Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature by Joel B. Lande (review)

Its title an alliterative echo of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Joel Lande’s Persistence of Folly tracks the many historical transformations undergone by the figure of the fool from the Early Modern period to the Age of Goethe. Anything but a straightforward literary historical account, Lande’s study reconstructs the evolving media-historical and public discursive coordinates that allowed for the continuous persistence of this bawdy agent of dramatic discontinuity. The fool is not understood here as an individual character nor even as a stock type, but as a role qua form that achieves variable theatrical embodiments in novel historical contexts. The theatrical form of the fool thereby functions as a kind of seismograph that renders legible how different periods negotiated the distinction between Scherz and Ernst, itself an evolving index of a “deep cultural need to regulate laughter” (3). As Lande demonstrates, this distinction is ultimately tied to that between the non-literary and the literary. One of the study’s central ideas is that the fool was a decidedly unliterary figure that contributed (via its initial banishment and subsequent reintegration) to the emergence of German dramatic ‘literature’ as such.

Three theoretical innovations exemplified in the study deserve immediate remark. The first is Lande’s deft avoidance of any paleo-formalist sequestration of questions of dramatic structure from historicity: dramatic form in all of its intricate detail is read here as inextricably bound to historical context in the very broadest of senses, from the media of theatrical performance (e.g., the wandering stage) to political discourses (e.g., the nascent biopolitics of Policeywissenschaft). As a result, Lande’s discussions of individual dramatic works (many of which are quite neglected) tend to also double as characterizations of the entire ‘theatrical culture’ that hosted them. A second theoretical avenue opened up by this approach lies in the historicization of the very idea of literariness. As Lande’s final chapter (consisting of close readings of Goethe’s Faust I and Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug) demonstrates, the most self-reflexive of aesthetic turns in these decidedly literary works draws on and creatively transforms the base conventions that governed the fool’s seemingly senseless antics. Literariness thus emerges not only as a structural feature of texts, but as a historico-institutional achievement of the public sphere in the wake of early Enlightenment theatrical reforms. The study here provides important impulses for those thinking about the emergence of national literatures in non-Germanic contexts. A third theoretical innovation can be found in how the study ties the literary/non-literary distinction to the medial consideration of what Goodman would call the theater’s status as an ‘allographic’ art made up of a written script that sponsors an ephemeral performance. As Lande shows, this privileging of the script as the source of the dramatic work’s identity was not always the case, above all for ‘pre-literary’ stages for which scripts functioned as revisable templates legitimately deviated from and even abandoned. Rendering German drama ‘literary’ turns out to have depended on a valorization of fixed textuality at the expense of the fool’s improvisatory exuberance

The study’s first part elucidates “[t]he game rules the fool plays by” (61) by distinguishing between an open-ended, fluid acting script and a more fixed dramatic text. The theatrical culture organized around the fool was improvisational, itinerant, and lacked a conception of authorial originality. Instead, scripts and their more primary performative realizations were conceived as partaking in “an ongoing chain of production that allowed for the unrestricted appropriation and redeployment of pre-existing narratives” (56). Wandering English players did not perform in theater houses, but at town fairs, royal courts, or schools, thus in contexts where they would have had to compete for spectatorial attention. Given such performative settings, Lande reconstructs the fool’s constitutive role as a theatrical practice. To track the fool within this itinerant and improvisational theatrical culture...