History and drama : the Pan-European tradition

Aristotle’s neat compartmentalization notwithstanding (Poetics, ch. 9), historians and playwrights have both been laying claim to representations of the past – arguably since Antiquity, but certainly since the Renaissance. At a time when narratology challenges historiographers to differentiate their “emplotments” (White) from literary inventions, this thirteen-essay collection takes a fresh look at the production of historico-political knowledge in literature and the intricacies of reality and fiction. Written by experts who teach in Germany, Austria, Russia, and the United States, the articles provide a thorough interpretation of early modern drama (with a view to classical times and the 19^th^ century) as an ideological platform that is as open to royal self-fashioning and soteriology as it is to travestying and subverting the means and ends of historical interpretation. The comparative analysis of metapoetic and historiosophic aspects also sheds light on drama as a transnational phenomenon, demonstrating the importance of the cultural net that links the multifaceted textual examples from France, Russia, England, Italy, and the Netherlands. Acknowledgments 5 Contents 7 Introduction 9 Literature and Historiography in Aristotle and in Modern Times 36 History, Myth, and Early Modern Drama 46 King Arthur in Medieval French Literature: History and Fiction, the Sense of the Tragic, and the Role of Dreams in La Mort le Roi Artu 50 When History Does Not Fit into Drama: Some Thoughts on the Absence of King Arthur in Early Modern Plays 64 Machiavelli’s Soteriology and the Humanist Quattrocento Dialogue 68 Lucretia without Poniard: Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft’s Geeraerdt van Velsen between Livy and Tacitus 80 The Historical Writing of Catherine II: Dynasty and Self-Fashioning in The Chesme Palace (Chesmenskii Dvorets) 94 History – Drama – Mythology 104 Fielding’s Farces: Travestying the Historiosophical Discourse 109 Ostrovsky’s Experience of the Creation of the European Theatrical Canon and Russian Stage Practice: Personal Preferences and General Trends 120 The Bildungsdrama and Alexander Ostrovsky’s Plays 129 “Sail[ing] on the Pathless Deep”: Michael Madhusudan Datta’s Dramatic Entanglements 137 The Crystallization of Early Modern European Drama in the Folk-Theater Tradition in Tyrol: The Marienberg Griseldis from 1713, Staged in 2016 155 Rhetorical Ventriloquism in Application 168 Notes on Contributors 201 Index 207

Aristotle's neat compartmentalization notwithstanding (Poetics, ch. 9), historians and playwrights have both been laying claim to representations of the past – arguably since Antiquity, but certainly since the Renaissance. At a time when narratology challenges historiographers to differentiate their "emplotments" (White) from literary inventions, this thirteen-essay collection takes a fresh look at the production of historico-political knowledge in literature and the intricacies of reality and fiction.

Written by experts who teach in Germany, Austria, Russia, and the United States, the articles provide a thorough interpretation of early modern drama (with a view to classical times and the 19 th century) as an ideological platform that is as open to royal self-fashioning and soteriology as it is to travestying and subverting the means and ends of historical interpretation. The comparative analysis of metapoetic and historiosophic aspects also sheds light on drama as a transnational phenomenon, demonstrating the importance of the cultural net that links the multifaceted textual examples from France, Russia, England, Italy, and the Netherlands.

This book-length study is concerned with the various - vicarious and delegative - devices pertaining to rhetorical ventriloquism (sermocinatio, ethopoeia, prosopopoeia, etc.) - including their technical, conceptual, and applicative history in European and Western literatures, from Ancient to (Early) Modern times. It is published as an Online Supplement (.pdf) to (the article "Rhetorical Ventriloquism in Application", forming part of) the following DramaNet volume: History and Drama. The Pan-European Tradition. Eds. Joachim Küpper, Jan Mosch, Elena Penskaya. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. Historiography and literature are verbal representations of actions and events that either have happened or could happen in the human lifeworld. As such, they possess an uncanny 'family resemblance' that has impelled theorists since Antiquity to define the limits of the two 'sister arts.' Historiographical texts, from one point of view, are liable to veer towards fiction