[In the following essay, Burwick examines Goethe's stage designs for Faust in order to trace his concern with “poetic imagination” and “mimetic reality.”]

The entire history of the drama could be studied in terms of the opposition of two basic elements: spectacle and mime. Certainly there have been periods in history when one or the other held dominance. Shakespeare's Globe, we know, provided only a naked stage with the barest minimum of props. The gimmicks of stagecraft, which began to dominate the theatres in the Baroque age, have continued to exert tremendous influence on the drama, often forcing playwright, player, and the play itself into subservience. The very effort to create stage illusion seems sometimes to have inhibited it. The visual enchantment of stage effects thus becomes an end rather than a means.¹ Staging and acting, of course, are not incompatible constituents of the drama. Nevertheless, dramatic theory and practice attest to the tension that persists between them. In the Romantic age, the tension between staging and acting was at an unusually high pitch, and the debate over the nature of stage illusion was being waged at all levels: by actors, directors, playwrights, and critics. The Romantic rebellion against neo-classical rule also led to experiments in the drama that have been labeled non-mimetic or anti-illusionist.

Goethe's Faust and Hugo's Les Burgraves have both been considered Romantic contributions to Anti-Illusionist Theatre.² The movement to propagate Anti-Illusionist Theatre has been led by vigorous and influential proponents. The Modernist experimentation of Terence Gray and the Cambridge Festival Theatre was dedicated to sweeping away the ‘hocus pocus and bamboozli’, ‘the cobwebs of external reality’, and emphasizing the formal symbolism of acting.³ In a similar manner, yet for very different reasons, Bertolt Brecht declared that the theatre must break away from the illusion of compelling momentum, and utterly dispel the illusions that the player is identical with the character or the performance with the actual event.⁴ Much of the Modernist and Post-Modernist theatre has been produced under the critical banner of ‘Anti-Illusionism’, and looking for antecedents, critics have found in Goethe's ‘world theatre’ and Hugo's ‘word opera’ plays that belong to a historical tradition of anti-illusionist drama.

The attack on the ‘theatre of illusions’ and the celebration of an ‘anti-illusionist’ drama is based on a fundamental mistake—venerable, but nevertheless a mistake. It is the mistake of confounding illusion with delusion. What is intended in anti-illusionist drama is primarily a liberation from the constraints of strict mimesis. On the one hand, there is the theatre as a mirror of life that imitates reality and exploits the illusion of the proscenium arch as invisible fourth-wall to the stage setting. On the other hand, there is the theatre of myth and ritual, of allegory and masque, which makes no attempt at verisimilitude. Now if we call the former illusionist and the latter anti-illusionist, then we are caught up in the paradox that fantasies and dream-sequences are to be considered anti-illusionist. If the indulgence of illusions, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Comus, bears the label ‘anti-illusion’, then perhaps there is something wrong with the label.⁵ All drama, as stage representation, is dedicated to creating some sort of illusion. Goethe and Hugo, like many playwrights of the Romantic age, both indulge and expose the illusion-making process.⁶

Although the nature of aesthetic illusion remains a crux in present-day criticism, contemporary arguments, pro and con, offer little more than a replication of the arguments that were waged during the Romantic period. Phenomenological hermeneutics and analytical philosophy have developed, to be sure, a new vocabulary for explaining, or denying, the experience. In the 1960s, following the publication of Gombrich's Art and Illusion, the debate recurs.⁷ Contemporary arguments restate the controversy between the affective aesthetic of the eighteenth century and the experiential aesthetic introduced in the Romantic period.⁸ The controversy over dramatic illusion continues to rehearse the same complex series of assumptions about moral purpose, catharsis, and the nature of the response to a dramatic performance, and still becomes entangled in the seemingly paradoxical simultaneity of the consciousness of artifice and participation in illusion.

The play, the acting, the staging, all contribute to stimulating illusion in the mind of the beholder. But each makes different demands upon the perception. The playwright conjures primarily through the language and action of the play, although he might well provide directions for staging and acting. The stage manager is concerned with effects of a particular production in a given theatre, with the proper application of the technology available. Hugo and Goethe both enjoyed privileged circumstances which enabled them to carry out their own ideas for translating text into performance. Since both Goethe and Hugo have left us notes and sketches for staging, it is possible for us to trace their concern with illusionist effects as well as ‘anti-illusionist’ departures from the mimetic tradition. Goethe, as we shall see, became fascinated with the magic lantern and the techniques of popular phantasmagoria. Hugo, for his part, was partial to a décor of hidden passages, reversals of on-stage and off-stage events, and above all a dynamic interaction between character and stage setting.

The opposition between the mechanics and the aesthetics of stage illusion and the tension between mimetic reality and poetic imagination are not only pertinent to the Romantic drama; they are thematic and, as my examples from Goethe and Hugo will show, fully integrated into the plays themselves as challenges to audience expectations. Their art is certainly anti-illusionist if we accept that definition involving a reflexive (ironic) attention to the process of illusion-making. In the drama, the characters are caught up in their own illusory perceptions, and they ‘escape’ only to remind the audience that they are acting. Contrary to the argument of several recent critics,⁹ this act of ‘falling out of the role’ (‘aus der Rolle fallen’) reinforces rather than disrupts the spontaneity of stage illusion. If a character falls out of one role, after all, he inevitably falls into another.¹⁰

Goethe and Hugo are intrigued with the effects of lighting and stage design. Developments in gas-lighting early in the nineteenth century, the advent of the lime-light in 1825, and the stage trickery of mirrors and the magic lantern, stirred a fascination with optical effects.¹¹ Of particular significance on the Romantic stage is the use of optical effects in representing the subjective and the supernatural. Hugo emphasized chiaroscuro effects on stage, and preferred to use light to emphasize shadowy darkness. Instead of a realistic setting with ‘natural’ overhead lighting, Hugo would create stark effects with angled light, hand-held lanterns, and torch or candle processions.¹²

II

Goethe aptly expresses his concern with the illusion-making process in his review of Calderon's The Daughter of the Air.¹³ Calderon is ‘thoroughly theatrical, even stagy (“bretterhaft”)’. Furthermore, he is utterly free of ‘what we call illusion, especially that sort which excites the emotions’. His plays are set forth with a rational plan; the scenes follow an artistic necessity, like a perfectly choreographed ballet. The delight in aesthetic execution is similar, Goethe says, to the pleasure afforded by the ‘technique of our most recent comic operas’. His plots always develop the same leitmotifs: ‘conflict of duties, passions, circumstances, deriving from the opposition of characters and from the recurrent situations’. While the major plot follows a course that is poetic, ‘the interludes, which move in dainty figures like minuets, are rhetorical, dialectical, and sophistic’. Because he represents ‘all elements of humanity’, even the fool is included: ‘should any illusion lay claim to our inclination and participation, the fool's homely reason threatens to destroy it immediately if not sooner’.¹⁴

Goethe's comments on illusion, here deserve close attention, for they have much to do with dramatic oppositions in Faust. He dismisses from his consideration of Calderon that sort of illusion ‘which excites the emotions’, not that which engages the imagination. He dismisses, that is, Enlightenment not Romantic aesthetics. He goes on to observe in Calderon a deliberate and self-conscious artistry that gives his drama a technical polish akin to the ballet or the opera. The human elements, however, are still at work, but the dramatic illusion is not allowed to overwhelm our sympathy. The fool provides that sort of ironic intrusion which, as Goethe says, ‘threatens to destroy’ illusion, but which in fact, reminds the audience not to rely on a merely emotional response. Ironic intrusion heightens attention to the dramatic illusions.

Goethe goes on, in this same review, to contrast Calderon with Shakespeare: the former gives attention to artifice, the latter to nature.¹⁵ The point of the contrast is to identify two different dramatic modes: the one elicits audience response through the imitation of nature, the other through artistic manner and convention. Along with Calderon's theatre of artistic manner, Goethe lists the ballet and comic opera. This is the sort of performance, again, in contrast to Shakespearean or mimetic drama, that has traditionally called for the most elaborate stage setting and technical accoutrements. The theatre of masques requires high ornamentation; the theatre of mimetic actions is self-sufficient on a barren stage.

The contrasts that he draws here Goethe certainly did not see as mutually exclusive. Indeed, the opposing elements might well interchange dialectically, so that stylized pomp and ritual could interact with a simple imitation of human action. Goethe not only experiments with this possibility throughout Faust; he introduces his audience to the dialectic opposition in his ‘Prelude’ and ‘Prologue’ to the play. The ‘Prelude in the Theater’ is used to introduce the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, which in turn introduces the ‘Tragedy’. We are to understand that Poet, Director, and Merry Person are witnesses to the wager between God and Mephistopheles, and that God himself becomes a spectator of the ‘Tragedy’. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare also made his play an extended play within a play introducing it as an entertainment intended to distract Christopher Sly.¹⁶ Petruchio's strategem to cure Kate is seen as part of the prank which the Lord plays on the drunken tinker. Goethe has added to the complexity, then, by presenting a play within a play within a play.

In the ‘Prelude in the Theater’, we witness on the stage three characters arguing about the nature of the stage and about the play that is to be performed.¹⁷ What is ‘to be hoped for’, the Director asks, ‘from this effort / In countries of the German tongue?’ (35-36). As we would expect, the Director thinks in terms of box-office receipts (54-56). To please the crowd he wants a play that will amaze, caress the taste, engage, and work its wondrous sway (43-44, 48, 57). Rather than astonish the perceptions or excite the physical passions, the Poet aims at lofty ideals in the ‘nook of heaven's stillness’ (64-65). The Poet rejects the Director's crowd-pleasing tactics; the audience he seeks to please is ‘posterity’ (74). The Merry Person is a Player, a Hanswurst drawn from the tradition of German comedy. Posterity is a meaningless goal for the Merry Person. He emphasizes the ‘Now’ (75-80).

Even if the Poet longs for ‘a broader audience’, his appeal must be to the moment. The Poet may want to address the ideal, but to do so he must also engage the complete human being:

Show Fancy in her fullest panoply:
Sense, understanding, sentiment, and passion,
And mind you, last not least, some foolery.

(86-88)

The Director agrees with the Merry Person's advice to the Poet, and recommends ‘above all … plot’. Plot, however, he understands as ‘a solid eyeful’, something at which the audience ‘can gasp and marvel’ (90-93). Plot means action, not the Aristotelian ‘imitation of human action’, but variety and excitement. For the Director, the best plot is episodic: it can be served in ‘pieces’ like a ‘stew’ (99-100). The Poet responds directly to the Director's metaphor, calling it a degradation of ‘true art’ to equate it with a ‘charlatan's ragout of tricks and bawdry’ (105-106). The Director, however, holds to his position. It is pointless to ‘daydream on your poet's eminence’ if the audience isn't satisfied. The way to please an audience, the Director repeats, is to ‘give more, and ever, ever more’ (129). The Poet need not enlighten them, he claims, for it is just as effective to confuse them (131).

The Poet is outraged at the Director's argument. In rejecting confusion and erratic variety, however, he repeats the Director's concern with audience response, for he claims unity, harmony, and meaning are the essential means to ‘kindle every heart’ and ‘conquer every elemental part’ (138-151). Unfortunately, the Poet's vision of unity, harmony, and meaning takes him from dramatic action to lyrical meditation on sunsets, flowers, Olympus, the Immortals (151-156). The Merry Person calls him back to the ‘Now’ of stage performance. The Poet may well nourish his lyrical fancy with such visions, for they conjure the enchantment of romance, and romance, in turn, provides the stuff of dramatic spectacle (159-167). Indeed, as the Merry Person insists, any source of speculation will do so long as it leads the Poet ‘into the wealth of human living’. Here, the Merry Person seems to be working out a reconciliation between the Director and the Poet. In affirming the Poet's lyrical flights of idealism, he turns the results of the Poet's endeavor back to the dramatization of human action and to the ‘spectacle’ and ‘illusion’ of that dramatization (166, 181).

The Poet accepts, at least conditionally, this turn to illusion. To compromise ‘the thirst for truth’ with the ‘delight in fictions’, however, requires the enthusiasm of youth. To meet the expectations of the Merry Person and the Director, the Poet, like Faust later in the play, bargains for youth (192-197). The Merry Person assures him that the recollection of youth will serve him much better than the ‘reckless whirling dance’ of youth itself (204-212). The Director calls for an end to the speeches: it is time for action (214-215). In the concluding lines of the ‘Prelude’, the Director orders that the stage be set.

You know, upon our German stages
Each man puts on just what he may;
So spare me not upon this day
Machinery and cartonnages.
The great and little light of heaven employ,
The stars you may freely squander;
Cliff-drops and water, fire and thunder,
Birds, animals, are in supply.
So in this narrow house of boarded space
Creation's fullest circle go to pace,
And walk with leisured speed your spell
From Heaven through the World to Hell.

(231-242)

Even though the Poet and Merry Person have reached an agreement of sorts, the Director still has his way. Or, rather, all three, each voicing one aspect of Goethe's own intentions, will continue to assert their conflicting preferences.

The play, thus introduced, pits poetic ideals against the marvels of ‘machinery and cartonnages’. The curtain falls upon the naked stage of the ‘Prelude in the Theater’ and rises upon the grand ‘Prologue in Heaven’ (figure 1). In Goethe's sketch, we recognize a mythic grandeur. God, bare-chested in his draped robe, sits upon his cloud-enveloped throne attended by the three Archangels. The light, from the fly-gallery, casts an appropriate gloria around the throne. In the right foreground, also surrounded with clouds, hovers the sphere of the world; in the left foreground, stands Mephisto gesturing toward the world. The scene might just as easily represent Hermes before Zeus. Again, we can observe a triadic structure: God and Mephistopheles appear in place of the Director and the Merry Person, and the Poet is replaced by the opening chorus of Archangels. The Archangels' song of creation (243-271) is followed by the crude jests of Mephisto. Although the source is the Book of Job, God's wager with Mephisto is played in a homely rather than a sublime style. Each seems to humor the other. In spite of Mephisto's condescending remarks about ‘the old gent’ (350), Goethe leaves his God just as surely in charge of events as his Director.

Mephisto may think that he is capable of startling man out of his illusions (a role, we must remember, which Goethe recognized in Calderon's fool), but when Mephisto departs and God has the last word, he tells us that man is too inclined to take things easy; so God has given him the devil as a companion to make him strive and work. Instead of ‘falling out of the role’, Mephisto reinforces rather than disrupts the harmony of God's World Theatre (Weltbühne). God, and Goethe, let us know that Mephisto is simply another agent of illusion.

Goethe's opening strategy takes the audience into a dramatic structure of Chinese-boxes, a sequence of alternate realities. Within the ‘Tragedy’, the same strategy persists as the play shifts attention to alternate worlds: the self-searching and metaphysical world of Faust, the demonic world of Mephistopheles, and the bourgeoise world of Gretchen. Throughout Faust, Part I, the triadic structure enforces the opposition of themes. The love of Faust and Gretchen is presented in seven short scenes (some 600 lines); then, divided by a scene with Faust and Mephistopheles alone in ‘Forest and Cave’, come six more scenes (less than 500 lines) in which the love is corrupted by the death of her mother and her brother and Gretchen's guilt and despair. Framing, as well as dividing, the Gretchen episodes are the scenes of Faust's soliloquies and his contest with Mephistopheles (‘Night’, ‘Outside the City Gate’, ‘Study’, ‘Forest and Cave’, ‘Dreary Day’, ‘Open Field’—over 2200 lines, the dominant substance of the play). The third sequence of action takes Faust into the demonic world of Mephistopheles. Faust first enters the demonic world, before wooing Gretchen, in ‘Auerbach's Cellar’ and ‘Witch's Kitchen’ (532 lines); he returns to the demonic world, after Gretchen's ruin, in ‘Walpurgis Night’ and ‘Walpurgis Night's Dream’ (564 lines). The demonic scenes, presented in two pairs, frame the scenes of Gretchen's love and ruin. In terms of total length, the scenes in the demonic world of Mephisto balance the scenes in the bourgeois world of Gretchen, and both together (just under 2200 lines) balance the scenes of Faust's mental wrestling. The tripartite structure dramatizes the three modes of perception: Faust's, Gretchen's, Mephisto's.¹⁸

Even in reading the text, we might well suspect that Goethe intended radically different staging for his episodic realms. Making the most of the pranks (Streiche) which Goethe adapted from the chap-book versions of the Faust story, such as those he gives to Mephisto in Auerbach's Cellar, performances in England and France freely indulged the magic of mechanical trickery (figures 2 and 3). From what we know of the plans for production in 1812, the presentation of scenes from Faust in Berlin in 1819, and the first full performance in Weimar in 1829, Goethe called for more modest mechanical effects than the arguments of his Director would seem to indicate. He was especially intrigued by the use of the laterna magica in conjuring stage effects. His most elaborate architectural setting was commissioned for the ‘Cathedral’. Perhaps it was his fascination with optics and colour theory¹⁹ that prompted him to rely on the trickery of the magic lantern to introduce the supernatural into a contrastingly simple setting.

The appearance of the Earth Spirit in Night, for example, was to be brought into Faust's study much in the manner of Rembrandt's painting of The Scholar and the Sign of the Microcosm. Except all was to be produced in giant proportions, as Goethe sketched the scene. At the time of the Berlin performance, he wrote to Count Brühl (2 June 1819):

This representation of the Earth Spirit conforms exactly with my intention. That he looks in through the window is ghostly enough. Rembrandt has used this idea very effectively in an engraved plate. When we, too, intended to take this scene and develop it for production, my conception was also simply to show transparently a colossal head and chest and I thought of adapting it from the well-known bust of Jupiter, for the words ‘horrible face’ refer to the feelings of the observer, who would certainly be frightened by such an apparition, and could therefore be aptly addressed to the figure itself; even here there should appear nothing grimacing or disgusting. How one might, perhaps with flaming hair and beard, to some degree approach the modern idea of the supernatural, on this we had come to no agreement.²⁰

Ten years later, when preparations were underway for the full production in Weimar, Goethe had decided that the supernatural scenes could be done in the manner of the popular phantasmagoria. He wrote to W. Zahn requesting him to obtain a magic lantern (12 December 1828):

Prince Radziwll … had the appearance of the Spirit in the first scene presented in the phantasmagorical manner; that is, in a darkened theater an illuminated head is projected from the rear upon a screen stretched across the background, first as a small image, then gradually increasing in size, so that it seems to be coming closer and closer. This artistic illusion was apparently conjured with a kind of Laterna Magica. Could you please find out, as soon as possible, who constructs such an apparatus, how one could obtain it, and what preparations must be made for it?²¹

The conjuration in Faust's study, a scene written in 1800, was apparently conceived in much the same manner as the Apparition of the Earth Spirit. The demonic poodle has the ‘flaming hair’ which Goethe associated with ‘the modern idea of the supernatural’. Certainly, with the use of the laterna magica the ‘flaming’ image could have been enhanced with red or orange tinted glass, and, as was done with the ‘burning house’ in the phantasmagoria of London, Paris and Berlin,²² the flames could have been made to flicker with a moirè transparency. The sketch shows the huge transparent head appearing in the framed alcove just beyond Faust's outstretched arm.

Another such trick was to be achieved with the mirror in the Witch's Kitchen. Sir David Brewster, in a contemporary account of stage illusions wrought with the laterna magica, describes the technique of shifting from reflected image to projected image.²³ In Moritz Retzsch's line engraving of this scene, we see that the witch's kettle occupies centre stage, while Faust gazes into the mirror obliquely positioned at the right. In Goethe's sketch, the hearth is to the right and the magic mirror, casting radiant beams, directly faces the audience from center stage, engaging the audience as well as Faust in the vision of the reclining Helena.

It seems likely too, that the apparition of Gretchen amidst the Walpurgis Night orgy on the Brocken was to be achieved as a phantom image cast by the laterna magica. Goethe's sketch shows Mephisto pointing to the left and tugging Faust by the shoulder to return to the revels, while Faust is turned to the right and stretches out his arms toward the vision of Gretchen who appears in a circle of light against the dark cliffs. Throughout the ‘Walpurgis Night’, Goethe reveals a growing antagonism between what Mephistopheles perceives and what Faust perceives. Mephisto and Faust pause at an abyss to behold the glowing red and gold in the ravine beneath them: Mephisto sees the Mammon-glow of human greed; Faust sees a triumph of golden sparks rising from the black depths to ascend aflame the rocky cliffs. When the phantom of Gretchen appears against the cliffs, Mephisto insists that it is only a magic image, while Faust continues to conjure the memory of Gretchen's physical presence.

Part of the irony in Goethe's dialogue is in Mephisto's revealing declaration that the apparition is but a trick. A more profound dimension of the irony, however, is in Faust's animating the lifeless image. Faust's vision occurs after the satirical dialogue with the Proctophantasmist, who tells the ghosts and demons that they don't really exist and declares that he will go to the devil and the poet to put a stop to this illusion-making. Goethe has it both ways: he introduces a critic of the supernatural, yet renders him a fool in denying the existence of the spirits visibly surrounding him.²⁴ Goethe thus insists that audience attend to the theatricality of illusion as well as to its dramatic enchantment.

What these sketches reveal is Goethe's own sense of dramatic orientation. Because he utilizes optical effects to enhance the thematic concern with perception, the mechanical aspects of production are not in competition with the aesthetic. Nor do these sketches imply a static setting in which the characters merely enact their roles. The setting (through the moving images of the magic lantern) actually participates in the dramatic action. While he joins the spirit of the age in proclaiming the primacy of the aesthetic experience and the power of the imagination in creating stage illusion, he shares with the Director in the ‘Prelude’ a pragmatic reliance on gimmickry to make the audience ‘gasp and marvel’.

His stage design for Romeo and Juliet, Act V emphasizes the confinement of the tomb with the vaulting arches which block the proscenium and frame the action within interior recesses. Further, the darkness of the stage, lighted by torches mounted on the pillars and by the indirect light streaming down the stairs, also adds the very sort of somber cave-like quality that, as we shall see, is repeated by Hugo in such plays as Hernani and Les Burgraves. Where Hugo would insist on making the Witches in Macbeth demonic and grotesque,²⁵ however, Goethe would rely on a ‘classical’ staging, presenting the Witches in the manner of a Greek chorus. In his sketch, we see that Goethe has designed a choric stage at the base of a giant gnarled oak. The foregounded figure to the left is a detail to indicate the veiled costumes. The details to the right indicate a graveyard setting.

As is evident in his review of Calderon, even in 1822 Goethe continued to emphasize emotional response in dramatic illusion. Nevertheless, with the Romantics he also affirmed illusion as the aesthetic engagement of the creative imagination. His careful discrimination of modes of perception in his Colour Theory led him to distinguish illusion from delusion. The perceiver is conscious of the illusory nature of his perception. The art of illusion may well involve a reflexive or ironic attention to the process of illusion-making. In exercising that irony in Faust, Goethe not only relied on the words and actions of the characters to remind the audience of the illusion, he also emphasized the very theatricality of stage production to enhance as well as expose illusion.

III

For Hugo, the paradoxical nature of stage illusion implicated and, depending on the playwright's skill, replicated the essential antagonism confronting all social, political, and religious ideals in the real world. His ‘history plays’ pretend no fidelity to actual historical events. He uses history as a psychological moment to explore possible motives and actions. Hugo is especially concerned with dramatizing the opposition of the practical and the imaginary and his stage settings provide for a contest between orthodox and radical perceptions of history. As we shall see, he is adroit in evoking vivid off-stage action as well as exploiting on-stage interaction with the physical setting.

In the Préface de Cromwell (1827), Hugo argues that artistic truth depends on the union of opposites. The tensions of actual experience justify an aesthetic of contraries: the fantastic and the rational, the ugly and the beautiful, the grotesque and the sublime provide the dialectic of verisimilitude, the artistic representation of ‘la verité’. Although all things are connected,²⁶ art cannot result if the opposition of extremes is tempered or compromised. The playwright must, in fact, intensify distinctions and contrasts to create dialogue: division and opposition creates drama. The playwright provides a ‘concentrating mirror’ which distorts yet focuses its components into art. The opposition of the grotesque and the sublime has been so emphasized in the commentary on the Préface that other aspects of the dramatic opposition have generally been overlooked. Hugo's attention to the truth of opposition and intensification leads him to affirm the interaction of supernatural and natural, irrational and rational, as dramatic principles.

Hugo's point is clear: art does not presume to duplicate nature. Through a rapport with nature, it strives to represent ideal as well as material life. It represents essences by bringing together the opposing tendencies of nature. The grotesque and the sublime, the real and the ideal, the natural and the imaginative all contribute to the dramatic illusion. Through the tension of opposites, the spectator recognizes the real. Drama, then, may hold up a mirror to nature, but it is a concentrating mirror which focuses and intensifies the light of its images. The stage is an optical point. Our perception of reality tends to be scattered and diffused, whereas our perception of the drama is concentrated. This paradoxical combination of the poetical and the natural is what engenders dramatic illusion; ‘lui donne cette vie de vérité et de saillie qui enfante l'illusion, ce prestige de réalité qui passionne le spectateur’.²⁷

When he takes up the problem of representation in the concluding section of the Préface he returns to the evocation of illusion. He refuses to separate scene and situation. Setting participates in dramatic action. The individual dualism of body and soul as well as the social conflict of classes and factions should be visibly evident in the setting. Thus ‘local colour’ should not only convince us of the historical period and place, it should also reveal the motives, lusts, ambitions of the inhabitants. To suggest inner conflict, Hugo repeatedly relies on chiaroscuro lighting. This does not mean that the stage should become subjective or solipsistic. Indeed, it must never seem an isolated platform; it should appear to be a part of the world that exists beyond it. Off-stage space must become an intimate part of the illusion. The illusion, however, should display rather than conceal itself, for, in contrast to historians who hide their factional bias, the ‘truth’ of the theatre derives from the honest proclamation of its illusions and the illusion-making process.

In the Préface, Cromwell is described in sublime and grotesque dimensions; in the play, however, Cromwell is set before us as a much more monotonous character, who does not expose the extremes of animal versus spiritual nature. But the plot itself evokes the opposition of the sublime and the grotesque in the political struggle for worldly power between the rival religious factions. The grotesque is abundantly distributed throughout the play, most notably in the antics of Cromwell's quartet of jesters, the bungling of his son Richard, the prophecies of the necromancer Manesse, and the religious fanaticism of Carr. The active use of stage setting, a factor to become more prominent in Hugo's dramaturgy, is evident in the concluding act. Carpenters are on stage building a platform, a platform to be used for a coronation—and an execution. The platform serves as a major symbol for the rise and fall of rulers. The carpenters' macabre reflections are followed, first, by the Roundheads' threat to behead their leader should he go through with the coronation and, then, by Cromwell's trance-like reverie on royal power. He seems ready to mount the platform, but then comes to his senses and restores political order.

Just as illusion-making becomes the subject as well as the object of the drama when Goethe takes us into Mephistopheles' world, so too in Amy Robsart (1822, first performed 1828 at the Odéon) and Les Jumeaux (1839) Hugo brings his own illusionists onto the stage to perform their pranks. The comic characters in Les Jumeaux, for which Hugo completed only the first two acts, are the mountebank Guillot-Gorju and his accomplice Tagus. Hugo opens with a clever variation of the play-within-a-play. The curtain rises to reveal this comic pair, with a mysterious third man identically costumed to switch roles with Guillot-Gorju, setting up their stage, a mere rag hung from a pole, preparing their show of disguises, palm-reading, and elixir-hawking. The costumes, Hugo notes, are in the style of Callot's commedia dell' arte grotesques.

Much in the manner of Brueghel's painting of the huckster who fascinates his dupe with the shell-game while his partner steals the dupe's purse,²⁸ Tagus the trickster also lets the audience witness a thief's skill in illusion-making.

TAGUS:
Peasant!—my master is a wizard so great that …
(He points a finger to the air, as if to show him something far away in the clouds.)
Do you see that bird?
BOURGEOIS:
(turning his head) No.
TAGUS:
O well!
My master, if he wishes, is going to guide his wings, rectilinear, oblique or parallel, through the sphere.
(He takes the man's purse and puts it into one of his coat pockets.)
BOURGEOIS:
I don't see the bird.
TAGUS:
Look. There! in the air!
BOURGEOIS:
(after having looked) No.
TAGUS:
It is because you have bad eyes, my friend.

This sort of exposé of cony-catching may provoke our laughter to the extent that we feel ourselves in conspiracy with Tagus and superior to the simple bourgeois.²⁹ Still, the awareness that we are at the same time being taken in by the illusion of the stage itself may well unsettle our confidence and give an uncomfortable edge to our laughter. And we know that when Tagus pointed, we too searched the empty air above the stage.

The play-within-a-play and the stranger's acting the role of the mountebank keep the audience aware of the physical presence of the stage. The identical costumes of the stranger and the mountebank also deflect the anticipations aroused by the play's title. Hugo cleverly misleads, yet at the same time he alerts his audience to a plot of intrigue in which things are not what they seem. He controls the illusion of a street scene, gradually dimming the lights to suggest nightfall; as the scene darkens, a lamplighter comes onstage and lights a streetlamp. Throughout the first act, Hugo makes theatricality and illusion-making a major theme. We watch as Tagus assembles and dismantles the stage, and we hear the mountebank tell the secrets of his trade. All the while, Hugo is gradually unfolding the serious plot: the street charlatans are arrested by soldiers and are soon before the Queen. The stranger disguised as a mountebank reveals his identity as Jean, Comte de Créqui.

Hugo's fascination with light-in-darkness is evident in his design for the second act. The stagefront gaslights have been dimmed; through a window to the rear, a lime-light casts its sun-like beam:

A very dark room, with a gothic vault and large stone plates on the floor, bright red velvet trimmed in gold on the walls, deep chairs with golden arms upholstered in tapestry; the whole aspect is sinister and magnificent. On the left, in a pan coupé, a wide bed, the hangings of red damasque alternating with tapestry; the canopy supported by columns and a bed of sculpted gold; on the bed, a spread of rich lace. On the right, in the pan coupé of the corner opposite, a high fireplace, decorated with a fleur de lys. This plaque is so large that the entire rear of the fireplace is covered by it. Also on the right a table covered with a velvet cloth and standing upon a carpet of Gobelin tapestry. Upon the table, a Venetian mirror. Upon the bed, a large ivory Christ on an ebony cross; this Christ isn't a Jansenist one—that is to say, with outstretched arms. In a corner, to the right close to the table, part of the drapery is torn and exposes the bare stone-wall, on which can be seen strange carved designs. A large nail has been tossed onto the table. The room receives light only through the long barred window in the rear which can be reached by three high stone steps. The ray of light passing through the window is clearly projected onto the pavement. The opening of the window reveals the enormous thickness of the walls.

The chiaroscuro effect of the back-lighted stage is to be functionally used by the actor who paces in and out of the shadows and climbs the stone steps to peer through the barred window. The place, Hugo has said, should be a witness to the event (‘un témoin terrible et inséparable’). The setting must thus reflect emotional atmosphere and personality. Props—such as the nail on the table—are not incidental decorations: they have a place in the dramatic action. The setting to Les Jumeaux, Act II, carefully detailed in Hugo's design and description, serves as an apt psychological reflection of the Man in the Mask, as apt as the image in the mirror which he will study when he comes on stage.³⁰ In spite of the stark contrast to the street-show setting in the opening, Hugo maintains thematic parallels: theatrical pretence, disguise, intrigue. Because Hugo has already established the pattern of concealed identity in Act I (‘L'Homme’, who becomes Count Jean), the audience listens to the soliloquy of ‘Le Masque’ for clues of the identity to be revealed.

In Amy Robsart, Hugo's grotesque villains are the conniving Varney, the evil sorcerer Alasco, and the sorcerer's apprentice Flibbertigibbet. The plot, which Hugo adapted from Scott's Kenilworth, involves the victimization of Amy, secretly married to Leicester, who is the favourite of Queen Elizabeth. Hugo shows considerable dexterity in manipulating off-stage strategies to counter that inept neo-classical use of the off-stage which prompted his frustrated complaint: ‘Vraiment! mais conduiseznous donc là-bas! On s'y doit bien amuser, cela doit être beau à voir’! To be sure, Hugo teases his audience with exterior places which cannot be seen, but he uses his off-stage space actively. In the opening act, Leicester looks out of the window at rear stage and comments on the cloudless sky beyond. Later, Amy throws a dagger out of the open window. The villain Varney announces that the sorcerer is above in his secret chamber; shortly afterwards, Alasco descends the staircase as if there were, in fact, a secret chamber somewhere ‘upstairs’ above the stage. These simple gestures of interaction with the stage-setting contribute greatly to enhancing the illusion and extending the boundaries of confined place. The conclusion exhibits a stunning reversal of that moral nicety which advocated all blood-shedding be relegated to off-stage. At first, Hugo seems to conform to the convention, for poor Amy is sent by Varney and Alasco, who pretend to help her escape, out to a passageway with a false staircase. As soon as she puts her weight on the first step it will fall open and she will plunge to her death. Amy steps through the door; from off-stage the audience hears ‘un grand bruit, pareil à la chute d'un madrier pesant’. But then Hugo defies the guardians of ‘la dignité’ of French theatre: with the death of his heroine, he left the violence (except for the sound effects) to the imagination, but the villains perish on stage. In Scott's novel, the conspirators die later, one poisoned, another jailed, a third starved. Hugo burns them alive in a fiery finale in the style of Pixérécourt's Marguerite d'Anjou.³¹

It may seem foolish to make so much of Hugo's ingenious stagecraft in Amy Robsart, for in spite of his collaboration with Delacroix, who assisted with costumes and settings, the play failed on opening night. Its grotesque elements were too erratic, its hero too weak, its development too shallow and melodramatic to do justice to Scott's narrative. Nevertheless, Hugo had obviously learned much from his experimentation with stage effects, and he continued to exercise the possibilities of character interaction with setting. In Marie Tudor (Act I), a stone breaks a pane of glass in the window and falls near the Queen. In Lucrèce Borgia (Act II), the impulsive Gennaro, enraged over the wickedness of this infamous family, crosses the stage (set as the Grand Square of Ferrara, with the Borgia Palace on the right), leaps onto the stone steps to reach the latticed balcony, and with his dagger hacks at the large stone escutcheon; from the golden-lettered Borgia upon the white marble he removes the first letter, leaving the savage pun Orgia to mark their domain.

Hugo's play with sound-effects also contributes to his dramatic conjuring. He uses sound to heighten suspense and to enhance the illusion of off-stage action. In Amy Robsart, Hugo's directions call for the repeated punctuation of events, throughout the play, of the clang of an iron door being closed off-stage; Act V adds the sound of her plunge to death. In the opening scene of Les Jumeaux, Guillot-Gurju points to the back of the square and announces that three knocks will be heard in ‘ce coin noir’. The anticipated sound is later heard. A more stunning instance is the sound of the horn in Hernani. The hero has given his horn to his rival, pledging to kill himself upon hearing it blown. He asks to live only until he has killed the king who has abducted his beloved. The king, however, in magnanimous gesture restores his bride, his title, his lands. The final act, which opens with the marriage celebration of Hernani and Dona Sol, teases the audience with the illusion of a ‘happy ending’, for the marriage, of course, is immediately blighted by the sound of the horn. The appearance of the rival as the harbinger of death in the final scene of Hernani was the signal for the outbreak of battle at the first performance.

Although it is merely a hasty sketch, Hugo's stage design for Le Roi s'amuse, (1832) reveals how thoroughly and profoundly he could incorporate his principle of opposition into the very setting of the dramatic action. As we have seen, Goethe kept his three worlds (Faust's, Mephistopheles', Gretchen's) separate and demonstrated their interaction through such visual devices as the demonic apparitions in Faust's study or the vision of Gretchen atop the Blocksberg. Hugo, however, divides his stage into two opposing worlds. As his sketch reveals, the right half of the stage front opens into a tree-lined street which turns and runs along the full back stage which is lined with houses. Hugo has sketched in the roof tops of many houses and several doors opening onto the street. Thrusting high above the rooftops is the tower (yes, it is phallic) of the King's castle. Below, stage left, is the enclosed garden and chateau of Triboulet and his daughter Blanche. While the walls seems to protect the privacy of the garden, one door in the upper right corner opens onto the public street. Through this door comes Triboulet, having met with the mercenary cut-throat Saltabadil; through this door comes the King, eager to claim the virginity of Triboulet's daughter.

Because Le Roi s'amuse is well known through Piavi's adaptation for Verdi's Rigoletto, it may help our understanding of Hugo's stagecraft to stress the two crucial differences between the play and the opera. First, in the opera, the Duke turns into a decent fellow who seems actually to fall in love with the innocent girl whom he has seduced; in the play, the King remains an ever-lusting womaniser who quickly forgets his last conquest in pursuit of the next. Second, in the opera, Rigoletto is only indirectly guilty of his daughter's death; in the play, Triboulet himself, albeit not knowing her identity, kills her. Although Piavi made other changes (he omits, for example, Hugo's poet, Clément Marot), these two significantly alter the dramatic tensions which Hugo had developed with his divided stage.

In terms of Hugo's body-soul dualism, only Blanche is sublime; all the other characters are grotesques. But as Hugo observed: ‘Le beau n'a qu'un type; le laid en a mille’. The manifold forms of the ugly are set forth in pairs with a studied sense of contrast and opposition. The King ought to possess the virtues of royal dignity and authority, but he is haughty and cruel, perverting his power to demean his courtiers, exploit his subjects, and gratify his sexual whims. If the King had a conscience, it would no doubt look and speak very much like Triboulet, deformed in mind and body. His sole power in court is his quick and cunning wit, and he uses it to make jests of the courtiers whose wives and daughters have been seduced by the King. Triboulet has one redeeming virtue: his devoted and doting love for his daughter. Just as Triboulet mirrors his King, so too he stands in contrast to Saltabadil, who is a skillfull opportunist at court, but more murderous and greedy than any of the sordid crowd in the street surrounding the garden of innocent Blanche. Triboulet's weapon is ‘une langue acérée’, Saltabadil's ‘une lame pointue’. Finally there is the seductive Maguelonne, sister of Saltabadil, as much of a mercenary opportunist as her brother, but whose trade is in arousing desires rather than in cutting throats. And she, of course, stands in contrast to the pure and innocent Blanche. All of Hugo's careful dualities are brought into conflict at the walls which divide his stage in Act II. While his two contrasting worlds appeared only in alternate scenes, or remained hidden, or off-stage in Amy Robsart and Hernani, Hugo brings them both onto the stage at the same time in Le Roi s'amuse. The Edenic garden is penetrated by the snake, for mere garden walls cannot protect virtue from vice. Revenge and lust both enter through the garden door, and the masses soon storm the sanctuary. As Act II draws to a close, Triboulet lends his hand to what he presumes is another affair with a lady at court. He thus unwittingly sanctions the seduction of his daughter. The first act has displayed Triboulet as the perverted wit, whose taunts bring down the wrathful curse of the humiliated courtier Saint-Vallier. By the end of the second act, Saint-Vallier's curse begins to be fulfilled. Triboulet's wit gives way to rage, and he utters his own passionate curse of revenge.

In Acts IV and V, Hugo provides another variation on the divided set. Here the stage has a river and Saltabadil's hideaway with two rooms. The divided stage no longer represents the fragile protection of virtue against vice, but rather the complications of revenge, duplicity, and deceit. Just as the action goes on simultaneously on both sides of the garden wall in Act II, in Act IV we watch what is going on outside as well as inside the hovel, and upstairs as well as downstairs. The characters in one room are being exposed or betrayed by those in the other room: we witness the King's passion for cold-hearted sexual gratification, Saltabadil's for cold-blooded murder, Triboulet's for revenge, Maguellone's for opportune coquetry, and, still in sublime contrast to them all, Blanche's for saintly goodness in her martyr's death. Here, again, Le Roi s'amuse avoids the sentimentality of the opera version: the King remains an unmitigated scoundrel and the Father must recognize his own part in the viciousness that destroyed virtue.

Hugo's stage design for Ruy Blas (1838), Act I, represents Le Salon de Danaé in the Royal Palace of Madrid (figure 15). Hugo describes the setting:

To the left, a large window with a golden frame and small planes. On both sides, in a pan coupé, a low door leading to some interior apartment. At the rear, a huge dividing partition, made of glass with golden frames, in which a large door, also of glass, opens onto a long gallery. This gallery, which crosses the entire theatre, is hidden by immense curtains which hang from top to bottom of the glass partition. A table, an armchair, and writing materials.

By the end of this first act, Hugo will have fully exploited every dimension of his stage design, with a grand opening up of space when the long gallery is exposed to view and the audience beholds the arrival of the Queen. As the curtain rises, Don Salluste enters through the small door on the left, followed by Gudiel and Ruy Blas, who carry parcels for Don Salluste's departure. With the very opening lines, Hugo begins to make use of this sumptuous and complex setting. Don Salluste commands his servant, Ruy Blas, to close the door and open the window. In telling contrast to the opening scene of Amy Robsart, where first Leicester and then Amy are much occupied with exploring the off-stage world beyond the windows, Don Salluste discovers nothing of interest outside the palace: ‘Ils dorment encore tous ici,—le jour va naître’. He then launches his long introspective account of his fall from power because he has refused to obey the Queen's order for him to marry the chambermaid whom he has seduced.

Don Salluste's opening command not only engages Ruy Blas in direct interaction with the setting, it also establishes the master-servant relationship. The master will command his servant to sit at the table and write a love letter, signing it Don César, as well as a personal statement of his service as a lackey, signing it Ruy Blas. The master will then order him to discard his livery and put on the clothes of a nobleman. To each count and marquis who then arrive in the salon, Ruy Blas is introduced as Don Salluste's cousin, Don César. Finally, when the Queen's entourage passes through the long gallery, the master gives a closing command: charm that woman and be her lover. While Don Salluste's revenge plot—to gain power over the Queen by revealing that her lover is a mere servant (neatly reversing his own disgrace over an affair with a chambermaid)—is perfectly transparent to the audience, Ruy Blas realizes the consequences of his assumed role only when he sees the Queen threatened. The events of Act V are swift. Don Salluste has the Queen in his trap. As he savours his revenge in revealing the true identity of her lover and announcing that she is disgraced and banished from the throne, he is attacked by his obedient servant (figure 16).

Hugo was much taken with the bleak panorama of ruined castles he saw on his trip along the Rhine with his mistress, Juliette Drouet. His principle of enhancing the real with the imaginary to attain aesthetic truth is evident in the union of the historical with the mythic past in his sketch of ‘Le Burg à la Croise’ (figure 17) which depicts Hugo's vision of a former unity between the Church and the feudal barons; a turreted wall joins castle and cathedral. In Les Burgraves (1843) Hugo constructs his own imaginative account of the dissipation of an heroic age following the reign of Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa. The play opens upon a scene in the ancient gallery of the Castle Heppenheff (figure 18). In Hernani, too, Hugo had used the portrait gallery as a stage device to develop interaction between character and setting. But the first glimpse into this gallery gives the audience an unsettling foreboding: the frescoes high along the walls may reveal scenes of valour and victory, but below all the portraits have been turned to face the wall. Hugo's stage directions reveal that a second level is built into the colonnade under the roman arches at the rear of the stage. The gallery is built around the tower on the right. The door to the tower leads into the dungeon. Along the left wall, under the mural, is a grand door and a small window through which a beam of light illuminates the shadowy stage. The vacant throne facing the audience from the proscenium is an apt symbol of the fall from empire. The gallery, Hugo adds, should appear ‘délabré et inhabité’.

As the curtain rises, a ceremonial procession crosses the stage, but the grandly robed figures are followed by prisoners in chains. The procession continues to be heard off-stage, as an aged crone, dressed in tatters and chains, steps to the centre of the stage. Guanhumara's opening vow of revenge against the princes expresses an epic conflict which has endured through three generations and which is dramatically contained in this three-act play. Once a ravishing Corsican beauty, she is now the personification of an abiding hate (‘cette esclave est la haine!’) resulting from the jealous conflict in which Job attempted to murder both her and his ward, who was in fact his younger brother. The enmity then fostered years of war as the brother, Frederick Barbarossa, becomes emperor, and Job rallies the burgraves to rebellion.

In the first act, Guanhumara offers a potion to save the life of Otbert's beloved Regina, for which Otbert must pledge to murder Fosco. Unknown to Otbert, Fosco is Job, and Job is his father. The act closes with the return of Frederick, who has been wandering as a beggar doing penance for having desecrated the tomb of Charlemagne. The plotted patricide in the present reenacts the attempted fratricide of the past. In both cases the identity of the victim is unknown, and both crimes take place in the dungeon vault, ‘humide et hideux’, the setting of the final act. Here, Job and Frederick and Guanhumara are reconciled, and the latter act to prevent Otbert from killing Job. Otbert is then revealed to be Yorghi, the long-lost son and heir to the empire. The complexity of concealed and revealed identities (Guanamara was once the Corsican maiden Ginevra; Job has taken the name Fosco; Frederick is the beggar Donato; Otbert is the long-lost Yorghi) functions as more than a mere artifice of plot. Each of the two names has its own epoch in this ancient conflict; the names, that is, designate periods of time during which a character had assumed one or the other identity.

The nature of Les Burgraves, as critics have pointed out, is epic rather than dramatic.³² It failed on its first performance in 1843, yet it is a far different sort of failure than Amy Robsart. In the late play, no less than in the early one, Hugo has persisted in experimenting with ways to extend the boundaries of the stage. The early play failed not because of the experimentation but because of shallow characterization and inept development of plot. The late play may succeed as a literary accomplishment, but fails on the stage precisely because the experimentation has exceeded the possibilities of theatre performance. The epic sweep is too vast. Hugo said in his Préface de les Burgraves that he saw in this story the mythic conflict of the Titans and Olympians, of Cain and Abel. His dramatic characters are intended to be mythic giants, and the great conflicts of the past are supposed to be contained within the present action.

The problem remains that the events of the mythic past, which are more interesting than those of the degenerate present, are narrated rather than acted. Bound, then, to extensive narrative dialogue, Hugo has reasserted dramatic tension by ironically undermining the narrators. As one character tells a fragmentary tale of past rivalries and battles, other characters scoff and deny the credibility of the story. The slave Hermann assumes the role of cynical disbeliever in the legend of Frederick and Job, while Guanhumara prowls the stage as living testimony of its truth. Illusion resides in the awful past that is made to haunt the present.

In Faust, Goethe radically departed from the neo-classical form he adhered to in Clavigo and Iphigenie auf Tauris. In taking his material from a folk tradition fraught with magic and occult lore, he sought to recreate on the stage, not a reality shackled by the norms of verisimilitude and probability, nor even a world overwhelmed by superstition and the supernatural, but a world experienced by ambitious, passionate, and self-divided man (Faust: ‘Two souls dwell, alas, within my breast’). Hugo similarly, dramatized the sublime and the grotesque of man's body-soul dualism. His prime concern in all his plays was to free the stage of the mimetic constraints, to infuse the real with the imaginative, to turn false ‘unity’ into the tension and opposition of human experience, and to enhance stage illusion through the dynamic interaction of the actor with his physical setting.

Notes

1. Herbert Frenzel, Geschichte des Theaters, Daten und Dokumente (Munich: DTV, 1979), pp. 50-151.

2. Jane Brown, Goethe's Faust. The German Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 16-20; Charles Affron, A Stage for Poets. Studies in the Theatre of Hugo and Musset (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 62-82.

3. Terence Gray, ‘This age in the Theatre’, Bookman, 32 (1932), 11; ‘The Festival Theatre in Cambridge’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 10 (1926), pp. 585-586.

4. - Bertolt Brecht, Kleines Organon für das Theater and Schriften zum Theater. 1918 bis 1933.

5. ‘Anti-mimetic’ might serve the purpose, unless one recalls that, as Aristotle defined it, mimesis did not refer to the stage as mirror of court or parlor, but rather to the imitation of human action - action that followed upon doubting, deliberating, and choosing. Jackson Cope, Dramaturgy of the Demonic. Studies in Antigeneric Theatre from Ruzante to Grimaldi (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984), discusses a theatrical tradition of antic clownery, but he also uses the term ‘antigeneric’ to acknowledge an experimentation in dramatic art not bound to imitation of traditional forms. For Theodor Adorno's ‘Rettung des Scheins,’ see: Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 164.

6. James R. Hamilton, ‘Illusion’ and the Distrust of Theatre’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 41 (1982), pp. 39-50.

7. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). For critical discussion of Gombrich's theory, see: Paul Ziff, ‘Art and the Object of Art,’ in Philosophical Turnings, Essays in Conceptual Appreciation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Richard Wollheim, ‘Art and Illusion’, in Aesthetics in the Modern World, ed. H. Osborne (London: 1968); Menachim Brinker, ‘Aesthetic Illusion’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36 (1977-1978), pp. 191-196.

8. The first colloquium on ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’ was devoted to illusion and mimesis; see especially: Wolfgang Iser, ‘Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen Roman’, and Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Nachahmungsprinzip und Wirklichkeitsbegriff in der Theorie des Romans von Diderot bis Stendahl’, in Nachahmung und Illusion (Munich: Fink, 1964), pp. 135-156 and pp. 157-178. Other recent discussions include: Roman Ingarden, ‘Les fonctions du langage au théâtre’, Poetique, 8 (1971), pp. 531-538; William Lynch, ‘The Imagination of the Drama’, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 14 (1975), pp. 1-10; Eckhard Lobsien, Theorie literarischer Illusionsbildung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975); Clément Rosset, Le réel et son double. Essai sur l'illusion (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); B. Beckerman, ‘Theatrical Perception,’ Theatrical Research International, 4 (1979), pp. 157-171; Kendall Walton, ‘How Remote are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37 (1978), pp. 11-23; Walton, ‘Appreciating Fiction: Suspending Disbelief or Pretending Belief?’ Dispositio, 5 (1983), pp. 1-18; Willi Oelmüller, ed., Aesthetischer Schein, Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie 2 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schòningh, 1982).

9. Ernst Nef. ‘Das Aus-der-Rolle-Fallen als Mittel der Illusions-zerstorungbei Tieck und Brecht’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 83 (1964), Heft 2, pp. 191-215.

10. In the parabasis of Aristophanic comedy, the character who has stepped out of his role is still playing a role provided by Aristophanes. In ‘Der gestiefelte Kater’ (1798), Ludwig Tieck has made ‘playing the play’ a major part of the play; the comic irony arises from characters shifting back and forth from alternate roles.

11. Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1832), pp. 37-97.

12. Jean-Bertrand Barrèere, ‘Le Lustre et la rampe. Petite note sur la conception de la scène selon Victor Hugo’, La Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, 1 (1948-49), pp. 282-286.

13. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, La Hija del Aire, in Obras completas (Dramas), ed. L. Astrana Marin (Madrid: 1933).

14. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, ‘Die Tochter der Luft’, Ueber Kunst und Altertum, Bd. 3, Heft 3 (1822), in Werke, 143 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887-1912 = WA), I. Abtheilung, Bd. 41, pp. 351-355. Jane Brown, Goethe's Faust. The German Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 19-21, refers to Goethe's review of Calderon in distinguishing illusionist and non-illusionist drama. See also Swana Hardy, Goethe, Calderon, und die romantische Theorie des Dramas (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1965).

15. Goethe, WA I Abt., Bd. 41, p. 353.

16. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst, 7 vols., ed. Edgar Lohner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967-1974), VI, pp. 146-148, discusses The Taming of the Shrew as an example of Shakespeare's ironic play with illusion.

17. Goethe, WA I Abt., Bde. 14, 15U, 15U. Faust, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); English quotations are from this edition and are documented parenthetically in the text by line reference.

18. Frederick Burwick, The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in Romantic Literature (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987); this analysis of the triadic structure introduces my explication of the Walpurgis episodes.

19. Goethe, WA II Abt., Bd. 1; Goethes Farbenlehre, ed. Rupprecht Matthaei (Ravensburg: Otto Maier, 1971); Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. and annotated by Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840); reprint, introduction Deane B. Judd (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970). See also: Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe's Color Theory and Romantic Perception (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1986).

20. Goethe, WA IV Abt., Bd. 31, pp. 163-164. The undated sketches for Faust were collected with Goethe's Theaterzeichnungen, presumably executed during his tenure as director of the Weimarer Hoftheater, 1791-1817. Now in the collection of the Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten, Weimar (NFG/GNM Corp. IVb 222, 223, 224, 227), they may have been sketched when the scenes were composed or, more probably, in anticipation of performance in 1812, 1819, or 1829. In his Tag- und Jahresheften, Goethe records that Wolff had persuaded him to have Faust performed in 1812 and he had even begun to prepare stage settings (‘Dekorationen und sonstiges Erfordernis’), Werke, III Abtheilung, Bd. 4.

21. Goethe WA IV Abt., Bd. 45, p. 80.

22. The Magic Lantern; its History and Effects (London: 1854); see also: Terence Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978).

23. Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic. Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: John Murray, 1832), pp. 37-97.

24. Brown, p. 125. She describes ‘Walpurgis Night’, Faust I, and ‘Charming Landscape’, Faust II, as, respectively, the ‘Illusion of Reality’ and the ‘Reality of Illusion’.

25. Victor Hugo, Préface de Cromwell, in Oeuvres Dramatiques et Critiques Complètes, ed. Francis Bouvet (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963), pp. 139-153; ‘Certes, les euménides grecques sont bien moins horribles, et par conséquent bien moins vraies, que les sorcières de Macbeth’, p. 142. Hugo's stage designs, sketched in the margins of his plays, are in the manuscript collection at the Biblothèque Nationale and the Maison de Victor Hugo.

26. Préface, p. 141, ‘Tout se tient’.

27. On Hugo's use of masks, disguises, and stage charlatanry: Jean-Bertrand Barrèere, La Fantasie de Victor Hugo, 3 vols (Paris: J. Corti, 1949-60).

28. Wolfgang Stechow, Pieter Bruegel, The Elder (New York: Abrams, 1969), pp. 56-59.

29. Henri Bergson, ‘Le Rire. Essay sur la signification du comique’, Oeuvres (Paris, 2nd ed. 1963), pp. 381-485. Samia Chahine, La Dramaturgie de Victor Hugo (1816-1843) (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1971).

30. Léon Chancerel, ‘Victor Hugo, metteur en scène, décorateur et costumier’, La Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, 4 (1952), p. 232.

31. Amy Robsart, in Oeuvres Dramatiques et Critiques Complètes, pp. 130-131.

32. Affron, pp. 62-82; John Porter Houston, Victor Hugo (New York: Twayne, 1974), pp. 64-66.