Der Zuschauer

Nude Volley Ball has suffered severe blows from all the rainstorms and thunder-clapping clouds of late, as have most nude beach activities, not to mention the US Open. Many established groups, such as the writer’s colony in Provincetown, Norman Mailer’s group, and the reconstituted Partisan group do their volley balling indoors in Truro, Wellfleet, etc., where all the talk is about Obama’s influence on the recent events in Tehran, or possible retaliation to a North Korean missile strike on Pearl Harbor. Super models continue to get knocked up, bait shops are open, and Critical Inquiry is still on sale at the bookstore in Vineyard Haven; thus you have to drive back to Oaks Bluff to get alcohol with your moralism, or is it the other way round? Savvy salty dogs have their TLS or NYRB delivered via post or internet. Your correspondent appreciates writing on the internet via this Journal for really big bucks, but I do not listen to Little Dorrit on an I-Pod or I-Phone, or try to read it online with any of the various new reading technologies now available. If you can’t get sand in it in the summertime why go to Marseille or Chatham in the first place. Of course the situation hasn’t changed that much. Reading a New Yorker after an Ivy League BA is held the height of casual awareness. There is much perfect storm discussion of the French airliner “disapeared” over the Atlantic. The usual blather about the Red Sox and the Yankees, spottings of Ayn Rand paperbacks continue, as well as the odd Decline of the West or Civilization and its Discontents. There always seem to be more French readers than German readers on Cape Cod and the Islands. Almost everyone now drinks Aussie Swill-Shiraz, which is the current dago red. John Ashbery seems set to live forever and one can’t help but think somewhat fewer Europeans will weep if he dies, than as they did for Lord Byron. My editors continue to remind me they are due articles on Icelandic economic reform and the Mongolian theatrical avant-garde. Max Klinger is in heavy debate with scientists over the presence of hotel resorts and spas in the Marinas Trench. C.D. Grabbe and Ekaterina Degout are no longer speaking to another.
Dear Reader, I write to you from the broad, sandy beaches which surround the hill-populations of Somerville, City of Trees and Dogshit. I travel to my local Brazilian Beer Store on an outboard-powered skiff. I have promised Herr Klinger more on this topic later, and some translations from the German poems of George Heym. My Best to you.
Stanley Richardson, Correspondent for Der Zuschauer
Northeast Corridor All Rights reserved Guam Battalions

Voltaire, lived in exile in Great Britain from 1726 to 1729. In 1734 he published his Philosophical Letters, or, Lettres anglaises. Containing letters on Quakers, on Parliament, Commerce, Inoculation with smallpox, Newton, Decartes, Bacon, and a System of Gravitation, they are written from acute observation, with witty insight, and at times, absurd wrong-headedness. They are a delight. Below we offer some extracts from the two letters, On Tragedy and On Comedy. We will remind you that Voltaire saw himself, chiefly as a dramatist.

“The English already had a theatre, as sis the Spanish, when the French still had nothing but portable stages. Shakespeare, who was cinsidered the English Corneille, flourished at about the time of Lope de Vegga. He had a strong and firtile genius, full of naturlness and sublimity, without the sllightest spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules.”

“I am going to tell you something rash but true, namely that the excellence of this author ruined the English theatre.”

“You know that in the tragedy of the Moor of Venice, a most touching play, a husband stangles his wife on the stage, and while the poor woman is being strangled, she shrieks that she is dying most underservedly. You are not unaware that in Hamlet gravediggers dig a grave, swallowing drinks and singing popular songs, cracking jokes typical of men of their calling about the skulls they come across. But what will surprise you is that these stupidities should have been inimated in the reignn of Charles II, which was the age of politeness and the golden age of the art.”

We will spare you much of Voltaire’s translations into French of some of the great soliloquies. “To be or not be,” in the German, robustly “Sein oder nicht sein.” Voltaire’s “free” translation goes to a rhyming, meandering couplet”
“Demmure; il faut choisir, et passer a l’instnat
Dela vie a la mort, ou de l’etre au neant.”

“The plays of the English tragic writers, almost all barbarous, quite lacking in good taste, order and plausibility, have amazing flashes amid this gloom. The style is too bombastic, too far removed from nature, too much copied from Hebrew writers who are themselves so full of Asiatic hot hair.”

“But also it must be admitted that the stilts of the figurative style upon whcih the English language is raised do lift the spirit very high, although with an irregular gait.”

“The first Englishman to create a reasonable play written end to end is the illustrious Addison. His Cato of Utica is a masterpiece in diction and beauty of verse.”

Since [Addison] play have become more regular, people try harder to please and authors more correct and less outrageous. I have seen recent plays very regular but frigid.”

“It seems as though up to now the English have been born to creat only irregular things of beauty.The brillant monstrosities of Shakespeare are a thousand times more pleasing than modern conventionality.”

From On Comedy:

“This author [a comic writer Shadewell] was pretty well looked down on in his own timel; he was not the poet of the best people, his plays, enjoyed for a few performances by the mob, were scarned by all men of taste and resembled so many plays I have seen in France
which draw crowds and offended reders, fo which it could be said: Tout Paris les condamme, et tout Paris les court.”

On behalf of our fellow editor, Mr. Shadewell, we can only descrfibe the above as pompous, ignorant, and wrong-headed. We for instance far prefer Shadwell to Congreve. Klinger, Grabbe, Degot, et al.

Having discussed Shadewell, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Congreve at somewhat less of a level than might warant the term thick desccription, Voltaire sums up thus:

“For the rest, don’t ask me to go into any detail about these English plays of which I am such a champion, nor to report a witticism or joke of Wycherley or Congreve; humor cannot be translated. If you want to understand English comedy there is no other way but go to London, stay there three years, learn English properly and go to the play everyday. I don’t get mcuh pleasure from reading Plautus and Aristophanes–why? Because I am neither Greek nor Roman. The subtleties of verbal quips, allusions, topicality are all lost on a foreigner.”

Dear Comrades, We have found it necessary to make some editorial changes in the journal. Ekaterina Degot has been forced out in what she calls a putsch. Christian Grabbe is in a padded cell, sort of an “alternative detention.” We hope to see him better and returned to editorial eminence. Lastly we welcome Thomas Shadewell to our working editorial board. All our best to you, Dear Readers.

Klinger, (Grabbe, Here), Shadewell, and Mrs. Inchbald.

“The work of art then, of course, presents itself to sensuous apprehension. It is addressed to sensuous feeling, outer or inner, to sensuous perception and imagination, just as is the nature which surrounds us without, or our own sensititive nature within. Even a speech, for instance, may be addressed to sensuous imaginatiion and feeling. Notwithstanding, the work of art is not only for the sensuous apprehension as sensuous object, but its position is of such a kind that as sensuous it is at the same time essentially addressed to the mind, that the mind is meant to be affected by it, and to find some sort of satisfaction in it.”

“…The interest of art distinguishes itself from the practical interest of desire by the fact that it permits its object to subsist freely and in independence, while desire utilizes it in its own service by its destruction. On the other hand, artistic contemplation differs from theoretical consideration by the scientific intelligence, in cherishing interest for the object as an individual existence, and not setting to work to transmute it into its universal thought and notion.”

GWF Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics.

From Her preface to Edward Moore’s tragedy, The Gamester.

This tragedy is accounted of high moral tendancy, as it paints the pernicious consequences of gaming in their blackest colors.
The author’s design has been a proper one, and he has produced a very affecting and ingenious drama from his materials. Yet surely its power of deterring one single gamester from his visionary pursuits, seems as improbable as the converting to reason the strayed minds of Moor Fields by the force of argument.
Gaming is no passion–it is a disease;–it cannot be called avarice, for the prodigal, of all others, delights in it; it is not ambition, for the careless and vile resort to it;–it is not love, for it predominates over all tender affections.
Still it may be urged, that gaming inspires ardent hope; but anxious hope of winning money, and agonizing fear of losing money, without the love of money, is a contrariety in sentiment that is produced by some latent defect in the brain, which neither plays nor sermons can ever remedy.
This tragedy is calculated to have a very different effect upon the stage and in the closet. An auditor deluded into pity by the inimitable acting of a Mrs. Siddons and a Mr. Kemble, in Mr. Beverly and Mrs. Beverly, weeps with her, sighs with him, and conceives them to be a most amiable, though unfortunate pair. But a reader, blessed with the common reflection which reading should give, calls the husband a very silly man, and the wife a very imprudent woman:–and as a man without sense, and woman without prudence, degrade both the masculine and the feminie character, the punishment of the author is rather expected with impatience than lamented as severe….
The reception of this play when first performed was by no means favorable; and it was said that the love of gaming had formed conspirators to drive it from the stage. But as the author meant his gamester to be an object of pity, not of detestation–and, in general his design has been fulfilled–it appears that he has pleaded an apology for the vice, rather than set all hearts against it. Ridicule had been the best means by which to have accomplished its extirpation.
Had Beverly, in the beginning of the play, been seen with architects and masons around him, busy in laying the first stone of a castle which was to be constructed with his intended winnings–the sight of this foundation in every act, rising no higher in its structure, and his own snug house gradually falling down in the meantime for want of repairs, and, in the last scene, tumbling with pantomime crash, so as to break his shallow pate,–whilst all the by-standers had laughed and hooted,–this had been the surest moral for a gamester.

You ask what does all this have to do with drama, history, and literature? Well, we will tell you. You might look into Non-October Literature, Selected Works, Trotsky, Dramaturgy:Definitions, and, even Intellectual Life on Cape Cod, anything related to Ulan Blator, and, of course, Editorial Statement.

We remain the Editors
Der Zuschauer
A Journal of Drama, History, and Literature

Can you find Ulan Blator? Do you know why Uncle Joe Stalin wanted Trotsky dead? Trotsky was unfortunately out of the Soviet Union when Lenin died. Trotsky, besides being a brilliant leader of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, was Jewish.
We wanted to show you a yurt. Perhaps later.

The Editors, Der Zuschauer
A Journal of Drama, History, and Literature