THE HISTORICAL MOMENT I would liketo revisit here is the curious and historicallynotorious ‘banishment’ of the fool Hanswurstfrom the German theatre that was publiclystaged outside the gates of Leipzig in 1737 byKaroline Friederike Neuber’s acting troupe.The Neuber acting troup were collaboratingwith the professor of logic, metaphysics andpoetics Johann Christoph Gottsched, whoregarded the theatre as a good vehicle for thedissemination of moral reason because, as heargued, examples ‘make a stronger impres-sion into the heart’ than logical reasoning.1When Gottsched directed his attention to theGerman theatre of his time, however, he sawa theatre dominated by the ‘disorderly’‘Haupt- und Staatsaktionen’ (chief and stateactions), which consisted of adaptations offoreign and German baroque dramas, Frenchand Spanish tragicomedies, as well as Italianopera libretti.2

Gottsched objected not only to the factthat these plays did not adhere to the unitiesof time, place, and action, or to probability

and the ‘imitation of nature’. In his theo-retical writings on the theatre, as well as inhis moral weeklies, Die Vernünftigen Tadler-innen and Der Biedermann, he criticized mostof all the integral role played by the comicfigure who under various names – Hans-wurst, Harlekin, Pickelhering, et al.3 – dis-rupted the ‘Haupt- und Staatsaktionen’ withhis crude jokes and mockery of the aristo-cratic ideal heroes.

The Neubers for their part were driven inequal measure by their own reforming idealsand by the need to survive the tough com-petition in a landscape of travelling theatretroupes. Karoline Neuber was not withoutulterior motives when she joined Gottschedin the fight against a stage dominated byHarlequin and Hanswurst: her strongestcompetitor in the struggle for performingprivileges was Joseph Ferdinand Müller, afamous Hanswurst performer. The unitedcampaign against the comic fool reached itsculmination in the symbolic ‘banishment’ orexpulsion of 1737, which took the form of a

124 ntq 23:2 (may 2007) © cambridge university press doi: 10.1017/s0266464x07000036

Karen Jürs-Munby

Hanswurst and Herr Ich: Subjectionand Abjection in EnlightenmentCensorship of the Comic FigureThe well-known ‘banishment’ of the popular comic figure Hanswurst from the Germanstage by Gottsched and the Neuber acting troupe in the early eighteenth century isusually read as part of the historical movement from improvised folk theatre to bourgeoisliterary theatre. In this article Karen Jürs-Munby goes beyond that received wisdom todiscuss what kind of acting, what kind of body, and what kind of relationship betweenstage and audience were censored by banishing Hanswurst. Considering this censorship aspart of the larger historical relationship between discourses on acting and the emergenceof a modern self in the Enlightenment, she argues that the osmotic body and stage thatHanswurst stood for prevented the aesthetic mirroring relationship sought by eighteenth-century stage reformers in an increasing need for bourgeois self-representation. TheHanswurst banishment can be theorized with reference to Julia Kristeva as an abjectionof grotesque acting – a form of acting whose political power to question the autonomousbourgeois subject was to be rediscovered by practitioners in the twentieth century. KarenJürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University; she has publishedarticles on theories and discourses of acting in the eighteenth and twentieth centuriesand recently translated Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre.

special prologue written by Karoline Neuberentitled ‘The Victory of Reason or the Deathof Hanswurst’ (‘Der Sieg der Vernunft – oderder Tod des Hans Wurst’).4

Despite the fact that actors kept on per-forming as Hanswurst, Harlekin, Bernadon,and Kasperl throughout the eighteenth cen-tury, especially in the southern, predomin-antly Catholic parts of Germany and most ofall in Vienna,5 and although the playwrightand dramaturg Gottholt Ephraim Lessinglater ridiculed Neuber’s and Gottsched’sHanswurst-banishment as ‘the biggest harle-quinade of all’ (‘die größte Harlekinade’) ’6 thisstaged banishment has generally been re-garded as an emblematic moment in Germantheatre history for the transition from popu-lar, improvised, so-called ‘Stegreiftheater’ to amodern bourgeois literary mode.

This paved the way for further debateabout the legitimacy of the comic figure andfor further theatre censorship throughout theEnlightenment. In Austria this took the formof a ‘Hanswurst Streit’ (1747–69) and compre-hensive state censorship under the absolutistmonarchy of Maria Theresia and Joseph II.7However, even though the censorship ofHanswurst performers often focused on theirdangerous habit of ‘extemporizing’, there areindications that it marks an even more pro-found epistemological break than the shiftfrom improvised to text-based theatre, in-volving changes in what and how theatresignified.

A Bourgeois Need for Self-Representation

In this article I propose to read the Hans-wurst banishment as part of the larger his-torical relationship between discourses onacting and the emergence of a modern self inthe Enlightenment. My main thesis with res-pect to this relationship is that the so-called‘natural’ acting style developed by theatrereformers from around the middle of the eigh-teenth century is a response to an increasingneed for self-representation, which turns the stageinto an aesthetic mirror for the bourgeoisindividual.

This can be approached with the help ofLacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytical

theories of subject formation. Lacan’s theoryof the mirror phase is highly pertinent here,as it not only shows how the child at a certainage first constitutes itself as a subject throughits (mis-)recognition in the mirror, but alsoargues that this first identification with anexternal image or ‘imago’ sets the self on atrack for future secondary identifications inthe search of an Ideal-I, that it ‘situates theego, before its social determination, in a fic-tional direction.’8 The subject’s (fictional)sense of cohesion and autonomy is given to itby the fact that in the mirror image the bodyappears in a sculptural perfection, as a‘Gestalt’ that contrasts with its own sense offragmentation.

Julia Kristeva’s theoretical contribution isto have argued that the child’s identificationin the mirror goes hand in hand with – or isactually preceded by – a rejection and repres-

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Anton Stranitzky as Hanswurst. Eighteenth-centuryetching, Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek(Sammlung Fritz Bruckner).

sion of bodily matters and energies thatthreaten the constitution of an Ideal-I and thesense of a closed-off, separate self: ‘Evenbefore being like, “I” am not but do separate,reject, ab-ject. Abjection with a meaningbroadened to take in a subjective diachrony,is a precondition of narcissism.’9

As I have already discussed elsewherewith respect to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’sHamburg Dramaturgy, Jacques Lacan can helpus theorize the bourgeois desire for self-recognition in the visual Gestalt of the tamedand disciplined actor, while Julia Kristeva’sconcept of abjection can help us explain thecensoring reactions to physically transgres-sive forms of performing and ultimately tothe very threat of performance as such.10

Arguably Lacan and Kristeva both assert thatpsychic processes of subject formation andabjection are universal individual phenomena,but Kristeva does indicate that

socio-historical considerations can be brought inat a second stage. They will allow us to under-stand why that demarcating imperative, which issubsequently experienced as abjection, variesaccording to time and space, even though it isuniversal.11

And elsewhere she acknowledges – as ifhistorically qualifying this universalism – that‘the transition from the baroque man, whohad neither interior nor exterior, to the psy-chological man of the romantics . . . occurredduring the eighteenth century’.12

Taking this as an invitation to historicizepsychological subject formation, the ques-tions I would, therefore, like to ask of theHanswurst-banishment are: what kind offigure, what kind of acting and along with itwhat kind of body was symbolically expelledfrom the stage by expelling Hanswurst?What was at stake in this banishment psycho-socially, politically, and aesthetically?

Hanswurst and the Civilizing Process

For good reasons, some commentators haveread the banishment of Hanswurst in termsof Norbert Elias’s ‘civilizing process’ and itsproblem with the carnivalesque plebeianbody: for if we compare Hanswurst’s main

characteristics and typical actions on stagewith Gottsched’s values and ideals of a vir-tuous and dutiful human being, the comic-ally stark contrast is that between a vulgar,base, and ‘uncivilized’ peasant, on the onehand, and a reasoned, restrained, and ‘civil-ized’ bourgeois citizen, on the other.

Accordingly, in another prologue play byKaroline Neuber, Der alte und der neue Ge-schmack (1738), the ‘old taste’ is personifiedby a peasant (Bauer) while the ‘new taste’ isa ‘junger wohlerzogener Mensch’ (‘young, well-mannered man’).13 Thus Hanswurst – in hisoriginal conception a ‘Sauschneider’ (pig but-cher) by profession but in later plays often apeasant-like servant figure – always has anenormous voracity for food and drink, whichis already indicated by his name (‘Pickel-hering’ and ‘Jean Potage’ suggest similarcharacteristics but are not as gluttonous asHanswurst). He eats and drinks himselfthrough enormous portions and grotesquelylong lists of food and booze and generallyhas nothing else on his mind. As Müller-Kampel analyzes this ‘Freßsack and Säufer’(glutton and drunkard):

Whether love intrigues are spun around him,whether battles are being fought and corpseshaving to be collected, or whether he only has tostand guard or deliver a letter, like will-o’-thewisps images of devouring or carousing areperpetually arising in him.14

By contrast, the readers of Gottsched’s Welt-weisheit are admonished to exercise moder-ation and self-restraint in their diet: ‘one hasto make oneself the master over one’s sensesand either break oneself of the habit of suchunhealthy things altogether or stop withthe foods and beverages when they tastebest’15 – an idea that would never occur toHanswurst.

Similarly, while Gottsched in his Welt-weisheit preaches a Protestant work ethic ofdiligence and moderation in expenditure,16

Hanswurst has a thoroughly materialisticWeltanschauung and is willing do anythingfor money except work.17 He is happy to lie,thieve, act as a hired killer, or marry someonerich but old and ugly. Only being a fool is forfree, Hanswurst affirms in Stranitzky’s Scipio,

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for everything else he requires money.18 Thisincludes even his own excrement: ‘Moneyand faeces are the equivalents in whichHanswurst deals,’ as Gerhard Scheit notes.‘The jester wants money for everything andhe gives for everything his excrement. Forborrowed money he offers the usurer “twopounds from my body . . . as soon as I’ve hada good meal”.’19

Finally, Hanswurst also exhibits a perma-nent lust for sexual adventures – his nameand the essential prop of a wooden swordalso bearing obvious phallic connotations (asthe contemporary etching alongside demon-strates in a scarcely veiled manner).

Mein Lust besteht in Würst, die groß und völligseyn;

Wer mir sie nehmen will, der muß sich mit mirschmeissen:

Ich ließ mir eh den Kopf, als meine Würstwegreissen.

Ein jeder Würst-Hanß stimt auch dißfalls mit mirein.

[My pleasure consists in sausages that are bigand full; whoever wants to take them from mehas to fight with me. I’d rather have my headtorn off than my sausage. Every Wurst-hansalso agrees with me in this.]

Being a notorious ‘collector of women andsexual dreamer’, Hanswurst’s pet names forhis lovers (he calls them ‘Menschern’) reveal,as Müller-Kampel explains:

his view of sexuality as a mutual use of genitalia,which he in turn reifyingly conflates with the im-bibing of food and drink, the use of everydaytools, the operation of war weaponry, or the copu-lation of animals.

For example: ‘my butterbarrel’, ‘you choseninkwell of my quill’, or ‘yonder target atwhich I have already shot most of mypowder’.20 Many plots thus revolve aroundHanswurst chasing women or converselyfinding himself being chased by women.Needless to say, such sexual appetite runscounter to Gottsched’s view that a virtuousperson should regard intercourse solely as ameans for procreation and refrain from itotherwise.21

Not surprisingly Gottsched at the end ofthis last section advises the person striving

for chastity that he avoid ‘places wheresensual pleasure is aroused, such as operatheatres and dishonourable comedies, inwhich romantic escapades, dirty jokes, andfooleries are the best adornment’ (‘Ervermeide ferner die Oerter, wo man zur Wollustgereizet wird, als Opernbühnen und unehrbareKomödien, darinnen verliebte Romanstreiche,Zoten, und Narretheidungen der beste Zierrathsind’).22 Gottsched obviously saw the stageas providing direct models or sensualenticement for the spectator’s behaviour –the dilemma being, as we have seen above,that he wanted to use the theatre as a didacticvehicle precisely because it was a mediumappealing to the senses. Consequently, cen-soring and controlling the action or thefigures on stage for Gottsched was synony-mous with educating and restraining peoplein the audience.

While Hanswurst apparently gives freereign to his drives, the tenor of Gottsched’s

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A priapic Wursthans. Seventeenth/eighteenth-centuryetching, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg.

‘practical’ Weltweisheit and by extension ofhis theatre reforms is the neccessary controlof one’s affects. As we ‘cannot root out thepassions altogether’, Gottsched says, ‘it istherefore enough that we learn to bring themunder the obedience of reason’ (‘Es ist alsogenug, daß wir [die Leidenschaften] unter denGehorsam der Vernunft bringen’).23 ‘Vernunft’here serves the function of the superego – beit as the moral agent for the individual or asthe three unities and various other rules forthe composition and performance of a play(these ‘new’ regular plays were often referredto by Gottsched and Neuber as ‘vernünftigeStücke’, or ‘reasonable plays’).

In light of this it makes sense to read theHanswurst figure as a victim of the ‘civiliz-ing process’, whose long-term influence inchanging social structures towards a higherlevel of differentiation and integration inmodernity, according to Elias, exact the priceof people’s increasing and differentiatingcontrol of affects and the gradual formationof a strong superego.24 This also seems to bethe object of Gottsched’s reform of comedy.

In his Critische Dichtkunst he constrasts the‘old comedy’ of the ancient Greeks, which hedescribes as belonging to peasant culture –’comedy’, as he points out, meaning ‘villagesong’25 – with the ‘new comedy’ of Terence,which was ‘regular’ and imitated nature with-out resorting to comic figures such as Hans-wurst or Harlekin who have ‘no example innature’.26 Gottsched summarizes the idealcomedy as follows:

Die Comödie ist nichts anders, als eine Nachahmungeiner lasterhaften Handlung, die durch ihr lächerlichesWesen den Zuschauer belustigen, aber auch zugleicherbauen kann. (p. 348)

[Comedy is nothing but an imitation of a wickedaction, which through its ridiculousness can amusebut at the same time edify the spectator.]

In other words, the spectator should nolonger laugh with a comic figure but about thewicked action of a person, while at the sametime applying this laughter to himself. Sup-porting the formation of a strong superego,his gaze should turn in on itself. This reformdemanded an identity of the subject andobject of comedy which Hanswurst or Harle-

quin as generic comic figures could not pro-vide (as I will discuss below).

Unlike Gottsched’s reform of comedy,which ultimately left no place for the comicfigure, Neuber’s reforming ideas at the timeof the Deutsches Vorspiel still included theHarlekin figure, whom she wanted to con-vert for didactic purposes.27 This project,however, would amount to a taming anddisciplining of the comic figure, as wasindeed witnessed in Neuber’s later plays. AsLessing later criticized, the reformers

hatten nur das bunte Jäckchen und den Namenabgeschafft, aber den Narren behalten. Die Neuberinselbst spielte eine Menge Stücke, in welchen Harlekindie Hauptperson war. Aber Harlekin hieß bei ihr Häns-chen und war ganz weiß anstatt scheckicht gekleidet.

[The reformers had only got rid of the colourful jac-ket and the name, but kept the fool. The Neuberinherself put on many plays in which Harlequinwas the main figure. But Harlequin with her wascalled Little Hans and was dressed all in whiteinstead of speckled colours.]

Even though Lessing here as elsewhere mocksNeuber’s and Gottsched’s ‘banishment’ ofthe comic figure, his own dramaturgy argu-ably still profited from it. For not only wasHanswurst turned into the harmless diminu-tive of Hänschen (after he had already beenreplaced by the more ‘civilized’, i.e. ‘frenchi-fied’, Harlekin), but the comic figure itselfwas also separated out from the main actionin the form of Hanswurstiaden or Harlequinpantomimes (i.e., plays in which Hanswurstsor Harlequins were the main figures). Thesecomic mini-plays were then relegated to theposition of pre- or after-play entertainmentsand merely framed the main ‘serious’ dramaof the evening.

Lessing’s Hamburger Dramaturgie reflectsthis new high/low division only in as muchas these Hanswurstiaden and Harlequin panto-mimes, like ballets and other ‘side shows’,are hardly ever mentioned in his commentson an evening at the theatre.28 Lessing’s andMylius’s own early theatre journalism hadactually programmatically brought aboutsuch a cultural marginalization of populartheatre by excluding it from critical reflec-tion. Thus they state at the beginning of theirBeyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters

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(Contributions to the History and Acceptanceof the Theatre, 1750):

Alle diejenigen Schaubühnen werden also außer derSphäre unsrer Betrachtungen seyn, auf welchen sichnicht anders, als von ohngefähr, ein gutes Schauspielsehen läßt, auf welchen das Geschrey des Hanswurstsund seiner Cameraden die Vernunft und den gutenGeschmack übertäubet und die Dummheit entzücket;auf welchen die curieusen, extragalanten Haupt- undStaats- und Heldenactionen das Bürgerrecht nochhaben, und kurz, welche Verstand und Sittenverderben.29

[All those stages will remain outside the sphere ofour considerations on which one can see a goodplay only by chance, on which the screaming ofHanswurst and his mates drowns out reason andgood taste and delights stupidity; on which thecurious and extra-gallant chief- and state- andheroic actions still have civil rights, and in shortwhich corrupt mind and morals.]

Hanswurst within a Baroque Episteme

The contrast in Lessing’s description betweenthe screaming Hanswurst and the (extra)gallant heroic actions makes us realize thatthe Hanswurst figure ultimately cannot beviewed in isolation if we want to understandits role in the civilizing process and its shift-ing epistemes. Rather, we have to backtrack alittle and look at the whole constellation ofartistocratic hero, opponent, and comicfigure within the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen(chief and state actions) of seventeenth-century touring companies. As Erika Fischer-Lichte has shown, this constellation and thesemiotics of German baroque acting practices,too, could be read within the context of thecivilizing process,30 since they embody newsocial requirements brought on by the trans-formation from a warrior class to a courtlynobility at the beginning of the seventeenthcentury, which Elias summarizes as follows:

Deliberation, calculation over long periods, self-control, precise regulation of one’s own affects,and knowledge of people and the whole terrainbecome essential prerequisites for every socialsuccess.31

Accordingly, the heroic ego in these baroqueplays of labyrinthine intrigue and changingfortune had to prove itself by resisting theonslaught of affects.

The disciplined art of acting which corres-ponds to this aim is elaborated in instruc-tional texts as late as Franciscus Lang’sDissertatio de Actione Scenica (1727). As hereillustrated, the actor is taught to assume thebasic posture, the so-called ‘crux scenica’, inwhich the feet were placed at a ninety-degreeangle, while performing strictly prescribedphysical representations of the emotions.32

By thus controlling his body according to therules, the hero proves that he is also incontrol of the affects that storm in on him.His opponent, on the other hand, often atyrant or a madman,

is characterized by being unable to follow the rules:he runs across the stage, hits his head against thewall so that blood is squirting out, rolls around on

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Illustration of proper posture in Franciscus Lang’sDissertatio de Actione Scenica, Francke Verlag, Bern1975, p. 29 (reprinted with permission from NarrFrancke Attempto Verlag).

the floor, and thus manifestly proves to the specta-tor that he is helplessly at the mercy of the affects.33

The comic figure – Pickelhering, Hanswurst,or Harlequin – similarly violates all the rulesof this highly regimented acting: rather thankeeping his body taut and controlled, hebends his knees and upper body, shows hisnaked behind, and gestures obscenely belowthe waist. But instead of being determinedby affects he is ruled by bodily materialism.Instead of proving himself through changingfortune like the heroic martyr, he adapts toevery change, thinking only of his stomach,never about the salvation of his soul.34

His reversals and transgressions were notnecessarily a threat to aristocratic authority.Within a baroque world view, he was funnynot because he ‘subverted’ the power of theheroes but because he revealed his ownpeasant ignorance of courtly ideals.35 Rather,as Fischer-Lichte has argued with referenceto Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival,within the episteme of baroque theatre theHanswurst figure had an important compen-sating function in the civilizing process:

He oppose[d] the controllable and controlledbody of the hero with the grotesque body ofcarnival, [bringing] the excluded back into theframe of society. In doing so [the comic figure]took on a relieving function for those spectatorswho were not yet up to the pressures of thecivilizing process and the demands of the newbehavioural ideals.36

What is not entirely convincing about thisargument is that early eighteenth-centuryreformers simply ‘thought the compensatoryfunction of the fool to be outmoded andobsolete’.37 This cannot account for all theirmotivations, and even less for their fervourin banishing him, which I shall now address.

I take my cue from a Hanswurst prologuepublished in 1816, which is itself part of anineteenth-century, counter-Enlightenmentnostalgia for the fool and which bemoans thedemise of Hanswurst and the fact that he isnow mostly known as a puppet-play effigyfor children. Commenting on the audience’spleasure which has since supplanted theenjoyment of watching a Hanswurst perfor-mance, the Hanswurst prologue says:

Doch will ich bey Leib damit nicht meinen,Daß außer mir keine Lust kann erscheinen:Sie seh’n auf den Brettern immer nur sichUnd wer ist spaßiger als der Herr Ich?38

[Yet by no means do I want to say hereThat no pleasure but me can appear;It is always themselves who on stage they seeAnd who could be funnier than Mr Me?]

What follows is a long list of scenes thespectators might see, a kind of parodic indexto the now dominant repertoire of bourgeoiscomedy and sentimental family melodrama.

From Osmotic to Closed Body, Stage, Self

Even though the representation of the bour-geois world and bourgeois heroes in comedyand tragedy was still a far cry for Gottschedand Neuber, because tragedy was reservedfor aristocratic heroes, I would maintain thatthey were already carving out a space for thebourgeois subject. Thus Gottsched not onlywants tragedy to hold a critical mirror up toaristocratic rulers – to ‘teach you, the gods ofthis earth, that you, too, are humans’39 – butconversely also paves the way for bourgeoistragedy by asking, ‘Can’t a noble man andcitizen practise on a small scale what princesand heroes have done on a large scale?’40

Gottsched signalled a move from the virtu-ous nobleman to the ‘noble citizen’ by insinu-ating that the ideals inscribed in baroquetragedy – virtue and gallant self-control – aretransferrable to the emerging bourgeoisie.

Hanswurst is an obstacle to this project of‘seeing Herr Ich’ on stage not only because ofwhat he represents but also because of whatand how he communicates in the theatre.First of all, he is not a suitable object foridentification because he is essentially amask. ‘He behaves himself like no humanbeing amongst ourselves behaves himself’was a contemporary objection Lessing cites,and ‘it is nonsensical to see the sameindividual appear in a different play everyday’. To which Lessing insightfully responds:‘So he doesn’t have to announce who he is. . . .One has to see him not as an individual butrather as a whole genre.’41

Lessing himself was quite prepared totolerate this ‘genre’ at the fringes, but at the

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same time he began to demand of tragedythat it should have heroes ‘of the samesubstance’ (‘vom selben Schrot und Korn’) as‘us’ – that is, the bourgeois spectators.42 How-ever, such an aesthetic identification with indi-vidual heroes on stage required an aestheticdistance and a mirror ‘plane’, a ‘fourth wall’between stage and auditorium. In otherwords, I argue that the emerging fourth wallserved the same function as the mirror’ssurface in Lacan’s model: without it, the illu-sion necessary for subject formation throughthe aesthetics of sympathy (Mitleidsästhetik)developed by Lessing could not have worked.Similarly, the actor’s corporeality would haveto be moulded into an individual, closed-offGestalt the spectator could identify with. Thefool, by contrast, represented an ‘osmotic’relationship between stage and auditorium;his was a dangerously ‘osmotic’ body whichthreatened subject formation and thereforehad to be ‘abjected’.

What causes abjection, according toKristeva, is ‘what disturbs identity, system,order. What does not respect borders, posi-tions, rules’.43 Stranitzky’s Hanswurst andKurz’s Bernardon, as Müller-Kampel hasanalyzed, represent a

baroque body without a self – which is in a doublesense a ‘character-less’ and ‘unreasonable’ bodywhose parts and functions do not obey theirbearer, lead their own lives, and often enough getinto conflict with one another.44

It is, moreover, associated with the kind ofquintessentially ‘open’ body that Bakhtin hasidentified as the grotesque body of carnival:

The distinctive character of this body is its openunfinished nature, its interaction with the world.These traits are most fully and concretely revealedin the act of eating; the body transgresses here itsown limits: it swallows, devours, rends the worldapart, is enriched and grows at the world’sexpense.45

It is also easy to see that Hanswurst does notadhere to the division between stage andauditorium: dramaturgically he is often posi-tioned at the threshold between specatorsand performance space, continually destroy-ing any illusion by extemporizing and

addressing himself directly to to the audi-ence. His asides frequently break throughthe reality of the stage action and point to itstheatricality: everything to him is play. Whilethis did not constitute a problem withinbaroque theatre, it did become a problem foran emerging bourgeois audience who wantedto see their world mirrored on stage.

Furthermore, the fool is not only posi-tioned right at the threshold between stageand auditorium but, as a carnivalesque figure,also ‘belongs to the borderline between artand life’, as Mikhail Bakhtin has stated.46 In asituation where the theatre is not yet firmlyinstitutionalized but still part of themarketplace, the comic performer is notlimited to the one theatrical site and istherefore capable of forming strong associa-tive links with other popular forms of enter-tainment and popular (pre-modern) beliefsand practices. Without making a distinctionbetween actor and character, Gottsched’smoral weekly Der Biedermann thus talks of

a lewd Hans Wurst who travels around from vil-lage to village with quacks, jugglers, marionettes,and cheapjacks. Everybody knows that these kindof people seek their sagacity in obscenities andtheir wit in a more than peasanty lewdness. Thesepeople I do not like to defend: rather I detesteverything dishonourable and disgraceful theytend to produce.47

Related to this is my point about Hanswurstas ‘osmotic body’ – someone who embodiedand was associated with a pre-modern con-ception of the body.

The Pre-Modern Perception of the Body

My reading here was originally inspired byBarbara Duden’s work on body perceptionsin the seventeenth and early eighteenthcentury. She states that: ‘The society of theseventeenth century did not yet have roomfor a corporeality that was isolated, “disem-bedded” from the total network of socialrelations.’48 With reference to contemporarydescriptions of the plague, Duden notes thata ‘constant exchange took place between theinside and the outside, a relation of osmoticexchanges with the elements’.49 Looking atthe narratives of medical patients in the early

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eighteenth century, she observes that the bodywas perceived to be vulnerable to vapours,‘impressions, delusions, and imagined things[as] the prime causes of illness’.50

In this cosmos the skin does not close off the body,the inside, against the outside world. In like man-ner the body itself is also never closed off.51

The bodies of actors and spectators in thetheatre were no exception to such perme-ability. On the contrary, as Joseph Roachexplains in a study that links theories ofacting to the history of science, seventeenth-century actors and acting have to be under-stood in terms of the rhetoric of passionsderived from Quintilian. Drawing on ancientphysiological doctrines such as pneumatism,this rhetoric defined the actor’s ‘imperson-ations as a mode of inspiration’, whereby‘inspiration’ was understood literally as akind of breathing-into-the-body:

The inspiring forces came literally out of thin air.A vital pneuma, imbibed from a universal aether,supposedly permeated the blood as spirits, and,radiating outward from the heart and lungs, dis-played inward feelings as outward motions. Thismagical aether was neither fire nor water, air norearth, but a fifth essence more subtle than anysubstance. The word emotion itself derives fromthe Latin emovere (to move out, to stir up), whichassumed the existence of a vital spirit, constantlyactive and motive, suffused throughout the humanframe.52

The actor who could call upon such ‘inspir-ation’ with his imagination was in a positionthat was especially privileged and at the sametime dangerous :

The rhetoric of the passions that derived from pneu-matism endowed the actor’s art with three poten-cies of an enchanted kind. First, the actor possessedthe power to act on his own body. Second, hepossessed the power to act on the physical spacearound him. Finally, he was able to act on thebodies of the spectators who shared that space withhim. In short he possessed the power to act.53

As Roach points out, this power also madethe actor physically dangerous to the audi-ence as well as to himself:

A seventeenth-century physician, steeped inageless anxieties of bodily penetration by vapours

from below, could not but notice the unsettlingresemblance between inspiration and disease.54

As a most flexible and trained but at thesame time dangerously uncontrollable actor,Hanswurst was bound to abuse this power.His humour, as we have seen, revolvedaround gluttony and defecation, sexual acti-vity, birth and death, emphasized all orifices,bodily functions and emanations. In this wayhis imagination might literally have beenseen as ‘infectious’ and dangerous.

Such power of the imagination (the Ger-man word Einbildungskraft literally meansthe ‘power to imprint’) can also be seen inanother example from Gottsched’s Bieder-mann, this time involving Harlekin. Warningof the dangers of dissimulation at the carni-val, a correspondent writes:

People go to great effort to disfigure themselvesthrough ugly masks and are not satisfied with theface and appearance given to them by nature. . . .Nobody considers that had he been born this wayhe would live as an unhappy monster to theabhorrence of others. Just recently we had amemorable example, as a mother who frequentedthe carnival every day gave birth to a child inwhose face a mask of flesh had grown and whosebody showed red, yellow, and green patches allover: for the mother had mostly attended thecarnival in the costume of a Harlequin.55

This example effectively condenses severalcontemporary cultural fears into one phobicimage: 1) the fear of maternal imagination,which was believed to have a direct materialimpact on the appearance of the unbornchild;56 2) the fear of uncontrolled artisticimagination in the shape of the ‘unnatural’fantasy figure Harlequin; and 3) the fear ofacting as dissimulation, as embodied in themask.57 The fear of maternal imaginationespecially relates this example to Kristeva’stheory of abjection, which she links to theattempt to separate from the maternal body:

The abject confronts us, . . . within our personalarcheology, with our earliest attempts to release thehold of maternal entity even before ex-isting out-side of her, thanks to the autonomy of language.58

Yet in the eighteenth century, this rejection ofan osmotic/merging relation with other

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bodies takes the form not so much of apersonal as a cultural form of abjection,which took place in several different spheresof society. As Duden has noted with respectto the medicalization of society in theeighteenth century, for example, peasants,the poor and women, who generally held tothe traditional (pre-modern) conceptions ofthe body much longer, came to be consideredas having ‘offensive bodies’ by Enlighten-ment reformers of medicine:

In the final analysis, the Enlightenment reformerwas not concerned with changing behaviour butwith creating a new body. As one country doctorwrote from the provinces, ‘It would be necessary,so to speak, to change the nature of the peasant . . .to make him into an absolutely different kind ofperson.

The creation of a new, ‘sealed-off’ body was,however, not restricted to only one field,practice, or discipline but has to be viewed inan interdisciplinary manner. Hanswurst andHarlequin play pivotal roles in this respectbecause they are positioned ‘at the borderbetween art and life’ and thus cross differentspheres.

In conclusion, we can say that Hans-wurst’s banishment is clearly multiply over-determined by several, often seeminglydisparate discourses: Not only is he, as wehave seen, opposed to the ‘civilized’ bour-geois values Gottsched and the Neuberswant to propagate through model behaviour;not only does he not adhere to the rules ofreason; and not only is he not a ‘natural’individual; but he is also representative of anosmotic body and an osmotic stage. As suchhe threatens the spectator with dangerousphysical energies that do not allow for anaesthetic distance and therefore for theconstitution of the subject in the mirror of thestage.

Conclusion: Subjection and Abjection

If the new aesthetic relationship of sympa-thetic identification between spectator andprotagonist in bourgeois tragedy can betheorized in terms of Lacan’s psychoanalytictheory of subject formation, as I have argued,

then the early banishment of Hanswurst, as Ihope to have shown, could be theorized interms of Kristeva’s theory of abjection.Theabject for Kristeva is defined as whatever isrejected from the subject’s (or the culture’s)self-definition with a feeling of disgust. It isthat which does not allow for a recuperationof the other as an (aesthetic) object: ‘Theabject has only one quality of the object – thatof being opposed to I.’59 Abjection is thusalways a function of the superego: ‘To eachego its object, to each superego its abject.’60

In the case of Hanswurst, as we have seen, itwas the superego of ‘reason’ that drove himoff the stage. ‘Ich’ could come about in bour-geois theatre because the censoring ‘Herr Ich’abjected Hanswurst.

The actual historical form which censor-ship of the comic figure took in the Enlighten-ment varied historically and geographicallyfrom institutional marginalization, criticalintervention (Gottsched), or critical silencing(Lessing), to the (attempted) state censorshipof plays and even gestures. Thus Joseph vonSonnenfels, the most powerful censor in theAustrian Enlightenment (which was anEnlightenment ‘decreed’ by the monarchyrather than genuinely motivated by a bour-geois emancipation) demanded in 1770 thatthe ‘concept of extemporizing be given itsbroadest meaning’, including expecially ‘ges-tures through which often an itself innocentspeech can become the smuttiest joke’.61

In Catholic southern Germany and Austria,as I mentioned earlier, the comic figure withits ‘baroque body’ is much more resilientthan in northern, Protestant areas. This isprobably due to a Catholic sensualism thatwas opposed to a Lutheran and Calvinistrationalism, and favoured the perpetuationof baroque traditions.62 But here, too, as therecent work of Beatrix Müller-Kampel hassystematically analyzed, the comic figureundergoes a gradual taming and civilizingprocess which amounts to a kind of self-censorship of theatre practitioners.

Stranitzky’s Hanswurst thus eventuallytransforms into Johann La Roche’s harmlessKasperl, who represents a ‘mere diminutiveof the previous Hanswurstian corporeality[Leiblichkeit]’ and is gradually relegated to

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increasingly minor parts.63 Often the laterforms of Hanswurst or Kasperl themselvesbecome civilized into figures of identifica-tion, if not for grown-up audiences then atleast for children. In order to achieve this,however, anything grotesque, disgusting,horrible, revolting, loud, and transgressiveabout these figures had to be ‘abjected’ in theprocess:

If the Hanswurst of the eighteenth century hadscreamed, roared, howled, and bawled, Kasperlnow squeaks childishly through the world. Themountains of sausages and meat that he devouredhave shrunken to a Gugelhupf, and instead of thebarrels of beer, wine, and schnapps he prefers aglass of milk or lemonade. The streams of sperm,blood, urine, spit, and vomit have long ceased toflow, and anything faecal or sexual he does noteven linguistically take in his mouth any more. Hedoes not fight, clobber, betray, insult, curse, andmock any more, but, on the contrary showschildren that all this can lead to no good.64

‘And yet,’ as Kristeva says, ‘from its place ofbanishment, the abject does not cease chal-lenging its master.’65 Analogously, as wouldhave to be shown in detail since it is beyondthe scope of this essay, the grotesque bodyand grotesque acting would be rediscoveredin twentieth-century German and Austriantheatre as a politically powerful tool to dis-lodge the notion of the autonomous bourgeoissubject – Herr Ich – by theatre practitionersranging from Bertolt Brecht and HeinerMüller to Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek.

Notes and References1. Johann Christoph Gottsched, ‘Die Schauspiele und

besonders die Tragödien sind aus einer wohlbestelltenRepublik nicht zu verbannen’ (1736), in Gottsched, Aus-gewählte Werke, Vol. IX, Part 2, ed. P. M. Mitchell (Berlin;New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), p. 492–500, here p.495.

2. See Manfred Brauneck and Gérard Schneilin,Theaterlexikon (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1986), p. 395.The term was polemically used by Gottsched to describethe repertoire introduced by professional Englishtroupes. While this repertoire was extremely varied andcould be said to have consisted of the dramatic works ofthe world literature of its time, the plays were mostlyreduced to the main plot and often changed to the pointof unrecognizability.

3. Helmut Asper has convincingly shown that thedifferent names for the comic figure do not indicateentirely distinct types but rather appear as different

generic names – some more prevalent at one time thanothers – for one and the same type of figure. Thus,roughly, the name Pickelhering is more prevalent in thelate-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, whenEnglish acting troupes introduced professional theatreinto the German-speaking landscape, Hanswurst is thegeneric term used more often by the end of the seven-teenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries,and the name Harlekin is used increasingly from thebeginning of the eighteenth century onwards, with therising popularity of commedia dell’arte plays. See HelmutAsper, Hanswurst (Emsdetten: Verlag Lechte, 1980), esp.Chapters I and II.

Even though Gottsched, Neuber, and Lessing oftenuse the names interchangeably, contemporary sourcesdo also make distinctions, especially between Hanswurstand Harlekin, based on their different connotations andpresumed ‘origins’. Thus, Harlekin is considered moresophisticated than Hanswurst, but at the same time isoften associated with ‘foreignness’ and with the ‘artifi-ciality’ of opera and courtly culture, since the figurearrived in Germany from Italy via France.

4. Compare the list of works by Karoline Neuber inSusanne Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutsch-sprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992), p. 411. Like most of Neuber’sdramatic works this ‘Vorspiel ’ was never printed (forfear of pirating) or has been lost.

5. For an interesting study of the various transmu-tations of the Hanswurst figure (especially in Vienna) upto its echoes in contemporary Austrian Volkstheater byThomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, and Werner Schwabsee Gerhard Scheit, Hanswurst und der Staat (Wien: FranzDeuticke Verlag, 1995).

6. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘Literaturbriefe, 17. Brief(16th February 1759)’, in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 2(München: Carl Hanser, 1959), p. 53.

7. See Karl von Görner, Der Hans Wurst-Streit undJoseph von Sonnenfels (Wien: Konegen, 1884); and morerecently Beatrix Müller-Kampel’s discussion in Hans-wurst, Bernadon, Kasperl: Spaßtheater im 18. Jahrhundert(Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003), especially p.152–65.

8. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: a Selection, trans. AlanSheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 2.

9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay onAbjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1982), p. 13.

10. Karen Jürs-Munby, ‘Of Textual Bodies and ActualBodies: the Abjection of Performance in Lessing’s Drama-turgy’, Theatre Research International, XXX, No. 1, p. 19–35.

11. Kristeva, p. 68.12. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans.

Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press,1995), p. 144.

13. Playbill quoted in Friedr[ich] Joh[ann] vonReden-Esbeck, Caroline Neuber und ihre Zeitgenossen. EinBeitrag zur deutschen Kultur- und Theatergeschichte (Leip-zig, 1985 (1881), p. 232.

14. Müller-Kampel, p. 94. 15. Johann Christoph Gottsched, ‘Von den Pflichten

des Menschen gegen sich selbst’, in Erste Gründe dergesammten Weltweisheit, Praktischer Theil, Gottsched,Ausgewählte Werke 2, ed. P. M. Mitchell (Berlin; NewYork: de Gruyter, 1983), p. 177. Gottsched’s Weltweisheitwas a philosophical handbook and compendium of con-temporary knowledge, the ‘practical’ part of which was

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intended as a ‘science . . . about the do’s and don’ts ofpeople, whereby they can make themselves happy’[‘eine Wissenschaft von den Mitteln der Glückseligkeit odervon dem Thun und Lassen der Menschen, dadurch sie sichglücklich machen können’ (p 71)]. First published in 1732(theoretical part) and 1734 (practical part) respectively,the Weltweisheit saw several new editions during Gott-sched’s lifetime.

16. Gottsched, ‘Von dem Fleiße, der Sparsamkeit undFreygibigkeit,’ Weltweisheit, p. 369–81 (IV, Hauptstück).

17. See Asper, p. 137–40.18. Joseph Anton Stranitzky, Wiener Haupt- und

Staatsaktionen, introduced and ed. Rudolf Payer vonThurn, Bd II (Wien: Verlag des literarischen Vereins inWien, 1908), p. 142, as cited in Müller-Kampel, p. 122.

19. Scheit, p. 43, my translation. He is quotingChristoph Blümel’s Der Jude von Venetien, in DasSchauspiel der Wandertruppen, ed. Willi Flemming (Leip-zig, 1931), p. 254. While, on the one hand, Hanswurst’sconnection of money and defecation shows archaictraits, Scheit argues that, on the other hand, it alsoindicates how deeply the money economy has alreadyinfiltrated feudal structures.

20. Müller-Kampel. 21. Gottsched, Weltweisheit, p. 366.22. Ibid., p. 368.23. Ibid., p. 335.24. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: sozio-

genetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, Vol. 1(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), Einleitung, p. ix–x.

25. Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, p.337.

26. Ibid., p. 357–8.27. Hannelore Heckmann, ‘Theaterkritik as Unter-

haltung: die Vorreden und Vorspiele der Neuberin’,Lessing Yearbook, XVIII, ed. Richard Schade (Detroit,1986), p. 120.

28. See J. G. Robertson, Lessing’s Dramatic Theory(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 42–3.

29. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christlob Mylius,Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, St. 1-4(Stuttgart 1750), 1. St., p. 1–2.

30. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte desdeutschen Theaters (Tübingen; Basel: Francke, 1993),Chapter 1.3, ‘Theater im Prozeß der Zivilisation’, esp.p. 72–3, 77–9; see also Fischer-Lichte, ‘Theatre and theCivilizing Process: an Approach to the History ofActing’, in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A.McConachie, ed., Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays inthe Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: Universityof Iowa Press, 1989), p. 19–36.

31. Elias, Vol. 2, p. 370 (my translation).32. See Fransiscus Lang, Dissertatio de actione scenica

(Munich, 1727). 33. Fischer-Lichte (1993), p. 77 (my translation). For a

more extensive semiotic analysis of this baroque code ofacting see her earlier Vom ‘künstlichen’ zum ‘natürlichen’Zeichen: Theater des Barock und der Aufklärung, Semiotikdes Theaters, Vol. 2 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1983).

34. Fischer-Lichte (1983), p. 36–7.35. Asper, p. 125.36. Fischer-Lichte, p. 78-9 (my translation).37. Fischer-Lichte (1993), p. 92.38. In Aloys Weißenbach, ‘Meine Reise zum

Kongreß: Wahrheit und Dichtung’ (Wien, 1816), as citedby Asper, p. 298–303.

The prologue appears as part of Weißenbach’s travelbook and report about folk theatre. As Asper argues, thenineteenth-century folk theatre does not prove thatHanswurst ‘originated’ in peasant theatre and survivedthere. Rather the Bauerntheater is a new tradition whichcannot be traced further back than the second half of theeighteenth century (Asper, p. 296). Asper also doubtswhether the prologue published by Weißenbach is auth-entic. This is, however, immaterial to my argumentbecause in either case it provides us with a reflectiveinsight on what was at stake in the banishment ofHanswurst.

39. Gottsched, ‘Die Schauspiele und besonders dieTragödien sind aus einer wohlbestellten Republik nichtzu verbannen’, Ausgewählte Werke, IX/2, p. 497.

40. Ibid., p. 498.41. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 17./18. Stück

(30 Juni 1767), p. 405.42. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 75. Stück, p.

651.43. Ibid., p. 4.44. Müller-Kampel, p. 182 (my translation).45. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans.

Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press),p. 281, also cited in Müller-Kampel, p. 183.

46. Ibid., p. 7.47. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Der Biedermann,

facsimile print of the original print, Leipzig 1727–29, ed.by Wolfgang Martens (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975), 85. Blatt(20 Dec. 1728), p. 140.

48. Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin: aDoctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans.Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1991), p. 11.

49. Ibid.50. Ibid., p. 142.51. Ibid., p. 11–12.52. Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in

the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1985), p. 26–7.

53. Ibid., p. 27.54. Ibid., p. 50.55. Der Biedermann, 43. Blatt (23 Feb. 1728), p. 171.56. See Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).57. This fear of dissimulation also focuses here on a

gender transgression which the masquerade makespossible, so that the monstrous child is probably alsoimplicitly seen as an ironic ‘just punishment’ for themother’s cross-dressing. As Terry Castle has shown forthe English context, the masquerade as a social andliterary site is associated with eighteenth-century trans-vestite subcultures. See Terry Castle, Masquerade andCivilization: the Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century EnglishCulture and Ficton (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1986).

58. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13.59. Ibid., p. 1.60. Ibid., p. 2.61. Joseph von Sonnenfels, ‘Pro Memoria fuer die

Richtlinien der künftigen Theatralcensur’ (c. 1770), asreproduced in Müller-Kampel, p. 227.

62. See Müller-Kampel, p. 177–9.63. Ibid., p. 187.64. Ibid., p. 190.65. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2.

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