The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism by Mary Helen Dupree (review)

The sociocultural history of acting and the perception of actresses presented against the backdrop of modern (bourgeois) theatre as a means of moral (and gendered) education have been explored since the 1980s, with groundbreaking studies by Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Renate Möhrmann, and Ruth B. Emde, as well as, more recently, Wendy Arons. Concurrently, scholars such as Dagmar von Hoff, Susanne Kord, and Anne Fleig have provided groundbreaking research by (re)discovering a plethora of female dramatists from the early Enlightenment onward, exploring their contribution to the real and/or imagined stage. The issue of the dual role of actress-writer thus has been approached from two disciplinary angles: theatre and literary studies; while the former analyses historical and actual performances within the cultural frameworks of production, the latter focuses more on dramatic texts as literary projections of what could or could not have been produced onstage, referring to ancient and modern dramatic theory.

What makes Mary Helen Dupree’s book so valuable is the perfect synthesis of both approaches. Her main objective is to focus on female authors who were at the same time actresses and who represent a new generation of young women “who came of age at a time when the status of the actress was beginning to be radically redefined in accordance with Enlightenment aesthetics and the cult of sensibility, as the model of the enterprising actress-director in the tradition of Neuber gave way to an idealizing view of the actress as a sentimental heroine” (11). The book is divided chronologically into four parts, discussing actress-writers between the late Enlightenment and Romanticism. The main focus is on their self-perception as expressed in various genres such as autobiographical and novelistic prose, poetry, and tableaux vivants. In methodological terms, self-promotion and the cultivation of a gendered public persona are at the centre of attention, inspired by Judith Butler’s work on performativity and Stephen Greenblatt’s work on social mobility and self-fashioning.

The sudden death of the seventeen-year-old actress Charlotte Ackermann (1759–75) was a catalyst for the formation of the new concept of “Gefühlsschauspielerin.” Chapter 1 explores how Ackermann, who through familiar relations was connected with the Hamburger Entreprise, the first bourgeois standing theatre (1766–67), took lead roles as of 1769, for example as Lessing’s titular heroine in Emilia Galotti or Goethe’s Marie Beaumarchais (in Clavigo). At her funeral, “Charlotte Ackermann’s memorialization was a multimedia event that produced not only a lavish public performance of mourning, but also a flood of lyric and prose texts that paid tribute to her memory,” including “a small volume entitled Die letztern Tage der jüngern Demoiselle M.M.Ch.A***. Aus authentischen Quellen zum Druck befördert” (23). The latter was “in fact a work of fiction” presenting a “story reminiscent of Lessing’s plays and Richardson’s novels” with “Charlotte as the tragic victim of an aristocratic seducer” (23). By analysing Ackermann’s media presence during the funeral, Dupree demonstrates how this brought to the fore women’s participation in the “cult of the natural genius, the continued influence of Prinzipalinnen such as Sophie Schröder Ackermann, the importance of women’s roles in the plays of bürgerliches Trauerspiel”; this further inspired “a rationalist backlash with strong misogynist undertones on the one hand, and on the other, a kitschy reimagining of Ackermann as a romantic heroine […]” (62).

Chapter 2 is dedicated to the Erfurt-born Sophie Albrecht (1757–1840), who performed in similar roles to Ackermann. Especially her “embodiment of Marie Beaumarchais, a role that requires the actress to appear onstage in a coffin, calls to mind both Charlotte Ackermann’s performance as Marie and her final appearance in her funeral” (65). Here, Dupree draws attention to the lyric production of the actress-writer: “[t]he lyric ‘I’ that...