Goethe's Allegories of Identity

Chapter 4. The Theatrical Self

c h a p t e r 4 The Theatrical Self The classical plays Egmont, Iphigenie auf Tauris, and Torquato Tasso all deal at bottom with how to recognize and represent identity, even though they seem quite different on the surface: Egmont, in prose, has a large cast and disjointed scenes and owes much to Shakespeare and English bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century, while Iphigenie and Tasso, in blank verse, have small casts and tight linear plotting and look more like Euripides in the French neoclassical mode (Iphigenie has a typical Euripidean prologue and even passages that evoke the tone of choral ode). Thus it is necessary to explore first how identity emerges as a theme, then how Goethe experiments with genre to generate a sense for the complexity of identity, and, finally, the techniques of dramatic projection he develops to make the complexity visible on stage. Identity as Theme Before entering into the analysis, consider the essential similarity of the three plays based on a brief comparative plot summary. Egmont is a public hero trying to protect his people from Spanish oppression by remaining loyal to King Philip and trying to mediate. He is both Spanish noble and Flemish populist, the one side represented by his court connections and the other by his bourgeois Flemish mistress, Klare. His effort founders on the effective planning of his major rival, the Duke of alba, and the play ends with Egmont dreaming of his mistress as the goddess of freedom and, upon waking, leaving his dungeon to be executed, while the orchestra plays a victory symphony. Iphigenie, saved from sacrifice at aulis to be priestess of Diana at tauris, is pulled between her longing to return to reconcile the sins of her fathers in Greece, and King 58 experiments in subjectivity Thoas’s demand that she become his wife and civilize his barbaric subjects in tauris. When her brother Orest arrives, Iphigenie achieves the impossible mediation between the two identities by freeing her brother of his madness induced by the Furies and by making peace between her brother and Thoas.1 The deus ex machina of Euripides’ play is no longer necessary as all then realize that only Iphigenie is the sister the oracle summons back to Greece and that the contested statue of Diana can remain in tauris. tasso also has alternate identities; they appear in the choice of profession—poet or effective diplomat -courtier, as embodied in his rival antonio—and also in two women, both named Leonore, who compete for his affection. tasso makes his choices in both cases so clumsily that he is abandoned by the court and descends into madness. The differences between a public and private identity appear differently in the three plays even as they gradually converge on a common method of representing it. For each of the central figures the question of identity dominates the play. tasso would like to be not only the gifted poet that he is, but also a polished, worldly-wise courtier, like the duke’s chief diplomat antonio. Disclosure of the identities of Iphigenie and Orest is already central to Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, but Goethe foregrounds Iphigenie’s identity by having her tell the story of the House of atreus not to the audience in the prologue, as in Euripides , but to King Thoas in order to dissuade him from marrying her. The shift makes her identity more personal, in that it is presumed to affect intimate relations with others, and something to be contested, since Thoas refuses to attribute the same importance to it that Iphigenie does. among a swirling mass of characters who all suspect one another of varying degrees of duplicity, Egmont stands as both hero and central enigma of his play. The question of how Egmont should be judged, first posed by Schiller, has dominated critical discussion ever since, with no agreement whether he is to be praised or condemned , whether he is ambitious or self-sacrificing, political or naive, competent or incompetent. as in Werther the problem of self for each of these protagonists, all initially conceived during or immediately after the writing of that novel, begins with solipsism.2 Egmont, begun shortly after Werther, is the closest to the early model.3 Goethe eliminated all reference to Egmont’s wife and eleven children in order to make him another Werther—attractive, spontaneous, and unable to accommodate the demands of propriety or the advice of well-meaning elders . Werther defending suicide to...