Angermion | 2019
Tracing National Traditions Transnationally: A.W. Schlegel, Walter Scott, and Two Takes on Theatre History
Abstract
In 1819, Walter Scott’s “Essay on the Drama” appeared in the ongoing supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1815– 24). The “Essay on the Drama” is a wide-ranging historical survey of drama and performance in Europe from the days before Aeschylus in ancient Greece to the present state of play on the British stage. Between these two poles, Scott considers theatre in Rome and Byzantium, before stopping in at medieval mystery plays, French neoclassicism, Italian opera, Spanish tragedy, the English renaissance, and drama from the Restoration through the Augustan Age. Running to a total of 178 pages in the 1834–36 edition of Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works,1 the “Essay on the Drama” represents Scott’s most significant, lengthy, and wideranging piece of dramatic criticism – with the obvious exception of his 453-page Life of Dryden from 1808, which, however, also devotes itself to other aspects of Dryden’s biography beyond his dramatic works. In an essay about the development of dramatic genres and performance styles across times, cultures, and nations, Scott’s account is international and, at times, he nods towards the benefits of intercultural cross-fertilisation in developing national dramatic traditions: drama, for Scott, does not develop in isolation, but moves between cultures, changing as it does so. His own account of the role of German drama in British theatrical renewal is a case in point. When he looks back on the state of the British stage in the 1790s, he maintains in hindsight, that