“Einen grünen Hering in der Hand”: Mixed Response in Itinerant Plays of Seventeenth-Century Germany
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
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| Description | Touring means adapting to various audiences. My paper discusses the structure of extant playtexts of English travelling comedians in Germany, focusing on opportunities for mixed response. The “impure” nature of the itinerant plays has often been looked down upon -- for conflating biblical, theological, secular, classical, carnivalesque and other features, for mixing genres and for confronting the sublime with the vulgar. I argue, however, that this mixed character was a means of instigating responses that were purposely diverse and stratified. I contextualize my analysis with the seventeenth-century debate on the philosophy of language, the anxieties about verbal ambiguities and the problematic nature of the theatre for rationalist philosophy. |
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