What can artists learn from theatre scholars when it comes to performing historical works on stage today? What can theatre scholars learn from today’s artists when it comes to understanding the works and practices of the past? How is the experience of modern spectators affected by attending performances in historic theatres? And how, aesthetically, do we experience the reconstruction of productions from the remote past? This collection of essays covers the findings of the research project ‘Performing Premodernity’: an international group of theatre scholars whose work centred on the Drottningholm theatre from 1766: just outside Stockholm, this famous theatre has authentic stage sets and machinery preserved almost in their original eighteenth-century state. Behind all the essays is a mixture of fascination and dissatisfaction with today’s performances of drama and opera classics, particularly those that take place in historic theatres, and those operating within the so-called Historically Informed Performance movement. Moreover, they reflect a desire to develop and expand the methods traditionally used by theatre historians. And they present a variety of angles on today’s performances in historic theatres and on today’s attempts to revive theatrical practices of the past. The authors combine academic and artistic research as a way of deepening and nuancing our understanding of eighteenth-century theatre practices. The historical research is set in dialogue with the dramaturgical insights and aesthetic experiences the historians gained from their practical doing in historic spaces. Experimentation with lighting, costumes, stage movement, vocal and instrumental practices, and the flow of energy between performers and spectators led to the investigation of topics that theatre historians otherwise tend to ignore. In turn, this has led the researchers to challenge long-held views of the sites, repertoires, and performance practices of eighteenth-century theatre. Performing Premodernity’s experimental, practice-based approach accords with the view of the late Enlightenment as what Vincenzo Ferrone has called ‘a real and still unexplored laboratory of modernity’. The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of both wide-ranging artistic innovation and earth-shaking political revolutions; it was a period when ideal and practice, philosophy and art influenced and guided each other to an unprecedented degree. The essays start from the conviction that any attempt at a holistic understanding of the theatrical practices of the time must take these exchanges into account. And that a strictly antiquarian approach that merely tries to establish ‘how it really was’, without considering the utopian dimension of the reforms of people like Rousseau, Gluck, and Mozart, will fail to grasp the impetus and the dynamic, communicative aspect of eighteenth-century theatre. Therefore, several of the essays revolve around the group’s historically informed production of a true ‘avantgarde’ work of the eighteenth century: Pygmalion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s scène lyrique from 1762. Performing Premodernity’s research-based production premiered at Český Krumlov Castle Theatre in 2015. The present anthology is essential reading for theatre scholars and musicologists studying eighteenth-century performance as well as for theatre and opera artists concerned with period performance practice.

In this essay, an interdisciplinary group of researchers sets out to address the period 1780–1840 in Sweden in a new way, by placing nature at its centre. With the help of ecocritical and transcultural theory, combined with renewed attention to the Swedish fine arts, learned discourses, and practices, we suggest a new approach to these revolutionary decades. The perceived dissonance, the interplay between climatic conditions and cultural template in early modern and modern Sweden, has not been fully addressed in current research, despite the fact that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a central issue in contemporary society and scholarship. Representations of nature situate the nation, they negotiate the relationship between a sensed reality and an ideal, between human and more-than-human beings. We suggest a focus on the unpredictable space created by negotiations of nature in Swedish representations during this crucial period, and, furthermore, on the ways in which this creative space is charged with utopian possibilities in the early Anthropocene. This is the background and the driving force of the planned research project ‘Cool Nature: Utopian Landscapes in Sweden 1780–1840’.

Im frühen 19. Jahrhundert boten die massenhaft gegründeten Amateurtheater-Vereine bürgerlichen Frauen die Möglichkeit, in einem vor-professionellen Umfeld eine ästhetische Bildung zu erlangen, das Schauspielen zu erproben und gegebenenfalls sogar als mögliches Berufsziel anzuvisieren. Somit wurden die Spielräume für diese Frauen erweitert, denen im politischen und gesellschaftlichen Kontext der Zeit ansonsten wenig Möglichkeiten zur freien Entfaltung offenstanden. Der Beitrag zeigt am Beispiel der Berliner Urania, wie Amateurtheater als wichtiges Scharnier zwischen einer privaten und öffentlichen Sphäre des Schauspielens wirkte. Durch eine solche ‚Zwischen-Position‘ wurde es wichtig für eine allmähliche Verbürgerlichung dieses lange prekären Berufes. Hier wurden Muster professionellen Schauspielens und bürgerlich-sittlichen Verhaltens eingeübt. Für Frauen bot die theatrale Amateurpraxis Spielräume der Aushandlung einer weiblichen Utopie von bürgerlichem, selbstbestimmtem Handeln. 

This chapter provides an analysis of the significance of August von Kotzebue, who was the most popular playwright in Europe around 1800. He gradually disappeared from theatre repertories after his murder in 1819 and is not included in the canon of German dramatic literature. To the author, the important reasons are that the newly established discipline of literary history applied criteria that prevented his works from being regarded as valuable literature, and his views on politics and nationalism contributed to his exclusion. The chapter investigates Kotzebue’s position in German aesthetics and literature based on Simone Winko’s theory of ‘negative canonisation’. The establishment of a literary canon around 1800 needed a negative model to create criteria of ‘valuable’ literature, and works that did not fit into the aesthetics of German idealism were degraded. The concept of ‘negative canonisation’ changed the reception of Kotzebue, as did his cosmopolitan Enlightenment ideas, which made him a target for disparaging nationalists after 1815. The author regards Kotzebue as an independent thinker who refused to adapt to prevailing bourgeois national conventions, which led to the negative view of his plays and his exclusion from the German literary canon.

In 1854, the city of Munich had arranged for the “First General German Industrial Exhibition” to promote German industry to the world and invited a global audienceto the event. At the same time, Franz Dingelstedt, director of the National Theater, organized a festival displaying the finest actors from Germany. Right after the opening of thefestival, cholera started raging in the city and leaving 3,000 deathsin the final count. The author sketches out the role of the theatre in this crisis, when Dingelstedt was ordered by the king to keep the theatre open at any cost. This appears awkward, in regard to the current global pandemic crisis where theaters have been identified as risk zones for infectionand consequently closed down. Why was the theatre at the time considered a safe and ap-propriate place even helping to counter the disease?