Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

      Neo-Classicism’s stranglehold on artistic output continued to tighten through the eighteenth century, even while the seeds of its destruction were being planted. The revolt against Neo-Classicism as a suffocating and dictatorial monolith, which demanded a complete surrender to its aesthetic dogma, had a political component to it. In Germany, where Neo-Classicism never really took hold in any meaningful way, the first rumblings of resistance were being marshaled and articulated by influential theorists and practitioners. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), a German writer, dramatist, philosopher, and critic, began to write persuasively about the need for a uniquely “German” theater — one which would embrace German traditions, mythology, and folklore rather than Greco-Roman source material. He also argued against the external imposition of Neo-Classical strictures, maintaining that a decidedly native sensibility should govern German dramatic and literary expression.

      Lessing’s campaign to distinguish Germany from France’s creeping influence and its attendant Neo-Classical sensibilities was joined by subsequent German thinkers. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) went so far as to cite the great English dramatist William Shakespeare (1564–1616) as a writer who consistently and aggressively violated Neo-Classical rules of composition yet still managed to dwarf the accomplishments of France’s greatest playwrights.

      Emerging from this growing revolt against French/Neo-Classical hegemony was a group of young German writers who embraced a fresh literary aesthetic that critics named Sturm und Drang, roughly translated as “Storm and Stress.” The Sturm und Drang movement was characterized by individual subjectivity and an unapologetic embrace of extreme emotionalism—both in direct contradiction to the staid, measured, rational order of Neo-Classicism.

      Sturm und Drang served as the foundation for Romanticism, a vitriolic, frontal assault on the Neo-Classical tradition.

      Romanticism, an artistic, philosophical, intellectual movement represented a sweeping and converging set of revolutionary currents, all aimed at subverting and replacing the doctrinal, dictatorial, ordered sense of Neo-Classical approaches to the arts. Romanticism championed the idea that the individual artist-genius and his/her subjective experiences and emotional truths should be at the center of the creative process, and the artist should never be obliged to submit to the prefabricated templates and restrictive regulations and assumptions of a Neo-Classical aesthetic.

      Under Romanticism, the ordered, restrained, balanced, symmetrical, nuanced, suggestive qualities of Neo-Classicism would be replaced by an embrace of the fragmentary, the incomplete, the mysterious, the cryptic, the unrestrained, the fear-invoking—all of which were showcased with emotional excess and a bold lack of restraint. And while Neo-Classicism favored themes that were general, timeless, and universal, Romanticism valued the personal, particular, and idiosyncratic. While Neo-Classicism emphasized the primacy of a well-wrought plot, Romanticism favored the exploration of character, which sometimes subverted time-honored notions of Classical dramatic structure.

      Any thorough examination of Romanticism must confront the movement’s preoccupation with the Sublime. To the Romantics, the greatest height of artistic achievement is the creation of a Sublime experience, which is loosely defined as something that transcends understanding, dwarfs pedestrian experience, and inspires awe. It is necessarily difficult to describe a Sublime experience, because its exalted nature defies categorization and overwhelms the limitation of mere words.

      It should be noted that the Sublime experience is not confined to resplendency (although glorious splendor and transcendent beauty can be a part of a sublime phenomenon)—it can also issue from situations, characters, or events that are grotesque, destructive, and frightening. In fact, one of Romanticism’s favored ways of accessing the Sublime was through sheer terror. Greatly influenced by the Gothic novels, poems, and short stories of the late eighteenth century, Romantic artists created tales and images that embraced cryptic, supernatural, fragmented, and unexplained elements designed to terrify readers and audiences, and haunt them into a Sublime experience.

      The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1782)

      Saturn Devouring One of His Children by Francisco Goya (1823)

The dismantling of Neo-Classicism by the Romantic revolt provided the opportunity for alternative artistic ideas to take shape and reach fruition—many of these ideas would have been considered subversive under the rigidity of Neo-Classicism.⁷

      One of the emerging aesthetics to emerge in the late nineteenth century was Realism, an artistic movement that attempted to illustrate and dramatize subject matter drawn from the real world in ways that avoided artificial conventions, exotic locations, supernatural characters, and extraordinary crises. The aim was to locate profundity in quotidian, domestic situations featuring “real-life” people confronting problems that audiences might find recognizable and immediately relatable, given their existence in a dramatic world that they identified as their own.

      Realism’s origins can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century, when the French philosopher, encyclopedist, and amateur dramatist Denis Diderot (1713–1784) encountered a stage production of a Shakespeare play, performed by an English theater troupe under the direction of actor/manager David Garrick (1717–1789). What Diderot saw on the stage amazed him. Gone were the phony histrionics, presentational style of delivery, and mannered theatrics of more conventional acting troupes. The more subtle, naturalistic style of Garrick’s performance not only fascinated Diderot but also planted the seeds for a new type of stage drama that he began to envision.

      Diderot was also a huge fan of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), whose work featured ordinary people in recognizable, domestic settings. Although many of the paintings include melodramatic exaggerations of emotion, their general subject matter was divorced from the over-the-top grandeur of more traditional approaches to the visual arts.

Diderot imagined a new type of drama—one that would combine the quotidian situations and domestic settings of Greuze’s paintings with the more naturalistic performance style of Garrick’s troupe. He also eschewed the idea that dialogue should be written in verse, and instead proposed the then-revolutionary notion that dialogue should be written in a manner that more closely approximated colloquial speech. The effect would be akin to the audience observing the action through an “invisible fourth wall,” as if it were watching an actual “slice of life” play out before them in real time.⁸

      Broken Eggs by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1856)

      The sum total of these prescriptive elements laid the foundation for Realism, which would reach a full fruition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the groundbreaking plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and many other celebrated European dramatists. Its influence would be staggering, and neatly hospitable to a burgeoning cinema that was still figuring out the best ways to locate and present dramatic content on the screen.

      The Stone Breakers by Gustave

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