From Anti-Theater to Anti-Theatricality

RECTR issue 29.2 is part 2 of a special double-issue dedicated to antiXvtheatrical discourse in early modern Europe. My introduction to part 1 (RECTR 29.1) grounds European anti-theatrical discourses in precise theoretical, cultural, and historical concerns, which create specific cultural climates, such as seventeenth-century England or Revolutionary France. With the broader issues therein addressed, the goal of this introduction is to describe briefly the difference in scope between the two parts as well as introduce and situate each of the five essays that complete this double-issue of RECTR.In contrast to those in part 1, the following essays concentrate less on the religious and social critiques of theater and more on anti-theatricality as a dramatic and critical construct used by playwrights, theater critics, editors, and other participants in the dramatic arts. These essays treat anti-theatrical discourse as an integral part of theatrical discourse, showing how anti-theatricality exists both inside (in the plays themselves) and alongside (in critical works) drama during early modernity. In short, the essays that follow indicate the gradual collapse of powerful, autonomous arguments against the stage into an interesting theme in dramatic criticism and production.Issue 29.1 includes articles about the contentious relationship between religion and theater in (mostly) France and England. The authors trace a host of ills, but in each case, they focus on the dangers of the stage through the lens of religious condemnation. Issue 29.2 is different in scope both thematically and, at times, geographically; most of the essays concentrate on the eighteenth century, when firebrand religious zealots, from Protestant England to Catholic Spain, lost ground to reformers, playwrights, and protheater government officials. This RECTR issue presents a series of essays that discuss intra-theatrical arguments against particular dramatic subgenres, playwrights, and actors rather than over-arching denunciations of performance, dramatic fiction, and the social or legal status of actors. This second part of the double-issue is more "dramatic" (as opposed to theological, philosophical, or anthropological) than the first issue: the authors herein deal with dramatic scripts, literary criticism, and editorial practices to the play-text. In sum, while 29.1 concentrates on "real," physical, political, and institutional critiques against theater, the authors in 29.2 grant that the theater deserves to exist in the daily lives of Europeans. The authors focus instead on the legacy of anti-theatrical discourse in (mostly) theatrical contexts-on how anti-theatricality maintained and even sometimes gained currency during a period of both rising secularization and theatromania.Frieda Koeninger s opening essay serves as a transition from the religious anti-theatrical discourse of RECTR 29.1 to the reformist conception of the stage, which links many of the essays in this second issue. Koeninger traces the efforts of Don Santos Diez Gonzalez, a civil censor and theater reformer in Madrid during the late eighteenth century. Vacillating between theatrophobe and theater reformer, Diez Gonzalez earned the respect of both innovators and neoclassical ilustrados. Diez Gonzalez' evolving tastes and opinions about the theater parallel the gradual and contentious transition of Spain from a Catholic cultural establishment to a modern European state. According to Koeninger, officials like Diez Gonzalez, although conservative at times, recognized the civil benefits of a successful theater and ultimately helped defeat a host of theatrophobic discourses in Spain, ushering in a period of dramatic innovation and increased theater attendance during the early nineteenth century.In essay 2, Maria Teodora Comsa demonstrates that anti-theatrical discourse operated as both a dramatic theme and a mode of anti-establishment criticism in France during the 1730s. …