Theatermoral: Moralische Argumentation und dramatische Kommunikation in der Tragödie der Aufklärung (review)

Wolfgang Ranke has produced a formidable study on Enlightenment theater that focuses on the eighteenth-century perspective of morals and ethics, presents a careful review of the literary debate concerning these concepts, and lays out a detailed analysis of the more significant works involved.

Ranke explicates the historical perspective of Enlightenment heroic tragedy with emphasis on the underlying correspondence of Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Nicolai. His point of departure in the study is what he considers Mendelssohn’s much misunderstood catch phrase, “theatrical morality.” In order to develop his argument concerning the question of morality as such, he analyzes Gottsched’s Sterbender Cato, for which he lays out the full mythological background of the legend, and employs Addison’s Cato and Deschamps’ Caton d’Utique as counterpoints.

Here Ranke considers why Gottsched chose the Cato legend as his subject matter in the first place, and he presents the relevant underlying moral arguments which he believes must have persuaded the author but which, at the same time, must also have led to some discrepancies between the theory and practice of what he surely had hoped to achieve. Ranke then confronts the eighteenth-century understanding of morality itself, which he argues was derived from Christian Wolff’s rationalism—supposedly the root of the eighteenth-century German preoccupation with “Vernunft.” However, Ranke is also quick to point out that Wolff’s rationalism did not necessarily filter down to all literary environments. For example, in England and for someone like Addison, literary norms were likely rather influenced by Hobbes who, Ranke argues, moved the moral discussion away from the merely theoretical and towards a more “practical rationalism.”

Ranke further argues that J. E. Schlegel’s 1746 “Trauerspiel,” Canut, ushered in a new, more reflective tradition with what he terms a “negative hero,” and he follows this argument into the subsequent discussion of Cronegk’s Codrus, which, for Ranke, serves as a predecessor for Schlegel that reveals yet another direction to the heroic tradition that is to be understood as more closely linked to Gellert and sentimentalism.

Ranke’s next focus is Lessing’s one-act play Philotas, which for him is of special importance since the reception of the work, in contradistinction to the previous models, is not predominantly based on the element of sympathy. From this perspective follows the final chapter’s argument concerning the actual effect of the theater on the audience. To this end Ranke provides a close analysis of Emilia Galotti and an extended discussion of Schiller’s “Über das Pathetische.” Above and beyond the question of morality per se, Ranke concludes that in any work of dramatic art, the real task of the tragic poet is to serve the aesthetic imagination of the viewer and not merely to obey the logical dictates of reason. A real viewer, he insists, will always judge the action of the dramatic characters on stage not merely as an aesthetic exercise but also as a moral condition.

For all of the absolute good that Ranke accomplishes, there are still some things to which one might rightly take exception. Chief among these is what appears to be his philosophically lax perspective on the terms “moral” and “ethical” which at the outset he conceives as basically synonymous (10, foot note 2). Yet, within the context of eighteenth-century philosophical thinking, these two terms often entail an important conceptual separation between the religious and the secular that he does not consider. And even when Ranke does briefly touch on the question of secularization, he does not perceive this critical difference between the terms (55), which might actually have served his theme very well.

In the same way, Ranke makes no sharp distinction between the terms “Tragödie” and “Trauerspiel” (see 11–12), which to eighteenth-century sensibilities denoted works of completely different qualities. The “Tragödie,” especially for Gottsched, encompassed all that expressed Aristotelian tragedy with its strict delineation of character and action. The...