even the Goncourt brothers found disturbing
(Rizzo 2003: 178–9).

A CONCLUDING COMMENT ON CHAPLIN

Debureau/Pierrot would be reborn, in the 20th century on the screen with

Charlie Chaplin. The connections between
the two go way beyond the
scope of this book. Still, whatever the exact nature of direct links, the
invention of
Charlot followed the exact same mechanism of possession
through mask as that of Debureau’s Pierrot:

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the
clothes and the make-up made me feel the person
he was. I began to
know him, and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born.
When I confronted
Sennett I assumed the character and strutted about,
swinging my cane and parading before him. Gags and comedy
ideas
went racing through my mind. (Chaplin ([1964]2003: 145–6)
 Obsessed with Paris and Public Fame
Richard Wagner, the Mimomaniac
11 Revolutionary

The role of Richard Wagner in eliminating the borderline between fiction

and reality, thus destroying the sense
of reality, so characteristic of the
dominant modern way of life, was decisive (Green 1986: 7–8, 12–3, 41,
57).
Just as striking, however, is the ignoring of this impact, characteristic
of the social, political and human
sciences. Wagner, supposedly, simply
composed music, about which one might have an ‘opinion’, and nothing
more.
This is so in spite of the fact that Wagner was prominently discussed
by Nietzsche, even to the point of
obsession, and not without reason.
Nietzsche scholarship never had much interest in the ‘Nietzsche contra
Wagner’ affair, considering it as an
episode in Nietzsche’s life and not his
thought. This was reinforced by two elements: intellectuals, including
many
Nietzsche scholars, enjoyed Wagner’s music and therefore preferred
Nietzsche’s earlier appreciation to his
later critique (see Badiou 2010; Zizek
2010); thus, through the usual psychoanalytical tinge, they search for
hidden personal motives behind the reversal. Nietzsche’s intellectual
integrity, taste and sense of judgment
cannot be questioned; his break with
Wagner was final, reasoned and irreversible; and if there was a problem
behind this affair, it concerns the early, positive assessment and not the late
judgment.
Nietzsche remains a perfect guide for the ‘case of Wagner’, especially
concerning the impact Wagner, the
‘mimo-maniac’ par excellence, exerted
on the world. As a result of his lifelong meditation on Wagner’s music,
Nietzsche made it clear that the appreciation of music is not a matter of
subjective preference. Any music plays
on emotions; and the type of
emotion stirred by a musical piece defines its value. The lasting success of
Wagner
is proof of how much ‘men of culture’ can applaud as representing
the height of art and culture something that is
a piece of well-packaged and
appetizing fake.

THE CASE OF WAGNER REVISITED: THE MAKING OF A

MIMO-MANIAC

Wagner’s character becomes transparent through his early writings,

including an 1843 ‘Autobiography’, an
autobiographically based 1840–
1841 short story about a musician’s vicissitudes
in Paris, and two political
writings from 1849 about revolution and communism. These are not only
revealing
testimonies about Wagner the human being and the artist but also
provide a precious key to the ‘pneuma-pathology’
of the modern type of
man (Voegelin 1978).
The tone of these writings is a perfect illustration of the ‘commedic’
experience of the world. ‘Tone’ is meant
in the Nietzschean sense of
‘sounding out’, as if with a tuning fork, the true value of a statement; and
the tone
set out by Wagner’s early writings is outrageously false. It mixes
two components: an unshakeable belief in his
own supposedly unlimited
talents in the form of a pathological exhibitionism, rendered evident by
publishing an
‘Autobiography’ upon his return to Germany in 1843, with its
last sentence pathetically stating that he felt the
need to give notice to
‘Germany’ about himself,1 and a particularly carefree manner of dismissing
earlier predilections, now recognised
as absurdly stupid and mindlessly
naïve. Pretending truthfulness, Wagner shamelessly describes the most
hideous
aspects of his previous beliefs and actions, taking moral credit for
such a purportedly courageous acts of
confession.
At this point one is bound to ask why somebody had to be so stupid in
the first place. This, however, is
prevented by Wagner crediting himself
with moral superiority for having had the courage to leap head over heels
into revolutionary fervor combined with moral debauchery. Whoever failed
to do so is considered a coward—either
by not supporting the cause of the
Revolution, lacking the courage to attack ‘Power’ or by ignoring the cause
of
Love, being a philistine. Without this blackmail, his pathetic
exhibitionism would be immediately unmasked.
Through blackmail,
however, the terms are reversed, and the ridiculous buffoon becomes a
brave hero, unassailable
not in spite of but because of his ignorance and
failure.
This can be seen through the main events of Wagner’s early life and his
first writings, starting from the account
he gave of it in his
‘Autobiographical Sketch’, published in February 1843 (Spencer 1992:
182). Not surprisingly
for a ‘mimo-maniac’, Wagner was a maniac
autobiographer as well, who also wrote in 1851 a 36,000-word
introduction
to the libretti of his operas as ‘Communications to My Friends’ (Ibid.: 183),
and published a nearly
900-page autobiography in four volumes (1870–
1880), which still only covered the first 51 years of his life
(Ibid.: 183–6;
Newman 1933: vii), showing Wagner ‘at his most tendentious’ (Spencer
1992: 183). This
preoccupation was duly followed by his admirers and, as a
result, ‘[t]he life of no artist—indeed, of very few
men in any walk of life—
is so copiously documented as that of Wagner’ (Newman 1933: vii).
Though this almost
defies belief, he started to prepare notes for his
autobiography from 1835, when he was only twenty-two (Spencer
1992:
182).

As Wagner was an exhibitionist searching for effects, one might dismiss his
early autobiography as pure
fabrication. This, however, in spite of many
factual errors, would be a
mistake. The manner in which effects are
searched for in autobiographical sketches is relevant for the ‘Wagner
effect’; and furthermore, it is part of such a character to shamelessly reveal
his own shortcomings.2
The first relevant information is that Wagner from an early age was not
interested in music but rather in
becoming a poet, an attempt in which he
failed. It was because of his failure as a writer that he turned to
music—
though his first efforts produced similarly unhappy results: he was simply
ridiculed.
On his own account, Wagner fell from one type of raving into another in
his early years. At age fifteen, he was
‘inclined to the craziest kind of
mysticism’; by age seventeen, because of the July Revolution in Paris, he
‘immediately became a revolutionary and came to conviction that any man
with the minimal ambition must dedicate
himself exclusively to politics’,
joining the circle of the ‘politically committed literates’; while in his
university years he descended into extreme forms of licentiousness. This
was justified by a fight against
‘puritan hypocrisy’, and by letting himself
be carried away by crowd action: ‘everything around was fermenting.
It
was the most natural thing in the world to abandon oneself to this ferment’
(Wagner 1983b: 89). In looking
back, he simply shook his head, with smug
understanding, concerning the stupidities of his youth, which included,
when employed by the Opera in Magdeburg in 1834, entertaining
‘extravagant relations’ with the singers of both
sexes.
As it has been for many romantics, the central reading experience of
Wagner’s life was the encounter with
Shakespeare. He immediately tried
out his talents by writing a play that ‘combined’ Hamlet and King
Lear.
This craze for synthesising apples and oranges, so characteristic of German
idealism, was to return
later to mark his work.

Wagner in Paris
This was the context of the central experience of Wagner’s life, a 1839 trip
to Paris. The significance of this
trip was revealed with particular clarity in
an 1867 letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, selected as motto to
the
English edition of his writings on Paris—a true gem unmasking Wagner the
mime. Arguing that Paris is
literally the heart of modern civilisation, he
adds a most telling passage: ‘[w]hen I decided to become a famous
opera
composer, my good angel sent me straight to that heart’, saving him from
wasting much of his precious time
on ‘wayward stations’ (Wagner 1973: 7).
In half a sentence, Wagner not only boasts that he ‘decided’ to become an
opera composer but that he decided to become famous; and he even
insinuates that once he made up his mind,
he got supernatural help.
The voyage turned out to be particularly liminal: he went by ship,
through London, escaping his creditors in June
1839, and during the
crossing encountered a serious tempest three times (Wagner 1983b: 93). In
Paris he met Meyerbeer, but the composer, just like other artists, was too
busy to receive
the young German ‘lion’, who became increasingly
disillusioned. It was out of this experience that he wrote, in
November
1840, a short story entitled ‘Death in Paris’, part of A German Musician in
Paris (Wagner 1973:
84–102). The story, and its reception, holds the key
for understanding the impact Wagner made on the commedic.
 The basic setting is simple, banal, and yet revealing about the
background world-view out of which the commedic
revolution leaped into
existence. The young musician was from a small, dusty, provincial German
town, considered
the pits of human existence—a place that could only be
escaped (Ibid.: 85). He was fully convinced of his
unparalleled talent: he
only needed to reveal himself and the world would be at his feet. This belief
was
justified by a new idol: the ‘public’ and its representative the ‘press’.
Here the ‘hero’ of Wagner’s tale, the
author himself in his earlier,
purportedly ‘transcended’ edition, identifies the ‘public’ as a new god that
cannot fail to recognise talent, a kind of ultimate arbiter of human and
social life; while the press is the
repository of truth by exposing any abuse
(Ibid.: 86). Still, self-presentation in front of the public runs into
trouble, as
a physical manifestation requires a ‘mediator’ to arrange a public
performance. This mediator,
unfortunately, happened to be impossible to
get hold of. At this stage, almost imperceptibly, the central act
through
which the talent of the musician is supposed to manifest itself is
transformed from a sheer revelation of
truth into ever shrewder tricks by
which the public could be hooked (Ibid.: 89). Yet our hero cannot find the
proper mediator except for the strange figure of an ‘English gentleman’
who often appears in the story at crucial
moments but remains elusive.
It is after much disillusionment that suddenly the illumination arrives:
the hero witnesses a Pulcinella
(Polichinell) marionette show, which sparks
in him the idea of how to become successful and produce an
effect (Wagner
1973: 91, 1983a: 123). The action in the show was shamelessly about tricks,
playing mostly with
breaking the laws, both natural and social; and it had a
‘demonic principle’, impersonated in a white cat that
was strolling around
the scene. This scene, as it just dawned on him, embodied ‘the most striking
political and
poetic truths … directly presented in a form that appeals to the
most receptive (empfänglichsten) as well
as to the most undemanding
(anspruchslosesten) public’ (1973: 92; translation altered).3 In particular, at
this moment Wagner
recognised the identities of Pulcinella and Don Juan,
seeing that both of them were lawbreakers (Trotzige,
somebody who is a
defiant provoker). His life project thus became to heighten the ‘artistic
significance of this
drama’ through music (Ibid.).
 We cannot exaggerate the significance of this statement, though it must
be carefully analysed. Its core consists
of a series of recognitions of
identity. The literal identification of Pulcinella with Don Juan has two
implications: first, it was a visionary recognition, by Wagner, that the
Pulcinella/Pierrot figure grew out of
Molière’s Don Juan; second, it was
also visionary concerning the
future, advancing the eventual joining of the
revolutionary proletariat and the ‘sexual revolution’, or Marx and
Freud.
Furthermore, it identified the streak in Shakespeare that so appealed to
Wagner and the romantics, his
roots in commedia dell’arte. Finally, it
identified the kind of ‘Dionysian’ theme that truly characterised
Wagner’s
music: the bombastic, grand guignol gesture of a Pantalone or a Capitan
Uncino.4 We can say the same thing about
Wagner that Hamvas said about
Hegel: had he realised his own limitations, his work could be enjoyable; but
as he
took himself seriously, he turned out to be a monumental fake
(Hamvas 1992, I: 56–7).
The ending of the story after this climax is also revealing. As a piece of
literature, the story simply
disintegrates, degenerating into the worst kind of
sentimentalism. Still, it contains a most interesting last
scene in which the
artist, who previously idealised the public and its agents, suddenly turns
around and blames
them for his misfortunes, forecasting the ‘blaming
clown’.

Wagner’s Thirst for Public Fame

Wagner did not succeed in Paris, but he brought back to Germany
manuscript works deeply influenced by his Paris
experiences, in particular
by having seen Fromental Halévy’s opera The Queen of Cyprus, which was
indeed
the perfect musical equivalent of the Pulcinella marionette show. His
own musical dramas were also influenced by
German romanticism, in
particular E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Contest of the Singers and Tieck’s The
Faithful
Eckart. Central for these was the transformation of erotic
experience, through words, into a morbid longing
where love and death
would become all but identical. Such an ‘erotically obsessive’ interest in the
‘subterranean’ fuelled the entire life-work of Wagner, at the psychological,
or rather psycho-pathological level,
towards the ever more remote past
world of ‘true myths’, given that he ‘lived in a permanent state of
regression’
(Köhler 2004: 152), which can be compared to the descent into
an abandoned mine, a world of dreams or rather
nightmares, advancing
Freud. Freud unearthed a psycho-pathology of the European psyche in
whose investment Wagner
played a not negligible part.
Success finally came to him in 1842, with Rienzi. As a result, in
February 1843 his ‘life-dream’ finally
came true: he became a permanent
member of the Dresden court theatre (Köhler 2004: 175). Yet further
success did
not come in the manner he expected, and by 1848 he was ‘in
debt, dissatisfied with his own work, and annoyed with
what he considered
a frivolous public that ignored him’ (Caldwell 2010: 95). The titan wanted
recognition as a
titan—and thus Wagner embraced with open arms the new
spirit of the revolution.

The Revolutionary and His Revolution

The outbreak of revolutionary fervour took place earlier in Vienna than in
Saxony, which ‘lured’ him there. As an
eyewitness tells the story in his
memoirs, ‘Wagner was all politics; he
awaited from the Revolution’s
victory a total rebirth of art, society and religion’ (Eduard Hanslick, as in
Berry
2006: 209). So when the ‘spirit’ arrived in Dresden, he eagerly
immersed himself in the events: ‘Wagner played a
very active and
important role in the uprising; it is difficult to overemphasise the
importance of the May events
of 1849, for Wagner’s life and works’
(Pateman 2002: 40).
In Wagner’s revolutionary mobilisation and activities a crucial role was
played by his friendship and association
with Bakunin.5 This episode
for
long was all but ignored, as from the 1860s onwards he would completely
cancel this episode out of his
autobiographical accounts and indeed his
memory. Wagner met Bakunin through his radical friend Karl August
Röckel
(Berry 2006: 40). The exact details are unclear, but it is known that
they took long walks together in early 1849
(Ibid.: 33–4), which resulted in
a mutual indoctrination and radicalisation, which Wagner formulated in
terms of
the struggle of ‘man’ against ‘established society’, beyond the
limits of ‘individualism’ (Caldwell 2010: 100).
This resulted in Wagner’s
genuinely absurd composition Jesus from Nazareth, which glorified
Bakunin as an
anarchist Jesus (Pateman 2002: 40). His effort culminated in
the performance of this work on 1 April 1849 in
Dresden, while Bakunin,
with due modesty, saluted it as the greatest music since Beethoven (Berry
2006:
209).6 At the same time, on
8 April, Wagner published in Röckel’s
journal a piece praising ‘the violent revolution as the “ever-rejuvenating
mother of mankind” ’ (Caldwell 2010: 100).

Wagner’s two 1849 political writings, ‘The Revolution’ (Wagner 1983:

234–41) and ‘The Art of the Future: On the
Principle of Communism’
(Ibid.: 242–61), are a decade later than his story set in Paris yet show no
sign of
maturity or wisdom. They share the same bombastic and illegible
style and the same puerile content about the
necessity of a completely new
world order, hailing the ‘revolutionary tempest’ that will annihilate
(vernichten) and destroy (zerstören), in an act of divine ecstasy, the old
order of things,
promising hope and unity to all, and especially to the
‘oppressed millions’, by ending all divisions (Ibid.:
237–40). Wagner
prophesied that this would be the ‘start of the new, Communist world order’
(Ibid.: 242–3), and
confirmed his unfailing belief in the eventual synthesis
of apples and oranges, this time egoism and Communism
(Ibid.: 244). The
most striking passage, however, is the last sentence of the essay on
revolution, a genuine
vision:

In divine ecstasy (Verzükkung), they spring out of the earth, no longer

being the poor and the hungry,
stricken by misery, rather proudly
raising their face, their expressions rendered noble through
enthusiasm, with
a colourful gloss filling their eyes, and shouting
loudly “I am a man!”—a shout that shakes the sky—millions of
people, the living revolution, man that has become god (der Mensch
gewordene Gott), precipitate in the
valleys and the plains, and
announce to the entire world the new Gospel of
happiness (das neue
Evangelium des Glückes). (Ibid.: 241)

Wagner later disowned his revolutionary radicalism, claiming that he was a

disillusioned observer (Caldwell 2010:
95), an account followed not only by
his acolytes but even his biographers (Köhler 2004: 223). The problem is
not
limited to the truth about Wagner’s past but involves the persistent
radicalism at the heart of his work. These
are particularly visible in his
programmatic claims concerning the radical overthrow of the existing,
Italian-style opera and bourgeois social relations (Caldwell 2010: 96); the
pretence for musical drama as a
‘total work of art’ (Ibid.: 96, 103); and in
particular its apocalyptic yearnings. In a famous 11 February 1853
letter to
Liszt, Wagner claimed that the Nibelung Ring ‘contains the world’s
beginning and its end’ (as in
Pateman 2002: 41–2), explaining that
‘redemption’ for his heroes meant death or suicide, thus ending in
emptiness, not harmony.7
Thus what remained constant behind all the volte-
face in Wagner’s career was his opposition to the ‘bourgeois’
(Clayton
1994: 50), meaning anything that is stable, settled, and respectful and not
just what has become
compromised through ‘passionate interests’.8
In the 1860s and 1870s Wagner became famous for works exuding a
fake ‘post-Christian’ Christianity, having traded
his anarchism influenced
by Feuerbach, Max Stirner and Bakunin for Schopenhauerian conservatism
(Berry 2006:
152–3, 233). By that time it was forgotten that after the brutal
crushing of the Dresden Revolution on 8 May 1849
Wagner remained in
exile for twelve years and that he escaped only because of ‘an extraordinary
string of
circumstances’ (Berry 2006: 42). If you give up everything, every
bit of integrity of your life in the relentless
search for public fame, you are
not only bound to succeed in modern times, but—it seems—even her
majesty
Fortuna herself will keep smiling at you.
The harrowing absurdity of the Wagner effect became visible during
World War II. Just when Wagner’s
Meistersinger provided a most important
inspirational music for the Nazi troops, Jewish emigrants from
Germany,
like Erich Korngold (1897–1957), transformed Hollywood films by making
the very techniques of Wagner’s
musical effects (like the leitmotif
accompanying the entry of the main actors) into the prime substance of
filmmaking, as his ‘endless melodies’ were particularly suitable for the
effect-mechanism of Hollywood films.

THE VICTORY OF PIERROT AND LULU, OR WAGNER’S SPIRIT

CONQUERS PARIS

Wagner’s lifelong obsession with ‘making it’ in Paris finally bore fruit in
the 1860s. Though the premier of
Tannhäuser in 1861 was a fiasco, it
captured the attention of Baudelaire and other central figures of the
romantic avant-garde, like Gautier and Jules Champfleury. Baudelaire
understood Wagner’s music through its similarity to painting, in particular
the work of Delacroix, who served as
a father-like figure of intellectual
guidance to him and who was dying just around that time (Calasso 2008:
148–9). Baudelaire’s misguided championing of Wagner had a devastating
impact on French intellectual life; as
after his death in 1867 it not only
became dominated by his epigones but Wagner-inspired limitless
symbolism was
running amok among them as well.
Wagner’s conquest of Paris took place in liminal conditions, marked by
the end of the Funambule and also the
arrival of the anarchism of Bakunin.
Concerning Wagner, the central aspect of his musical symbolism was its
pompous solemnity, devoid of any sense of humour, with its fake religiosity
being a replacement for spirituality
in an age when the religious spirit that
still animated the romanticism of Hugo and Baudelaire was dwindling
away, leading to the self-abandonment to fantasising (Béguin 1939: 381–3).
The affectedness of Wagner’s music
called for laughter and satire (Green
1986: 7–8), which would indeed arrive in the 1890s, marked by Verlaine,
who
simply found Wagner ridiculous (Ibid.: 26). The effect was a
permanent oscillation between the opposed extremes
of purism, like the
exaggerated concern with the purity of language, characteristic of
Mallarmé, main epigone of
Baudelaire and devotee of Wagner’s music, and
unlimited sensualism and carnality (see Starobinski 1970: 65). Such
schismatic fracturing of the self, a ‘preference for the Multiple over the
One, of dichotomy over integrity’, was
central feature of the emerging
decadent movement (Palacio 1990: 39), characteristic even of Verlaine
(Green
1986: 26).
At the same time, owing to a change in the ‘spirit’ of times, the naïve
romanticism of the previous generation
was replaced by the much more
sinister ‘spirit’ influenced by the anarchism of Bakunin, with violence
lurking in
the background. Given that the toying with dreaming and
fantasising characteristic of early romantics undermined
the sense of
judgment, while the gratuitous dissolving of borderlines and inciting of
senses, once started, had
to be continued, the new generation looked for
stronger impulses.
 This new mood of cultivated madness reached the stage in 1881,
through Pierrot Murderer of His Wife, a
bizarre piece by Paul Marguerite,
cousin of Mallarmé (Storey 1978: 118). As death was due to the tickling of
feet, it was certainly a comic murder; yet, murder it was,9 and—rendering
the gyration ever more vertiginous—by Marguerite’s
own admission it was
influenced by Gautier’s Pierrot analysis, which ‘induced my satanic, ultra-
Romantic, and yet
very modern conception: a subtle, neurotic, cruel, and
ingenuous Pierrot, uniting in himself all contrasts, a
veritable psychical
Proteus, a bit sadistic, willingly drunken and perfectly villainous’ (Ibid.:
117–8). The
play, ‘[i]n spite (perhaps because) of its puerility … is an
intriguing and powerful piece’ (Storey 1985: 258).
The idea turned out to be contagious, and soon ‘Pierrots of a disturbing
nervosisme began to invade the
salons, the music-halls, and circus’ (Storey
1978: 118). The new shows,
featuring ‘sadistic clowns’, were described in
terms like ‘lugubrious farce’ and ‘sinister buffoonery’, showing
‘an
enthusiastic admiration for their art, “so genuine in its dispassionate
madness, so ferociously comic in its
excess” ’ (Ibid.: 119). Its height, the
‘apotheosis of Decadent Pierrots’ was Pierrot Sceptic, a pantomime
by
Jules Chéret, where Pierrot ‘murders his tailor, assaults a beautiful display-
window mannequin, and burns down
his rooms in a fit of pique’, thus
ending in ‘apocalyptic flames’ (Ibid.). As usual, members of the previous
generation of romantics (like Banville) were deeply disturbed by such
developments, but in vain, as the spirit
they conjured up now grew above
their heads. The animating force behind this new turn towards the macabre,
even
sadism, was the image of the artist generated by the exaggerated
misreading of Shakespeare’s and Watteau’s
self-reflections, the artist as an
outcast (Starobinski 1970), a consciousness that is becoming conscious of
itself, in a truly Hegelian vein (Ibid.: 135–6). The new self-image of the
artist, driven by self-pity and the
schismatic doubles of purism and
sensualism, was used to justify the abandonment of prudence for the
sublime
passions of the mind (Ibid.: 137). Such irresponsibility was
rendered into a poetic manifesto by Verlaine, who in
his early poem
‘Grotesques’ gave a particularly troubling shade to the standard ‘decadent
theme of
artist-vagabond-outcast’, while his late ‘Pierrot gamin’ made
Pierrot’s innocence into ‘symbolic of the
detachment, the total
irresponsibility, of the poet’, where every licentious gesture only further
reinforced its
innocence and ‘wayward integrity’, suggesting that in an age
without heroes, one style of heroism was still
available: ‘the heroism … of
Sancho Panza twisted by the dreams of Don Quixote’ (Lehmann 1967: 221,
222–3).

Perhaps the most emblematic figure of this new vision of was Jules
Laforgue (1860–1887), a charismatic poet and
actor who died, like true
romantic, at the age of twenty-seven. He not only played both Hamlet and
Pierrot but
played Hamlet as Pierrot and Pierrot as Hamlet and furthermore
styled himself in his real life as Jaques—and as
Pierrot (Green 1986: 26–7;
Lehmann 1967: 216). He was also self-consciously unmanly, walking
masked on the
streets, being frightened by women, even denying his own
masculinity, identifying himself instead with all
Pierrots and clowns.
Fashioning himself as heir of Baudelaire, he was also a prophet of Wagner
(Green 1986: 28),
being attracted in particular to images of purity and
indecision, thus glorifying, jointly, Hamlet, Lohengrin and
Pierrot.
If Verlaine and Laforgue glorified Pierrot, at the same time an opposite
schismogenic development was also taking
place, and on a mass scale: an
infinite proliferation of ever more faceless Pierrots. Contagion was the
technique
by which images of Pierrot were spreading and multiplying, and
with alarming speed: Pierrot ‘contaminates the
novel, where the pantomime
often erupts … just as he appears in the midst of carnival-like scenes which
he helps
to unsettle’ (Palacio 1990: 10). This is also the period in which Le
Bon and
Tarde offered pioneering reflections on the psychology of crowds
and the laws of imitation, owing to the evident
proliferation of imitative
processes in social life. The pullulating of Pierrots, outside the theatre, was
both
symptom and operator.
Jean de Palacio’s excellent book devoted to the fin-de-siècle Pierrot is
dominated by two numbers: infinity and
zero. Pierrots suddenly appeared
everywhere: in all kind of writings, including novels and poems (Palacio
1990:
9–10); dominating publicity, from walls to book covers (Ibid.: 10–1,
22, 43–4); pullulating in iconography and
saturating minds with their image
(Ibid.: 11–3). Yet, this suddenly omnipresent Pierrot was also without any
distinguishing feature, anticipating Musil’s Man Without Qualities, thus
representing the infinite
proliferation of the zero (Horvath 2010). Pierrot’s
whiteness, so central for the purity of decadence, is absence
of colour, in
contrast to the excessive colourfulness of Harlequin, whom he finally
defeated in this period, as
Harlequin was fixed into the role of winner, while
the new age tolerated only suffering victims and losers
(Palacio 1990: 13,
18–9). Pierrot’s art is thus the art of absence, an embodiment of non-being,
in the language
of Plato’s Sophist. This Pierrot-nullity is best captured in the
‘cosmopolitism of Pierrot decadent’
(Ibid.: 39); a striking metaphor
recalling the ‘cosmopolitan’ trickster protagonist of The Confidence-Man,
Melville’s last and ‘most theatrical’ novel, published in 1857, and used
programmatically by Agnew as epilogue to
his masterpiece: passenger on a
‘ “ship of fools” ’, during a boat ride on April Fool’s Day, thus a highly
liminal setting; ‘a “stranger in the extremest sense of the word” ’, who
tricks, fools and confuses other
passengers, themselves only masks, with
‘calculated aimlessness’, being outside meaningful human relations, whose
very arrival on the ship was ‘pregnant with evil’ (Agnew 1986: 195–200).
A Pierrot-nullity, as already alluded to by Laforgue, however, only
underlines Pierrot’s traditional problem with
women. Around 1900 this
resulted in another schismogenic development: the appearance of Lulu,
female equivalent
of the Pierrot-nullity; and the parallel rise of the femme
fatale who crashes and dominates poor hapless Pierrot.
Lulu was born in the
one-act 1888 pantomime of Félicien Champsaur. It was made into a novel
by Champsaur in 1901,
and then into a series of plays by Wedekind,
including the 1904 Pandora’s Box. Soon it became multiplied
on the cinema
screen, the most famous version being Marlene Dietrich’s ‘Lola Lola’ in the
Blue Angel;
while its namesakes pullulate in novels like Nabokov’s Lolita,
or as Lala in Béla Hamvas’s
Karnevál, the key novel in Hungary of the
century. The name incorporates Pierrot’s obsession with the
moon, as the
first syllable of Lulu and the moon (lune in French) are identical (Palacio
1990:
49).10 The 1888 pantomime
was a consciously epoch-making piece,
with all major figures of commedia dell’arte appearing, each being ‘old
ancestors of Her Modernity Lulu’ (Ibid.: 31). Lulu thus became a great
weapon of decadence, representative of
pure female power, the heartless
woman who, at the same time pointing forward to Meyerhold, conjures the
‘
“victory of the automaton”—a being deprived of will, autonomy, face and
voice;
deprived, at the limit, of all personal reality’ (Ibid.: 38). Lulu as
schismogenic double of Pierrot, product of
a strange case of
parthenogenesis, would be central for the coming ‘war of the sexes’, based
on a presumed
eternal conflict between male and female, ignoring the
conclusion of Plato’s Statesman, which holds that
maintaining the
harmonious relationship between male and female principles is a central
task of true statesmen
(310C–1C).
The ‘demolition of masculinity’ (Palacio 1990: 50) characteristic of this
new Pierrot and its double Lulu is
completed through the motif of
decapitation, an ‘absolute obsession’ of decadence (Ibid.: 113). Chapter 5 of
Pala-cio’s book is entitled ‘Pierrot Decapitated’, an imagery partly
explained by the similarity between the full
moon and a human head and
partly by the identification of Pierrot as a modern day St. John the Baptist.
Such a
regression of Pierrot, through Pulcinella the nulla, to its Zanni
origins in the mid-summer night fair is
indeed striking, confirmed by the
parallel fascination with the dance of Salome.11
Pierrot the zero, the nullity, the decapitated and castrated automaton, a
schismatic being deprived of all
integrity: this is the image with which the
artistic avant-garde of Paris leads Europe into the 20th century—the
promised century of liberal and socialist progress, enlightenment, and
eternal peace. These are the images that
would be given a new radiance by
the bright shining revolutionary light that would soon come from the east.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS MADNESS IN REALITY

Arthur Symons
Arthur Symons (1865–1945), a British poet from Wales, of Cornish parents,
was a major champion of modernism,
impersonating the ‘renaissance’ of
the 1890s. W.B. Yeats called him the best critic of his generation, and he
had
a major impact on modernists, including—apart from Yeats—Joyce,
Ezra Pound, and especially T.S. Eliot. His most
famous work was an 1899
study of symbolism. He identified the movement with art gaining self-
consciousness,
resulting in an overcoming of boundaries between art and
life; a ‘literature in which the visible world is no
longer a reality, and the
unseen world no longer a dream … ’ (Symons 1989: 83). In this way, he
was hoping that
it would be possible to re-evoke and restore beauty, the
great dream of his life, thus overcoming the fear of the
unknown, even of
the void (Ibid.). His two key relevant essays, published in a 1906 book with
the alchemic title
Studies in Seven Arts, are about the pantomime and the
ballet, both representing ultimate metaphors in his
world-changing life
project.
The pantomime is presented together with poetic drama—evidently
alluding to Shakespeare—as the only genres worthy
of ‘absolute criticism’
(Symons 1906: 381). It is ‘thinking overheard’: a form of art so universal,
so close to human experience, that it has no need for words (Ibid.). It is
gracious
silence, risking perfection like a rope-dancer, incorporating
mystery and equivalent to dreaming (Ibid.: 382–3).
With its silent poetry, it
offers a unique path to beauty—comparable to Wagner’s music, which is
‘the most
complete form of art yet realised’—this last being the closing
statement of the short essay (Ibid.: 384).
The significance of ballet for Symons is evoked by the Shakespearesque
title: ‘The World as Ballet’. Dancing, ‘in
its very essence’, is a symbol of
life; it therefore has ‘pre-eminence among the more than imitative arts’ (as
in
Symons 1989: 81). It is more real than reality—after all, ‘all humanity
[is] but a masque of shadows’ (Ibid.:
82); dancing is its essence. This is
because it lies beyond morality, being animal life, natural madness and
ideal
excess; in sum, it is the Dionysian. This exaltation, however, has its own
paradoxes, as this
larger-than-real art is also characterised as miming the
instincts and as being sinful, even doubly so (Ibid.:
80–1). And while
Symons was trying to escape the sense of sinfulness in his writings, he
could not do so in his
life, where he was caught through ballet.
In 1893 he became fatally obsessed, at first sight, with a ballet dancer,
only identified as Lydia, ‘illegitimate
daughter of a Spaniard with gypsy
blood’ (Beckson 1983: 100). Being attracted by what he identified as the
‘primitive element’ combined with a sense of her ‘Chastity’, he ‘proceeded
to make her “perverse” ’ (Ibid.).
Driven with irrepressible desire, she
appeared as ‘absolutely seductive, fatally fascinating, almost shamelessly
animal’ (Ibid.). The tormented relationship lasted for two years, and
arguably Symons was more obsessed with his
own obsessions of sin than
with Lydia, transforming her into ‘a mythic symbol of lust—a vampire, a
Circe, a Helen
of Troy’ (Ibid. 101–3).
 In early September 1908 Symons travelled to Venice, staying in Piazza
Desdemona, being ‘enthralled by the city’
(Ibid.: 253). After a few weeks
his handwriting became distorted, and he had alarming fantasies about sin
and
punishment. Leaving for Perugia, he inexplicably stopped at Ferrara.
There, wandering up and down the streets,
encountering ‘the most horrible
shapes and shadows’, he became deranged (Ibid.: 257). He tried to leave
this
‘unholy place’ but was arrested and thrown into the dungeon of Castel
Vecchio, the old prison. After a few weeks
his friends managed to take him
back to England, and—having spent two years in mental institutions—he
managed to
recover some sanity. The corresponding chapter title in his
biography—all such titles are direct quotes—reads:
‘Fatal Initiation of
Madness’, well rhyming with some others, like ‘My Life Is Like a Music-
Hall’, ‘Fading into
Shadows and Unrealities’, and the last one: ‘The End of
Our Passionate Pilgrimage’.

Nietzsche’s Last Words

On 5 January 1889 Nietzsche collapsed in Turin, thus not so far in space
and time, in a ‘world historical’ sense,
from the Ferrara of Symons,
embracing a horse that was badly beaten, recalling
the horse-beating dream-
scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The following days he sent
around a
series of letters signed, in equal proportion, either as ‘Dionysos’ or
as ‘the Crucified’; his last texts. They
evoke Ecce Homo, completed two
months earlier, and undersigned Dionysos versus the Crucified. The
penultimate entry on the last page of his last notebook is a single cryptic
Latin phrase: ‘condamno te ad
vitam diaboli vitae’ (Nietzsche 1988, XIII:
647). The last lines return to ranting against the Hohenzollerns,
ending with
the phrase ‘I annihilate the lie’.
The a priori injunction that these texts are already products of madness
is untenable; they must be read and
interpreted as symptoms and documents
of a liminal threshold moment. The phrase is a sentence in the original
sense of judgment: ‘I condemn you to live the life of the devil’.
Every single aspect of the sentence is loaded with meaning. It is in
Latin, a language Nietzsche knew well, being
a philologist, but one he
never used to convey his own ideas. It is personal: ‘I condemn you’. It
registers on a piece of paper what one being told another. But who spoke to
Nietzsche? Or who was condemning
whom? The ‘what’ of the
condemnation at least is clear enough. It is life, not death; not in the
ordinary sense
of a ‘life sentence’, but to living a life which is identical to
the life of the devil—or madness.
The voice recorded was a performative speech act, as Nietzsche indeed
became mad. However, this did not happen
before he managed to pin down
another enigmatic claim, his last testament, about annihilating the lie. Did
the
voice tell this as well; or was it Nietzsche’s evidently last act of utmost
clarity? Were these last words
related to the ‘last men’ of Zarathustra’s
Prologue? Or his last book about the ultimate ‘mimomaniac’? And in
what
sense, if any, did he succeed?
 Pierrot and Pulcinella between Paris
and Petersburg
12 The Avant-Garde of Diaghilev and Meyerhold

DIAGHILEV

The impact that Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872–1929) exerted on

modern art and fashion, and especially on their
connections, is inestimable.
Yet, knowledge about this impact and the person of Diaghilev is amazingly
minimal.
Diaghilev is best remembered as the legendary impresario of the
Ballets Russes, which took Paris by storm in
1909, with the incomparable
Vaslav Nijinsky as its main dancer, and then produced a series of
performances with
contributions by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Eric Satie,
Picasso and Matisse, which radically transformed our image of
ballet.
Diaghilev was also a notoriously controversial character owing to his
dictatorial style and his lavish
expenses, by which managed to squander all
the money gained by his spectacular successes, and the series of
controversies within and around the ballet, not least because of his
outspoken homosexuality, which was highly
unusual at that time.
Perhaps the best way to introduce this complex figure, and particularly
relevant for this book, is through his
characterisation by Serge Lifar, a
leading dancer and Diaghilev’s lover in the last period of the Ballets Russes,
who continued to lead the company from Diaghilev’s death in 1929 up to
1959.

Face Mask or Mask Face?

For Lifar the most striking phenomenon of Diaghilev’s face was the
curvature of his lips, recalling Peter the
Great—a similarity Diaghilev kept
boasting about (Lifar 1940: 3) but which turned into the sort of smile
resembling the disdainful frown captured in Blake’s poem. In
contemplating this face, and this smile, a strange
feeling ‘takes possession
of the viewer’: that this face itself was a mask; or ‘that the man’s face and
mask have merged’ (Ibid.). Yet at the next level, as if such a surprising
claim could be taken further, it was
exactly this mask-like, immobile face
that became ‘exceedingly expressive’, so much so that Diaghilev himself
mistook this, his face frozen into a smiling mask, for his actual face.
So what did this paradoxical, particularly expressive mask/face render
manifest? At a social level, it showed a Russian aristocrat, expressing
height and distance from mundane everyday
life, but doing so with genuine
contempt, even an outright ‘antipathy to life’ (Ibid.: 4). Yet again, in
identifying Diaghilev as a cold cynic, the mask-like face revealed
something completely different, as if real
humanity were suddenly to
become visible from under the mask, radiating charm and warmth but also
helplessness
and defence-lesness—a ‘childish smile’, which was even
‘virginally tender’ (Ibid.). This was best seen by
focusing on the eyes,
which manifested a sort of ‘sacred melancholy’ and ‘sacred torment’, even
simple
sentimentality (Ibid.: 4–5).
Just by looking at the face, through the eye of a person particularly
close to Diaghilev, we got a strikingly
vivid and complex description. We
now need to inquire how somebody could have become his own mask—and
then
transmitted, through this mask, an extremely powerful world view that
contributed much in transforming the world
into its own mask.

Diaghilev’s Background
Diaghilev’s problems with himself and the world started at the moment of
his birth—or at least thus he came to
think; or rather, even more precisely,
and moving to the heart of the unfathomable complexities of his
personality, this is what he told others. His most striking physical feature
was his exceedingly large head, and
he kept relaying the story that his birth
killed his mother, thus presenting himself as a born monster and killer
at the
same time. The story, however, is pure fiction: his mother died only three
months later, probably from
Semmelweis syndrome (childbed fever; see
Scheijen 2010a: 8–9). Still, the story goes a long way toward explaining
both his great contempt for and resentment of the world and his even
greater vulnerability. It also conveys his
deep-seated hatred of women,
further corroborated by the single episode of his life when he actually made
love to
a woman, only to contract syphilis (Lifar 1940: 31–2; Scheijen
2010a: 30). Combined with the traumatic conditions
of his birth, Diaghilev
ended up not only being homosexual but misogynous as well, claiming that
excellence in
art is incompatible with any intimate relationship with
women.
The first invented trauma corresponds with two real traumas in his early
life. The first took place in 1879 when
Diaghilev, aged seven, moved with
his family from St. Petersburg to Perm (Scheijen 2010a: 19ff, 2010b: 34–5).
In
the capital, they lived an open and rich social life, with Tchaikovsky and
Mussorgsky being familiar guests; but
suddenly, at that sensitive age,
Diaghilev was cast into the end of the world, at the farthest reaches of
Europe,
near the northern Ural mountains, where the closest city lay several
day’s walking distance and winter
temperatures reached minus forty
degrees centigrade. Yet the place was not completely forsaken either, with
intellectuals and civil servants organising musical recitals and even teaching
German, the dominant mood being a
fervent longing for Vienna or Paris.
The second trauma was family bankruptcy and the subsequent departure
from Perm
at another sensitive moment, when Diaghilev was eighteen
(Scheijen 2010a: 30–2, 2010b: 36). This coincided with
the start of his
university years and the summer before a visit to Europe, in particular to
Vienna and Venice. In
Vienna he had his first experience with theatre,
watching operas by Mozart, Rossini and especially Wagner and
also The
Fairy Doll, a ballet by Joseph Bayer, originally a pantomime for amateurs,
where in the second
act the toys take up life on their own; this exerted a
peculiar fascination on Diaghilev (Pritchard 2010a: 52–3;
Scheijen 2010a:
36). The encounter with Wagner also turned out to be crucial; Diaghilev
came to cultivate a
‘hero-worship of the composer’, and already in 1902
predicted that he would die in the same place where Wagner
did (Scheijen
2010a: 3). Still, the experience of visiting Venice, at which he arrived by
boat, was even more
overwhelming, though his impressions were
ambivalent: in his letters to his stepmother he described it as a
‘magic
kingdom’: exceedingly beautiful but also gloomy, even depressing
(Scheijen 2010a: 36). There was, however,
no return home from this trip:
the house in Perm had to be sold, so Diaghilev’s entire childhood was
suddenly
wiped out (Scheijen 2010a: 38–9, 2010b: 39). As a result, for the
rest of his life he was ‘tormented by morbid
fantasies’ (Scheijen 2010a: 4),
in particular by an ‘almost paranoid fear of dying’, which was a genuine
anguish,
already present in a letter to Tolstoy written during his university
years, so not a late invention (Scheijen
2010b: 39).

A crucial episode of his university years was his joining of a group of

friends, led by Alexandre Benois, in St.
Petersburg (Green 1986: 54–7).
Two aspects are central in this association: it was a characteristic group of
high-class avant-garde literati who not only purported to be way above the
rest in taste and intelligence but
considered this as a token of overall
superiority. Diaghilev was a latecomer to the group, together with Leon
Bakst, who would become one of his main artistic collaborators. He was
thus both insecure, ridden by an
inferiority complex and tried to
compensate this with particular flamboyance, overdoing things and in
general
demonstrating a deficiency in taste—quite significant for a person
who would shape the taste of the Paris
avant-garde for decades to come.
The group, and Diaghilev in particular, had three main sources of
inspiration as the basis of their avant-garde
revaluation of art and life:
fairground performances of marionettes and comedy shows, in particular
the figures
of Harlequin and Pierrot;1
the music of Wagner; and the
protagonists of decadence, in particular Oscar Wilde (Green 1986: 57–8).
It was on the basis of this personal background that Diaghilev came to
formulate his own ars poetica:
originality at any price.2
Given the aesthetic
interest of his reference group, this had to be in art; and his great innovation
was to
temporarily shift the focus of avant-garde protest away from religion
and politics into the sphere of art, making
St. Petersburg, this third
Constantinople, the new centre of artistic avant-garde.
The outlines of this strategy were already present in a letter written to
his
stepmother—the only woman with whom he stayed on cordial terms in
his life—in 1895. This self-description is
widely considered as holding a
key to Diaghilev’s personality:
 ‘ “I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio; secondly, a great
charmeur; thirdly, I have any amount
of cheek; fourthly, I am a man
with a great amount of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I
think I
have no real gifts. All the same, I think I have found my true
vocation—being a Maecenas. I have all that is
necessary save the
money—mais ça viendra.” ’ (as in Green 1986: 57; see also Spencer
1974: 43)

While honesty about oneself is admirable, a self-definition as ‘charlatan’

goes beyond the limits of cynicism,
though it captures, with etymological
precision, Diaghilev’s eventual position. It was indeed as a
charlatan-magus
that Diaghilev capitalised on his sole talent: his capacity to overwhelm and
conquer people, both
in the metaphorical and most concrete sexual sense,
by the sheer force of his willpower. This force came at the
moment when it
was missing in great artists: as his friend Benois recognised, ‘ “[t]here was
one thing lacking in
the artists of that generation who have become world-
famous: they lacked the spirit to fight and impose
themselves” ’ (as quoted
in Green 1986: 58). At any rate, and again quoting Benois, ‘ “[t]his spirit
Diaghilev
possessed in the highest degree, so that we can say he too had his
specialty, namely will-power” ’ (Ibid.), which
defines the required talent of
a charlatan-impresario (Ibid.: 56).

The Collapse of the Campanile in Venice

The life events told so far were already full of singular features and striking
coincidences. These were,
however, dwarfed by what took place on 14 July
1902: the Campanile of St. Mark’s Square in Venice collapsed, and
Diaghilev happened to be in Venice (Scheijen 2010b: 33–4). The symbolic
significance of this event cannot be
exaggerated: the bell tower of any
Italian city is symbolic of its identity, so much so that even today
campanilismo is a widely used term of Italian politics, equivalent to
chauvinism at the level of
nation-states. And this was not any campanile,
but that of Venice, standing for republicanism for more than a
millennium;
even further, and truly defying belief, it collapsed on the anniversary of
Bastille Day, celebrating
the French Revolution.
 The impact was immediate and overwhelming. As explained in a letter
written to his stepmother five weeks later,
from an artistic conservative,
devotee of the Renaissance and the art of the 18th century, Diaghilev had
converted to modernism. The Campanile could not be rebuilt; instead, there
was a need for a new cathedral and a
new religion, and Diaghilev now
devoted his life to creating these. Owing to a series of further coincidences,
he even came to enjoy an astonishing degree of success. As Walter Nouvel,
his
first biographer, wrote in a letter shortly after Diaghilev’s death, he lived
as a special favourite of the gods:
He was given unique opportunities and
captured them fully, throughout his career managing so successfully to
combine sheer luck and shrewd planning that up to now experts debate
whether he was a radical maverick or a canny
operator (Marsh 2010: 26).

The Road to Paris

Diaghilev’s first successful venture was an exhibition of Russian historical
portrait paintings organised in the
spring 1905. Fully capturing the radical
changes that were just taking place in Russia, with the war with Japan
(1904–1905) and the coming revolution, forecast by the terroristic bomb
that had exploded just seven week before,
he opened the exhibition with a
bombastic but most effective speech entitled ‘The Hour of Reckoning’
(Marsh 2010:
15). Explicitly alluding to the bomb attack, he declared that
such apocalyptic events can only be overcome by
things that come ‘in name
of a new, unknown culture’ (Ibid.).
Backed by this success, he organised an exhibition of Russian art in
1906 at the Salon d’Automne of the
Petit Palais, near the Louvre. This
effort was connected to his friendship with Mikhail Fedorovich
Larionov
(1881–1964), which had lasted since 1903. Larionov was an enfant terrible
of Russian avant-garde
painting and an aficionado of Jacques Callot
(Haskell 1968: 84). The event coincided with a major exhibition of
Gauguin’s paintings, both being major successes. Picasso also visited the
exhibition, and whether he saw the part
organised by Diaghilev or not, he
started Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which would revolutionise painting,
just
a few months later (Jones 2010: 9), and would team up with Diaghilev,
collaborating with him between 1917
and 1927 on five Paris productions,
most notably the 1920 Pulcinella.
Given the success of the exhibition, Diaghilev wanted to return with an
opera. But funding evaporated, and
instead of just giving up he decided to
take a leap in the dark (Marsh 2010: 26), instead bringing a ballet to
Paris.
His biggest gamble became his greatest victory. To understand what
happened and why requires careful
attention to detail.
First of all, Diaghilev could rely upon developments inside Russia.
Classical ballet had a long-standing
reputation in Russia, but in 1907
Diaghilev met Fokine and Nijinsky, who helped him to explore new
avenues in
ballet (Scheijen 2010a: 172). In this period Isadora Duncan had,
in 1904, danced with success in St Petersburg
(Ibid.: 173). Ida Rubinstein
also played a vital role. Orphan of a prodigiously wealthy Jewish family,
she had no
classical dancing skills but an unusually expressive body
language, and—being prepared to do anything for
success—was a perfect
match for Diaghilev. In December 1908 she took the title role in a
performance of Oscar
Wilde’s Salome, finishing the dance of the seven
veils completely naked
because, in the words of Benois, to ‘achieve her
artistic aims she was prepared to test the limits of social
tolerance and even
decency’ (as in Scheijen 2010a: 177). The scandal that broke out was not
only because of the
nudity but also the Orthodox Church’s prohibition
regarding the representation of sacred figures on stage. It
contributed to the
fact that the Tsar pulled his support for the Paris event—even confiscating
the sets and
costumes already prepared—yet Diaghilev went ahead
undisturbed.
The shift to ballet was also suggested by the peculiar and long-standing
fascination of Parisians with exotic and
sensual Oriental dancing, which
Diaghilev would use to the full (Marsh 2010: 25). This obsession went back
to the
1830s (Pritchard 2010: 50; see also the cancan fever discussed
before) but was raised to a higher pitch by the
turn of the 20th century. In
this a central role was played by the World Exhibitions—a significant
connection,
given the importance such expositions played in the genesis of
modern capitalism, in particular the spiral
between consumerism and
advertising.3 Such fairs, first staged in 1851 in London, started to promote a
‘spectacularisation of
otherness (altérité)’ since the Paris Fair of 1870, and
were raised to a new pitch in 1889 when the
novelty of individualised
national pavilions was introduced, with the greatest attractions, hand in
hand with the
Eiffel Tower, being a series of exotic dancing shows: Middle
Eastern belly dancing, Andalusian gypsies, and
sacred dancers from Java
(Décoret-Ahiha 2004: 21–2, 25–30). Success was reproduced in 1900,
while in the first
years of the new century Paris was inundated by a series of
‘exotic’ dancing fads, mostly imported from America,
whether from the
north (like the ‘cakewalk’), or the south (most famously the Argentinian
tango). It culminated
in the craze for jazz, with Jacques Cocteau as a main
propagator (Ibid.: 63ff), and a genuine dancing fury around
World War I,
well captured in a famous 1912 article on the dancing mania entitled ‘The
Possessed’ (Ibid. 69,
99).4
Here were directly arrive at the success of the Ballets Russes, with its
unique combination of wild
gambling and careful staging, relying on and
promoting the most extreme forms of fashion and marketing,
avant-garde
art and radical politics.

Diaghilev in Paris
To understand the exact effect mechanism, a close look at the events of the
first premiere, on 19 May 1909,
hailed as ‘ “the turning point of all the arts”
’ (Diana Vreeland, as in Davis 2010: 17), taking place at ‘a
crucial moment
in the history of European art’ (Jones 2010: 9), is of particular importance.
The show went down
in history as a revelation: a rediscovery of the
spontaneity of Dionysian experience, something westerners long
lacked,
and which required a happy importation from ‘exotic’ Russia, given that
‘Russians still believed in
“art”—still knew the great Dionysiac inspiration’
(Green 1986: 64). However,
in actual fact, far from being spontaneous,
every element of the show was carefully calculated, and not simply in
the
sense of meticulous care being taken with artistic perfection, but exactly in
the sophist/rhapsode sense of
ruthlessly planning and calculating the effect
on the audience. The parallels with Wagner, the most
important source of
Diaghilev and the Russian aestheticising avant-garde, just as of the French
and English
fin-de-siècle decadent movement, are therefore especially clear.
The central concern was to generate an
impression of profound originality
and authenticity from something that was second-rate, mere imitation and
fake.
 The key to success was to work the audience even before the spectacle
began. It had two main elements. First,
through people ‘in the know’,
rumour was spread that the Ballets Russes was preparing something great,
never
before seen—rumours that, of course, bounced back on the artists as
well. As a result, the moment when the
curtain went up, performers and
public were both ‘in a state of feverish excitement’ (Spencer 1974: 49).
Second,
in order to ensure in advance a right attitude in the audience, its
members were not only carefully selected to
include the most prominent
members of the Paris intellectual avant-garde and of the upper classes with
known
taste and even better-known purse but Gabriel Astruc, the French
manager, invited for the first rows of the
balconies the most beautiful Paris
actresses and models, of which fifty-two actually came, organisers being
careful enough even to pick blondes and brunettes in alteration (Haskell
1968: 61). As a result, ‘the auditorium
became a stage, and everyone was
everyone else’s audience’ (Green 1986: 64). This seating trick turned out to
be
so successful that such balconies became known in France as ‘Astruc’s
basket’ (Spencer 1974: 49).
All these tricks, however, had to work with the performance itself—
which did not fail to confirm expectations,
providing just the right
combination of connoisseur art and piquant spectacle. Russia had a great
tradition of
classical ballet, so Diaghilev could rely on well-qualified and
expert performers who were furthermore happy to
participate in an
adventure that was supposed to bring great artistic and cultural recognition
for their country.
Even further, he had the great fortune to secure the
services of a uniquely talented dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky. The
explosive
success, however, was not due only to the quality of the Russian dancers
but also to a series of
carefully planned tricks. This included the entry
scenes, in particular the entrance of Ida Rubinstein as
Cleopatra,
choreographed by Leon Bakst for his protégé (Spencer 1974: 53); the
manipulative, exotic rendering of
sex and violence, always fiddling with the
limits of tolerability, occasionally tripping over and provoking a
scandal,
which only reinforced the aura of the company; and not the least the
surprising emphasis on male as
opposed to female dancers. French ballet, as
sanctified by Théophile Gautier, was always more about female than
male
dancers (Haskell 1968: 61); even in the Russian scene, before and after
Diaghilev, the great ballet dancers
were female. Presenting male dancers in
explicitly erotically challenging scenes was not only a novelty but also
offered another forbidden-fruit-type pleasure—especially as Diaghilev
and
Astruc again made sure that the audience would be filled with members of
the Parisian artistic avant-garde
with homoerotic inclinations (Green 1986:
64).
Diaghilev and his associates left nothing to chance, and the trick
worked: the audience and then the entire
Parisian artistic and intellectual
establishment went into raptures over such truly authentic and spontaneous,
ecstatic Dionysian extravaganzas. Words used to capture the explosion in
the audience included terms like
‘frenzy’, ‘seizure’, ‘possession’,
‘seduction’, ‘intoxication’ and ‘sacred flame’. Let me quote at length an
eyewitness account by Anne de Noailles, a poetess, who arrived late: ‘ “I
realized that a miracle confronted me.
I could see things that have not lived
before. Everything dazzling, intoxicating, enchanting, seductive, had been
assembled and put on that stage” ’ (as quoted in Spencer 1974: 53). The
resulting frenzy, which lasted for six
whole enchanted weeks, can only be
described in terms of mass psychosis (Lifar 1940: 219).
The success was repeated in 1910, when the Ballets performed
Scheherazade, with Nijinsky as
Scheherazade’s slave, which became an
absolute favourite and trademark show for decades: ‘No other ballet before
or since has succeeded in impressing itself on the imagination of its
audiences to such a degree’ (Spencer 1974:
149, see also 162). It also
‘performed the Carnival, danced to Schumann’s music, with a Pierrot, a
Harlequin, and a Columbine’ (Greene 1986: 70). In 1911 it had Stravinsky’s
Petrushka at its centre, based
on the popular Russian version of
Pierrot/Pulcinella. The power of this performance, one of the most
mesmerizing
of all by the Russian Ballet, was much fuelled by its staging of
the actual relationship between Diaghilev and
Nijinsky: the conflict on
stage between the Charlatan and Petrushka

mirrored the central emotional drama within the company [as]

Diaghilev, the great impresario and charlatan, had
taken his leading
dancer as lover. By general agreement, Nijinsky delivered a marvelous
performance as Petrushka,
but of a kind never seen before…. Nijinsky
really looked like a puppet trying to be human. (Green 1986: 67)
Diaghilev had a very concrete and personal victim: one of the greatest ballet
dancers of all times, his protégé
and lover, Vaclav Nijinsky. This story
provides a perfect illustration for the problem posed by Plato in his
dialogue: the effect a ‘hunting down’ type of education offered by the
sophist to his naïve, hapless victim.

Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky was not only a talented ballet dancer. He possessed a divine
touch; seeing him perform evidently
was an incomparable experience; it
was a manifestation of divine grace. ‘When
Nijinsky appeared, it seemed
that his feet did not ever touch the ground. The spirit won over the
matter…. No
ballet dancer ever gave a similar impression of flying, such a
pro-digious elevation’, producing an almost
supernatural impact on the
viewer (Citati 2008: 207). Unfortunately we have no visual record of his
performance:
Diaghilev argued that contemporary recording equipment
would not be able to capture its real character, so he
forbade filming. Still,
even the still images we have—for example, of his performance in
Scheherazade—manage to capture the unique grace of his movements. His
leaps were considered so far beyond
ordinary human reach that after his
death his feet were dissected in an attempt to discover some anatomical
reasons for these acrobatic feats. Nothing was found.
One might argue that even here impressions are deceiving. We know
from Jean Cocteau, who saw Nijinsky’s
performances up close, that after
producing his stunning leaps Nijinsky would be panting, exhausted, off
scene.
Every human feat comes at a price. Still, this is radically different
from Diaghilev’s tricks: there, we have to
do with cynical, modern
impression management; here, with Renaissance sprezzatura, just as in the
pictures
of Raphael. The effort involved in creating a perfectly graceful
picture must be hidden away in the finished
product, but this does not
question its outstanding value.
Diaghilev boasted that had not only discovered Nijinsky but outright
‘moulded’ him (Lifar 1940: 200). This is
certainly not true; it is highly
questionable whether Nijinsky gained anything from Diaghilev. What is
certain is
that Diaghilev destroyed him. Nijinsky’s mother foresaw this very
clearly, and at the start. Nijinsky was ethnic
Pole; his parents worked as
dancers in a circus and spent their lives trying to elevate their children into
the
more respectable occupation of ballet dancing. His mother immediately
perceived that through Diaghilev her son
would get back where they had
started from.
Diaghilev not only brought Nijinsky into disrepute; he literally and
physically abused and destroyed him, having
raped him the first time they
met. Nijinsky, trembling, could not resist, as he needed Diaghilev’s support
to
make a living (Nijinsky 1937: 51). This episode is told in his diary,
written in February 1919, just before he
was hospitalised with
schizophrenia and published decades later by his Hungarian wife Romola
Pulszky in an edited
version.5 Often dismissed
as the product of an already
sick mind, it is instead a stunning document, written in a liminal moment by
a
tragic genius, comparable to similar documents written by Nietzsche and
Warburg. They render evident how much
Nijinsky was misplaced,
misunderstood and abused in the Ballets Russes. As a true genius,
comparable to
Baudelaire’s albatross, Nijinsky was certainly not up to the
shrewd technical tricks and manipulations of
Diaghilev’s associates; but this
does not mean that he was hopelessly inept, as was alleged. His wife saw
the
contrast with perfect clarity: Nijinsky did not want to make money and
become famous; he only wanted to bring joy to the world, with a pure heart
and humility, having a childlike
faith in the basic Platonic values of art,
beauty and God—concerns that were far beyond the comprehension of the
Ballets Russes people (in Nijinsky 1937: 11), like Bakst, for whom films
were good because they could make
money (Ibid.: 53).
In Paris, Nijinsky infamously provoked a scandal by simulating a sexual
act on stage in the 1912 Afternoon of
a Faun (Haskell 1968: 77). In his
diary he claims that this was imposed on him, like other similar
performances. He had no interest in sex: life is not sex, and sex is not God
(Nijinsky 1937: 147); lust is rather
the death of life (Ibid.: 32). His core
concern was feeling, in ballet as well as in literature. In contrast to
Hamlet,
who reasons too much, Nijinsky in a particularly moving passage describes
himself as ‘a philosopher who
does not reason—a philosopher who feels’—
just like Shakespeare, who not only wrote plays but loved theatre
(Ibid.:
148–9). It is by having feelings that we humans can be like God, because
God is nothing but feeling,
especially for beauty and love (Ibid.: 32, 155). If
Nijinsky was searching for sex, chasing the cocottes
of Paris, it was only to
escape Diaghilev—and he found, to his great surprise, that they were also
doing it
‘that’ way, claiming that otherwise ‘they would die of hunger’
(Ibid.: 31).
The diary also contains a precious portrait of Diaghilev. It cannot be
dismissed as guided by resentment, as on a
liminal threshold one does not
waste time on empty chatter. Nijinsky told the truth, the hard-won truth that
he
uniquely knew about Diaghilev, as he indeed knew him like none else,
including ‘all his sly tricks and habits’
(Ibid.: 29). While Diaghilev thought
that he was the god of art, his art was rather ‘utter nonsense’ (Ibid.).
This is
because true art, like that of Shakespeare, Gogol or Dostoevsky, can only be
based on feelings and not on
the brain; too much thinking rather destroys
feeling (Ibid.: 127). Diaghilev’s art is worthless, as he always
looks for
logic; and if he has feelings, these are bad feelings (Ibid.: 53–4). Most of
all, he cheats people
because he wants to get noticed (Ibid.: 54). Diaghilev
is even outright described as a ‘malicious’ person: he
loved to humiliate
people. He could only think strategically, ‘organising troupes’, while
Nijinsky was always
interested only in human beings (Ibid.: 69). Diaghilev
even told Nijinsky that ‘love for woman is a terrible
thing’, which he even
had to believe, as only in this way could he continue living (Ibid.: 55–6).
Nijinsky also
singles out for attention Diaghilev’s fake smile: ‘I love
smiling people, but not when the smile is forced as
Diaghilev’s. He thinks
that people do not feel it’ (Ibid.: 48). Thus, in sum, as he formulated in a
letter
addressed to Diaghilev in the diary, ‘You are dead because your aims
are death’ (Ibid.: 69).
The end of the diary is particularly moving to read, as one feels how,
from page to page, Nijinsky became
increasingly overtaken and broken by
the weight of the suffering he had to endure. Its epilogue is explicitly
devoted to suffering; it is his soul, not his mind, that is sick, that has
suffered too much. In what, according to Citati, is ‘the most moving page’
in the diary, he says that ‘ “I am a
leaf of God” ’ (Citati 2008).

Given that Nijinsky defined Diaghilev in 1919 as the very embodiment of

death, one might wonder how Diaghilev’s
death in 1929 might have a
bearing on this claim. Two episodes are relevant in this context, both having
great
symbolic power. Diaghilev died on 19 August 1929 in Venice
(Pritchard 2010b: 206–7), his coffin being carried by
a huge gondola to San
Michele Island (Spencer 1974: 120, 126), strikingly corresponding to the
image evoked by
Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, something that might
have even been explicitly considered, given that
Diaghilev as carefully
planned his death as his theatrical spectacles, thus ‘turning death into an act
in the
theatrical spectacle of his life’ (Scheijen 2010a: 4). Second, according
to the biography of Misia Sert, a
confidante of Jean Cocteau, the very
moment when ‘the greatest magician in the world of art died’—a very
Thomas
Mann-like label indeed—those present became witnesses to an
‘incredible scene’ owing to an explosion of mutual
hatred between Serge
Lifar and Boris Kochno, Diaghilev’s secretary, both his lovers: ‘ “They
rolled on the floor
tearing at each other, biting one another like the savage
beasts. They were in the grip of real frenzy. Two mad
dogs were fighting
over the body of their master” ’ (as quoted in Spencer 1974: 126). The
scene is put down to
manifestations of an essentially Russian emotionality,
comparable to the novels of Dostoevsky; however, taking a
hint from René
Girard, one might argue that something radically different and distinctly
modern was at stake.

The Diaghilev Effect

The lasting effect of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes goes way beyond the
narrow sphere of ballet dancing or
even modern art. Here again the impact
of Scheherazade was particularly resounding, prepared by Cocteau’s
title-
page image of Scheherazade in his journal: ‘the first performance was an
important evening for the theatre,
for dressmakers, for interior decorators,
for jewellers and for all branches of decoration. It is difficult to
realise
today the metamorphosis which transformed the decorative arts’ (Battersby
1974: 149).6
For two decades, up to 1929, Parisian culture ‘maintained a steady
flirtation with [the] Ballets Russes’ (Davis
2010: 9), which had a great
direct impact on fashion; and in a more general way the productions of the
company
‘seeped into the consciousness of West-European society’
(Pritchard 2010b: 187ff). Interest started to return in
the 1950s (Davis 2010:
10), and the 1960s (Pritchard 2010b: 187), but especially from the mid-
1970s, with a
series of tributes paid to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes by
Yves Saint Laurent (Davis 2010: 7) and by Diana
Vreeland, considered over
the past thirty-odd years as a main ‘seer’ in fashion, but also by major
figures at Dior, Chanel, or Vogue (Ibid.: 15–9), with emphasis being placed
on the
‘liberating aesthetics’ of Diaghilev: his modernism, sophistication
and urbanity, though also his elusiveness
(Ibid.: 20–1).
However, one could argue that the single most important and lasting
legacy of the Russian Ballet is the
complicity between the political and
artistic avant-garde on the one side and marketing, publicity and interior
decoration on the other.

MEYERHOLD

Just like Diaghilev, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) clearly and

uncompromisingly formulated his ars
poetica; and like Diaghilev’s, though
in different ways, it is not only highly revealing of both the artist
and his
work but also harrowingly disturbing. According to Meyerhold, as ‘[t]he
public expects invention,
play-acting and skill’ of the theatre, and not a
‘slavish imitation life’, artists must move away from reality by
‘carefully
choosing a mask, donning a decorative costume, and showing off one’s
brilliant tricks to the
public—now as a dancer, now as the intrigant at some
masquerade, now as the fool of old Italian comedy,
now as a juggler’
(Meyerhold 1969: 130).
Every major word in this short paragraph is profoundly problematic.
Meyerhold starts by characterising the artist
as a slave: not of imitation as a
task, but to a ‘public’ that must be ‘satisfied’ at all costs. It does not yet
have the demagogy of ‘market value’ or ‘taxpayer’s money’; and it is clear
enough that a work of art is made to
be appreciated. But why by ‘the
public’? How can ‘the public’ judge a work of art, immediately, on the
spot? Any
possible educational sense of culture, the heart of European
civilisation since the Greeks, is thus immediately
rendered irrelevant,
reduced to the provocation of laughter, characteristic of a circus or the
Hippodrome. After
such an arch-betrayal, it is less surprising that three of
the most important values of European culture are
subtly abused and
appropriated. It is care—which is reduced to the selection of a way of
disguise, a
frozen face; it is gift-giving, which here means the taking up in
another such way a theatrical costume;
and finally brilliance, the gift of
talent, which is delivered to the service of tricks. Meyerhold does
not even
feel a sense of shame for explicitly propagating illusionism, and this is the
perspective from which he
lists the four archetypal artists of his theatre,
sources and effects of commedia dell’arte.

From the Actor Back to the Mime

Given that Meyerhold’s philosophy of theatre reduced acting to pulling
tricks, it is reasonable to assume that
his purported return to the ‘pure’
sources of theatre is also nothing but a trick. This is best visible through
his
glorification of cabotinage and in his confusing the origins of commedia
dell’arte among charlatans and
buffoons with medieval mystery plays. A
‘cabotin’ is a second-rate strolling
actor or charlatan. However, when
Meyerhold’s style of acting was dismissively described by this word, he
proudly
took it up as a praise, claiming that ‘a cabotin is a kinsman to the
mime, the histrion, and the juggler; the
cabotin can work miracles with his
technical mastery; the cabotin keeps alive the tradition of the true art of
acting’. He even evoked the story of Reynard the fox (Meyerhold 1969:
122), now widely identified as the central
medieval trickster figure, whose
story was taken up by Goethe in 1792–1794, capturing his falling out with
the
French Revolution (Varty 1967, 2000). Far from being a mere aside, it
captures the ‘revaluation of values’ at the
heart of Meyerhold’s project,
oriented against the classical tradition of ‘inspirational acting’. This style of
acting—which Meyerhold simply fails to grasp, as he identifies it with
playing merely according to ‘subjective
mood’ (Meyerhold 1969: 129)—is
result of a long ‘civilizing process’. By this the mere mime origins of
European
theatre were transformed and spiritualised, implying—in the
spirit of Dilthey’s philosophy—personal empathy with
the person
represented on stage. This established an affinity with the experience of the
original character and
the playwright, and transmitted it to the audience, in
the Platonic sense of the interpretive rings (see
Ion), thus transforming
theatre from mere spectacle into a participatory experience, resurrecting the
original sense of classical Greek theatre. Meyerhold’s propagation of
commedia dell’arte is regressive, all the
more so as, through the recapturing
of the spirit of Callot through E.T.A. Hoffman and Tieck, in particular
Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots and TopsyTurvy World (Clayton 1993: 5, 29), it
directly and self-consciously
plunged back to the fairground sources of
commedia dell’arte, the charlatan and the mime. What attracted
Meyerhold,
like the other figures of the avant-garde, to commedia dell’arte was its
appeal to all social classes
and its greater possibility of exerting an effect
(Gordon 1983).
This seems counterbalanced by the purported return to medieval
mystery plays, also championed by Evreinov. This,
however, only indicates
and proliferates further misunderstanding. Mystery plays were not pure
spectacles but
genuine rituals, where the condition of access was
participation in the religious substance of the performance.
Meyerhold
missed this participatory component in exactly the same way as he missed
the importance of human
personality in ‘inspirational acting’.
Such a failure reflects serious personality defects. Meyerhold had an
extremely negative, deprecatory view of
human beings and life in general,
bemoaning the spiritual poverty of mankind and the general vulgarity of
life,
considering that whatever was said in jest was more serious than what
was meant seriously, confusing the
accidental and the regular, dressing up
idiosyncratic errors with hidden essences (Moody 1978: 860, 865), like
Freud. In a revealing passage he considered Molière’s Don Juan as a mere
mask and puppet of the author,
employed as a way ‘to square accounts with
his innumerable enemies’ (Meyerhold 1969: 133) and thus reducing the
great artist to the level of a Terence, revealing more about himself than
about Molière. Meyerhold’s ‘view of the human race’ is contained, in
condensed form, in the
concluding scene of the Fairground Booth, an
‘astonishing coup de theâtre’, in the image of a
‘collection of tragically
grotesque puppets’ (Moody 1978: 868).

The Fairground Booth

This play, written by Alexander Blok and pivotal for Meyerhold’s oeuvre,
was second in the three performances in
which he resurrected the spirit of
Debureau’s Pierrot on the Russian stage, between his 1903 graduation and
the
1910 Carnival, staged by Fokine and based on Schumann’s music, after
which he stayed with the figure
(Moody 1978: 860–2), combining it with
the mask of Dr. Dappertutto, a sinister figure conjured up by E.T.A.
Hoffmann. It was a kind of manifesto, asserting the comic freedom of the
grotesque. Central for the effect
mechanism of the grotesque, taking up
hints from Callot, is the persistent mixing of incompatible elements and
the
accumulation of surprising turns in the plot (Meyerhold 1969: 137), thus
shocking the audience until its
members have given up all attempts at
understanding and abandon themselves to pure entertainment, giving up
their
integrity as well.
The play was presented as a double bill with the Miracle of St Antony
(Green 1988: 87),7 itself a provocation, following even
here the example of
Callot. It was used as a main vehicle for Meyerhold’s programmatic
concern with returning to
the world of commedia dell’arte and the
‘primordial elements of the theatre: the power of the mask, gesture,
movement and plot’ (Meyerhold 1969: 125). The staging was rendered
possible by a double coincidence, combining
historical and personal
liminality: the disorientation caused in Russia by that country’s defeat in the
war
against Japan and by the Revolution of 1905 and by the disillusionment
of Blok with symbolism as an ersatz
religion, who poured all his
disillusionment into the play, ridiculing what he had held sacred. It was a
unique
combination of the Russian avant-garde’s obsession with the
‘moonstruck Pierrot’, who embodied everything that
was ‘degenerate’, with
the ‘microbes’ of French symbolism that quickly ‘infected’ Russian poetry,
and the
fascination with circus, especially the clown (Clayton 1993: 9–10).
Blok was a great poet and genuine human
being, who would die in 1925,
sick from living in the hallucinatory boredom and hypocrisy of Communist
Russia,
where Meyer-hold would strive as fish in water until he got hooked
himself.
Fairground Booth was a return not to commedia dell’arte but to its
parody, where the actors were enacting
a mechanised caricature of
themselves (Green 1986: 90–1). Its story line was purposefully inane and
beyond
belief: a group of mystics, sitting around a table, are expecting the
arrival of death as beautiful woman, but
instead Columbine arrives,
followed eventually by Harlequin and Pierrot. At the same time, and in
conformity with
Meyer-hold’s attitude to full truthfulness, it combined the
shameless use of tricks with cynically revealing the technical machinery of
theatre, with ‘all the ropes and wires [being]
visible to the audience’
(Meyerhold 1969: 70; see also Clayton 1993: 29).
With this play Blok and Meyerhold demonstrated that they had learned
the lesson of Debureau and the French
romantic avant-garde: even the most
inane plot can be declared as work of genius if the self-proclaimed cultural
elite agrees that it is so—given that the sole judge after the French
Revolution, ‘the’ public, proved itself
incapable of judging.
The final scene was a genuine climax to the anti-theatre, where, as
described by the actress playing Columbine:

‘The curtain fell behind Pierrot-Meyerhold and he was left face to face
with the audience. He stood staring at
them, and it was as though
Pierrot was looking into the eyes of every single person…. There was
something
irresistible in his gaze. Then Pierrot looked away, took his
pipe from his pocket and began to play the tune of a
rejected and
unappreciated heart. That moment was the most powerful in his
performance. Behind his lowered
eyelids one sensed a gaze, stern and
full of reproach’ (as in Green 1986: 92).

At that time the sense of judgment was not yet completely confused, and
many found the outrageous provocation
unacceptable, not knowing yet that
within less than two decades this would be made into official public policy
by
the Bolsheviks: the play provoked ‘nearly violent scandal in the
audience, derision from the critics, outrage
from the playwright’s betrayed
fellow symbolists—and, from many young radicals, deep enthusiasm’
(Ibid.).
The article Meyerhold would write a few years later, apart from giving
the rationale for his regression to
commedia dell’arte and beyond, contained
a visionary insight concerning cinema—or the script of what was to be
enacted soon. In contrast to those who considered the cinema as a vehicle
for realism, he argued that it rather
was comparable to the fairground booth,
which was ‘eternal’—a claim he immediately repeated, using standard
rhetorical trick, to hammer home the effect—and projected the coming
return of the clowns with the help of the
screen (Meyerhold 1969: 135).
This would indeed happen soon, in the emerging Hollywood, with Chaplin
as its main
protagonist. Meyerhold had a major impact on Eisenstein,
considered his disciple (Moody 1978: 868–9); they shared
a fascination
with Wagner and also with Callot (Clayton 1993: xvi–xvii, 33).

If, by regressing back from theatre to miming, Meyerhold unearthed the

charlatan and the buffoon, through Wagner
he successfully regressed back
to the pantomime and even the dancing masters of the moresca. ‘If an opera
were
produced without words it would amount to a pantomime’ (Meyer-
hold 1969: 80); as for Wagner, ‘The modern
symphony is based on the
harmonized dance’ (Ibid.: 85), indicating that for a proper playing of
Wagner a new type of actor was needed, to be trained by none else than ‘the
ballet-master’
(Ibid.: 86). In the spirit of Wagner’s music, itself much
infused by commedia dell’arte, given that Wagner’s
vision of the theatre of
future was a place where ‘the marble creations of Pheidias are clothed in
flesh and
blood’ (Ibid.: 87), Meyerhold introduced some of its main
innovations: that the ‘illusory become[s] real through
the mime’ (Ibid.); that
acting should be based on ‘the principle of bodily movement in space’
(Ibid.: 91) or ‘the
fragmentation of the play into antagonistic scenes’
(Moody 1978: 862). Thus Meyerhold combines the vision of
Callot’s focus
on dualism and duelling with the Newtonian vision of a world dominated
by mere bodies moving
across time and space (see Horvath 2013).
Meyerhold’s next major show was again perfectly timed. After five
years of preparation and with a cast of 200, he
staged Lermontov’s
Masquerade on 25 February 1917, when the first shots of the Revolution
were fired; a
student was even killed in the vestibule (Clayton 1993: 11–2;
Green 1986: 103; Moody 1978: 865). The piece was
again masterfully
chosen: Meyerhold caught a sour work by a great poet, who was despairing
over the tragic
corruption of Russia in the 1830s, presenting it through two
masked balls and ‘the ominous Stranger, the figure
of vengeance’ (Green
1986: 102). Meyerhold transfused it with his usual ‘commedic alchemy’
(Ibid.: 107), fixating
it into a vicious and cynical vision of the world,
presenting an ‘extravagantly decadent image of society’
(Ibid.: 102),
distilling the ‘dark forces’, even ‘demonism’ out of the play, including the
motifs ‘murder through
tears’ and ‘laughter after murder’ (as in Moody
1978: 865), worthy of a Byzantine mime of the Hippodrome. Critics
immediately identified it as ‘typical of Meyerhold’s own decadence and
megalomanic extravagance’ (Meyerhold 1969:
80), but to no avail; with the
revolution, Meyerhold’s time finally has come.

Acting as ‘Biomechanics’
Throughout his career Meyerhold was helped by a series of extraordinary
coincidences working in his favour,
whether in 1905/6 or in February 1917.
By 1921 the devastation of the Civil War created the right ‘tabula rasa’
to
put his ideas into practice. This culminated in the idea of ‘biomechanics’,
whose source was Jacques Callot
and his obsession with the grotesque
(Clayton 1993: 33).
Meyerhold joined the Communist Party early, in 1918 (Green 1986:
104), and this was no sheer opportunism but
based on a shared fascination
with industrialisation, mechanisation, science, technology and progress. In
particular, his vision of the ‘new actor’ was perfectly in tune with the Soviet
vision of the ‘new man’: he
needed actors who, far from searching for
‘authentic emotions’, instead performed like puppets, abstracting from
actual life the ‘mechanism of human behaviour’; actors who not only wore
masks but whose own bodies would become
masks (Moody 1978: 866).
The Civil War produced the proper primary material
for Meyerhold, just as
for Makarenko, the great educator of Soviet Russia, who considered that the
best pupils of
the new socialist education were orphans, as they were not
bogged down by old-fashioned concerns with family
life. So Meyerhold
chose his actors from seventeen- and eighteen-year-old war veterans, from
low social
backgrounds, so that ‘understandably, their devotion to the
“Master”, as Meyerhold was now known to his students,
bordered on the
fanatical’ (Braun 1995: 170).
Meyerhold’s short texts on biomechanics are an extraordinary read
today, as one cannot possibly imagine that this
could have been considered
in its time, and for decades after, as manifesto for the theatrical avant-garde.
The
central idea is that actors should mirror the way assembly-line work
has become a joyful necessity in the new
socialist society, thus eliminating
the separation between work time and rest, learning to regulate rest and
fatigue as efficiently as possible. This incorporated recent research in
America, especially the ‘methods of
Taylorism’, which should ‘be applied
to the work of the actor in the same way as they are to any form of work
with the aim of maximum productivity’, thus promoting ‘[t]he Taylorization
of the theatre’ (Meyerhold 1969:
197–9). He called this method
‘biomechanics’, where actors, instead of building the role from their own
emotions,
rather study their ‘innate capacity for reflex excitability’ (Ibid.;
italics in original), memorizing
technical tricks and controlling their own
physical movement, as a result of which actors could gain conscious
control
over the excitation of the audience as well:

By correctly resolving the nature of his state physically, the actor

reaches the point where he experiences the
excitation which
communicates itself to the spectator and induces him to share in the
actor’s performance:
what we used to call “gripping” the spectator. It is
this excitation which is the very essence of the actor’s
art. (Ibid.: 199)

Meyerhold duly illustrated his lectures with performances by his students,

who danced a mechanical pantomime that
must have been strikingly similar
to Domenico’s mime balls of the 1450s.
The corollary of this was a technique taught by Meyerhold in the 1930s,
which can be called ‘out-casting’.
According to this, and moving beyond
Debureau, in order learn ‘correct’ acting, which meant Meyerhold’s
constructivist de-naturalisation of normal human emotions, actors had to be
induced to take up roles against
their temperament: ‘In order to spur an
actor into action you sometimes need to set him a paradoxical task which
he
can manage only by discarding his normal criteria’ (Ibid.: 204). Meyerhold,
just like Nodier or like any
professional pimp, realised that the technique of
transgressing boundaries always worked: once the integrity of a
human
being is successfully broken, he or she is trapped in the act and looks to his
or her perpetrator, who has
become master by rendering the other slave, for
future guidance.

In 1940 the luck of the misanthrope mime ran out. Meyerhold became a
victim of
Stalin’s purges. This death was very different from Diaghilev’s
macabre-romantic ending in Venice but just as
symbolic.

CONCLUSION: REALITY BEYOND MODERN MADNESS

Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), the most important Russian playwright and
novelist of the 20th century, was heir at
once to Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
As his father taught at the Theological Academy, both grandfathers being
priests,
he lived and died oblivious to Bolshevik ideology. His successful
but controversial 1926 play about the civil war
so pleased Stalin that he was
spared persecution and was able to die peacefully in 1940.
From 1928 up to his death Bulgakov was working on Master and
Margarita, his most important work, the key
novel of Communist Russia,
drawing in particular upon Gogol’s Dead Souls and Goethe’s Faust,
endlessly revisiting every sentence of the manuscript with the help of his
wife, as he was going blind, knowing
that the work was unpublishable.
Surprisingly, in 1965 his wife managed to convince the authorities to
publish
it, with minimal omissions. The 150,000 copies of the literary
journal in which it appeared were sold out within
hours, and people talked
about nothing else for weeks. It was immediately translated into English,
and in May
1968 the Rolling Stones, inspired by it, composed ‘Sympathy
with the Devil’. It was a stunning analysis of the
trickster (Horvath 2000).
The book aimed at capturing the essence of Bolshevism, its in-depth
alchemic effect, so is does not waste time on
denouncing Communist lies,
the Stalinist purges, or the activities of the secret police. It is about the
materialisation of the devil named Woland, in person, with two assistants, in
plain daylight, in the Moscow of
the 1920s. Given the decade-long impact
of the Bolshevik Revolution on everyday life, they turn out to be among
the
more positive characters of the novel. A central scene takes place in the
circus.
Woland promises to perform ‘black magic’ and ‘revelations’, so
suspense is guaranteed. He enters the arena
wearing a black Venetian-style
half-mask. The performance, however, produces revelations quite different
than
expected, as not only the officials present but the public at large would
be unmasked, eventually physically
rendered nude. The crucial moment of
the scene, and in a way of the entire novel, comes after few genuinely
magical tricks. The trio suddenly ends its hilarity and starts to scrutinise the
public silently, closely
recalling Meyerhold’s Pierrot, but with a radically
different purpose and effect. Bulgakov is not asserting his
own superiority
by provoking and confusing the public; rather, is trying to return Russians
to their senses. The
question Woland asks his assistants is whether the
inhabitants of Moscow have
genuinely changed, as the Communist
propaganda has it, and the answer is so evident that it need not be spelt
out.
Still, the novel has its genuine heroes, the Master and the love of his
life, Margarita. The Master, alter ego of
Bulgakov, is true master of his art;
he knows this, and without the slightest pretence. Yet, because of too much
suffering, he became a broken person, escaping all his commitments, even
Margarita. Thus, according to the final
judgment delivered in the novel, he
‘did not merit the light, only merited peace’ (Bulgakov 2008: 376). This
peace he receives at the very end, when he is reunited with Margarita, and
the two are taken by Woland to their
final resting place, an idyllic home
surrounded by quiet and silence, to be accessed by a stone bridge over a
trickling creek—a stone house with a Venetian-style window, with vines
running up the roof.
The true hero of the novel, however, and in the most classical sense of
ritual contest and victory, is not the
Master but Margarita. She is the one
who has the force to pass all the tests, including a genuine Witch’s
Sabbath,
given by the Devil itself, after which she even manages to ask for the right
reward in the right manner.
Margarita is a figure of practically unlimited
love and grace with only one romantic blemish: she did not have
children.

Béla Hamvas
Béla Hamvas (1897–1968) was a Hungarian essayist and philosopher of
religions. Having mastered seventeen
languages—including Greek, Latin,
Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian and Mandarin Chinese—as well as most
of the
sacred traditions of mankind, he was constrained after 1948 to work
as an unskilled laborer in socialist
industrial plants until he was almost
seventy. His novel Karnevál (Carnival), written between 1948
and 1951,
remained in manuscript until 1985, when it was published with minimal
cuts. Though 1,184 pages long and
in two volumes, the book was sold out
within days and was immediately hailed as the key novel of its time and
place. Like Bulgakov’s work, it is not about Stalinist atrocities but rather a
grotesque overview of the past 100
years through the eyes of three
generations, the title serving as a parable for the modern condition.
 Once life becomes a permanent carnival, the question is the possibility
of returning to normal reality. Hamvas
addressed this Hamletian dilemma
throughout his life, with various degree of success. Arguably the best
answer is
contained in his essay subtitled ‘Demon and Idyll’, part of his last
collection (Hamvas 1992, II: 148–63). The
terms represent ‘two end-points
of the world’ (Ibid.: 154). The idyllic is associated with the child, implying
meaningful order, joyfulness, cheerful simplicity, and a sense of humour. It
recalls Platonic harmony and
measure, the primordial order of the world
that can be forgotten and ignored but never lost (see Ibid.: 11). It
is best
evoked in works of art: paintings by Corot or Raphael, music by Bach or
Mozart, poems by Hölderlin,
Wordsworth or Keats, or A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Recalling Mauss’s
‘gift relations’, it is not what should be
but what is the reference point of our life, and ‘whenever it
appears in a
human being or a work, in a scenery or a sound, everybody knows that this
is where we are really at
home’ (Ibid.). It is different from sentimentality,
which is not the idyll, but its caricature; the idyll is
rather ‘where being,
burning in the ice of the blind and dark fire of creation, is transformed into
a soft and
shining, warm light’ (Ibid.: 158).
At the opposite pole stands the demonic, its characteristics being
impetuousness (it doesn’t feel); having fixed
ideas (it doesn’t think); and
hectic activity (it lacks of serenity). Its single most important feature is
fury:
it desperately wants to destroy the idyll and—most of all—wants to corrupt
the innocent (Ibid.:
154–57). Childlike innocence and demonic fury are
opposite end-points of life, and on this very rare occasion
they do not share
a point of contact (Ibid.: 157).
Between these two opposites there is a threshold, and the guard
controlling it is woman (Ibid.: 159). Only
a woman is capable of trashing
the head of the serpent (Ibid.: 160). But if the demonic forces are not tamed,
they will be unleashed, and this is also connected to women. The
consequence is the ‘tremendous power of the
corrupted woman, stronger
than every knowledge, every moral and every law’ (Ibid.: 160). The
outcome will be a
world infused by the demonic, resulting in a corrupted
existence, with human beings becoming playthings of the
demonic until
they turn around (Ibid.: 161).
  Conclusion
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of
passionate intensity.
—W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

—Alexander Pope

You have lost all faith in anything great; you are doomed, then,
doomed to perish, unless that faith returns,
like a comet from
unknown skies.
—Hölderlin, Hyperion

 
Living in the contemporary world increasingly offers the terrific and ter-
rifying experience of a world turned
upside down. The area where this is
most visible is in the upbringing of children, the heart of European culture,
marked by the Greek connection between child (pais), playing (paidia), and
culture (paideia)
but probably going back much before; ignored completely
in the pseudo-rationalism inaugurated by Descartes and
Kant.
Such experience can be derived from two possible sources. One is
living through a period in which, owing to a
natural disaster or a socio-
political calamity, the very framework of human existence that was
previously taken
for granted suddenly evaporates. It can again be traced to
the deepest accessible layers of European culture, the
poetry of Archilochus
or Homer’s depiction of the Trojan War. The other source is comedy,
especially the clown
act, also traced back to Greece of the 7th-century bc.
Seemingly these two sources could not possibly be more different. One
touches upon the most profound layers of
human existence, which in our
current terminology can be best described as an apocalyptic experience, the
end of
the world as we know it, preserved in cultural and political memory
and revived in solemn communal celebrations,
while the other belongs to a
most superficial and disdained field of human culture, the clown acts of a
circus,
entrusted since time immemorial to itinerant ped-dlers, social
outcasts.
Yet, they also share a theoretically most important common feature:
each captures a liminal situation, and of a
most serious kind, involving not
only the temporary suspension of aspects in the stable framework of human
existence but also the sudden elimination of all. In the first case, this is real
and concrete; in the second, it
is a mere game. Still, it is in the nature of
liminality that reality and dream, anguishing experience and
playful fan-
tasy, can transmogrify into one another.
When real-world large-scale liminality, the most intensive participatory
human
experience, and the fleeting level of an ambulant mime touch upon
each other, something can come into being which
should never have
happened. Plato called this non-being; in contemporary terminology it
could be called
‘permanent liminality’. In ‘permanent liminality’ one
experiences at the same time the exhilaration of complete
freedom and the
suffocating feeling of being caught in a trap that is impossible to escape.

The contemporary thinker who did most in capturing this experience and
explaining its source is Michel Foucault,
most importantly with his striking
metaphor of the Panopticon: a machinery of perfect visibility as a
technological instrument for realising a utopian social order. Yet Foucault,
just like the other best analysts of
modernity—like Weber, Tocqueville,
Elias, Voegelin, Borkenau, Koselleck and Mumford—focused on only one
aspect of
the modern adynaton experience of permanent liminality, its
austere, disciplinarian, puritan side. He
failed to realise something
absolutely trivial and seemingly senseless yet carrying an extremely
profound and
most harrowing meaning: that the Panopticon has a spatial
structure identical to that of a circus.
The circus is also circular, organised around the same principle of full
visibility. It has a centre as well, the
clown, who focuses attention on
himself; a centre that is just as elusive, transforming itself into the void and
zero that, according to Claude Lefort, is at the very heart of modern
democratic power (Horvath 2013, Wydra
2007). This zero becomes visible,
or almost so, at the moment when the clown, having successfully
galvanised
every eye upon himself, suddenly bends down, thrusting
upwards his buttock. This is the moment when the
experience of a world
turned upside down becomes fixated, and the trap snaps—in a most elusive
and innocuous
manner.
The third, vital aspect of modern permanent liminality, complementing
the panopticon-circus, concerns the media.
The term ‘media’ literally means
‘in between’ and is actually in between everything, being the liminal centre
of
our world, insinuating itself, through technology, into every aspect of
human existence, from the highest and
broadest to the most minute and
intimate: no longer just the living room of every house, but every room
there,
even every bed, proceeding from this liminal point of entry to
unmake and reproduce, ‘defuse’ and ‘refuse’ every
single aspect of human
existence: every social bond, every human feature, every move we make,
every moment of
thinking and imagining, every breath we take. The media
bring home, at the same time, the Panopticon and the
circus, thus
alchemically fusing the two into an indissoluble mix. Through the media,
visions of 18th- and
19th-century painters became everyday reality: the
clown became politician, and politicians became clowns.

In the seductive but radically misleading criticism propagated by the

‘Frank-furt school’, the media were seen as
instruments of capitalism. Like
every characteristic half-truth of ‘critical
theory’, this is not completely
wrong; but the extent to which it misses the point becomes visible only by
exposing the limitations of Habermas’s approach to the ‘public sphere’. The
market and the media rely upon each
other, but neither are final causes of
power. Given the circularity of both media and money, one might be
tempted
to stay at the level of a vortex-like infinite circular movement, but
this would be a grave error. A critique of
the market and money can serve to
turn attention away from the most basic source of our current condition.
Modern
permanent liminality does have an ultimate source and moving
force, which is the idea of the public
as the ultimate reference point by
which and through which everything must be justified: something which is
most
abstract (it never stops at anything concrete, existential and personal,
moving always ‘beyond’) and yet most
matter of fact (it does not leave
intact any segment of human life, any community bond or personal feeling,
deriving its impetus by extreme factual stories taken out of context, with the
most absurd idiosyncrasy being
transmogrified into a positive or negative
model); promoting the joint rule of infinity and the nulla
(zero). It presumes
an absolute prerogative to refer everything to itself, whether through the
power of money,
the power of votes, or the power of pushing a button on
the computer. It is through such prerogative powers
assigned to ‘the public’
that the clown who pushes us to the utmost levels of hilarity on the sofas or
beds in
our homes through his bottom suddenly stands up, turns around,
points the finger at you and puts you into jail,
the assembly line, a
transparent office or a camp; at first only in imagination and then in
falsified reality.
The public sphere is not only the realm of discursive
freedom and self-abandon as fun; the modus operandi of a
fully transparent
and homogenous public arena is terror.
Since the Enlightenment, codified through the various stages of
modernism, the self-understanding of the ‘West’
has become fixated on the
idea of progress: technology, science, industry and economic growth are
supposed to
lead us into a bright future, luring us to give up care over our
concrete existence, abusing the benevolence and
magnanimity that has been
the most basic feature of Europeans since time immemorial. The ideology
of progress,
however, instead provided a fast track for regressing into chaos
and the void, by tearing away all layers of the
social tissue protecting
meaning, thrusting human beings naked into the ‘public arena’,
transforming social life
into institutionalised hypocrisy and human persons
into mere masks, time and again culminating in world-wide
warfare and
totalitarian political systems. The media are instruments of the
technologisation that is
transforming human activities and social life into
ever smaller and more meaningless fragments that can then be
integrated,
according to the principle of division of labour so cherished by Durkheim,
into faceless automatisms.
Modern permanent liminality endlessly oscillates
between the ‘collective effervescence’ of infinite freedom,
derived from the
destruction of social bonds, and resignation to the ensuing austerity
measures. As the best thinker-novelists of the 20th century—like Thomas
Mann, Karen Blixen,
Mikhail Bulgakov and Béla Hamvas—realised, the
modern world increasingly approaches the frightening nightmare of
a
permanent apocalyptic carnival.
Yet as they also realised at the same time, along with Shakespeare and
Plato, all this, after all and
fortunately, does not matter that much. Time
might be out of joint again, as recurrently happens, and we as
humans can
indeed do very little on our own to fix it. But we are not on our own. There
is a more basic, indeed
fundamental type of evidence available to us at the
limit of being human, beyond the chimera of infinite progress
and the
terrorising nightmare of regression into the void. This is our awareness of
Divine Love, the ultimate
human experience: a love that is omnipresent,
omnipotent and indestructible. Nietzsche also came close to
capturing such
evidence in The Birth of Tragedy, as recognised by Kerényi, who placed the
phrase
‘indestructible life’ into the title of his magnum opus on Dionysos;
yet both remained too modern to realise
that, behind the indestructible
forces of life, there is Divine Love. Poets like Blake, Hölderlin, Auden and
Ted
Hughes went further.
We, social theorists and scholars, must follow them if we do not want to
be cast out, since ultimately ‘the
readiness is all’.
Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. For further details, see Szakolczai (2003; 2013).

2. See Chapter 1.
About this, see in particular Calasso (2010); the seventh volume of Roberto Calasso
3.
extraordinary
project.
Even the book title is influenced by a chapter title in Starobinski: ‘Being blown off in front o
4.
lightness, or the triumph of the clown’.
This is the case of Weber’s ignoring of the phenomenon of imitation, here being too close
5.
influenced by
neo-Kantian dogmas.
See Elias, who offers a few related comments in his discussion of psychologisation, but not a fu
6.
treatment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

It is to be noted that in the Öffentlichkeit article in the Geschichliche Grund-begriffe

projec
1. edited by Koselleck, Habermas’s work is referred to only once or twice, exclusively
connection with the rise of the coffeehouse culture.
It should be added that during the September 1989 conference, organised for the Englis
2. publication of
the book, Habermas still claimed that ‘I am the last Marxist’ (Habermas 199
469).
Actually, given that Gadamer’s work was published only in 1960, whereas Habermas defende
his
Habilitation in the late 1950s (Müller-Doohm 2008: 27; Salvatore 2007: 45), Haberma
3.
evidently
inserted the reference only after the thesis was already completed and defended, an
failed to alter the
argument in any way.
The rarity of theatrical practice is linked to a very specific kind of performance: ‘disenchanted
4.
‘spectatorised’ forms of shamanism, originating in Central Asia.
5. The diagnosis of the public sphere offered above, from the perspective of its ignoring the givin
up of
identity as the ‘entry’ to the public ‘arena’, is not written in support of a ‘politics o
 identity’.
Quite the contrary; the ‘cosmopolitanism’ implied in the public sphere, and the variou
‘identities’
affirmed by the ‘politics of identity’, are rather each other’s schismogenic double
This is best seen
in the fact that current identity-based movements all, as proponents of th
‘public sphere’, assume the
same ‘victim position’ as a starting point.
6. On permanent liminality, see Szakolczai (2009: 215–26), also Griffin (2007).
See Giesen (2006), following Luckmann; see also Agnes Horvath’s
contrast between charism
7.
and the trickster.
Here Giesen returns to Weber’s concern with ‘routinisation’ (Veralltäglichung). However, th
ignores the point that the permanence of charisma lies at the level of personality; it is not
continuous performance. This point is elaborated in the classical theology of grace by Aquina
8.
as
‘habitus’, which has its own sociological importance, as Bourdieu’s use of the term
considered by
Alexander and Burke as belonging to the ‘performative turn’, can ultimately to b
traced, through hints
in Elias and Weber, back to Aquinas.
This helps to reconsider the limitations of Durkheim’s approach, and the problem which i
universalisation poses, already noticed by Mauss, who—completing the circle—returned to gi
9.
relations, a
term clearly associated with Weber’s concern with charisma as a ‘gift of grace’, a
foundational.
10. For further details, see Szakolczai (2007b).
11. Note that even Alexander evokes Nietzsche on the last page of his lead-off chapter.
12. This is the famous spot where Plato uses the term parrhesia.
Plato had a good knowledge of the Sophronic mime; he was frequently accused of being a
13. imitator of
Sophron and his dialogues had mimic elements. The Euthydemos was eve
considered a mime play. See
Reich (1903: 361–2, 380–89, 400–5).
On Pizzorno’s theoretisation of identify formation, see especially Pizzorno (1986, 1991, 200
14.
2007). On
collective identity, see also Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995).
The Musée du Quay Branly in Paris contains a particularly full collection of masks from all ov
15.
the world.
The terms is absent from the index of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, and—apart from very fe
casual
references, mostly in the context of various book reviews—is also absent from the thre
16.
volume French
edition of Mauss’s complete works. The reason might be that Mauss was ver
critical of the work of
Frobenius, so he simply did not want to enter the discussion on the mask
17. Michelangelo is also reputed to have sculpted in this manner.
Pizzorno here all but advances Foucault’s later arguments about the gaze, both in The Birth o
18.
Clinic and Discipline and Punish.
On closed space and total institutions, see Weber (monastery, sects); Foucault (asylum, hospita
19. prison); Elias (court society); Voegelin (Gnostic and heretic sects); Mumford (megamachin
monasteries);
or Goffman (asylum).
This idea might have been from Baudelaire, whom Nietzsche intensively read around this tim
20.
whereas
Baudelaire took it from de Maistre.
This point might be connected to Girard’s on the sacrificial mechanism, linking there bo
21.
masked dances
and trickster figures; but this is an argument that cannot be pursued here.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
 This argument is proposed by James Porter, against the idea of a radical break in Nietzsche
1.
thinking
with Birth of Tragedy (Porter 2000).
On his lectures entitled ‘On the Future of Our Educational Institutions’, see Young (2010: 142
2.
7).
Julian Young’s recent biography makes a very strong case against the idea of purely organ
3.
illness (see
Young 2010: 559–62).
4. For more details, see Szakolczai (2007b).
5. For more details, see Szakolczai (1998: 61–70).
6. The image of Prometheus was selected by Nietzsche for the title page of the first edition.
7. See Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Archilochus).
Already in a series of 1871 lectures Nietzsche argued that studying the classics is literall
8.
identical
with a study of modernity (Porter 2000: 175).
Nietzsche’s interest in such ‘oceanic feeling’ is a legacy of his reading of Hölderlin (Youn
2010: 44),
and so probably Hölderlin rendered him sensitive to Wagner. This might be a reaso
9. why there is
strikingly little reference to Hölderlin in his late work and correspondence—
perhaps an unconscious
effort to avoid Hölderlin’s fate, which, however, yielded the opposi
result.
About this, see in particular his ‘Homer’s Competition’, part of the ‘Five Prefaces to Fiv
10.
Unwritten
Books’ of 1872 (Young 2010: 139).
About this, see Welsford (1968). Welsford also noted that the fool was occasionally killed as
11.
scapegoat
(see also Starobinski 1970: 113).

NOTES FOR CHAPTER 3

I am most grateful to Stephen Mennell for sending me a pdf file containing a good selection o
1.
the more
legible of these notes.
See pp. 1B and 2B; pdf pp. 3–7. As the pdf file contains numerous drafts having the same pag
2.
number, I
give both numbers.
3. See p. 2B, pdf p. 6.
4. See p. 2B, pdf p. 4; p. 9B, pdf p. 26; p. 10B, pdf p. 27.
5. See p. 2B, pdf p. 5.
6. See pp. 2B–3B, pdf pp. 6–7.
7. See p. 10B, pdf p. 27.
The passage of Philebus (48B) also contains crucial methodological remarks about the difficul
8. of
analysing the proper mixture of our feelings when watching comedy, which might hav
influenced Elias.
The concern with laughter would return in a late masterpiece, often considered his mo
9.
characteristic
work, The Man Who Laughs.
The parallels are particularly strong here with Nietzsche, who claimed that a proper analysis o
10.
theatre
would require an ‘artistic Socrates’ (Nietzsche 1967a: 91–3).
11. See Kerényi (1991); for more details, see Szakolczai (2007a: 239–42).
12. Baudelaire himself refers to schizophrenia (see 1972: 159).
 13. Trickster figures are often masters of communication; see, for example, Hermes, the Gree
trickster
deity, god of commerce, but also a thief; god of communication (see hermeneutics), b
also a liar.
14. The trickster by the Greeks was also called mechaniota.
15. For further details, see Szakolczai (2007a: 222–3, 227–31).
Interestingly enough, Baudelaire also wrote an essay on puppets, but focusing on children
16. experiences
of intimacy and of growing up; while Bergson starts his second chapter b
explicitly mentioning
children’s toys.
The etymology and semantics of both the Hungarian and Greek terms are of particular relevanc
here. In
Hungarian, ‘absurd’ is képtelen, literally ‘image-les’, meaning something so much ou
17. of touch
with reality that it cannot even be captured in an image. The equivalent Greek term
adynaton,
literally ‘power-les’, discussed before. The two definitions of the absurd thu
establish an illuminating
affinity between image and power.
See in particular the impact of Hyperion on The Birth of Tragedy (Babich 2006: 124, 144
18.
Young 2010: 44–6).
Hölderlin is thus revealed as the source for ‘backward inference’,
thus fountainhead of th
19.
genealogical method.
This is strikingly confirmed by recent archaeology, which demonstrated that Athens was th
20. only major
Mycenaean city that avoided destruction by the ‘Sea People’ around 1200 b
identified with the ‘Trojan
War’ (Drews 1993).
‘bei ihnen nur so unvollkommen alles ist, weil sie nichts Reines unverdorben, nichts Heilige
21.
unbetastet
lassen’ (Hölderlin 1994b, II: 170–1).
22. This will be discussed in Chapters 8 and 10.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. About this, see in particular Muir (1997: 8).

In fact, the Hippodrome became so much a basic symbol of the Byzantium in the eyes of th
outside world
that when the Kiev cathedral was decorated with imperial symbols, suc
2.
decoration included, in a prime
place, the mimes of the Hippodrome, granting us some preciou
images about such spectacles (see Ivanov
1992: 131).
3. I thank Przemyslaw Marciniak for allowing me to consult his article before publication.
Once the organisation of theatrical guilds decayed, the terminology became imprecise, wit
mimos
standing more for actor than jester, while gelotopoios more for jester than acto
4. paigniotés meaning mime as jester, thymelikoi a more respectable dancer, while
skenikos being
more general term, sometimes seemingly meaning a more respectable type of mime,
like th
acrobat (Marciniak 2013).
See for example Katakalon Kekaumenos, author of Strategikon, a kind of guide to the Byzantin
5. world, who ‘displays something between repugnance about and utter hatred of the mimes’,
Marciniak
(2013).
6. See IPA 2009/1, in particular Horvath (2009), Szakolczai (2009c), and Thomassen (2009).
See Latour (2001), Wydra (2011), and IPA 2011/1, in particular Szakolczai and Thomasse
7.
(2011).
 8. See Radin (1972); also Horvath (2008, 2013).
9. On this act being the ‘magical dimension’ of folly, see Willeford (1969: 6).
For these reasons the term ‘schismatic identity’ is preferred to ‘hybridity’ (on the ‘hybrid’ natu
10.
of
Byzantine identity, see Cameron 2006: 15–9).
Concerning‘strategification’ or ‘strategic games’, see Foucault (1982; see also Szakolczai 200
11.
211–4).
This is brought out for contemporary Istanbul in a 2005 film by Fatih Akın, Crossing th
12.
Bridge: The
Sound of Istanbul.
13. Other Icons is full of such images dating to the 12th century.
14. It is in this sense that St. Francis of Assisi considered himself a ‘jester of God’ (giullaro di
Dio
Thus, in his 1996 article John Jory still claimed that the pantomime emerged in Greece, back t
the 4th
and 3rd centuries bc and was introduced into Rome in the second century bc (Jory 199
15. 2; note also his
claim on p. 5 that no systematic study exists of Roman mime and pantomime
while in his otherwise
excellent article on Choricius, T.D. Barnes claims that the pantomim
only emerged in the 2nd century AD
(Barnes 1996: 170).
Dictatorship in Rome was a temporary institution, and the theoretical significance of i
16. permanentisation can be understood with the help of liminality, through the coincidence of suc
permanentisation of the liminal with a significant change in theatrical practice.
17. Here I’ll rely on the excellent analysis of Jacobs (1978).
In Hungarian ‘graceless’ is literally ‘cruel’ (kegyetlen), illuminating how in Rome, over tim
18. ritual performances lost their grace and became its opposite, cruel, in particular throug
gladiator
games.
It is not accidental that the first recorded theatrical event, Phrynichus’s Fall Of Miletus,
19.
connected to 494, the Persian crushing of the uprising in Miletus.
See Segal (1987), preface to the 2nd edition. This innovation would be given a further twist
the very
first ‘humanist’ comedy to be produced in Europe, in the late 14th century, by Vergeri
20.
who would invent
the figure of the ‘evil servant’, to be perfected by Shakespeare, in the figu
of Iago.
In this sense Roman pantomime is a strict relative of gladiator games, with their cruelty, just a
sex
and violence belong together in action movies, pushed to its extreme in pornography an
21.
horror—which can
also have its parody, see the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a kind of ‘ultimat
film.
There was no philosophical education in Byzantium, only the training of civil servan
22. (Ierodiakonou
2002: 4). The parallel with the case of China was realised by Weber’s use of th
word ‘literati’ for the
Confucian education of bureaucrats.
23. See also Molloy (1996: 21).
Already Virgil exaggerated with alliteration, just as with the great detail in which he depicte
24.
violence
and cruelty.
25. See also Padgett (2003).
For contrasting positions, see the Introductions to the English and Hungarian editions, the latt
26.
opting
for full seriousness, the former being more skeptical about it.
27. Concerning Plato’s real position on dancing, see Laws (813C–16D).
This argument is rejected as fallacy by the greatest modern mime, Marcel Marceau: instead o
28.
imitating
speech, dance should develop its own qualities (Royce 1977: 193–4).
 29. The name means ‘golden mouth’; and Libanius is reputed to have said in his death bed that S
John
Chrysostom was the most talented of all his students.
This idea reached its ultimate development already under Emperor Elagabalus (218–22), wh
ordered that
all sexual acts performed on stage must be real and not simulated. The significanc
30.
of Elagabalus for
theatre was emphasised by one of the main figures of modern theatre, Anton
Artaud (Jacobs 1981).
The term ‘homo byzantinus’ is misleading in so far as it assumed a ‘singular essenc
underlying the
Byzantine world, a term not applicable for a schismogenic society, which has n
31.
single ‘essence’; yet it
is useful in capturing features of the intelligentsia. My analysis here
strongly influenced by the
classical analysis of Konrád and Szelényi (1979).
For crucial analogies with the 20th century, see the ideas of Hankiss (1983) about th
32. infantilising
impact of Communism. About Hankiss and Szelényi, see Szakolczai and Wyd
(2006).
This was discovered by Heidegger in his dissertation, leading him to the claim that the enti
33.
history of
Western metaphysics is a commentary on a few passages from Aristotle.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Similar claims would be repeated by Enlightenment, liberal and socialist figures, like Ada
1.
Smith,
Jean-Baptiste Say, or Claude Henri de Saint-Simon.
About Chrysoloras being interested in Hermogenes, not in Plato or
Aristotle, see Monfasa
2.
(2004, I: 13).
This is the kind of distortion characterising Gnostic readings of Plato in the later Hellenist
3. period,
which would have a fundamental impact on Neo-platonic misreading that persiste
through the various
renaissances of Gnosticism up to the present.
Thus the term ‘hypothesis’, so central to neo-Kantian and neo-positivistic methodology, revea
4.
itself as
being of sophistic origin and Byzantine colouring.
He is not to be confused with Giovanni Conversini, a major associate of Petrarch, who als
5. spent some
time in Ravenna, and with whom for centuries he was regularly confused—
confusion that might have been
instrumental in promoting Conversini’s career.
It is another recurrent aspect of the life of trickster figures that they not only generate muc
suffering around themselves, from which they then try to develop, through self-pity, emotion
6. and social
capital, but their lives often indeed are full of suffering; thus, all of Conversini
children died
before him, and especially the loss of his two children from his Udine relationshi
in their early
teens, due to a plague epidemics, was a terrible blow.
The poem would receive eloquent defence from Guarino, as a result of which Panormita woul
7. receive in
1432 from Emperor Sigismund the title laurel crown as a poet (de Panizza Lorc
1968: 134, fn.47).
The kind of education he provided can be intimated by his predicating about the soundness
the moral
judgment of Terence (Grund 2005: ix), meaning that bad pimps were always punishe
8.
in his comedies; but
ignoring the question why pimps are represented at all, not to mention the
prominence.
9. In Italian Plato’s Symposium is (mis)translated as convitto, until today.
10. The boarding school there would be called La Gioiosa (‘The Joyful House’) (Ciccolella 200
 139).
Giulio Bertoni thought it opportune to devote an entire book to refute this misconceptio
11. According to
him Guarino was not the establisher, rather the animator of humanism at the cou
in Ferrara (Bertoni
1921: v), meaning that he invested it with a certain kind of Byzantine spirit.
About the latter points, see Thomson (1976: 175–6). According to him, Guarino had little actu
12. knowledge
of Plato and probably only compiled the list of Plato’s works from secondar
sources.
13. See Makarenko’s famous pedagogical poem.
The fascination with Hercules was a recurrent theme in the Renaissance, representing
14.
particular
combination of civic heroism and homoeroticism (see Simons 2008).
For the original Latin and a Hungarian translation, se
15.
http://mek.niif.hu/04200/04297/04297.htm#14; accessed 4 November 2011.
16. This concept will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6.
About the ‘severe’ way in which the Venetian patricians treated the earlier, not performed play
17.
of
Polenton (1419), see Marsh (1994: 420–1).
18. Alberti also spent time in Ferrara (Colantuono 2010: 203).
Note that Alberti was in a particularly difficult personal situation when he composed h
19.
comedy, thus in
a proper state for the lure of Guarino (Perosa 1965: 22).
20. Frulovisi’s misogyny is the schismogenic counterpart to the perspective of Poliscena or
Chrysi
On the significance of the Ferrara court for miniature painting in the period 1441–1505 se
21.
Torrido
(2003: 105).
Details about Pisanello’s life are also scarce and enigmatic; he came back from Rome with
22. ‘daughter’,
but there was no trace of a mother, and, while taking care of her, he hardly ever live
with her (Puppi
1996: 29–34).
This is the reason why the study of optics became so fundamental,
indeed foundational
23. modern philosophy and science, as anticipated by the optical experiments of
Alberti in Rome
the 1430s.
Particularly important in this respect is the famous ‘Memory Theatre’ of Giulio Camillo, built
24. the
early 16th century in Venice (Yates 1976: 135–72), thus contemporaneous with the rise o
theatre there.
This explains the fact that Ferrara also championed instrumental music, in contrast to th
25.
medieval and
Platonic emphasis on human singing (Kemp 1976: 357–7).
26. One might wonder whether Trebizond’s mistranslation of Laws 656C had an impact here.
As Guarino acted as translator in the proceedings (Lockwood 2009: 34), one can imagine th
27.
mess he must
have created.
For a claim about the arrival of Byzantine mimes in Venice, partly through the mediation
Cyprus, see
Reich (1903: 332, 352, 679–80). Reich’s work has been much criticised, but suc
28.
arguments partly remained
unarticulated and partly they are instances of hyper-criticism, so h
work remains fundamental.
29. See Szakolczai (2011b), based on ideas from Elias and Foucault.
30. It is for such a situation that Bateson introduced the concept ‘complementary schismogenesis’.
Strohm evokes a 1449 contract between a student of Avignon and a minstrel, Mosse of Lisbo
31.
explicitly
stipulating the teaching of popular songs (Strohm 1993: 347–8).
32. Pantomime dancers in antiquity similarly marked their necks, wrists and ankles (Webb 2005: 6
 About this, see in particular the famed Arcetri frescoes of the Pollaiuolos (Fulchignoni 1990: 4
33. Szakolczai 2007a: 231–2). The connection with Ferrara might have been established throug
Maso
Finiguerra, probable teacher of Antonio Pollaiuolo, who spent time in Ferrara.
34. This aspect of the moresca is also emphasised by Mignatti (2007: 144).
35. The analysis here follows the spirit of Foucault’s ideas on the ‘repressive hypothesis’.
It should be noted that in 1457–1458 Cornazzano had a conversion experience, after which h
36. completely
repudiated both his comedy and his work about dance and would compose religiou
writings and poems
imitating Petrarch (Stäuble 1968).
Gelosi would be also the name of the most famous commedia dell’arte company of the 16t
37.
century.
See also the two ‘Giosta dell’Amore’ that took place in 1478 and 1480 in Ferrara, representin
38. another
mixed or liminal genre, an intermediate type of spectacle between the sacred and th
profane (Lockwood
1986: 418–9).
This is helped by the mechanical reproduction of images of moresca dancers and buffoons. Se
in
particular the images of the Buffoon malin, danse de la bague and Fool dancing the moresc
39. both engraved by Israhel van Meckenem (1440/5–1503), one of the most famous ear
engravers (Povoledo
1975: 261). Salome’s dance in front of Herod was also a favourite theme o
van Meckenem.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

On the role of such games in keeping the Roman populace quiet and satisfied, see Augu
1.
(1970).
Strictly speaking, it is not possible to talk about ‘theatricality’ in a period where theatre did n
2. exist. However, in lack of a better word, and given the widespread use in the literature, the ter
will
be retained.
See in particular the famous 1496 painting of Gentile Bellini,
Procession in the Piazza Sa
Marco, which not only gives a perfect visual representation of such
events but is ‘traditional
3. regarded as an almost archaeological record of how the square looked at the
end of the fifteen
century’ (Fenlon 2007: 19, 91–2), together with Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 1500 woodcut
View
Venice.
4. Concerning the sociology of reputation, see Pizzorno (2007, ch. 5–6).
He was the first person to have come into possession of the new translation of Plato’s Republi
5.
while Guarino dedicated his translation of Plutarch’s Themistocles to him (King 1986: 437).
The Accademia Pontiniano was founded in Naples by Panormita and was later transferred t
Rome by Pomponio
(Grund 2005: xiv). Pomponio would be imprisoned in Venice in 146
6.
charged with sodomy, escaping only to
face another trial in Rome, in the context of th
dissolution of his academy by Pope Paul II.
Thus perhaps Venice was so much concerned about the hubris of individuals that it failed t
notice how
the entire city became close to being a case of collective hubris. This point
7.
explicitly made in the
context of procedures used to ward off pestilence by Fenlon (2007: 62–
and Muir (1981: 250).
8. Autonomy, autarchy and freedom (eleuthereia) were the three central values of Greek city-state
 in
antiquity.
Voltaire’s questioning of the significance of this battle is thus not just plain wrong b
9.
perplexing
concerning its intentions.
On the international dimension of buffoons, connecting them to itinerant mimes and eve
10. gypsies, a number
of important new studies exist; see Henke (2002), Katritzky (2008
Radulescu (2008).
11. This is challenged by Vianello (2005: 96–7).
12. On these close links, see also Henke (2002: 52).
According to Vianello, Zuan Polo invented plurilingual talk in the 1515 intermission o
13.
Plautus’s
Miles gloriosus (Vianello 2005: 114).
This was particular serious as it was undermining the fidelity demonstrated by peasants for th
14.
city
during the war.
15. See Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani; http://www.treccani.it/biografie/
His coming was also helped by another liminal figure assisting the rebirth of theatre as
‘midwife’,
Andrea Michieli, who was ‘an elder citizen, mediocre poet, failed necromancer, an
16.
declared
Epicurean’—thus, a ‘weak but necessary ring in the chain that link real situations
literary scenarios’
(R. Guarino 1995: 206–8).
On the significance of the printing press for the rise of theatre, see also Gentilcore (2006: 336
17.
Henke
(2002: 52).
Francesco Sansovino would claim, fifty years later, that Cherea invented improvisation on stag
18.
(Marotti-Romei 1991: xxxv).
Increasing consternation, Leo X was son of Lorenzo De’ Medici, Il Magnifico. The puzzle ca
19. be resolved
by realising that his mother was Clarice Orsini (Burke 1978: 178), who was taugh
to ‘dance’ by Domenico
da Piacenza.
On the tight connection between charlatans and inns, and also music, see Gentilcore (2006: 20
20. 1). In this
connection note the semantic links between ‘pub’ and ‘public’, just as the meaning
‘public house’ as a
‘brothel’ in many languages.
Charlatans were often disguised as orators; the famous English charlatan John Taylor eve
21.
‘called his
oratory “true Ciceronian” ’ (Gambaccini 2004: 38, 172).
See the 1710 image about John Taylor ‘operating’ an eye in Florence, and having a Pulcinella a
22.
his
assistant (Gambaccini 2004: 172).
See also a chapter in Gambaccini (2004) titled ‘A Carnival of
Publicity’, just like the title o
23.
Tessari (1980).
A famous Italian charlatan, Giovanni Greci (a name indicating Byzantine origin), called himsel
24. employing the widespread trick of using nicknames (Gentilcore 2006: 20–1, 308), ‘th
cosmopolite’ (Ibid.:
200).
Given the prominence of the cult of John the Baptist in such fairs, this was probably the way
25.
which
some buffoons started to play John, Gianni, or Zanni.
The first actresses appeared in Italy, to be traced to around 1550; the first well-documented cas
26. being
in Mantua, 1566–1588. Outside Italy for a very long time female acting would not b
accepted.
27. Then as now, Strasbourg was a highly liminal place, between Germanic and French/Latin areas
The reason why the first Zanni figures mimicked Bergamask accent was to poke fun on th
28.
number of
immigrants in Venice who came from Bergamo, many of whom worked as porters.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

On the ‘marginalisation of the liminal’ and ‘liminalisation of the marginal’, identified through th
1.
works of Michel Foucault, see Szakolczai (2009: 189–95).
2. I owe this reference to Agnes Horvath.
The discovery of this process was hindered by the fact that the Italian term ‘zanni’, just as ‘lazzi
seems to be plural. Mignatti (2007) demonstrated that ‘Zanni’ developed out of ’Gianni’. O
3. Zanni being
the third which then doubles, see Rizzo (2003: 19). See also St. John’s dance,
Gnostic cultic dance
performed on the eve of his martyrdom on 29 August, which survived in th
Middle Ages (Backman 1952:
14–5, 315).
Apart from the bear, the other character closely identified with the ‘wild man’ was the smi
4.
(Mignatti
2007: 124).
According to Eliade, there is a close association between shamanism and birds; see Mignat
5.
(2007:
163–4).
See the drawing ‘Moresca of the Zanni’ (Mignatti 2007: 145); and also Goethe’s ‘Sorcerer
6.
Apprentice’, a
1797 poem.
Here as in describing other figures, I will use extensively the work of Thelma Niklaus. Thoug
often
derided by academics, this book captures the best qualities of an ‘amateur’ work, in th
original sense
of the term: somebody who does not simply meet a professional obligation b
7.
writing a book but pursues a
deeply personal passion and this way can gain insights that pure
professional academic works often
lack. Understanding the commedia dell’arte requires suc
studies.
Hamvas wrote his monumental Carnival, key novel of its time and place, comparable to Thoma
8.
Mann’s
Magic Mountain or Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, in 1948–1951.
This is based on his Scientia Sacra, a overview of the sacred tradition of mankind, complete
9.
during World War II (Hamvas 1995–1996).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

1. Here Hughes uses Eliade (1989).

2. See in particular the mountebank scene in Volpone (Henke 2008b: 228).
3. See also Reich (1903) on Shakespeare being a ‘mimograph’.
4. For details, see Szakolczai (2007c).
5. TNS will be the abbreviation used for The Norton Shakespeare (Greenblatt 1997).
Oscar Campbell’s much neglected studies of 1925–1932 focused on the commedia dell’ar
6.
elements in these
early Shakespearean comedies (Henke 2008b: 229).
This was not realised by Girard, who maintains the simply absurd position that RJ is just
7. much
an unmasking of romantic love as TGV; just as untenable as his interpretation of th
Bacchae of Euripides, and identifies an unfortunate puritanical streak in Girard’s work.
8. Thus Athens became the scenery of MND.
Shakespeare lacked university education, singled out by Robert Greene in his ‘upstart crow
9.
attack.
 10. Girard (1991: 5); see also Agnew (1986) on the widespread concern with ‘protean characters’
the
period.
11. 11. See Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.
12. Contemporaries often called the play The Jew of Venice.
It should be noted that the word ‘melancholy’ appears at the very beginning of A Midsumme
13. Night’s
Dream (I.i.14), as a general state of the population that should therefore be ‘stirred’
‘merriment’.
We can realise the extreme emphasis on the word by noting that the term ‘motley’ is only use
14. ten times
by Shakespeare in his entire oeuvre; seven out of the ten is in As You Like It, and 6 o
the 7 in
Act II, Scene vii.
‘Vaulting ambition’ would become a central issue in Macbeth (see I.vii.27). Shakespeare als
15.
connects ambition to dreaming.
A search for somebody even unhappier than the protagonist plays a fundamental role in th
16.
preliminaries
of The Thousand and One Nights as well.
17. For details, see Horvath (2007, 2012).
Hughes here goes astray by identifying Othello with the Queen of Hell, which is untenable an
18. far-fetched. According to the logic of Hughes’s own analysis, it is rather Othello who identifie
Desdemona with the Queen of Hell.
19. For an excellent overview of this literature by a social theorist, see Hankiss (1995).
This is close to the interpretation offered by Ann Thompson in the Arden Shakespeare editio
20. according
to which Hamlet gains serenity by recognising that he only has to do what has bee
assigned to him; thus,
that ‘The readiness is all’ (Thompson and Taylor 2006: 136–7).
21. See Welsford (1968) and Yates (1969).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

While being a royal herald was a charge reserved to the nobility, it also implied a threshold
1.
liminal
figure.
2. I’ll use the excellent article of Posner (1977), comparable to Hughes on Shakespeare.
According to Horvath, the box as empty hole represents here the female genital organ (see als
3.
Arasse
2005).
This idea receives further support from the fact that Watteau’s last image, completed just befo
4.
he
died, was a now lost Crucifixion (Posner 1984).
A hint to this is contained in the fact that Giambattista published the Capricci in 1743
(Comerla
1996: 348), the year in which he started to work on the Scherzi (Comerlati 1996: 358; Kno
1984: 442–3), and the same year in which Count
Francesco Algarotti, a friend of Giambattist
5.
gave the first commission to Giandomenico when he was
sixteen years old, instigating h
independent talents (Levey 1994: 125–33). Algarotti would have a
lifelong interest in th
Pulcinella theme.
6. Taste was turning away from his style, with the onset of a new academism, through the classicism
championed by Winckelman and Lessing and represented by the paintings of Anton Meng
Tiepolo’s rival in
the Spanish court. The assessment of Winckelman, a characteristic an
extraordinary misjudgment, is well
worth quoting here: ‘ “Tiepolo does more in a day tha
 Mengs in a week; but Tiepolo is seen and
forgotten, whereas Mengs is immortal” ’ (as in Alpe
and Baxandall 1994: ix).
7. See his famous 17th letter, written on 16 February 1759.
This expression is mirrored by that of Europa in ‘The Rape of Europa’ paintings, anoth
8. recurrent theme
of Tiepolo, comparable to Shakespeare’s pre-occupation with rape. I owe th
observation to Agnes
Horvath.
9. For further details, see Szakolczai (2009c).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 11

The modern artist most closely resembling Wagner is Madonna, reflecting the manifo
1.
‘Dionysian’ aspects
of rock music.
The method is the same as that followed by Mauss in his 1924 sociological essay on Bolshevis
2.
(Mauss
1992).
The problems with the translation of this passage are quite revealing. Wagner alleges
difference
between ‘most receptive’ and ‘most undemanding’; however, the two can easily mea
3. —and for the ‘commedic’
actually do mean—the same thing. So the translator had to invert th
serial order and insert the term
‘perceptive’, not present in the original text, in order to mak
‘sense’ of Wagner, thus distorting the
original meaning.
4. On the presence of the carnivalesque in his early works, see Berry (2006: 209).
5. Concerning Bakunin’s significance, see in particular Voegelin (1999: 251–302).
The revolutionaries, not having the minimal sense of humour, failed to realise that this even
6.
took place
on April Fool’s Day.
See Caldwell’s excellent analysis in a section entitled ‘How to End the World? The Ring of th
7.
Nibelung’ (2010: 107ff).
8. The expression is Tarde’s; for further details, see Latour and Lépinay (2009); Horvath (2013).
In a typical piece of sophistry, Derrida would argue that there was no question of a crime, on
9. the
memory of a crime never committed (Storey 1985: 260). What really matters, however,
the effect
mechanism investing insinuation.
Perhaps such ‘Lu’-mania was anticipated by Paul Rée when he started to call Lou Salome ‘Lu
10.
(Young 2010:
343–4).
Just around 1900, in full fin-de-siècle decadence and Wagnerism, Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde an
Richard
Strauss would each resurrect this scene of Salome dancing in front of Herod with th
head of the Baptist,
rendering it a particularly striking symbol of high modernism, culminatin
in the naked Salome kissing,
at length on the mouth, the severed head of the Baptist—a genuin
‘kiss of death’; an idea going back to
Sappho, and taken up as a central theme in the poetry o
11.
Michelangelo (see Wind 1958: 161–2). Picasso’s
1905 ‘Salome’ drawing captures th
irresistible, but clearly vicious
dynamism (see Starobinski 1970: 42–3). One hardly dares
observe that Lou Salomé, by her very name,
advanced not only ‘Lu’ but ‘Salome’ as well; an
in her most famous photo she rides, with whips in hands,
a cart driven by Nietzsche and Pa
Rée (Young 2010: 342–3).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 12

Denmark and Russia were the countries in Europe where the commedia dell’arte tradition staye
1.
alive even
at the end of the 19th century (Thurman 1984: 210).
2. The phrase ‘astonish me!’ would remain his trademark (see Davis 2010: 21).
About this, see the recently defended PhD thesis of Cesare Silla at the Catholic University o
3.
Milan.
The character of the phenomenon is captured in section titles by Décoret-Ahiha’s excellent boo
4.
like
‘the fury of dancing’ and ‘the devil in body’.
Until 1938 Nijinsky was in Kreuzlingen under the care of Ludwig Binswanger, the same doct
5.
who also
treated Nietzsche and Aby Warburg.
6. Franz Kafka wrote his Metamorphosis in 1912, first published in 1915.
7. The chapter on Meyerhold was written by John Swan.
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Name Index

Note: Nietzsche, Plato, Shakespeare and Tiepolo are to be found in the Subject Index

A
Achilles Tatius 109, 111
Adorno, T. 15
Agamben, G. 21
Agnew, J.-C. 2–3, 4, 199, 213, 215, 271, 308
Akin, F. 302
Alberti, Leon Battista 112, 126, 134, 141, 144, 146, 152, 224, 304, 305
Alexander the Great 108
Alexander, J. 6, 25–7, 29, 300
Alexios I Komnenos (Emperor) 88
Algarotti, Francesco 309
Allegri, L. 71
Alpers, S. 236, 238, 239, 240
Amato, E. 113, 117
Anderson, G. 89, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120
Andreini family 200
Andreini, Francesco 206
Andreini, Isabella 215
Andrews, R. 178, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207
Andronikos III Palaiologos (emperor) 92
Anna Komnena 88
Anne (Queen) 81
Anthony, St. 150
Apelles 108, 149, 239
Apollonio, Mario 141, 191, 192
Apollonius of Tyana 106
Aragon, Camilla of 162
Arasse, D. 308
Arcangeli, A. 152, 164
Archilochus 44–5, 47, 94, 295
Arethas 118
Argyropoulos, John 128
Aristophanes 51–2, 141, 230
Aristotle 20, 54, 106, 112, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 129, 145, 159, 162, 163, 168, 173, 199, 230,
303, 304
Arnason, J. 5, 74
Artaud, A. 303
Astruc, G. 281, 282
Auden, W.H. 298
Auerbach, E. 17
Auguet, R. 305
Augustine, St. 104, 126, 192
Augustus 96, 100, 103
Austin, J. 25

B
Babich, B. 67
Bach, J.S. 293
Backman, E.L. 192, 307
Badiou, A. 262
Bakhtin, M. 201
Bakst, L. 277, 281, 284
Bakunin, M. 267, 268, 269
Baldwyn, B. 77, 94, 120
Balsamon 91
Banville, T. 259, 270
Barasch, F. 215, 216
Barbari, Jacopo de’ 306
Barbaro, Ermolao the Older 172
Barbaro, Ermolao the Younger 172
Barbaro, Francesco 133, 171
Barlaam of Seminara 126
Barnes, T.D. 117
Baron, H. 123
Barzizza, Antonio 141
Barzizza, Gasparino 8, 131, 134–5, 141, 145,
171
Basch, S. 97
Basil (of Caesarea), St. 115, 117, 118
Bassi, Pietro Andrea de’ 155
Bate, J. 218
Bateson, G. 2, 4, 60, 77–8, 202, 305
Bathylos 98
Battersby, M. 285
Baudelaire, C. 6, 48, 57–61, 62, 64, 197, 256, 257, 268, 269, 270, 283, 300, 301
Baxandall, M. 123, 140, 146, 149, 152, 236, 238, 239, 240
Bayer, J. 277
Beckson, K. 273
Beethoven, L. 211, 267
Béguin, A. 256, 269
Belcari, Leo 152
Bellini, Gentile 306
Benjamin, W. 57
Benois, A. 277, 278, 280
Bentham, J. xiii
Beolco, Andrea. See Ruzante
Bergson, H. 7, 62–7, 188
Berni, Francesco 193
Berry, M. 267, 268
Berschin, W. 123, 125, 126, 129
Berti, E. 139
Bertoni, G. 304
Bertrand, A. 260
Bessarion 166
Binswanger, L. 310
Blake, W. 60, 275, 298
Blixen, K. 298
Bloch, M. 159
Blok, A. 288, 289
Boas, F. 51
Boccaccio, G. 142, 200
Bonaventure, St. 120, 140
Bonner, C. 116
Borgias (Popes) 174
Borkenau, F. 1, 5, 81, 296
Borowitz, H. 256, 257, 261
Botticelli, S. 152
Bourdieu, P. 300
Bowersock, G.W. 76, 91
Börne, L. 249
Brainard, C. 158, 160, 161
Brand, C.P. 141, 142
Branham, R. 113
Brant, Sebastian 192
Braun, E. 291
Brion, M. 182
Bruni, Leonardo 123, 127, 135, 141, 144, 163
Brunschwig, J. 105, 106, 108, 109
Bruscagli, R. 137, 147, 148
Bulgakov, M. 292, 298
Bull, M. 155
Burckhardt, J. 147, 168, 174
Burgess, G. 4
Burke, K. 25
Burke, P. 25, 71, 93, 129, 130, 188, 191, 300, 306
Burnett, A.P. 45

C
Calasso, R. 236, 241, 242, 243, 269, 299
Calder, W.M. 51
Caldwell, P.C. 266, 267, 268, 309
Calhoun, C. 13, 15
Callot, Jacques 9, 56, 189, 231–3, 235, 236, 241, 260, 279, 287, 289, 290
Calvesi, M. 232
Cameron, A. 302
Camillo, Giulio 305
Cammelli, G. 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130
Campbell, O. 215, 308
Casey, T.J. 249
Castelli, P. 152, 163
Castiglione, Baldassare 184
Cavicchioli, S. 85
Champfleury, J. 269
Champsaur, F. 271
Chaplin, C. 203, 248, 261, 289
Chekhov, A. 292
Cherea (Francesco de’ Nobili) 181–6, 306
Chéret, J. 270
Cheynet, J.-C. 82, 86, 89
Chigi, A. 185
Choricius 112, 116–7
Christ 249
Christiansen, K. 241
Chrysoloras, Manuel 8, 123–31, 133, 134, 135,
139, 140,
141, 144,
151, 157,
171, 172,
173, 304
Chuvin, P. 96
Cicero xi, 138, 306
Ciccolella, L. 124, 125, 129, 130
Cicu, L. 96
Cimador 179
Citati, P. 249, 283, 285
Clayton, J.D. 259, 268, 287, 288, 289, 290
Clubb, L. 148
Cocco, C. 134, 144, 145
Cocteau, J. 280, 283, 285
Colantuono, A. 148
Constantine the Great 80, 82, 83, 93, 104
Constantine V 86
Contarini, Lucrezia 177
Conversini, Giovanni (da Ravenna) 8, 131–3, 134,
135, 141,
144, 146,
171
Conversini, Giovanni (associate of Petrarch) 304
Conversino da Frignano (father of Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna) 8, 132
Cook, A.B. 51
Copeau, J. 209
Cornaro family 185, 186
Cornaro, Alvise 186
Cornaro, Caterina 178, 182, 186, 225
Cornazzano, Antonio 142, 152, 163, 305
Cornford, F.M. 50–2
Corot, C. 293
Cottas, V. 75, 76, 83
Cotterell, A. 39
Couture, T. 261
Couzin, V. 55
Cribiore, R. 115
Croce, B. 180
Crossley, N. 13, 14, 15,
Cuppone, R. 191, 234, 253, 254, 255, 256, 259
Curtius, E.R. 46
Cyriacus of Ancona 156

D
Dandolo, Andrea 167
Dante, Alighieri 56, 161, 184, 211, 217
Davis, M.E. 280, 285
Debureau, C. 259
Debureau, J.-G. 10, 254–9, 261, 288, 289,
291
Decembrio, Angelo 130
Decembrio, Pier Candido 130
Decembrio, Uberto 130
Décoret-Ahiha, A. 280
Delacroix, E. 269
De Maistre, J. 300
Demetrius 114
De Panizza Lorch, M. 143
Derrida, J. 309
Descartes, R. 44, 151, 200, 295
De Staël, Mme. 249, 255
Dewey, J. 28
Diaghilev, S. 10, 248, 275–86, 292
Dickens, C. 147, 256
Dietrich, M. 271
Dilthey, W. 67, 81, 129, 197, 237, 287
Diogenes 212
Doglio, F. 155
Domenico da Piacenza 152–5, 161, 162–3, 164, 291,
306
Dostoevsky, F. 211, 214, 274, 284, 285, 292
Dotoli, G. 57
Duffy, J. 87, 118, 120
Duncan, I. 279
Dunning, E. 103
Dürer, Albrecht 180–1, 192, 210
Durkheim, E. 3, 25, 26–7, 28, 34, 51, 78, 233, 297, 300

E
Eaker, H.L. 132
Ebbesen, S. 121, 122, 124
Einstein, A. 259
Eisenstadt, S.N. 300
Eisenstein, S. 289
Elagabalus 144, 303
Eliade, M. 307
Elias, N. 1, 4, 5, 6, 51, 53–4, 72, 81, 98, 103, 177, 198, 233, 248, 296, 299, 300, 301
Eliot, T.S. 272
Elizabeth (Queen) 81, 213, 253
Empedocles 68
Erasmus (of Rotterdam) 108, 129, 190
Eribon, D. 14
Este family 147, 155
Este, Alberto d’ 148
Este, Ercole I d’ 155
Este, Leonello d’ 145, 146, 148–9
Este, Niccolo III d’ 148
Evreinov, N. 287

F
Fele, G. 85
Fellini, F. 220
Fenlon, I. 166, 167, 168, 176, 215
Fera, V. 123, 124, 126, 128, 129
Ferrone, S. 72, 182, 201, 207
Feuerbach, L. 25, 268
Ficino, Marsilio 128
Figueroa-Dorrego, J. 53
Filelfo 129, 137
Finiguerra, Maso 305
Finlay, R. 168, 169, 170, 176, 177
Fokine, M. 279, 288
Foscari family 225
Foscari, Francesco 167, 177
Foscari, Jacopo 177
Foucault, M. xiii, 1, 4, 5, 14, 22, 30, 41, 43, 57, 72, 81, 189, 197, 198, 253, 296, 300, 302
Fra’ Mariano 185
Fracasso. See Gasparo Sanseverino
Francis of Assisi, St. 212, 302
Franzini, E. 55
Freud, S. 61, 90, 240, 266, 287
Frobenius, L. 34, 300
Frulovisi, Tito Livio de’ 134, 144–7, 171,
304
Fulchignoni, E. 161, 305
Fultner, B. 19
Furlan, Margherita (wife of Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna) 132
Fyrigos, A. 126

G
Gadamer, H.-G. 255, 299
Gallo, F.A. 163, 164
Gambaccini, P. 189, 190, 191
Gardner, E.G. 144
Garelli, M.-H. 96, 98, 100, 104, 116
Garin, E. 136
Garland, L. 76, 90, 93, 94
Garzoni, Tommaso 180
Gaskill, H. 68
Gauguin, P. 279
Gautier, T. 66, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 269, 281
Gavarni, P. 261
Gealt, A.M. 247
Geanakoplos, D.J. 92, 123, 155, 165, 166
Gentile da Fabriano 150
Gentilcore, D. 189, 190, 191
Gentili, B. 44
George, St. 150, 155,
George of Trebizond 127, 128
Gérôme, J.-L. 260–1
Ghezzi, Pier Leone 246
Giesen, B. 6, 25, 27–30, 236, 300
Giglioli, P.P. 85
Gilbert, F. 123, 176
Giles-Watson, M. 215
Gillot, C. 234, 259
Giovanni Ambrosio 152, 163–4
Girard, R. 7, 9, 20, 28, 38, 46, 52, 55, 63, 64, 66, 78, 213, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 230, 236, 254,
285, 300, 308
Girgenti, G. 255
Giustinian family 131, 133
Giustinian, Leonardo 133, 161, 166
Giustinian, Lorenzo 137, 161
Giustinian, Marco 133
Giustinian, Marco di Bernardo 133
Gocer, A. 54
Goethe, J.W. 56, 58, 211, 213, 218, 226, 227, 255, 287, 292, 307
Goffman, E. 25, 27, 29, 81, 300
Gogol, N. 284, 292
Goldoni, C. 71, 253
Goncourt brothers 260, 261
Gonzaga, Federico 192
Gordon, D. 149, 150, 155
Gordon, M. 197, 287
Gorgias 110
Graf, A. 180, 185
Grafton, A.J. 136, 137, 138, 139
Grasselli, M.M. 235
Greci, Giovanni 307
Green, M. xiii, 4, 5, 206, 262, 269, 270, 277, 278, 280, 282, 288, 289, 290
Greenblatt, S. 213, 214
Gregory of Nazianzus 117
Griffin, R. 299
Grimaldi, J. 207, 253
Grimani family 185
Grimani, Antonio 176, 185
Grimani, Domenico 185
Guarini, Bartolomei (father of Guarino da Verona) 131
Guarino da Verona 8, 123, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135–140, 141, 144,
145, 146,
148, 149,
150–1, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 171, 174, 304, 305
Guarino, R. 179, 181, 182, 183, 188, 192, 218
Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro. See Giovanni Ambrosio
Guilland, R. 83, 85
Gundersheimer, W.L. 139, 147, 148

H
Habermas, J. xiii, 1, 5, 6, 7, 13–23, 29, 63, 71, 190, 297, 299
Hadot, P. 43, 236
Hägg, T. 89, 90
Haldon, J. 76, 77, 87, 93, 94
Halévy, F. 266
Hamnet (Shakespeare’s son) 46
Hamvas, B. 55, 209, 210–2, 266, 271, 293–4, 298, 307
Hankins, J. 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134
Hankiss, E. 303, 308
Hanslick, E. 267
Harris, J. 123
Harrison, J. 51
Haskell, A.L. 279, 281, 284
Haskell, F. 257, 261
Hauser, A. 193
Hegel, G.W.F. 9, 41, 46, 58, 67, 111, 266, 270
Heidegger, M. 25, 67, 129, 303
Heliodorus 109
Henke, R. 179, 180, 185, 191, 201, 204, 205, 215, 216
Henriet, Israël 231
Henry III (King of France) 215, 225
Henry V 146
Henry VIII 81
Heraclitus 60
Hermes Trismegistos 60, 128
Hermogenes of Tarsus 105, 107–8, 118, 129, 304
Herod 160, 305, 309
Hesiod 45
Hibbard, G.R. 217
Hobbes, T. 33, 147
Hoffman, E.T.A. 266, 287, 288
Hohenzollerns 274
Homer 45, 49, 114, 295
Horkheimer, M. 15
Horvath, A. xv, 38, 77, 78, 146, 189, 203, 212, 232, 233, 237, 271, 290, 292, 296, 300, 302, 307, 308,
309
Hölderlin, F. 7, 67–8, 226, 293, 295, 298, 301, 302
Hughes, T. 9, 213, 216, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 298, 308
Hugo, V. 7, 55–7, 58, 260
Huizinga, J. 20, 62, 158, 198, 220
Humphrey (Duke of Gloucester) 145

I
Ierodiakonou, K. 120, 124, 126
Ignatius Loyola, St. 68
Ivanov, S. 75, 86, 91, 104

J
Jacobs, C. 97
Janine, J. 257
Janus Pannonius 134, 139–40
Jardine, L. 136, 137, 138, 139
Jauss, H.R. 57
Jean-Paul (Johannes Paulus Richter) 46, 65, 66, 129, 240,
249–50, 253, 255
Jeffery, V. 225
Jenkins, R. 94, 120
Jesus 218, 230, 267
John VI Kantakouzenos (Emperor) 92
John the Baptist, St. 160, 203, 204, 255, 272, 307, 309
John Chrysostom, St. 115, 303
John Paul II (Pope) 306
Johnson, Ben 215
Jones, M. 279, 280
Jory, J. 96, 98, 100–1, 102, 104, 116
Joyce, J. 272
Julian the Apostate 81, 104, 115, 118
Julius Caesar 96, 103
Jung, C.G. 230

K
Kafka, F. 310
Kant, I. 41, 44, 121, 200, 239, 295
Katritzky, M. 179, 191, 198, 200, 203, 231
Kaufmann, W. 43, 46
Kazhdan, A. 119
Keats, J. 293
Kerényi, K. 42, 44, 230, 298, 301
Kernan, A.B. 225
Kerrigan, W. 219
King, M.L. 144, 145, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 178
Kirby, E.T. 97, 98
Kochno, B. 285
Kohl, B. 132, 133, 135
Konrád, G. 303
Korngold, E. 268
Koselleck, R. 1, 4, 15, 248, 296, 299
Köhler, J. 266, 268

L
Laforgue, J. 270, 271
Larionov, M.F. 279
Larkin-Galiñanes, C. 53
Laurent brothers 254
Laroque, F. 218, 219
Latour, B. 17, 302, 309
Lauterbach, I. 233, 234
Le Bon, G. 270–1
Lefort, C. 296
Legrand, D. 258
Lehmann, A.G. 257, 259, 270
Lemerle, P. 87, 91, 117, 118
Leo III (Emperor) 85
Leo X (Pope) 185, 192, 306
Leonardo da Vinci 156, 182, 184, 191, 192, 193, 213, 230, 246
Leontius Pilates 126
Lermontov, M. 290
Lessing, G.E. 46, 237, 239, 240, 253, 255, 308
Lewis-Williams, D. 212
Libanius 106, 111, 112, 113, 115–6, 117, 118,
131, 303
Lifar, S. 275, 276, 282, 283, 285
Limbourg brothers 150
Liszt, F. 268
Lloyd, G.E.R. 105, 106, 108, 109
Lockwood, L. 146, 148, 152, 153, 163
Lombardo, A. 225
Longinus 109
Louis XIV 81, 213, 233, 234
Lucian 94, 109, 111, 112–5, 116, 117, 129,
139, 141,
144, 146,
149, 153,
197, 218
Luckmann, T. 300
Lucretius 101
Ludwig II 264
Luke, St. 79
Lun (John Rich) 253
Lust, A. 97, 181, 203
Luther, Martin 184, 185, 188, 190, 192
Lydia 273
M
McGowan, M.M. 192
McLeish, K. 99
McNeill, W. 177
Machiavelli, Niccolò 145, 174, 184, 191
Maclean, D. 4
Madonna. See Virgin Mary
Madonna (Louise Ciccone) 309
Magri, N. 225
Maguire, E. 76, 79, 80, 91, 92
Maguire, H. 75, 76, 79, 80, 90, 91, 92
Makarenko, A. 291, 304
Mallarmé, S. 269, 309
Mancini, F. 177, 179, 182, 186
Mango, C. 76, 84, 87, 89, 91
Mann, T. 261, 285, 298
Manuel III of Trebizond (Emperor) 130
Marceau, M. 303
Marcello, Pietro the Older 171, 172
Marciniak, P. 75, 76, 77, 94
Marcus Aurelius 107
Marguerite, P. 269
Mariuz, A. 236, 239, 245, 248
Mark the Deacon 117
Marlowe, Christopher 218
Marotti, F. 185, 188, 191
Marsh, D. 105, 129, 139, 141, 144, 146
Marsh, G. 279, 280
Martinelli, Tristano 207
Marx, K. 266
Masini, F. 249
Mast, J. 25, 26
Matisse, H. 275
Matthias Corvinus (Hungarian king) 134
Mattioli, E. 129
Maturin, C.R. 59
Mauss, M. 20, 25, 27, 34, 198, 294, 300, 309
Meckenem, Israhel van 305
Medici family 155, 182, 215, 231
Medici, Cosimo de’ 155
Medici, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’. See Leo X
Medici, Lorenzo de’ 156, 163, 306
Meier, C. 99
Melville, H. 271
Menander 99
Menas 85
Mengs, Anton 308
Mennell, S. 301
Mercer, R.G.G. 134
Mercurino Ranzo 143
Meuli, K. 34
Meyerbeer, G. 265
Meyerhold, V. 10, 271, 286–92
Michelangelo, Buonarroti 56, 65, 155, 171, 211, 213, 242, 300, 309
Michelet, J. 55
Michiel, Marcantonio 185
Michieli, Andrea 306
Mignatti, A. 160, 203, 207
Milton, J. 56
Mitchell, S. 108
Modigliani, A. 193
Molière 66, 186, 199, 213, 253, 266, 287, 288
Molloy, M.E. 116
Monfasani, J. 107, 127, 128, 129
Moody, C. 287, 288, 289, 290
More, Thomas 184, 188, 191
Morolli, G. 156
Morris, B. 217
Moureau, F. 233, 235, 236
Mozart, W.A. 211, 233, 277, 293
Muir, E. 167, 168, 170, 174, 176
Mullett, M. 75
Mulryne, J.R. 219
Mumford, L. 1, 5, 81, 147, 174,
296, 300
Muraro, M.T. 177, 179, 182, 186
Murray, G. 51
Musil, R. 271
Mussorgsky, B. 276

N
Nabokov, V. 271
Napoleon Bonaparte 147, 248
Nerval, G. 249, 255
Nevile, J. 152, 153, 155, 162, 163
Newman, E. 263
Newton, I. 151, 200, 290
Nicholas of Cusa 126, 144
Nicol, D.M. 91, 92
Nicoll, A. 72, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209–10
Nijinsky, V. 275, 279, 281, 282–5, 310
Niklaus, T. 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 237–8, 307
Noailles, A. de 282
Nodier, C. 249, 255, 256, 291
Nouvel, W. 279

O
Oestreich, G. 197
Orsini, Clarence 163, 306

P
Padoan, G. 137, 145, 161, 165, 180, 182, 183, 192
Paërl, H. 226
Palacio, J. 269, 270, 271, 272
Palladio, Andrea 225
Pandolfi, V. 71, 178, 180, 186, 187, 188, 201
Panofsky, D. 233, 234, 235
Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli) 134, 137, 143,
148, 304,
306
Pansiéri, C. 99
Pant, D.R. 34, 38
Parmigianino 193
Pateman, R. 267, 268
Paul, St. 43, 121, 192
Pavanello, G. 245, 247
Pearce, R. 46
Pedrocco, F. 247
Penella, R. 116
Perlman, M. 215, 216
Pernet, H. 34, 38
Perosa, A. 143
Peter the Great 275
Petrarch 126, 128, 161, 167, 170, 200, 304, 305
Petrides, A.K. 113
Pheidias 290
Philostratus of Athens 105, 106–7, 110, 111
Phillips-Court, K. 151
Phocas 85
Photius 112, 113, 118
Phrynichus 303
Picasso, P. 212, 248, 275, 279, 309–10
Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvio. See Pius II (Pope)
Pico della Mirandola 152
Pieri, M. 165, 178, 179, 180
Piissimi, Vittoria 215
Pirckheimer, Willibald 180
Pirrotta, N. 164
Pisanello 149–51, 155, 304
Pius II (Pope) 141–2, 156
Pizzorno, A. 2, 6, 20, 21, 33–6, 300, 306
Platt, P.G. 219, 225, 226
Plautus 99–100, 137, 142, 144, 145, 183, 202, 205, 218, 219, 306
Plax, J.A. 235
Plutarch 129, 306
Polenton, Sicco 131, 133, 135, 141, 144, 304
Poliziano, Angelo 129
Pollaiuolo brothers 305
Pollaiuolo, Antonio 65, 155, 305
Polybius 99, 100
Pompey 100
Pomponio Leto 172, 306
Pontormo 193
Pope, A. 295
Porter, J.I. 300
Posner, D. 232, 234, 235, 308
Pound, E. 272
Povoledo, E. 164, 166, 177, 179, 182, 186, 187
Previté Orton, C.W. 145, 146
Pritchard, J. 277, 280, 285
Procopius 116, 117
Prokofiev, S. 275
Protagoras 33
Proust, M. 214, 236
Psellos, Michael 87, 88, 89, 94, 120
Puchner, W. 73, 75
Pulszky, R. 283
Pummer, R. 117
Pylades 98

Q
Queller, D.E. 170
Quéro, D. 234

R
Rabelais, François 55, 56, 211
Radcliff-Umstead, D. 141, 143, 144, 145, 146
Radin, P. 79, 302
Raphael 184, 185, 192, 193, 211, 213, 246, 283, 293
Rawls, J. 18
Rée, P. 309, 310
Reich, H. 72, 97, 182, 300
Reinach, S. 76
Rembrandt 235, 260
Rémy, T. 257, 258
Reyna, F. 153
Riccoboni, Luigi 208
Rivière, H. 260
Rizzo, C. 259, 260, 261
Roberts, J.M. 13, 14, 15
Rohde, E. 89
Rollo, A. 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131
Romano, Giulio 193
Romei, G. 185, 191
Rosenberg, P. 235
Rossi, Roberto 125
Rossier, E. 231
Rossini, G. 277
Royce, A.P. 159, 165, 166
Röckel, K.A. 267
Rubinstein, I. 279, 281
Runciman, S. 80, 87, 88, 157
Ruskin, J. 174, 176, 177
Ruzante 186, 187, 188

S
Sabbadini, R. 123, 125, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 144
Saint Laurent, Y. 285
Salmen, W. 159
Salome, Lou 309, 310
Salutati, Coluccio 123, 124
Salvatore, A. 299
Samonas 94
Sanctis, F. de 193
Sand, G. 259
Sand, M. 259
Sanseverino, Gasparo 185
Sansovino, Francesco 306
Sansovino, Jacopo 167
Santosuosso, A. 193
Sanudo, Marin 191
Sappho 309
Satie, E. 275
Saygin, S. 146
Scala, Flaminio 199, 204, 206
Scarperia, Jacopo Angeli da 125
Schleiermacher, F. 129, 255
Scheijen, S. 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 285
Schlegel, F. 255
Schopenhauer, A. 40, 41–3, 268
Schumann, R. 282, 288
Scola, Ognibene della 131
Segal, A. 98
Sennett, M. 261
Sert, M. 285
Séverin, G.F. 258, 259
Sforza family 182
Sforza, Costanzo 162
Sforza, Galeazzo 156
Shepard, J. 82, 86
Sigismund (Emperor) 304
Silla, C. 310
Simmel, G. 20, 78, 198
Simons, P. 155
Slater, W. 96, 102, 103
Smith, A. 200
Smith, A.W. 3, 156, 163
Smith, G. 145
Socrates 30, 31, 47, 172, 212, 216, 246
Somers, M. 2
Sparti, B. 155, 162, 163, 164
Spedicato, E. 249
Spencer, C. 278, 281, 282, 285
Spencer, S. 263
Staël, Mme. de 55
Stalin, J.V. 292
Starobinski, J. 4, 248, 256, 269, 270, 299, 301
Stäuble, A. 141, 142, 143, 144
Stefano, pre’ 179
Stendhal 214
Stirner, M. 268
Storey, R.F. 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 269
Stravinsky, I. 248, 275, 282
Strohm, R. 160, 161
Strozzi, Palla 125
Sulla 96
Swan, J. 4, 310
Symons, A. 272
Syson, L. 149, 150, 155
Szakolczai, A. 2, 5, 29, 73, 81, 95, 107, 174, 212, 213
Szelényi, I. 303
Szilágyi, J.G. 112

T
Tagliacalze 179, 183, 184
Tani, G. 153, 154
Tarde, G. 20, 78, 230, 271, 309
Tasso, Torquato 148, 245
Taylor, John 306
Taylor, R.P. 97
Tchaikovsky, P.I. 276
Terence 142, 182, 205, 287, 304
Tessari, R. 72, 182, 191, 198, 199
Themistius 118
Theodore Gaza 131, 172
Theodosius 130
Thomas the Slave 86
Thomas Aquinas, St. 120, 300
Thomassen, B. 77, 302
Thompson, A. 218, 308
Thomson, I. 137
Tiberius 96
Tieck, L. 46, 240, 253, 255, 256, 266, 287
Tocqueville, A. de 4, 20, 197, 230, 296
Tolstoi, L. 277
Tommaso dei Frignani (uncle of Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna) 132
Tougher, S. 75, 76
Towsen, J.H. 97
Trevisan, Zaccaria the Older 171
Tudors 216
Turner, V.W. 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 34, 78, 214, 225
Tylor, E. 34, 159

U
Ugolino Pisani da Parma 143–4
Ullman, B.L. 125
Urban II (Pope) 88

V
Van Gennep, A. 34, 78
Van Gogh, V. 211
Varty, K. 287
Vergerio, Pier Paolo 125, 131, 132, 133, 141, 172, 303
Verlaine, P. 269, 270
Verrocchio, Andrea del 156
Veyne, P. 14, 116
Vianello, D. 165, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 186, 187, 188
Villoresi, M. 135, 137
Virgil 303
Virgin, the 249
Vittorino da Feltre 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 155, 181
Voegelin, E. 1, 5, 17, 99, 197, 263, 296, 300, 309
Voltaire 255
von Richthofen sisters 4
Vreeland, D. 280, 285

W
Wagner, R. 4, 5, 6, 10, 37, 40–3, 46, 47–9, 57, 97, 262–9, 270, 273, 277, 281, 289, 290
Waller, J. 192
Warburg, A. 283, 310
Watteau, A. 9, 233–6, 259, 270, 308
Webb, R. 89, 96, 103, 104, 108, 110, 113
Weber, M. 1, 4, 5, 7, 16, 18, 25, 30, 72, 74, 77, 78, 81, 186, 197, 198, 218, 296, 299, 300, 303
Wedekind, F. 271
Weiss, R. 125
Welsford, E. 203, 301
White, A.W. 75, 82
Wilamowitz, U. 47
Wilde, O. 277, 279, 309
Willeford, W. 302
Winckelmann, J. 237, 308
Wind, E. 309
Wolfe, T. 149
Wordsworth, W. 293
Woudhuysen, H.R. 217
Wyatt, M. 146
Wydra, H. 78, 296, 302

Y
Yates, F. 87, 151, 193, 305
Yeats, W.B. xi, 77, 79, 272, 295
Young, J. 67, 300

Z
Zijderveld, A.C. 53
Zizek, S. 262
Zorzi, N. 124
Zuan Polo (Liompardi) 179, 183, 185, 306
Zwingli, Huldrych 188
 

Subject Index

Note: The works of Nietzsche, Plato, Shakespeare and Tiepolo are collected together

A
Aaron the Moor 218
‘Abelard and Heloise’ 200
absolute comic 7, 61, 64, 65,
absolute criticism 272
absolutism 1, 4, 10, 147, 213, 233, 253
abstraction 2, 22, 121, 290 297
absurd 61, 65, 66–7, 301
abyss. See void
academies 193
acrobacy/acrobatics 76, 83, 157, 161, 180, 208, 247, 283
act of God 92
Adam 89
Adonis 115
Adoration of Magi 160
adultery 141, 142, 206
advertising. See marketing
adynaton 44, 174, 184, 296, 301
Aegean sea 44
Africa 38, 39, 84, 112, 225
Afternoon of a Faun (Diaghilev) 284
agon 51
agora 17, 30
alazon. See intruder albatross 283
alchemy 24, 38, 72, 137, 154, 155, 191, 193, 229, 260, 272, 292, 296; commedic 290
Alexandria 84, 98
Algeria 261
alienation 51, 193
Altivole 182, 225
ambiguity. See ambivalence
ambition 211, 222, 264; vaulting 211, 308
ambivalence 9, 20, 23, 67, 87, 102, 212, 225, 237
America 38, 280, 291
Amiens 255
amphitheatre 101, 103, 104, 166
anarchism 267, 268, 269
Anatolia 83, 95, 112
anatomy 149, 150, 283
Andalusia 280
Angola 38
Antaeus 155
anthropological foundations 36, 77–9, 210,
236
Antichrist 43
Antioch on the Orontes 108, 112, 115
antiquity 49–50, 56, 71, 89, 118, 119, 121, 123, 156; cult of 49, 193, 218
Antonio 220, 221
anxiety 193
apocalypse/apocalyptic events 88, 187, 192,
249, 268,
270, 279
(See also experiences: apocalyptic)
Apollo 43, 155, 238
apotropaic 80, 98, 159, 167, 203
Apologia (Conversini) 133
Apologia Mimorum see ‘Oration in Defence of Mimes’
April Fool’s Day 271, 309
Aquileia 172
Arcetri 305
archetype 233, 235, 236
Argentina 280
Arlecchino. See Harlequin
Armenia 87
Armida 245
ars poetica 277, 286; Diaghilev’s 277–8; Meyerhold’s
286
artistic Socrates 301
ascetism 156, 218
Asia 84, 112, 225, 241
Asia Minor. See Anatolia
Atellan theatre 99
Athens 6, 30–3, 67, 74, 86, 105, 106, 138, 219, 246, 302
Attic Greek 87, 89, 90, 92
aufgehoben 46
Augustinian order 185
austerity 297
Australian aborigines 27
Austria 255
autarchy 175, 306
authenticity 25, 29, 30, 49, 118, 281, 282
authority 36, 86, 92, 103, 125, 173, 183, 201, 222; lack of 223
autobiography 132, 133, 263, 264, 267; Conversini’s 132, 133;
Wagner’s 262, 263
automatism 64, 272, 297
autonomy 3, 28, 65, 175, 227, 272
avant-garde 4, 9, 10, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 272, 277, 280, 281, 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291
B
Bacchae (Euripid) 308
bacchanal 245
backward inference 6, 16, 3–2
balance. See measure
Balkans 83, 177
ball(s) 154, 164, 291; masked 250, 260,
261, 290
ballet 152, 154, 164, 272, 273, 275–86
Ballets Russes 10, 275, 280–6
Balls of Sfessania (Callot) 231, 232, 241
Baptism of Christ 160, 203
Barco d’Asolo 182
Bari 87
baroque 72, 147
Bastille 249, 278
bassadanze 154
Bateson’s rule 202, 213
battles: of Agnadello 177; of Chioggia 172; of Lepanto 176, 177; of Manzikert 87; of Mohács 191;
of
Ravenna 183; of Zonchio 176
‘Battle of the Centaurs’ (Michelangelo) 65
‘Battle of Nudes’ (Pollaiuolo) 65
Bavaria 238, 264
bear 203, 307
beauty 7, 56, 57, 68, 77, 86, 87, 88, 108, 111, 112, 140, 149, 168, 174, 219, 237, 272, 273, 277, 284;
of the world 30, 45, 80, 92, 246
befana. See Baptism of Christ
behind. See buttock
beholding 151, 239, 240, 241
belief 20, 35, 45, 83, 116,
Belmont 219, 220, 225
belongingness 2, 153, 168
benevolence 297
Bergamo 134, 192, 201, 203, 207, 307
Berkeley 236
Berlin wall 15
Bestiality 203, 208
Biblioteca Adelphi 236
biomechanics 207, 290–1
Birth of Clinic, The (Foucault) 300
Birth of Tragedy, The. See Nietzsche: works
Black Sea 83
blacksmith 131. See also smiths
blame 44–5, 63, 108, 119
blasphemy 160
Blue Angel (Sternberg) 271
boar 150, 224
boarding school 134, 304
boasting 52, 205, 206
Bohemia 254
Bologna 132, 136, 147, 172, 202, 205, 216
bolshevism 136, 289, 292, 309
Book of the Courtier, The (Castiglione) 184
bookworms 50, 91
boredom 113, 131, 139, 220, 222, 245, 288
boundaries: dissolution of 3, 4, 14, 25, 28–9, 43, 46, 49, 187, 209, 212,
249, 262,
269, 272,
291
Bosporus 83
boundlessness 2, 3
Brenta river 225
Brighella 203, 206–7, 208
brilliance. See genius
Bronze Age 50
Brussels 58
Buda 132, 141, 181
buffoons 4, 8, 56, 76, 164, 178–99 passim, 202, 234, 253,
256, 263,
270, 286,
289; Byzantine. See
mime(s): Byzantine; and
disenchanted young Venice patricians 8, 182–8
bureaucracy 77, 88, 105, 113, 124, 303
buttock 76, 80, 150, 191, 232,
233, 296
Byzance 82
Byzantine: Empire 8, 92, 104, 105, 157, 180, 244; learned men 73, 74, 119, 124,
129, 137,
197;
migrations 92, 155; mimes/buffoons. See mime(s):
Byzantine; spirit 7, 8, 71, 77–80, 84, 89,
95, 123–64 passim, 156, 197, 220,
304; theatre 74–5; world 7–8, 71–122 passim, 130, 140,
156, 157, 180, 244
Byzantinisation (of Europe) 107, 137, 253
Byzantium 5, 7, 71–122 passim, 127, 130,
156, 170,
177, 181;
lack of universities 119, 121, 122, 126

C
cabotinage 286, 287
Caesarea 87, 118
Calabria 126
Caliban 228, 229
Calumny (Apelles) 149
Cambridge 4, 28; ritualists 51
Campanile (Venice) 278
campanilismo 278
cancan 261, 280
capitalism 2, 6, 10, 19, 199, 218, 280, 296; spirit of 77
Capitano 158, 205–6, 215
Cappadocia 115, 117, 118, 120
Capricci (Callot) 232, 241
Captain Fracasse (Gautier) 260
care 150, 286, 297
caricature 58, 62, 245, 261, 288, 294
carnality 133, 269
carnival 8, 71, 76, 80, 90, 143, 157, 160, 165, 177, 179, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188, 198, 203, 204, 236,
237, 245, 250, 259, 270; permanent 3, 247, 293 (apoca-lyptic 298)
Carnival (Diaghilev) 282
Carnival (Hamvas) 271, 293, 307
Carnival (Meyerhold) 288
Castel Vecchio (Ferrara) 273
catharsis 29, 216
Catholic University (Milan) 310
Catinia (Polenton) 141
Cauteriaria (A. Barzizza) 141
cave art 42
cave metaphor (Plato) 54
centaur 79, 111–2, 162, 245, 246
Chaldean oracles 87, 120
Chanel 286
chaos 45, 203, 212, 233, 297
chariot races 83, 90, 104, charisma 28, 78, 79, 179, 270, 300
charlatan(s) 8, 166, 189–92, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 223, 235, 245, 246, 278, 282, 286, 287,
289; typology 189–90
chastity 89, 256, 273
Chigi Chapel 185
China 210, 303
chivalry 90
chorus 43, 45–6, 51, 97
chosen people 129
Christ Pantocrator 88
Christianity 55, 56, 82, 94, 104, 109, 112, 116, 118, 121, 126, 130, 136, 140, 142, 228, 268
Chrysis (Piccolomini) 141
Church 79, 91, 137; Fathers 87, 94, 109, 115, 117, 118, 120; Orthodox 7, 75, 80, 118, 280
Cilicia 87, 98, 108
cinema 240, 271, 284, 289
Circe 273
circle/circularity 35, 39, 219, 248, 297
circus 76, 83, 166, 269, 283, 286, 288, 292, 295, 296
Circus Maximus 83, 101, 104
civilisational analysis 74
civilizations: Arabic 82, 85, 121, 122; Byzantine. See Byzantine world, Byzantium; Etruscan 73, 82,
98; Greek xiii, 5, 17, 37, 41, 50, 86, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 108, 110, 112, 115, 121, 123,
138, 156, 286, 295; Roman 73, 91, 121–2; Turkish 82,
92, 125,
160, 176,
177 (Ottoman 130;
Seldjuk 87)
Civilizing Process (Elias) 53, 287
clarity 114, 274
classicism 175, 237, 255
clergy 76
Cleopatra 281
closed institutions 1, 4, 81, 300
Clouds (Aristophanes) 52
clown(s) 46, 64, 76, 83, 157–8, 164, 184, 207, 208, 222, 230, 235, 248, 253, 255, 260, 270, 288, 289,
295, 296,
297; blaming 266, 289, 297; demonic 80, 233, 235,
256; sad/melancholy 221–3,
233, 235;
sadistic 269, 270
cocottes. See prostitution
cohesion, social 26, 116
Collège de France 14
Colombina. See Columbine
colonialism (British) 105
Columbine 206, 256, 259, 260, 282, 288, 289
Commagene 112
commedia dell’arte 1, 4, 8, 9, 56, 71, 141, 158, 165, 178, 179, 180, 187, 188, 191, 197–202, 231–48
passim, 253, 260,
266, 286,
288, 289,
290; origins 71–3, 286; main features 198–209;
Shakespeare and 215–20, 226, 237, 256; its spirit 231, 232,
235
commedification xiii, 4, 5, 9, 10, 198
commercialisation 6, 198, 199
commodification 198
common good 4, 171
‘Communications to My Friends’ (Wagner) 263
communism 263, 267, 288, 292, 293, 303
Communist Manifesto (Marx) 18
Communist Party 290
communitas 24
Compagnie della Calza 177, 179, 181
complexity 26–7, 77
complicity 3, 17, 139, 140, 163, 187, 286
confession 263
Confidence-Man, The (Melville) 271
conscience, bad. See guilt
Constantinople 72, 80–1, 82, 84, 87, 89, 92, 104, 115, 118, 119, 121, 124, 130, 131, 133, 135, 137,
139, 151, 156, 168, 174, 175, 176, 179, 182, 277; sack 91, 93, 156, 158, 176,
182, 243,
244,
258;
second Rome 176; second Jerusalem 176; siege 84,
85, 130
consumerism 280
contagion 64, 158, 164, 224, 226, 269, 270
contest 50, 198
Contest of the Singers, The (Hoffman) 266
conversion 60, 80, 81, 83, 104, 117, 130, 132–3, 294, 305; negative 212
Cornwall 272
corruption 3, 4, 31, 50, 58, 88, 90, 139, 142, 176, 290, 294
cosmology 82, 168, 232
cosmopolitanism 271, 299, 307
cosmos 38, 45, 168, 228
Council in Trullo 75, 85, Council of Ephesus 85
court 80, 81, 86, 88, 91, 119, 148–9, 160, 162, 166, 178, 179, 181, 205, 215, 217, 225, 228, 232, 266;
Burgundy 150; Byzantine 90, 186;
festivities 161, 164; Ferrara humanist 148–9, 162; French
158;
politics 7, 77, 81, 119; society 8, 81, 89, 90, 119, 147, 197, 198, 221
Cracow 215
Cressida 223, 224
Crete 42
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) 274
critical theory 15, 297
criticism. See critique
critique 10, 14, 21, 143, 170, 171, 226, 257, 272, 296
Critique and Crisis (Koselleck) 1, 15
Cromwell (Hugo) 55
Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (Akın) 302
crowd psychology 271
Crucifixion (Watteau) 308
cruelty 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 101, 111, 257, 258, 303
Crusades 121; First 88; Fourth 91
cultural pragmatics 25–6, 29
cynicism 7, 30, 86, 158, 188, 275, 278, 283, 290
Cyprus 157, 182, 224, 225, 305

D
dance/dancing 35, 80, 83, 96, 97, 98, 101, 113–5, 149, 152, 159–64, 192, 197,
232, 233,
273, 275–
85; of death 233; mania 280, 310; Oriental
280; ‘revolution’ 152–5, 161, 180, 190; of Salome
160, 204,
272, 305,
309; St. John’s 307
dancing-jack 65
dancing masters 142, 151–5, 158, 160, 162–4, 166, 177,
182, 289
Dappertutto, Dr. 288
dark ages: Greek 50; European 175
David (Michelangelo) 171
De miseria humane vite (Conversini) 133
De re uxoria (Barbaro) 171
De Republica (Frulovisi) 145
Dead Souls (Gogol) 292
death 35, 64, 184, 237, 244, 256, 261, 268, 274, 277, 284, 285; kiss of 309; premature 233
‘Death in Paris’ (Wagner) 265
Death In Venice (Mann) 261, 285
debauchery 140, 144, 193, 201, 254, 263
decadence 30, 43, 47, 48, 50, 57, 88, 100, 174, 255, 259, 269, 270, 271, 272, 277, 281, 290
decency 4, 64, 186, 280
decivilisation 98, 141, 177
decorative arts 285
degradation 58, 65, 85, 94
Delphi 98
‘Deluge’ (Leonardo) 184
democracy 18, 19, 30, 32, 57, 296; American 4; Athenian 6, 30–3, 246
demon(s)/demonic 9, 28, 30, 44, 80, 159, 179, 180, 187, 203, 212, 221, 225, 226, 235, 259, 265, 290,
294
‘Demon and Idyll’ (Hamvas) 293–4
Denmark 310
derision 248
Desdemona 57, 273, 308
despair 41, 91, 172, 193, 227, 290
despotism 147
devil 59, 142, 187, 226, 250, 274, 292–3
devotio moderna 161
diairesis (method of division) 107
digitalisation 3
Dignity of Man (Pico della Mirandola) 152
Diomede 224
Dionysus 37, 40–9, 98, 104, 111, 206, 230, 266, 273, 274, 298
Dior 286
diplomacy 124, 125, 128, 130, 133, 135, 181, discipline 37, 72, 197, 198,
296
Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 300
divine child 230
Divine Comedy (Dante) 184
division of labour 3, 10, 27, 297
doe 79, 150
Doge 167, 169, 177, 185
Don Juan 265
Don Juan (Molière) 265, 287
Don Quixote 270
donkey 203, 235
dotti. See Byzantine learned men
Dottore 158, 202, 205
double bind 60
Dragmalogia (Conversini) 133
dragon 150
dream(s) 43, 66–7, 76, 88, 89, 101, 102, 109, 184, 216, 230, 240, 249, 253, 254, 255, 256, 259, 266,
270, 272, 273, 274, 295; method of forcing 249; revolutionary 257
Dresden 266, 267
dualism(s) 44, 61, 290
Ducal Palace (Venice) 185
Duecento 174
Duel after the Masked Ball (Couture) 261
dwarf 67, 68, 111, 232

E
eagle 79, 111
earthquake 45, 92, 148
Ecce Homo. See Nietzsche: Works
Ecce Homo (Rembrandt) 235
eclipse 44–5
ecstasy 38, 44, 45–6, 97, 115, 159, 267, 282
education 32, 40, 41, 49–50, 68, 85, 99, 105, 107, 113, 134, 135–40, 149, 152, 169,
171, 197,
219,
236,
243, 246,
282, 286,
291, 303,
304
effect mechanism xii, 9, 31, 55, 58, 61, 63, 99, 184, 198, 199, 202, 205, 209, 213, 216, 223, 236, 248,
268, 280, 281, 288, 309
effervescence, collective 297
Egypt 84, 210 8 and 1/2 (Fellini) 220
Eiffel Tower 280
ekphrasis. See ekphrastic description ekphrastic description 88, 90, 104, 106, 108, 110–2, 149, 150,
183, 237
ekstasis. See ecstasy
Elementary Forms (Durkheim) 300
eloquence 90, 112, 113, 116, 125, 189
enacting 115
encomium 108, 113
enema 191
England 23, 61, 146, 190, 207,
213, 215,
216, 220,
235, 253,
273, 281,
292
Enlightenment 1, 6, 15, 23–4, 28, 33, 34, 50, 56, 62, 190, 193, 233, 249, 254, 272, 297; radical 250
entertainment 8, 9, 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 156, 183, 187, 189, 220, 232, 253, 288
envy 45, 59, 119, ephebe(s) 242, 243
Ephesus 219
epigone 118
epiphany 17, 29, 79, 239, 243
Epidamnus 219
Epiphany. See Baptism of Christ
Eros 89
Erotemata (Chrysoloras) 124
erotic: conquest 2, 152, 278; desire 79, 162, 187, 200; dreams 89–90, 256;
pleasure 102, 159, 162,
246, 266
eroticism 101, 104, 108, 116, 160, 186, 187, 193, 281–2
eschatology 82
ethics 108, 173; discursive 15
Ethics (Aristotle) 54, 129, 162,
163, etymology 17, 32, 66, 124, 139, 278, 301
Eunuch, The (Terence) 181
Europe 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 24, 30, 41, 43–4, 47, 48, 50, 57, 68, 71, 73, 74, 77, 84, 96, 107, 108, 110,
112, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 142, 144, 146, 147, 152, 158, 161, 165, 184, 186, 190, 201,
205, 212, 213, 214, 219, 221, 225, 226, 228, 238, 240, 246, 254, 256, 272, 276, 277, 280,
285, 286, 287, 295, 296
Eusthatius Macrembolites 89
event 6, 25, 29, 38, 43, 80, 167, 243, 244
evil 56, 57, 60, 67, 249, 271
evolutionism 26, 27, 34, 51, 186
exaggeration 65, 161
excess 33, 46, 65, 108, 109, 132, 143, 172, 232, 270, 273
excitation of senses 93, 159, 164, 211, 269, 281, 291
exile 89, 145, 155, 170, 185, 188, 268. See also refugee
existential community 2, 63
expectation(s) 31, 127, 137, 173, 187, 191, 281
experience 156, 160, 166, 169, 170, 238, 273, 287; apocalyptic 88, 91, 158, 295; commedic 263;
Dionysian 280, 282; erotic see erotic: pleasure; of home 2; loss of self 43; peripatetic 238; of
spectator 151; transcendence 43, 151; vision 31, 184, 213, 214, 216, 249, 265; world upside
down 44–6, 76, 184, 188, 201,
211, 222,
241, 247,
295, 296
experiential basis 44
extremism. See excess

F
fair(s) 9, 93, 157, 160, 162, 189, 190, 198, 201, 204, 234, 235, 236, 272, 280, 287
fairground booth 191, 289
Fairground Booth (Meyerhold) 288–90
Fairy Doll, The (Bayer) 277
Faithful Eckart, The (Tieck) 266
faking 97, 249, 250, 262, 281, 284
falcon 79, 246
Fall 60, 245
Fall of Miletus (Phrynichus) 303
Falstaff 215
fantasmagoria. See fantasy fantasy 31, 107, 109,
150, 206,
219, 250,
253, 254,
256, 260,
269, 273,
277, 295
farce 188, 199, 206, 250, 270
Farnesina 185
fashion 10, 275, 280, 285
Faust (Goethe) 213, 218, 255, 292
Faustus, Doctor (Marlowe) 218
feasting/festivities 43, 46, 52, 80, 99, 101, 113, 153, 156, 159, 166, 177, 179; Greek-style sacred 97,
99, 100, 103; turned
sour/going wrong 46, 160, 179, 188, 230; wedding 27, 83, 162, 163,
206,
215,
230
feigning. See faking
Femmes savants, Les (Molière) 66
Ferrara 8, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 144, 145, 147–57, 158, 161, 162,
163, 164,
179, 181,
205,
219,
225, 273,
304, 305;
ecumenical council 156–7, 158
fertility 237. See also ritual: fertility
fez (Turkish hat) 244
figuration 154
film. See cinema
fin-de-siècle 255, 271, 281
fixating 151, 164, 212, 290
fixed idea 66, 170, 259, 294
flâneur 260
flattery 17, 106, 108, 119, 172
flirting 205, 219
Florence 123, 125, 128, 130, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 148, 151, 152, 155, 156, 160, 162,
166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 189, 193, 200, 204, 215, 231, 232; ecumenical council 156–7, 158
Florilegium Marcianum 117
Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire) 257
Fly, The (Lucian) 109, 218
Foligno 191
Foligno Madonna (Raphael) 184
fool 221–2; holy 94, 212, 227; Megarean 52; motley 221
Fortuna 268
founding a city 31, 80–2, 170, 173–6
fragmentation 2, 3, 4, 48, 153, 290, 297
France 9, 14, 48, 53, 55–6, 57, 61, 66, 148, 190, 192, 203, 205, 207, 213, 215, 220, 226, 253, 255,
261, 281, 289
Franceschina 206, 215
Franciscans 132
Francolino 205
Frankfurt School 296
Fraudiphilia (Cornazzano) 142
free will 192
Funambule theatre 254, 255, 259,
260, 269
‘Funambulesque Odes’ (Banville) 259
fury 249, 250, 280, 294, 310
fusion 26–7, 29–30

G
Gaia Scienza. See Gay Science (Nietzsche: works)
Gallipoli 84, 92
Garden of Eden 89, 158, 242
Gaspard of the Night (Bertrand) 260
Gaza 116–7
gaze 35–6, 151, 235, 240, 241, 289; circular 239; devotional 151, 200
Gelosi (theatre company) 200, 305
genealogy 1, 4, 5, 6, 13, 16, 23, 24, 30, 40, 47, 50, 71, 72, 74, 112, 141, 146, 231, 302
Geneva 188
Geneva school 4
genius 41, 48, 49, 175, 236, 265, 286; evil/malefic 249, 260;
romantic 233, 255, 260; tragic 283
Genoa 172
German Musician in Paris, A (Wagner) 265
Germany 17, 41, 46, 48, 55–6, 67, 68, 161, 174, 237, 239, 253, 254, 255, 263, 265, 266, 268, 276
gerontocracy 169, 177
Gersaint’s Signboard (Watteau) 235
Gift, The (Mauss) 34, gift relations 20, 198, 286, 294,
300
Gilles 234, 235
Gilles (Watteau) 9, 231, 233, 234–5
giving. See gift relations
gladiator(s) 83, 101, 103, 303
globalisation (American) 105
Gnosticism 127, 128, 228, 230, 304, 307
goat 203
golden age 117, 118, 261
golden calf 245
Golden Dream, The 255
goldsmith 124. See also smiths
goliardic farces 132, 143–4
Gospel(s) 210, 268; Matthew 210
grace 56, 64, 98, 140, 208, 221, 283, 293, 300, 303
grammar 107, 113, 123, 128, 136, 138, 154,
Graziano (commedia dell’arte figure) 136, 205, 216
Gresham’s law 207
grotesque 7, 55–6, 61, 65, 109, 164, 187, 188, 234, 260, 288, 290, 293
‘Grotesques’ (Verlaine) 270
guilt 157, 163
gunpowder empires 177
gyps(ies) 231, 273, 280, 306
Gypsy Woman, The 216
gyration. See spiral
H
habitus 300
Hamlet 9, 46–7, 68, 209–12, 218, 227, 256, 259, 270, 284, 293, 308
hare 79
harem 258
Harlequin 56, 158, 201, 203, 206, 207–12, 215, 221, 222,
226, 234,
258, 259,
261, 271,
277, 282,
288
harmony 32, 57, 108, 117, 168,
171, 174,
198, 268,
272, 293
hatred, 116, 119, 221, 285; of children 133; of mimes 302; of women. See misogyny
hedonism 139
Helen of Troy 273
Hellenism 42, 50, 87, 88, 89, 98, 104, 105, 109, 110, 118, 129, 190
Hercules 137, 155, 162, 304
heresy 75, 94
Hermaphrodite, The (Panormita) 134, 149
Hermetic writings 87, 120, 137, 190
hermeneutics 19–20, 29
Hermes 189, 301
Hernani (Hugo) 57
Herotes 142
hieros gamos 230
hilarity 125, 180, 184, 186, 187, 188, 292, 297
Hippodrome 8, 76, 82–3, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, 104, 157, 158, 286, 290, 302
historical sociology 1, 16, 71; comparative 1, 5, 7, 74, 77, 99, 121
histrio 104, 160
Hodegetria icon 79
Hollywood 101, 217, 268, 289
Holy Lands 88, 116
home 20, 172–3
homo Byzantinus 119, 303
homo economicus 119
homo sovieticus 119
horse 79, 111, 149, 150, 180, 274
hubris 7, 58, 228
humanism 8, 49–50, 62, 71, 73, 74, 86, 87, 88, 91, 117–20, 122, 123–43, 162, 164,
167, 169,
170,
174,
175, 183,
193, 197,
201, 205,
218, 219,
237; civic 123; Florentine 125; Italian 125, 126;
Paduan
133; Renaissance 8, 124, 126, 144, 145; Venetian 144–5, 170, 171–3
humiliation 76, 86, 91, 92, 94, 284
humour 7, 53, 76, 93, 94, 95, 180, 188, 208, 237, 253, See also sense, of humour
Hungary 132, 144, 177, 210, 271, 283
hunting 80, 83, 90, 150, 186
hybrid 79, 98–9, 164, 175, 302
Hyperion (Hölderlin) 295, 301
hypocrisy 3, 6, 10, 25, 143, 198, 256, 264, 288, 297
hypothesis 304
Hypotheses (Libanius) 131
Hysmine 89, 90
Hysminias 89
Hysmine and Hysminias (Eusthatius Macrembolites) 89–90

I
Iago 9, 215, 218, 225, 226, 249, 303
Iberian Peninsula 158
iconoclasm controversy 85–6, 117
ideal speech situation 6, 7, 15, 16, 18, 19–22, 24, 212
idealism, German 43, 264
identity 20–2, 24, 27, 33–6, 78, 121, 199, 215, 222, 226, 227
ideology 170
‘Idiot’ (Nodier) 256
idyll 293
illusion 66–7, 110, 115, 239, 286
Il Mondo Novo. See Tiepolo: works
I Modi (Romano) 193
image: magic 85, 242, 243, 246, 249; power 31, 85, 301 (its thinking 241–6)
imago dei 34
imitation 2, 20, 32, 63, 64, 78, 97, 143, 153, 158, 161, 175, 222, 246, 248, 258, 281; laws of 271; of
reality/nature 108, 111, 162, 180, 237, 239, 286
imitative arts 31–2, 114, 273
Immanuel 123
improvisation 161, 198, 306
Impruneta 189
inciting passions. See excitation of senses
incubation 2, 8, 147–9, 156, 161, 215, 225
India 210
infantilism 91, 94, 119, 303
infection 9, 76, 91, 140, 143, 189, 198, 222, 224, 254, 288
infinity 3, 153, 212, 248, 271, 297
initiation 232, 273
innocence 20, 54, 59, 60, 61, 68, 294
integrity 116, 193, 262, 269, 270, 288, 291
intercivilisational misunderstanding 121–2, 126, 160
interludes 83, 145, 152, 164, 191
intermedi. See interludes
intervals. See interludes
intoxication 43, 48, 61, 282
intrigue 77, 81, 119, 206, 286
intruder 52, 63, 205, 220, 221, 230
invective 94, 136
involvement and detachment 51, 53, 63
irony 55, 218, 245, 260
irresponsibility 270
Islam 84, 85, 116, 117
Italy 9, 19, 56, 61, 72, 73, 87, 95, 98, 100, 123, 124, 128, 204, 207, 219, 226, 231, 234, 236, 253, 278
Itinerary of the Soul (St. Bonaventure) 140

J
jack-in-the-box 65, 72
Jacobins 248
Janus 38
Janus Sacerdotus 143
Japan 279, 288
Jaques 221, 222, 223, 226, 227, 235, 270
Java 280
jazz 280
Jerusalem 175, 176
Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso) 245
jesters 164, 178, 185, 187, 189, 190, 199, 302; Byzantine 94; court 94
Jesus from Nazareth (Wagner) 267
jinn 208
joke/joking 68, 76, 94, 125, 186, 204, 244
joust 156, 305
joy 7, 59–60, 159, 293; tears of 59–60, Juliet 57, 219
justice: in Venice 168, 169, 170

K
Kiev 302
khora 23, 167
komos 51–2

L
L’art pour l’art 257
La Fée aux miettes (Nodier) 256
Laertes 215
laments 184
Last Judgment (Michelangelo) 242
‘last men’ 274
laughter 5, 6–7, 21, 30, 53–68, 76, 90, 93, 97, 186, 188, 205, 212, 221, 222, 242, 243, 269, 286;
angelic 59. See also
smile; satanic 7, 57–61, 62, 226; violent 54–5, 58
Laws. See Plato: works lazzi 192, 202, 203,
206, 207
Le Boeuf enragé 255
League of Cambrai 176, 182. See also wars: League of
Cambrai leap 263, 265, 279; acrobatic 181,
283; over
boundaries 46; into nothingness 22, 212
Lemnos 106, 108
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso) 279
lethargy 46, 220, 223, 254
Levant 98, 112
Leviathan (Hobbes) 147
L’Historia Bellissima 184, 188
liberalism 18, 24, 198, 272
libertinism 172, 182, 183, 187
‘Life of Porphyry’ (Mark the Deacon) 117
liminality 3, 6, 8, 15, 16, 23–4, 35, 37–9, 51, 66, 78–9, 83, 94, 98, 99, 102, 105, 108, 132, 158, 165,
173, 178, 179, 181, 182, 192, 193, 199, 204, 205, 213, 214, 219, 227, 233, 238, 241, 242,
269, 271, 284, 288, 295, 296,
307; Constantinople (spatial 83–4, 175–6; temporal 84–93);
 hyper-liminal 224–5; permanent 23, 175, 187,
188, 296, 297, 299, 302; real-world large-scale
296; Venice as 175
liminal arena 23
liminal crisis 8, 78, 79, 84, 91–3, 99,
liminal moment(s) 8, 23, 24, 101, 108, 178, 181, 214, 254, 259, 274, 283
liminoid 3, 6, 23
limits: eroded. See boundaries, dissolution
Linear B 42
linguistic turn 108
links: actor-audience 61; Baudelaire-Shakespeare 226; buffoons and moresca dancers 192, 305;
buffoons and disenchanted young
Venice patricians 8, 182–8; Byzantium-Europe 165;
carnival and
death; charlatans and buffoons 191–2; charlatans and inns 306; child, playing,
culture 295; circus-Church 83; defecation-childbirth 91; Dionysian-Apollonian
43, 44,
97;
dreaming and waking 89; elite and masses 93, 101, 103,
116; Heaven and Earth 82, 93, 168;
incitement and repression 162; Italian
comedy and Tudor England 215–6; love and death 256,
266;
marginal-liminal 181, 199, 225, 307; nomadic-settled 97; oratorical vs.
academic
freedom 144; perpetrator-victim 227, 236,
258, 291;
private-public 17, 98, 100, 101, 104,
164, 177, 223; purism and sen-sualism 269, 270, theatre and hunting 186
lion 79, 150, 155
literati 119, 277, 303
Lives of the Sophists (Philostratus) 106
logic 107, 118, 120, 126, 278, 284
Lohengrin 270
Lola Lola 271
Lolita (Nabokov) 271
London 264, 280
Lord of Misrule 215
Louvre 233, 234, 279
love 142–3, 153, 218–9, 226, 263, 284, 293; divine 228, 298;
romantic 200–1, 224, 254
Lucca 181
Lulu 268, 271, 272
Lyons 215

M
macabre 85, 191, 198, 260, 270, 292
Maccus 72, 99
madness 41, 67, 68, 193; divine 210, 211, 270,
272–4; world 274
Maecenas 278
maelstrom 211
Magdeburg 264
magic 80, 85, 87, 97, 98, 116, 159, 161, 190, 211, 228, 232, 237, 242, 243, 245, 260, 292; black 292
Magic Mountain (Mann) 307
magician 189, 240, 260, 285
magnanimity 297
Magnifico 201, 202, 204
Mahabharata 242
Mainz 179
malevolence 67, 77, 160, 249
Man Who Laughs, The (Hugo) 260, 301
Man Without Qualities (Musil) 271
manifesto 41, 55, 170, 288, 291
mannequin. See marionette
mannerism 109, 193
Mantua 134, 155, 163, 181, 207, 307
Marburg 53
Margarita 293
marionette 64, 65, 243, 245, 246, 250, 259, 265, 266, 270, 277
market 2–4, 10, 18, 19, 189, 223, 286, 297
marketing 10, 18, 19, 190, 191, 200, 223, 271, 280, 286, 307
marriage 27, 51–2, 81, 89, 171, 204, 206
Marrrchand d’habits 258, 260
Marxism 15, 16, 18, 188, 233, 299
mascara. See masquerade
mask(s) 3, 6, 10, 33–8, 65, 72, 95–6, 143, 148, 161, 165, 177, 180, 185, 189, 193, 198, 199, 203, 204,
205, 207, 208, 209, 212, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 232, 243, 249–50, 258, 259,
271, 275,
276,
286,
287, 288,
290, 297; power/possession 209, 258, 261;
Venetian style 198–9, 292
Mask and the Shadow, The (Tessari) 72
Masks and Buffoons (Sand) 259
masque 152, 228, 229, 230, 273
masquerade(s) 155–6, 164, 192, 234, 286
Masquerade (Lermontov) 290
mass media 16, 19, 190, 265, 296, 297; electronic 25
mass psychosis 282
Massacre of the Innocents (Callot) 232
Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 292, 307
master-slave dialectic (Hegel) 9, 58, 202
materialisation 292
meaning 25, 26, 28–30; second 119
measure 32, 57, 86, 160, 162, 293; Aristotle’s theory 162, 163
mechaniota 301
media. See mass media
mediator 265
medieval world 6, 146, 200
Mediterranean 175; culture 42, 93, 121, 228; sea 83
megalith(s) 42
Meistersinger 161
Meistersinger (Wagner) 268
Melanesia 38
melancholy 193, 212, 220, 221, 222, 223, 245, 247, 260, 275, 308
Melmoth 59, 60, 63
Melqart 115
‘Memory Theatre’ (Camillo) 305
Menaechme (Plautus) 202
Merchant of Venice. See Shakespeare: works messenger 203
Messiah 123
Metamorphosis (Kafka) 310
methodology 107, 108–10; historical 155, 178; sophistic 87;
of translation 126
Mezzettino 234
Middle Ages 19, 103, 160, 198, 200, 217
Midsummer Night 160, 203, 216, 272
migrants 97, 173, Milan 125, 130, 156, 182, 200,
Miles Gloriosus (Plautus) 202, 306
Miletus 303
mime(s) 48, 52, 72, 74–7, 79, 80, 83, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95–104, 116–7, 122, 142, 145,
157, 158,
160, 165,
189, 190,
191, 203,
209, 253,
254, 258,
286, 287,
290, 291,
292, 296, 300;
Byzantine 8, 74–7, 79, 80, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 157, 165,
182, 221,
290, 302,
305; origins
95, 97
mimesis. See imitation
mimetic desire 214, 219, 223, 230
mimus albus 258
mimomaniac 6, 48, 262, 263, 274
Minoan culture 42, 45
Miracle of St Anthony 288
Miranda 229
Mirano 244
misanthropy 292
Miseries and Misfortunes of the War, The (Callot) 232
misogyny 44, 133, 146, 193, 284, 304
Mistra church 88
mixed government 168
mocking 5, 7, 62–3, 67–8, 76, 77, 86, 90, 91, 94, 145, 193, 208, 247, 257
Modena 132, 147
modern type of man 72, 203, 263
modern world. See modernity
modernism 272, 278, 286, 297
modernity 1–2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 17, 28–30, 33, 37, 40, 47–9, 57, 71, 110, 147, 148, 154, 197, 200, 210, 226,
233, 249, 250, 262, 271, 293, 297, 298,
301; its emblem 250; its spirit 233
momaria. See mummery
momos. See blame
Momos (deity) 45, 233
Momus (Alberti) 146, 224
Momus (deity). See Momos
Mona Lisa (Leonardo) 234
monasticism 1, 81, 92, 119, 161
money-making 219, 220, 222
monotheistic religions 34
monster 111, 112, 164, 228, 249, 276
moon-cult 257, 259, 271, 272, 288
morality 36, 115, 133, 173, 214, 256, 263, 273
moresca 8, 157, 158, 161–4, 192, 197, 204,
232, 289
‘Moresca of the Zanni’ 307
Moscow 292, 293
Moses 128, 226, 242
motley 208, 212, 221, 222
mountebank 9, 166, 189, 198, 199, 201, 232, 235, 236
mummery 164, 166, 177
Munchausen, Baron 206
murder 67, 259, 260, 270, 290
Musée du Quay Branly (Paris) 300
music 32–3, 35, 37, 40–9, 57, 145, 149, 152, 159, 160, 163, 166, 180, 190, 232, 262, 264, 268, 269,
273, 288, 290
music-hall 269, 273
Mycenaean 42, 302
mystery plays (medieval). See rappresentazione sacra
Mythic Equation 212, 221. See also Tragic Equation
mythology 51, 104, 116, 206; Greek 17, 39, 45, 102, 189; modern
234; Nordic 39; Roman 102
myths of foundation 36

N
Nancy 231, 232
Naples 179
narcissism 250
National Gallery (London) 150
nationalism 24
Nazi 268
neo-Kantianism 18, 25, 78, 107, 108–10, 299, 304
neo-Platonism 7, 80, 82, 86, 87, 88, 92, 128, 168, 304
neo-positivism 107, 304
Neolithic 42
neurotic 259, 269
New Hegelians 25
‘new man’ (Soviet) 136, 290
New Testament 58
Nibelung Ring (Wagner) 268
Nietzsche, F. xiii, 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 16, 30, 36–7, 40–52, 57, 66, 67–8, 72, 97, 98, 99, 100, 129, 134,
146, 174, 210, 226, 227, 236, 239, 249, 262, 273–4, 283, 298, 300, 301, 310; works:
Beyond
Good and Evil 37, 42, 48, 50; Birth of Tragedy, The 6, 40, 41–7, 67, 97, 100, 210, 298, 300,
301; Case of Wagner, The 47–9; Ecce Homo 274; Gay Science 37, 42, 67;
Genealogy of
Morals 37, 47, 100; ‘Homer’s
Competition’ 301; Nietzsche contra Wagner 42, 47–9; ‘On the
Future of Our Educational Institutions’ 300; Untimely
Meditations 40, 41, 49; Zara-thustra
67 (Prologue 254,
274)
nihilism 43, 47, 50, 66, 99, 113, 133, 173, 218, 248, 254
no man’s land 182
noble/nobility 37, 56, 57, 162, 169
nomos 32
non-being 225, 227, 271, 296
Normans 87, 88, 121
nose 150, 203, 205, 206; hooked 207, 243, 246,
247
nothingness. See nulla
novel(s) 142; Hellenistic 89–90, 108, 109, 111
nude(s) 79–80
nudity 90, 93, 280
nulla 167, 212, 223, 225, 227, 237, 249, 271, 272, 296, 297

O
obedience 172, 173
obscenity 90, 93, 101, 134, 143, 180, 182, 193, 199, 201, 232
obsession 66, 193, 255, 256, 260, 262, 266, 268, 272, 280, 290
oceanic feeling 43, 48, 301
Old Testament 17, 115, 117, 226, 242
Offenbarung. See revelation
Öffentlichkeit 17
Old Cloths Peddler, The 256
Olympians 44
On Dancing (Lucian) 113
‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (Baudelaire) 57–61
On the False Hypocrite 143
‘On Masks’ (Tasso) 148
‘On the Method of Awesomeness’ 107
‘On the Principle of Communism’ (Wagner) 267
On Status (Hermogenes) 107
opera 164, 166, 277, 279
opérateur 253, 271
operetta 206
Ophelia 57, 215
optic 151, 305; Alberti’s experiments 305
‘Oration in Defence of Mimes’ (Choricius) 117
Orations (Libanius) 131; 2nd 116; 64th 117
order: dissolution/collapse 38, 44, 248, 295; meaningful 293; primordial 293
Orientals 241, 242, 243
originality 277, 281
Orlando 222, 223
Orontes river 115
orphan xvii, 131, 279, 291
Othello 218, 225, 226, 308
Ottoman. See civilization: Turkish
outcast 36–7, 59, 222, 234, 257, 258, 259, 270, 295
out-casting (Meyerhold) 291
outsider 21, 37, 59, 63, 140, 153, 157, 188, 257, 258
owl(s) 241

P
pact 3, 139
Padua 71, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134, 141, 146, 147, 155, 172, 186, 219
paideia 32, 110, 115, 116, 129, 295
paidia 295
pais 295
Palaeolithic 42
Palaiologan period 118, 124
Palestine 84
Pan 61, 111
Pandarus 223, 224
Pandora’s box 173
Pandora’s box 271
Panopticon xiii, 22, 296
panta heinai (all is one) 60
Pantalone 158, 191, 201, 204–5, 215, 216, 220,
221, 222,
266
pantomime 8, 61, 64, 74, 76, 95–104, 110, 113–5, 116, 117, 122,
162, 163,
253, 270,
271, 272,
277,
289,
303; English 208, 254; mechanical 163, 291
Papal State 147
Papua New Guinea 77
parabasis 51–2
Paradise 168
paradox 5, 9, 30, 31, 38, 54, 61, 66, 77, 100, 108, 109, 111, 118, 139, 144, 167, 178, 187, 210, 212,
219, 221, 225, 226, 228, 235, 275, 291
parasite 52, 189
Parasite (Lucian) 141, 146
pariah 257, 259
Paris 10, 48, 120, 121, 203, 233, 235, 253, 254, 255, 261, 262, 263, 264–6, 267–9, 272, 275,
276,
277,
278, 279,
280–4, 285
parodos 51
parody 56, 65, 90, 91, 111, 113, 180, 187, 247
parrhesia 300
parthenogenesis 272
participation 16, 21, 27, 29, 30, 35, 53, 75, 97, 101, 110, 113, 116, 153, 154, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165,
166, 171, 200, 287, 296
passage. See liminality
‘passionate interests’ 268
pathogenesis 2, 248
patria 156, 173
patrician(s) 125, 133, 172, 173, 183, 193; disenchanted young (Rome 102–3; Venice
8, 182–8). See
also Senate
Paulus (Vergerio) 141, 142
Pavia 127, 130, 134, 143, 144, Pavlovian reflex 180
Pécs 134
pedantry 113, 116, 117, 122, 136, 138, 205
pederasty 143
Pedrolino 158, 203, 225, 234
penis 233
performative speech act 25, 27, 274
performative turn 6, 24–30
Perm 276, 277
Persian Empire 84, 117
‘Person, The’ (Mauss) 34
personality 20, 31, 107, 208, 209, 238, 257, 258, 276, 287, 300; paranoid 136; split/schismatic 61,
232 (See also schizophrenia)
perspective 151, 237
Perugia 273
perversity/perversion 256, 273
Pesaro 162, 163
Petit Palais (Paris) 279
Petrushka (Stravinsky) 282
Pforta 134
phallus 204
Phenomenology (Hegel) 58
philistine(s) 50, 263
Philodoxeos (Alberti)141, 146
Philogenia (Ugolino) 143
philology 6, 8, 40, 41, 49–50, 129, 134, 274
Philosophy of Money (Simmel) 308
Phoenicia 39, 44
physiognomic expressiveness 149–50
Piacenza 130, 155
Piazza San Marco. See St. Mark square
Piazzetta (Venice) 167
Pierrot 10, 203, 206, 207, 209, 234, 235, 253–75, 277, 282, 288,
289, 292
Pierrot (Watteau). See Gilles Pierrot: Cain (Rivière) 260
‘Pierrot Decapitated’ (Palacio) 272
‘Pierrot gamin’ (Verlaine) 270
Pierrot Murderer of His Wife (Marguerite) 269
Pierrot Sceptic (Chéret) 270
piety 172, 173, 218
pilgrimage 88, 190, 273
Pisa 170, 181
plagiarism 145
plague 98, 130, 137, 167, 172, 222
Plato xiii, 6, 7, 8, 20, 23, 30–3, 36, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54–5, 65, 85, 86, 87, 95, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109,
111, 112, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 149, 151, 167, 172, 210,
211, 224, 228, 230, 238, 239, 246, 254, 271, 272, 282, 284, 287, 293, 295, 298,
300, 303,
304,
305,
306; works: Euthydemos 300; Euthyphro 172; Ion xiii, 31, 48, 49, 246, 287;
Laws xiii,
31–3, 65, 127, 246, 303, 305; Philebus 54, 107, 301;
Protagoras 111; Republic 31, 54, 127,
130,
246, 306;
Sophist 31, 107, 139, 246, 271; Statesman xiii, 31, 246, 272; Symposium xiii,
31, 109, 120, 127, 304; Timaeus 23, 140, 167,
246
play 20, 32, 62, 68, 109, 198, 220
pleasure principle 31
pneuma-pathology 263
Poetics (Aristotle) 54, 129
poetry 44, 56, 57–61, 90, 94, 114, 116, 134, 138, 139–40, 159, 193, 200,
229, 254,
257, 264,
265,
270,
271, 272,
273, 275,
288, 290;
invective 94;
‘new style’ 161
police: secret (Byzantine 94; Soviet Russian 292)
Polichinelle. See Pulcinella
‘Polichinelle’ (Nodier) 256
Poliscena (Bruni) 141, 142
politics of spectacle 155
Polonius 215, 216
Polynesia 38
popularity 161, 210, 234
pornography 44, 89, 94, 109
Portia 219, 220, 221
‘Possessed, The’ 280
possession 38, 209, 282
postmodern(ity) 207, 255
power/knowledge/sexuality 212
pragmatism 29
prehistory 97
presence 29, 35, 61, 110; and absence 34–5; of sacred 28, 29, 35, 245
press see mass media, printing
Priapus 61
Priene 98
Primavera (Botticelli) 152
printing 6, 17, 19, 183, 190, 231; in Greek 165
Prince (Machiavelli) 184
problem plays 223
problematisation xiii, 20, 23, 36, 85, 211, 216, 226, 227
Procession in the Piazza San Marco (Bellini) 306
professionalisation: of acting 165, 186, 198,
199; of dancing 113, 159, 163
progress 3, 22, 24, 33, 177, 187, 200, 272, 290, 297, 298
Progymnasmata exercises 108, 110
proletariat 203, 257, 266
Prometheus 33, 43, 58, 111, 301
promiscuity 140
prophet(s) 17, 79, 115, 270
Prospero 228, 229
prostitution 116, 191, 200, 206, 284
Protestantism 4, 17, 122, 136, 197, 198, 213, 254
Proteus 2, 96, 199, 219, 269, 308
Provence 161
provocation 117, 214, 248, 253, 286, 288, 289, 292
psyche, European 266
psychoanalysis 262
psychogenesis 248
‘public, The’ 230, 265, 286, 289, 297
public arena 20–22, 167, 212, 255, 297
public sphere 13–33, 165, 189, 297
publicity. See marketing
Publikum 17
Puck 217
puerility 50, 259, 267, 269
Pulcinella 9, 72, 203, 208, 209, 226, 231, 234, 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244–8, 254, 256, 260,
265,
266,
272, 282,
306, 309
Pulcinella (Diaghilev) 248, 279
puppet 32, 54, 64, 65, 229, 243, 282, 287, 288, 290, 301
puritanism 3, 4, 9, 10, 85, 86, 87, 113, 118, 197, 198, 213, 216, 253, 254, 264, 296, 308
purity 50, 87, 269, 270, 271
Puss-in-Boots (Tieck) 287

Q
Quattrocento 110, 125, 127, 131, 133, 134, 135, 149, 152, 171, 174, 178
Queen of Cyprus, The (Halévy) 266

R
rabbit 208
radicalism 267, 268, 280, 289
rape xii, 200, 218, 219, 283, 309
Rape of Europa. See Tiepolo: works
Rape of Lucrece. See Shakespeare: works
rappresentazione sacra 19, 71, 75, 152, 286,
287
rational choice theory 3
‘rationalism’: neo-Kantian 78; pseudo-
295; pure 250; puritan 254
Ravenna 132
reception 14, 15, 42, 92, 121, 236, 240, 265
recognisability 201
recognition 20, 21, 101, 145, 222, 230
Rede (Jean-Paul) 249
Reformation 5, 128, 129, 177, 188, 197, 213
refugees: Levantine 84–5; Byzantine 157, 158,
166
regression 45, 97, 223, 230, 231, 239, 256, 287, 289, 297, 298;
permanent 266
Renaissance xiii, 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 30, 40, 65, 73, 87, 96, 102, 110, 112, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128–93
passim, 197, 198, 213,
223, 237,
255, 272,
278, 283;
Byzantine 117, 119; collapse 5, 6, 7, 74,
124, 140, 147,
192, 197,
212, 218;
Macedonian 89
renovatio. See Venice: renovatio
Repetitio Magistri, or Zanini the Cook (Ugolino) 143
repetition 65, 80, 224
representative publicness 5, 18
‘repressive hypothesis’ 305
republicanism 166, 168, 278
repugnance 77, 302
reputation 4, 20, 101, 116, 168, 170; sociology of 306
resentment 10, 36, 43, 119, 172, 221, 276, 284
resignation 22, 45, 91, 223, 297
respect 4, 20, 101, 198, 199, 204
respectability 100, 101, 198, 199, 200, 283, 302
responsibility 65, 240, 254, 256
ressentiment. See resentment Resurrection 248
revaluation of values 202, 247
revel 229, 230
revelation 17, 229, 292
revenge. See vengeance
revolution 57, 186, 201, 229, 253, 255, 263, 266, 267, 272, 279, 288, 290; American 244; commedic
10, 265; commercial 190; dancing 152–5, 161, 180, 190; Dresden 267, 268; French
4, 6,
7,
23–4,
55, 203,
233, 244,
248, 254,
255, 268,
278, 287,
289 (its values 9, 23–4, 247); July 264;
Russian/Bolshevik 290, 292; sexual 266
‘Revolution, The’ (Wagner) 267
revolutionary tradition 10, 13, 18, 24, 57, 188, 203,
248
Reynard the fox 287
rhapsode 246, 281
rhythm 3, 35, 53, 64, 97
Rialto 182
Richard III 211
ridicule 5, 7, 10, 21, 22, 31, 53–68, 76, 86, 90, 94, 113, 158
Rienzi (Wagner) 266
Rinaldo 245
riot(s) 76; pantomime 96, 102–3
rite of passage 23–4, 34, 99, 214
ritual(s) 8, 16, 25, 26, 29, 34–6, 37–9, 51–2, 75, 98, 99, 113, 159, 160, 166–7, 180, 200,
206, 230,
287; agonistic 52, 220; of degradation 85, 94; Dionysian
37, 46,
206, 211;
fertility 51, 203; of
sacrifice 28, 115, 210,
220
ritual process 24, 38
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The 303
Rolling Stones 292
Roman Empire 8, 72, 74, 80, 95–105; Eastern. See Byzantium;
collapse 175; emergence 96
romanticism 28, 42, 43, 48, 55–7, 58, 68, 198, 201, 203, 228, 231, 233, 249, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257,
260, 268, 269, 270, 289, 293; cult of Shakespeare 46, 68, 237, 255,
270
Rome 37, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 94, 105, 172, 175, 176, 185, 187, 192, 193, 231, 258; sack 167, 187
Romeo 210, 211, 219
rope dancer. See tightrope walker
Roquairol 249–50
Rubicon 96
Russia 10, 48, 91, 207, 275, 279, 280, 282, 285, 288, 290, 292, 310; Soviet 4, 119, 291, 292
Russian Ballet. See Ballets Russes
Russian dolls 52

S
Sabbath 261
sacred 6, 25, 27–30, 82, 91, 92, 99, 245, 293
sacrifice 28, 44, 52, 153, 154,
169, 220,
245
Sacrifice of Abraham, The (Leo Belcari) 152
sacrificial mechanism 7, 46, 52, 63, 230, 300
saint(s) 156; female 142
Saint-Germain (in Paris) 234
Salome 160, 204, 272
Salome (Wilde) 280
‘Salome’ (Picasso) 309–10
saltimbanchi. See mountebank
Samosata 108, 112
San Canciano (Venice) 181
San Cassiano (Venice) 182
San Michele Island (Venice) 285
Sancho Panza 270
Santa Maria del Popolo Church 185
Santissima Annunziata Church 200
San Basso Church (Venice) 145
Sarsina (Umbria) 99
Sassanid Empire. See Persian Empire
Satan 58, 256, 269
satire 89, 94, 113, 139, 269
satyr(s) 46, 208, 242, 243, 245, 246
satyresse(s). See satyr(s)
Saxony 266
scandal 280, 281, 284, 289
scapegoat(ing) 63, 301
Scaramouche 56
scatology 76
Scheherazade 282, 283, 285
Scheherazade (Diaghilev) 282, 285
schism 2, 7, 60, 68, 79, 80, 82–3, 86, 121, 128, 139, 150, 163, 202, 213, 214, 220, 225, 226, 228,
232, 254, 269, 270, 272, 302; foundational Byzantine 83; Great Schism
73, 87,
156
schismogenesis 2, 5, 8, 9, 60, 77–8, 80, 85, 88, 101, 106, 225, 246, 254, 270, 271, 272, 299, 303, 305
schizophrenia 60, 283, 301
scholasticism 107, 120–8 passim Scientia Sacra (Hamvas) 307
Sea of Marmara 83
Sea People 302
‘Second Coming, The’ (Yeats) 79, 295
‘Second Oration’ (Libanius) 116
second prefaces 40, 42
Second Sophistic 8, 50, 74, 102, 105–17
secret societies 1, 2, 34
secularism/secularisation 87, 99, 135, 151, 193, 198
seduction 89, 153–4, 156, 159, 163, 232, 242, 273, 282
Seldjuk. See civilisations: Turkish self-consciousness 111, 151, 270, 272, 287
self-portrait 9, 235, 239
self-realisation 169
self-referentiality 243, 258
self-reflexivity 42–3; Shakespeare’s 214, 224,
270; Tiepolo’s 236, 238, 239; Watteau’s 235, 270. See
also
spiritual exercise
self-victimisation 10
Semmelweis syndrome 276
Senate: Roman 101, 102, 103; US xi; Venetian 169. See also
patricians, disenchanted young
Senegal 38
sense: of judgment 94, 262, 269, 274; of humour 220, 221, 269,
293 (Byzantine 93–4, 95); of reality
262; of sinfulness 273
sensualism 208, 270
sentimentalism 266, 275, 294
separation: audience-actor 6, 19, 51, 83, 157, 164, 165,
166; beholder and image 151; high and low
culture 193, 200; painting-literature 237; work time and rest 291
Sequel to a Masked Ball (Gérôme) 260
Serenissima, La 168, 177
serenity. See tranquillity
Sermon on the Mount 210
serpent(s) 241, 242, 243, 294; brass 242
seven sages 123
Shakespeare, W. 2, 9, 46, 49, 55, 56–7, 60, 68, 112, 146, 186, 199, 202, 203, 209, 210, 211, 212–30,
231, 235, 236,
237, 240,
242, 246,
249, 253,
254, 255,
256, 264,
266, 270,
272, 273,
284,
298, 303, 309; works: As You Like It 220, 221–2, 308; Comedy
of Errors 2, 202, 217; Hamlet
46–7, 209–12,
215, 216,
224, 227–8, 256, 264, 308; Julius Caesar 227; King Lear 228, 264;
Love’s Labour Lost 215, 217,
218; Love’s Labour Won 217; Macbeth 211, 256; Merchant of
Venice 219–21, 224, 225, 227, 242; A Midsum-mer Night Dream
216–7, 218, 293–4, 308;
Othello 215, 219, 223,
224–7, 242, 249; Rape of Lucrece, The 214, 218;
Romeo and Juliet
218–9; Taming of A Shrew
217, 219;
Taming of The Shrew 217, 218, 219;
Tempest, The 9,
228–30, 240; Titus Andronicus
218; Troilus and Cressida 221, 222–4,
226; Twelfth Night 215;
Two Gentlemen of Verona 218,
219; Venus and Adonis 213–4
Shakespeare (Girard) 213
Shakespeare (Hughes) 213
‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’ (Gautier) 256
shamanism 97, 98, 159, 161, 189, 203, 213, 216, 229, 299, 307
Ship of Fools (Brant) 192
ship of fools 271
Shylock 220
Sicily 87
siege 177; of Constantinople 79, 82, 83; mentality 129
Siena 170, 185, 193
signboard poster 235
simplicity 293
sinister 76, 80, 94, 188, 193, 203, 205, 207, 208, 247, 257, 260, 269, 270, 288
siren 79, 156
Sistine Chapel 242
Sistine Madonna (Raphael) 184
skomorokhi (mimes) 91
skoptikoi iamboi. See poetry, invective
slapstick 76, 86, 90, 253
slave revolt (Nietzsche) 9, 100
Sly 217
Smeraldina 206
smile 59–60, 275, 284
‘Smile, The’ (Blake) 60, 275
smith(s) 136, 307: blacksmith 131; goldsmith 124; of
‘new man’ 136; wordsmith 112
sociability 20, 21, 198
socialism 24, 272
sociogenesis 248
solstice 160
sophist(s) 6, 8, 30–3, 85, 86, 89, 92, 94, 95, 102, 104, 105–17, 122, 126, 137,
138, 140,
143, 149,
150, 153,
157, 189,
197, 221,
246, 281,
282, 309
‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (Goethe) 307
Soviet Union. See Russia: Soviet
Spain 84, 121, 205, 244, 245, 273
Sparta 97
spectator 3, 61, 65, 110, 151, 156, 164, 200, 216, 230, 291, 299; pure 151, 162
‘Speech of Elagabal to Prostitutes, The’ (Alberti) 144
sphinx 79, 249
spiral 57, 93, 111, 158, 160, 165, 180, 185, 186, 202, 223, 269, 280
spirit of gravity 67, 68
spiritual exercises 43, 229. See also self-reflexivity
spirituality 34, 42, 269
split. See schism
sprezzatura 283
St. Mark’s Cathedral (Venice) 176, St. Mark’s Square (Venice)
145, 166,
167, 176,
182, 191,
278
St. George and the Princess of Silena (Pisanello) 150
stag 150
St. Peter’s Church (Venice) 176
St. Petersburg 48, 80, 276, 277, 279; as third Constantinople 277
‘Stalactites’ (Banville) 259
stock types 9, 52, 144, 158, 177, 179, 197, 198, 199, 203–9
storm 96, 176, 248, 275
Strasbourg 192, 307
strategification 81, 198, 302 Structural Transformation (Habermas)
13, 16,
19
Studies in Seven Arts (Symons) 272
sublime 45, 56, 270
suffering 22, 24, 37, 57, 59, 88, 111, 133, 157, 203, 232, 253, 257, 258, 270, 284, 293
‘suffering servant’ 235
Switzerland 147
symbolism 269, 272, 289
‘Sympathy with the Devil’ (Rolling Stones) 292
Symposium. See Plato: works syphilis 276
Syria 84, 108

T
tabula rasa 290
tango 280
Tannhäuser (Wagner) 268
Tarquin 219
Tarsus 108
Taylorism 291
technique of self. See spiritual exercises
technology 32, 290, 296, 297
Temptation of St. Anthony, The (Callot) 232
terraferma 182
terror 6, 7, 24, 34, 36, 39, 90, 242, 295, 297, 298
terrorism 279
thaumazein 149, 228
Thasos 44
theatrification 254
theatrocracy 31–3
theatrum mundi 151
Theological Academy (Kiev) 292
Theotokos (mother of God) 85
Thousand and One Nights 208, 308
Thrace 44, 92
Tiepolo family 9, 231, 236, 249, 254, 256; Giambattista 236–48, 309 (works: Capricci 239, 241, 308;
Rape of Europa, The 309; Scherzi
239, 240,
241–4, 245, 247, 248, 309; Treppenhaus frescoes
238–41, 242); Giandomenico 236–48, 309 (works: ‘Divertimenti per Ragazzi’
244, 247–8;
Farewell of Pulcinella, The 247;
Il Mondo Novo 245; Pulcinella and the Acrobats
247;
Pulcinella in Love 247; Pulcinella’s Swing 246; Stanza dei Pulcinella 246–7;
Villa Zianigo
frescoes 244–7); Lorenzo 238 Tiepolo Pink (Calasso) 236 Tiepolo and Pictorial Intelligence
(Alpers and Baxandall) 236
tightrope walker 234, 254, 273
Timaeus. See Plato: works time: out of joint 9,
211, 227,
298
Titan(s) 33, 43, 45, 46, 58, 68, 152, 171, 183, 266
Titan (Jean-Paul) 249
‘To Guarino of Verona’ (Janus Pannonius) 140
tone 32, 58, 113, 229, 263
Topsy-Turvy World (Tieck) 287
total social fact 198
total institutions. See closed institutions
totalitarianism 22, 28, 250
tragedy 7, 30, 41–7, 51, 56, 57, 66, 71, 74, 76, 96, 97, 100, 116, 166, 185, 216, 228
Tragic Equation 212, 224, 226. See also Mythic Equation
tranquillity 168, 177, 212
transcendence 28, 45–6
transgression 28, 182, 209, 248, 291
translation 134, 141, 146, 160, 216, 249, 255, 309; methodology 126; Plato’s 126–9, 306 (errors in
127, 305) transparency xii, xiii, 6, 19, 198
trauma 28, 177, 276, 277
trespassing limits 209, 210. See also boundaries:
dissolution
Treviso 182
trickster 6, 38–9, 52, 63, 64, 79, 95, 97, 112, 115, 132, 142, 146, 160, 182, 189, 190, 207, 215, 217,
224, 246, 249, 271, 287, 292, 300, 301, 304; demonic/diabolical 206, 257
Triumph of Pierrot, The (Green) 4
Troilus 223, 224
troubadours 161, 200
trust 20
truth 25, 56, 61, 105, 106, 108, 116, 128, 142, 143, 230, 240, 265, 284
truth-teller 37
Tsar 280
Turin 273
Turkey 108, 112
turning around. See conversion
Tuscany 181, 184
Twelfth Day. See Baptism of Christ
Two Pantaloons (Callot) 232
Two Politicians (Couture) 261

U
Udine 133
ugliness 56, 57, 150, 162
Ulysses 223
unanimitas 145, 171, 173, 185
Uncino, Capitan 206, 266
unconsciousness 43, 61
understanding 81, 107, 108, 110, 111, 288
Ural 276
Urbino 184
utilitarianism 20, 25, 53, 254
utopia 22, 174, 188, 296
Utopia (More) 184, 188

V
vacuum. See void
vagabond(s) 178, 255
vanity 66
vengeance 36, 227, 259, 290
Venice 8, 9, 71, 74, 102, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148,
151, 155, 157, 158, 161, 165–95, 200, 201, 204,
205, 207,
215, 219,
220, 222,
224, 225,
236,
237,
242, 243,
244, 253,
259, 261,
273, 277,
278, 285;
‘myth’ 168–70; political constitution 168–70; renovatio 167;
‘theatricality’ 166–8, 175–6, 305; tranquillity 168, 177
Venus 61
Verona 135, 137, 144, 150, 151, 155, 219
Verstehen. See understanding
‘vice’ figure 215
victimhood 28, 45, 47, 64, 76, 116, 203, 205, 253, 257, 258, 271, 299
Vienna 266, 276, 277
View of Venice (Barbari) 306
Vigevano 130
Villa Valmarana 245
Villa Zianigo 244, 246
violence 3, 50, 64–5, 67, 88, 93, 101, 116, 150, 159, 161, 162, 163, 218, 222, 227, 238, 246, 250,
253, 257, 269, 281
Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and George, The (Pisanello) 150
Virgin Mary 85, 170
virginity 90, 201, 275
virility 204
virtuosity 161
vision. See experience: vision
Vision of St. Cecilia (Raphael) 184
Vision of Saint Eustace, The (Pisanello) 150
Vogue 286
void 27–8, 30, 35, 124, 167, 193, 212, 272, 296, 297, 298
volcanoes 39, 45
Volpone (Johnson) 307
vulnerability 20, 176, 178, 276

W
Wales 272
war(s) 8, 36, 84,103, 176, 223, 224,
297; Byzantine civil 92; of England (Civil War 103; of Roses
46);
First World 280; Italian (1494–8) 176; of the League of Cambrai 8, 176, 178, 182, 183,
191, 192; Napoleonic 254; Ottoman Venetian
176; Persian 99 (Sassanid 84, 117); Russia
(Civil 290; Japan 288); Second
World 268; Thirty Years’ 232, 233; of the sexes 272; Trojan
49,
295, 302
warfare. See war(s)
watching 140, 151, 162, 239–40, 242, 243, 244,
258
wild man 203, 204, 307
will to power 42, 47
Windsor 215
Witch’s Sabbath 293
Woland 292
wordsmith 112
‘World as Ballet, The’ (Symons) 273
World Exhibition 280
world history 46, 243, 273
world order 82–3: divine 168; eternity 79, 83, 168; rejection
156; as theatre 250, See also experience:
world upside down; beauty: of the world
World War One. See war(s): First World
World War Two. See war(s): Second World
Würzburg 238

Y
Yahweh 226
Yale 2

Z
Zambia 38
Zanni 4, 9, 144, 187, 191, 201, 202, 203–4, 207, 215, 234,
254, 272,
307
Zemganno Brothers, The (Goncourt) 260
zero. See nulla
Zeus 44
Zürich 188