Affecting Grace: Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist by Kenneth S. Calhoon (review)

Kenneth S. Calhoon’s Affecting Grace: Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist is a careful study on the changing role of theatricality in eighteenth-century German theater, literature, and art. The eighteenth century witnessed a definitive shift in theater practices from a Baroque theatrical exteriority to Neoclassicism’s fourth wall and internalized gaze. At the same time, the rediscovery of William Shakespeare in Germany beginning in the eighteenth century (and especially influential slightly later during the Romantic period) also left a significant mark on theater and aesthetics. Affecting Grace examines this pivotal creative period between 1750 and 1808 via the literary works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and Heinrich von Kleist. It considers these works’ important yet contradictory relationships both to the antitheatrical spirit of the times emanating from France (especially via the influence of Denis Diderot) and at the same time to the very theatrical works of Shakespeare, in particular The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, and Henry V, as well as the Sonnets.

Affecting Grace advances the thesis that this dual influence creates a paradox of Enlightenment sensibility and subjectivity, on the one hand, and Baroque theatricality and divine grace, on the other. Calhoon demonstrates how German writers and artists creatively engage this paradox in their works. Theatricality becomes feigned and the gaze of the other (audience, deus ex machina) becomes embedded, not as a chorus, but as a judge or king, or even an internalized Lacanian Other. Divine grace thus becomes “affected” in these modern works, as the author appropriately points out in the title of his study. While Lessing’s dramas Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and Nathan der Weise (1779), as well as Kleist’s comedy Der zerbrochne Krug (1808), play a central role in this study, Calhoon, however, does not limit his range of investigation to theater alone. He also offers detailed examinations of Schiller’s elegy “Der Spaziergang” (1800), Bernardo Bellotto’s tableau-vivant urban-scape portraits (1747–1766), and the gestural nature of Meissen porcelain (1720–1756). Although each chapter concentrates on a specific work or oeuvre, Calhoon lucidly and effectively interweaves each work’s instantiation of the book’s larger theme.

German literary and artistic engagement with Shakespeare during the Romantic period, at a time when Germany shifted its focus from France to England, is a rich area of study in scholarship. The ever authoritative Schlegel-Tieck translation project of Shakespeare’s plays in the early part of the nineteenth century has been the focal point of much research, such as, for example, Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann’s “Klassische Übersetzung, Modernisierung und Eklektizismus” in Komödie und Tragödie—übersetzt und bearbeitet (1994) and Kenneth E. Larson’s slightly earlier “The Origins of the ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ Shakespeare in the 1820s” (German Quarterly 60 [1987]: 19–37). Studies on earlier engagement with Shakespeare, however, are rather scant. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s influence on German Enlightenment theater is widely acknowledged. Lessing’s own direct criticism of Johann Christoph Gottsched’s praise of French classical theater in favor of the Shakespearean model is expressed in Lessing’s collaborative Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759–65). Roger Paulin’s comprehensive study on the role of Shakespeare in Germany, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914: Native Literature and Foreign Genius (2005), indeed takes this as a thematic starting point. Lessing’s embracing of Shakespeare is, however, much more nuanced than previous studies have been able to illustrate. Through its close readings of individual passages from just a handful of works, Affecting Grace carefully and rigorously demonstrates how the works of Lessing and others negotiate Shakespeare within Enlightenment sensibility and bourgeois restraint. Calhoon’s book therefore offers an important contribution to Shakespeare scholarship within German studies that nicely complements previous publications in this area.

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