More Quotations from Steiner

Some more quotations from Steiner’s Death of Tragedy :

“We cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not perceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama . . . . The romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a criticism of life; it is a dramatization. And at the origins of the romantic movement lies an explicit attempt to revitalize the major forms of tragedy. In fact, romanticism began as a critique of the failure of the eighteenth century to carry on the great traditions of the Elizabethan and Baroque theatre. It was in the name of drama that the romantics assailed neo-classicism. Not only did they see in the dramatic the supreme literary form; they were convinced that the absence of serious drama arose from some specific failure of understanding or some particular material contingency. The modern view that a dearth of dramatic poetry is a natural state of affairs, remedied by rare and unpredictable good fortune, would have struck the romantics as absurd and self-defeating. The defeat, moreover, was of a kind which no society could safely endure. The romantics believed that the vitality of drama was inseparable from the health of the body politic.” Which raises the question of whether they recognized the sacrificial roots of tragic drama, and whether or not they pursued these.

Steiner quotes Shelley: “it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence: and that the corruption or extinction of drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of the a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life.” Drama here becomes a kind of secularized liturgy, the “cult” that must drive “culture.”

Steiner sees the 17th century as the great divide in the history of tragic drama, and offers several explanations for its demise: in England, drama was in the hands of a few theater managers, and the lack of competition made for soft productions; in order to make as much as possible, Coventry Gardens and other English theaters were larger than the Elizabethan theater, which pressured the drama to become more spectacle and the actors more exaggerated and melodramatic; the democratization of the drama put pressure on the theater to write down to the audience; the loss of a unified “world picture” among the audience; the rise of the novel. In the end, drama became a form of entertainment, not a means for purgation of the soul or the soul of the polis: “Drama was becoming what it is today: mere entertainment. And the middle-class spectator of the romantic period did not want more. He was not prepared to take the risks of terror and revelation implicit in tragedy. He wished to shudder briefly or dream at ease. When coming from the street into the playhouse, he was not leaving the real for the more real (as does any man who is willing to encounter the imaginings of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, or Racine); he was moving from the fierce solicitations of current history and economic purpose into the repose of illusion.” Curiously, the same romantics who bemoaned the death of tragedy helped to promote a world-weary tragic stance toward history: In a letter to Byron, Coleridge complains about the “tragic Dwarfs” that followed Shakspeare, a remark that “expresses the strain of melancholy historicism which leads directly from the romantics to Spengler.”

Somewhere recently I read a criticism of Steiner’s tendency to make broad and tenuous historical connections. For my part, that is precisely what I find most stimulating about Steiner’s work. He may be wrong on some details, and some connections may be overly erudite and fine, but the effort at EXPLANATION is admirable.