/lit/ - Literature

>>20380013
Never heard of her. Who's this 'Wagner' lady?

>>20380013
Fred is the single most fred on fredburger.

Wagner was a racist.

>>20380013
Then share something he wrote about Shakespeare you dumb faggot. Why make these zero content threads day in day out.

>>20380181
>To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little [142] positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

>What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the [143] stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."

>>20380230
>Thus undoubtedly the essence of Dramatic art, as against the Poet's method, at first seems totally irrational; it is not to be seized, without a complete reversal of the beholder's nature. In what this reversal must consist, however, should not be hard to indicate if we recall the natural process in the beginnings of all Art, as plainly shewn to us in improvisation. The poet, mapping out a plan of action for the improvising mime, would stand in much the same relation to him as the author of an operatic text to the musician; his work can claim as yet no atom of artistic value; but this it will gain in the very fullest measure if the poet makes the improvising spirit of the mime his own, and develops his plan entirely in character with that improvisation, so that the mime now enters with all his individuality into the poet's higher reason. This involves, to be sure, a complete transformation of the poetic artwork itself, of which we might form an idea if we imagined the impromptu of some great musician noted down. We have it on the authority of competent witnesses, that nothing could compare with the effect produced by Beethoven when he improvised at length upon the pianoforte to his friends; nor, even in view of the master's greatest works, need we deem excessive the lament that precisely these inventions were not fixed in writing, if we reflect that far inferior musicians, whose penwork was always stiff and stilted, have quite amazed us in their 'free fantasias' by a wholly unsuspected and often very fertile talent for invention.—At anyrate we believe we shall really expedite the solution of an extremely difficult problem, if we define the Shakespearian Drama as [144] a fixed mimetic improvisation of the highest poetic worth. For this explains at once each wondrous accidental in the bearing and discourse of characters alive to but one purpose, to be at this moment all that they are meant to seem to us to be, and to whom accordingly no word can come that lies outside this conjured nature; so that it would be positively laughable to us, upon closer consideration, if one of these figures were suddenly to pose as poet. This last is silent, and remains for us a riddle, such as Shakespeare. But his work is the only veritable Drama; and what that implies, as work of Art, is shewn by our rating its author the profoundest poet of all time.—

>>20380013
Don't you get tired of this, you insufferable Wagnertard?

>>20380230
this post format haunts my dreams

wagnerfag is the single worst tripfag since butters.

>>20380174
Where do I learn more?

>>20380013
>>20380230
>>20380234
When will Germans stop being obsessed with English culture? They hate us because they ain't us. Why should I care about Wagner's opinion? He's not a novelist or playwright. He wrote music and was German. Both irrelevant to compare to Shakespear.

>>20381332
He's only mentioning Shakespeare, Mr Anglo.

>>20381332
We don't care about your shitty Austen and your shitty Woolf. We care about Shakespeare, who is a universal genius

>>20380013
>Wagner
Never heard of him until now. So, he can't be that important.

>>20381332
>He's not a novelist or playwright. He wrote music

>>20380479
>Here our first business would be to discover the exact principle on which the mimetic naturalism of Shakespeare's dramas is to be distinguished from what we call by that name in the case of almost every other dramatic poet.
>I venture to deduce this principle from the one fact that Shakespeare's actors played upon a stage surrounded by spectators on all sides, whereas the modern stage has followed the lead of the French and Italians, displaying the actors only from one side, and that the front side, just like the painted 'wings.' Here we have the academic theatre of the art-Renaissance, modelled upon a misunderstanding of the antique stage, in which the scene is severed from the public by the orchestra. The special-privileged "friend of art," who erst preferred to sit on each side of this modern stage as well, our sense of seemliness has finally sent back into the parquet, to leave us an untroubled view of a theatrical picture which the skill of the decorator, machinist and costumier has almost raised to the rank of a generic work of art. Now, it is both surprising and instructive to see how a trend toward rhetorical Pathos, intensified by our great German poets to the didacto-poetic pitch, has always preponderated on this Neo-european stage, miscopied from the antique; whereas on Shakespeare's primitive folk-stage, which lacked all blinding scenic glitter, the interest was centred in the altogether realistic doings of the meanly clad play-actors. Whilst the later, academically ordered English Theatre made it the actor's imperative duty under no circumstances to turn his back on the audience, and left him to sidle off as best he could in case of any exit toward the rear, Shakespeare's performers moved before the spectator in all directions with the full reality of common life. We may judge what a power the naturalistic mode of acting had here to exert, since it was backed by no auxiliary illusion, but in every gesture had to set in closest neighbourhood to us the poet's marvellously true and yet so curiously uncommon figures, and make us believe in them to boot: here was need of the very highest dramatic pathos, if only to maintain our belief in the truthfulness of this playing, which would otherwise have proved quite laughable in situations of great tragic moment.

>>20383207
>In the antique Orchestra, almost completely surrounded by the amphitheatre, the tragic Chorus stood as in the public's heart: its songs and dances, instrumentally accompanied, rapt the nation of spectators to a state of clairvoyance in which the hero, now appearing in his mask upon the stage, had all the import of a ghostly vision. Now, if we think of Shakespeare's stage as pitched within the Orchestra itself, we at once perceive what an uncommon power of illusion must have been expected of the mime, if he was to bring the drama to convincing life under the spectator's very eyes. To this stage transplanted to the orchestra our modern proscenium bears the relation of that theatrum in theatro of which Shakespeare makes repeated use, presenting the performers of his actual drama with a second piece performed upon that doubly fictive stage by players playing at being players. I fancy this feature proves an almost conscious knowledge, on the poet's part, of the original ideality of those scenic conventions which he here employs according to their traditional misunderstanding and abuse! His Chorus had become the drama itself, and moved in the Orchestra with so realistic a naturalism that it well might end by feeling itself the audience, and expressing in that capacity its approval or disapproval of, or even but its interest in, a second stage-play acted to it.

>>20381332
Operas are kind of plays, although I doubt anyone would care about Wagner today without music

>>20380174
Wasn't he literally part african?

>>20383233
Lol.

>Wagner's conversations with Gobineau during the philosopher's 5-week stay at Wahnfried in 1881 were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner's diary entry for June 3 recounts one exchange in which Wagner "positively exploded in favour of Christianity as compared to racial theory." Gobineau also believed that in order to have musical ability, one must have black ancestry.

>>20383290
Lol.

>Wagner's conversations with Gobineau during the philosopher's 5-week stay at Wahnfried in 1881 were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner's diary entry for June 3 recounts one exchange in which Wagner "positively exploded in favour of Christianity as compared to racial theory." Gobineau also believed that in order to have musical ability, one must have black ancestry.

>>20380013
His eyes are.. hypnotic.

>>20380013
Who the fuck is Wagner?