The arrival of the entertainment industry.

Paris in mid-nineteenth century:

The cultural centers of 19th. century Europe were Paris and Vienna; London was its commercial center. In Paris the arts and literature were paramount. The great names are: in painting, Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and the great Impressionist painters (and later the Expressionists); in poetry, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé; in the novel, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola; in music, Berlioz, Bizet, Saint Saëns, Gounod, Fauré and Franck. And in the theatre? Pixérécourt, Scribe, Dumas fils, Augier and Sardou! In other words, theater in France was nowhere near the level of the other arts. The best dramatist of the time in France, Alfred de Musset, wrote what he called 'armchair drama' (closet drama) - that is, plays he did not try to get performed in the theater - basically, because the theatre profession would not have understood what he was doing. (I strongly recommend de Musset's plays, esp. 'Don't Trifle (Fool) With Love' - they are playable, and fine dramas.) Theatre in London and America was even more mediocre than in France. Indeed, the best known play to survive from nineteenth century Paris, apart from 'La Dame aux Camélias', is Rostand's 'Cyrano de Bergérac', a sentimental and escapist fantasy. It is startling to realize it was written long after Ghosts!

A NON-SUBVERSIVE THEATRE FOR THE BOURGEOISIE

Parisian theatre was mediocre because safe. We'll see later why Parisian drama and that of its imitators in England and the U.S. was so timid. It was the theatre of the new bourgeoisie, the middle class, the most dynamic class, perhaps, since the Athenians of the classical age. This class that had displaced the aristocratic center of power and could now look back in nostalgia, as in Scribe’s 'A Glass of Water'. The bourgeoisie was the new economic and political power, creating huge industrial cities with their large proletarian populations, establishing imperial possessions for its trade, and, in America, countenancing slavery and the annihilation and dispossession of the native people. For its self-esteem it needed to construct a morality that conveniently evaded the uglier facts of a cultural identity that was engaged primarily with the acquisition of wealth. 'Morality' became social ‘respectability’ - I think for the first time. The voracious bourgeoisie, wanted an art that reflected its tastes and devised a morality manufactured to reassure its uneasy conscience. To satisfy this appetite there was an explosion of cultural activity in painting, sculpture, music, ballet, opera, and the theater. It was the beginning of two centuries of often atrocious taste, later provoking reactions such as ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ and the various Modernist and avant-garde movements mostly originating in Paris.

Paris was the only theater city in France (touring companies from Paris finished off the provincial theaters) so that the situation in Paris was the situation of France and of Europe which, as in pre-revolutionary times, took what Paris culturally dictated . From the mid-nineteenth century, the well-made-play dominated the fashionable theatres of Europe; melodrama dominated the popular theater. Both forms upheld conventional social and political beliefs.

WHO WENT TO THE THEATRE?
The audience that assembled in the Parisian or the London theatres was a miniature reconstruction of society. In the stalls and dress circle sat the well-to-do; in the next gallery, the middle-middle classes. In the top galleries, those better-off working classes who did not patronize the melodrama. To ensure the maximum receipts, all the classes in the theatre had to be kept amused and contented: not divided into hostile factions. Any ideas that encouraged critical thinking about society were kept off the stage. The managers simply could not afford to offend any section and lose its patronage.

Not only were theater managers careful not to permit subversive ideas - they conspired with the Censors in e.g. Paris, London and Vienna, to attack and eliminate any hint of subversion. The theatre was the most reactionary cultural institution. Yet there was a minority of the public that supported the progressive elements in the other arts, in politics and in criticism of the social and cultural system. They wanted a theatre: but no theatre could afford to cater to them. While the theatre supplied what Ibsen called “Scribe & Co.’s sugar-candy confections” the rest of the culture, at its minority and advanced levels, was undertaking a radical questioning of the nature of modern society and the historical and ideological assumptions that went into establishing it.

In belle-époque Paris the wealthy patrons of the boulevard theatres; smart, sophisticated, international patrons of opera, ballet and well-made-plays written to formulas were not receptive to any muddying of the limpid streams of cultural fare poured out in lavish style and quantity. Richard Wagner's battle over the Jocky Club's demand for the obligatory ballet in 'Tannhäuser' was typical of the refusal of patrons to consider such notions as artistic integrity. This was an international public (including fabulously rich rubber plantation owners) definitely not interested in complex or controversial subject matter. This is the advent of our current commodity entertainment industry producing for a huge international market of avid, undiscriminating consumers.

THE FINANCIAL INVESTMENT IN THE THEATRE
It was the period of large financial investments in the theater: in the buildings, sets, costumes and star actors. (This lavish expenditure was another reason for artistic timidity. With such investments managers dared not risk alienating the public with controversial work). The situation was the same as with Broadway today: a commercial success could make the fortunes of a show: but the show demanded a tremendous outlay of expenses for stars, sets, costumes, etc. 'A Glass of Water', for example, required sumptuous Queen Anne sets and costumes: this was much of its appeal. Because of this expense a failure could be catastrophic . Thus the only thing for theatre managers was to play safe and 'give the public what it wants.' This meant playing to a common denominator which, by definition, could not be divisive, subversive - or particularly distinguished.

The reason for this is logical. Society is made up of people who, in smaller aggregates, like some things very much: and of much larger aggregates who like some things moderately. The smaller aggregates might like intensely string quartets, poems, fine art, philosophy, serious politics, history, difficult drama, innovative paintings, the novels of Flaubert or Henry James. None of these smaller groups can generate the amount of profit that the public as a whole can give. If we address, not the smaller groups but almost everybody, we find they nearly all like some things moderately.

As with Hollywood and T.V. today, the trick for entrepreneurs of entertainment (and, today the corporations who control them) is to give the larger public what it likes moderately. Very few smart Parisians would like Schiller's 'Don Carlos' but those who did would like it immensely. Victor Hugo’s 'Hernani' is 'Don Carlos' for the crowd: a glamorized and lobotomized 'Don Carlos' with all its intellectual challen ge removed. Controversial or original plays, like Alfred de Musset's or Georg Büchner’s definitely could not attract the large public. A theater of a minority is not profitable business, even if it fosters good art.

Most of the public would have been agreeably entertained by 'A Glass of Water' and would pay to see it, as a lot of people, today, are entertained by Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. In the art of the novel major writers like Flaubert, Henry James or Joseph Conrad could survive on a relatively small and select readership. They would not become immensely rich but could make a comfortable living. And would not risk immense loss. But the economics of theatre meant that drama could not address a select and discriminating few: (why de Musset wrote armchair dramas.) There was not yet a Little Theatre movement; that was to arrive later, mostly because of Ibsen.

The main money-making creations of the nineteenth century commodity theatre were:: melodramas increasingly for popular audiences; farces (by Labiche and Feydeau) and well-made plays. Also operettas (e.g. Offenbach) ballets, vaudevilles, the circus - every kind of both sophisticated and elementary entertainment.

2) THE WELL MADE PLAY: (Scribe, Dumas fils, Augier and Sardou)
There are enjoyable aspects of the well-made-play: it is safe entertainment for the intelligent and sophisticated. The pleasure of the well-made play was to see the ingenious ways in which Scribe and his follows adapted the formula to new subjects. The formula, once mastered, could be repeated countlessly, and in rapid succession. Scribe wrote over 300 full length plays, and nearly as many shorter farces, opera libretti and operettas. This is not necessarily an indication of superficiality: the great Spanish dramatist, Lope de Vega, wrote over 1,500 plays. However, Scribe himself would have been the first to admit his plays were really just entertainments with no serious purpose behind them other than to be popular and profitable. The one admirable quality of the well-made-play as that it was at least well-made: and in Paris it was performed with a great deal of artistic skill.

The American novelist, Henry James, was an avid theatergoer in Paris and London and he was impressed by the Parisian product:

“A good French play is an admirable work of art, of which it behooves patrons of the contemporary English drama, at any rate, to speak with respect. It serves its purpose to perfection, and French dramatists, as far as I can see, have no more secrets to learn. The first half-a-dozen a foreign spectator listens to seem to him among the choicest productions of the human mind, and it is only little by little that he becomes conscious of the extraordinary meagerness of their material. ...Prime material was evidently long ago exhausted, and the best that can be done now is to re-arrange old situations with a kind of desperate ingenuity. The field looks terribly narrow, but it is still cleverly worked.”
“An old theme, - but with a difference,” the workman claims; and he makes the most of the difference - for laughter, if he is an amuseur pure and simple; for tears if he is a moralist.”
(Henry James: The Scenic Art )

In other words, the French turned out a well crafted product which could be appreciated by middle-class connoisseurs of smart taste. This affected the whole way drama was discussed. Unlike the critics of the earlier period, who fought passionately over principles of dramatic art, there now appeared a whole new class of critic serving the commodity theatre and its skills. In the well-made plays of Dumas fils and Augier, even the ‘problem play’ or piece à thèse (thesis play) like Augier's 'Olympe’s Marriage' was really a spicy entertainment with no serious call for cultural soul-searching. This is an audience that would have been either outraged or bored - most likely both - by Ibsen’s 'Brand' or Büchner’s 'Woyzeck'.

By 1850, Paris had 50 theaters and an even greater number of theatres outside France were willing to translate or adapt the plays, which, if successful, could be performed in numerous international venues and make a dramatist's fortune - and the fortune of everyone connected with the enterprise, from the stars to the janitor and the theatre’s resident cat. A whole network of theaters were in place throughout the world to put on the latest product from Paris. Scribe became immensely rich from his writing..

A legitimate function of theatre is to keep up the profession, give it lots of work to do and please a theater-going public. It might be an essential function: for once you get this public, then it is possible for the serious playwright to arrive and challenge it. The well-made-play created in reaction an audience that, if not ready to accept Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw at least was ready to be offended, perplexed, and ultimately even intrigued by them. Ibsen could not have become a world dramatist without the creation of an international, theater public. Conventional playwrights like Scribe Augier and Sardou created the theatrical 'vocabulary' which the serious writers could then violate or extend into truly imaginative, bold and subversive art.

Shaw: Dramatic Opinions
The best introduction to this is the dramatic criticism of George Bernard Shaw, one of the finest and funniest of theatre reviewers. Most of the work he had to review was mediocre British adaptations of French well-made-plays. However, while Shaw was reviewing, Ibsen’s plays began infiltrating the London theatre scene and iShaw became a major champion of this ‘New Drama’. Shaw's dramatic criticism is an on-the-scene account and analysis of a revolution taking place in dramatic art.

3) THE CENSORSHIP AND THE THEATRE
European governments after the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and the Commune of 1871 were highly nervous about dangerous ideas. The theatre has always been potentially a subversive art form where the representative public, gathered together, can be 'worked upon. Censorship in the European countries, France, England, Germany, made sure drama remained safe and non-subversive. Hence the prosecutions of writers and artists like Baudelaire and Flaubert; the hostility encountered by Manet and the Impressionists; the banning of works (e.g. 'Ghosts')from public performance; the tremendous cultural controversies of the time. This century had experienced not just political revolutions, but had seen Charles Darwin and Karl Marx shatter the conventional assumptions by which the middle classes sought to understand their world.

From Schiller, dialectical drama through Ibsen up to Genet In this tradition, dramatic action is carefully SHAPED to bring out the collision of forces behind events, to expose false reality and, by its demolition,. to instigate a search for a truer one. Scribe's well-made-play method might be seen as lobotomized version of this dialectic.

In Buechner the ‘episodic method’ replaces the dialectical plot through Wedekind up to Brecht and beyond. In this tradition drama either tries to recreate reality as we actually experience it, with no theatric peripeties and anagnoreses, or breaks dramatic linearity into separate, more or less free-standing moments, each to be examined by itself, in isolation from the whole .

In Brecht, this fragmentation will be pursued further, in a ‘separation of the elements’ so that the structure of the performance is exposed. (Brecht, combines dialectic with episodic methods in his later, MARXIST dramas beginning with the lehrstücke


The development of a dramatic prose capable of the same intensity as verse is going to change all the rules of drama: of scene, character, action, dialogue, props. The development took some time: English dramatists (e.g. George Lillo: The London Merchant) and the French tried and failed with the new bourgeois ‘serious’ drama (drames). In Germany, Lessing attempted bourgeois tragedy with Miss Sara Sampson and Emilie Galotti These, for us, fail because they convert the old verse rhetoric into an equally fervid prose rhetoric: they changed the milieu of the play from aristocratic to bourgeois but keep the rhetorical histrionics which still derived from the neo-classical verse theater. However, in Germany Stürm und Drang dramatists, like Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, (1751-1792) adapted many of the elements of the Serious Drama, broke with the artificial rhetorical style, and depicted shockingly violent actions and dialogue to create genuinely interesting drama. {Büchner wrote a sympathetic novella about Lenz's mental breakdown which has strong parallels with the plot of Woyzeck}

Lenz’s The Tutor, and The Soldiers search out a striking new, indeterminate dramatic form – (Lenz called his plays comedies, but then changed his mind) - that anticipates Büchner's Woyzeck, (The often extreme violence of some scenes of the Stürm und Drang plays anticipate the work of Sarah Kane. In, e.g., The Tutor the hero castrates himself onstage). Other 'disciples' of Lenz are Franz Wedekind and Bertolt Brecht (Brecht adapted The Tutor}. Though Lenz rather incongruously tries to tack on a ‘moral’ at the end of his violent plays, (e.g. better treatment of tutors: regulated prostitution for the military) these can painlessly be removed to reveal one of the major modern dramatic methods: the episodic {epic} drama. Lenz and Büchner did not found a tradition in their own times, but were discovered in the early twentieth century by Wedekind and Brecht. Woyzeck seems an elaboration in working class terms of Büchner's account of the mental breakdown of Lenz, which is itself a brilliant piece of imaginative writing. The fragmentation of reality is even more acute, leading to the protagonist's breakdown into insanity.

The Stürm und Drang tradition (which Goethe and Schiller subscribed to in their early plays) is a major alternative to the more ‘formal’ dramatic tradition of Ibsen and the modern realist and dialectical dramatists. . Lenz and Büchner show us one possible tendency of modern drama, held in suspension until it was taken up in the early 20th. Century. . There is a fluid, organic, seemingly unstructured nature to their succession of scenes and the scenes very casual relation to each other: and in the finely indeterminate moods: comic, pathetic, tragic, satiric, grotesque - all evident of a totally serious art, determined to break away from neo-classical models. The staccato rhythms, sudden outbreaks of violence (the tutor's self-castration) and indeterminacy of mood, part pathetic, part tragic, part comic grotesque anticipate Büchner's Woyzeck). Bertolt Brecht wrote an adaptation of The Tutor.

THE EMBATTLED BOURGEOISIE
Arnold Hauser ('The Social History of Art') wrote that the nineteenth century bourgeoisie's right to exist was challenged from the outset, by both the Right and the Left. The Right attacked it for its irreligious materialism, its crass taste, its hypocrisies and cowardice: the Left attacked it for its social injustices. All this had to be kept out of the drama if the unified and lucrative mass audience was to be appeased.


THE WELL MADE PLAY
Conventional art like the well-made-play and melodrama served a political purpose, as modern entertainment and sports do today. 'La Dame aux Camélias' is a highly sentimental, conventional drama but, because of its sympathetic portrait of its courtesan heroine, it created a scandal that led to calls to ban it from the stage. The official Censor, however, permitted the 'performance of the play to divert attention from controversial government policies. There was nothing in the play seriously to challenge the operating beliefs of society. Naturally, the play became a hugely popular success.

The clever formula of the well-made-play was to get the audience caught up in a suspense-filled action that never strayed beyond conventionally accepted subjects or themes. This required creating a purely tactical situation, usually adultery and murder or risqué sexuality located in smart society, and then subject it to the tension of urgent, artificial time. Scribe was the master of this art.

Eugene Scribe (1791-1861)
Scribe's 'A Glass of Water' is lobotomized history. Its only lesson is that history has no meaning; that it is futile to search for deep causes behind historical events. As ‘real’ causes are trivial accidents, the kind of intellectual analysis that might instigate radical action is patently a delusion. This is a view that those in power obviously would encourage. The contrast with Friedrich Schiller’s 'Don Carlos' couldn't be greater. In Schiller's play the story allows us to see and better understand the competing ideologies of Catholicism and Protestantism, of orthodoxy versus freedom of thought, behind the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain; and how this ideological conflict can be read as a metaphor for understanding our modern condition. The human story opens up large perspectives, of a turning point in western history: an idea of history Scribe emphatically denied. Its Idealist account of history will be worthy to be challenged by Marxism.

In Scribe's play the quarrel between two nation states, England and France, is reduced to the colliding infatuations of two women over a handsome, brainless guardsman, Masham, and the stratagem of a cynical politician, Bolingbroke, to use of this situation to bring about his policy of peace between Britain and France. Because none of the characters represents any conceivable idea, the struggle over Masham is hardly more than the struggle of cardboard figures over a military tailor's dummy. Nothing in the action indicates larger issues of war and peace, or any serious reason why, for instance, the Duchess of Marlborough should be the enemy of Bolingbroke.

Scribe is a master is making all this theatrically suspenseful. There is no denying the play is enjoyable, just as e.g. a well-performed detective story on TV is enjoyable. It is a well crafted use of the formula. The 'reversals' are almost purely mechanical and tactical, not leading to any significant insight and not advancing any argument. It is action more or less disconnected from themes or ideas like a cleverly contrived mechanical toy.

THE THEATER OF THINGS, OBJECTS
In fact, the well-made-play increasingly focused attention, not on ideas or themes but on contrived situations and on things: a glass of water, a scrap of paper, an incriminating bracelet, (Wilde) a sealed letter, a locked cabinet, a gun: some thing that could be mentioned, anticipated, received, hidden, discussed and finally flourished - fatally or triumphantly. This served the purpose of suspense - the perfect device of a materialistic society. The analogy is with the suspense of the gambling table or the Stock Exchange. The world of the well-made-play is smart society, either in historical times or in the present (mostly the latter). One of the better practitioner's of the well-made-play was Oscar Wilde who used the creaky formula shamelessly but set about subverting it with epigrammatic wit.

The melodrama, unlike the urban and urbane well-made-play, employed powerful elements of the natural world: of storm, earthquake, flood, fire: all these were the 'amazing' interventions of the world of nature onto human affairs. These interventions by Nature were the equivalent of the 'metaphysical landscape' employed by Elizabethan theatre: the supernatural characters, the storms and miraculous manifestations of Shakespearean drama. Ibsen will bring back this natural world in Brand and Peer Gynt and in the Realist Cycle he will smuggle Romantic natural perspectives into his images of modern life

Scribe obviously approved of the cynical world-weariness of his Lord Bolingbroke. None of his characters are capable of change or growth, of evolution or devastation because there is nothing in them to evolve or to be devastated by. Similarly, it is pointless to look for meaning in history: it is nothing but a play of trivial causes, of chance.

This idea of history would make any attempt consequentially to change society obviously futile. Belief in revolution, in reform, in passionate involvement in a cause, similarly would be futile. This was a very congenial philosophy for a modern capitalist bourgeoisie in denial about the injustices and horrors its system had created. Scribe is perfectly aware how the theme of the play is one that his patrons appreciate - that is its political purpose as it is of Hollywood and the T.V. networks. And Scribe is no fool. He is certainly clever in the way he manipulates his play so that we will be intrigued by the events.

‘We' are on Bolingbroke's side because he brings us into his confidence - as in his speech (p.46) on the theme of meaninglessness in history. By this speech, Scribe gets his audience to conspire with his hero: we are flattered in being addressed as if we, too, know the ways of the world: Now that the speech has removed serious morality or ideology from the conflict, we can settle down and enjoy the mechanical contrivances of the plotting.

Each Act ends on a resounding 'curtain' which will make the audience eager to hurry back after the intermission to see what will happen next. The curtain usually is some tremendous reversal of fortune for the sympathetic party, so that the audience interest is how the sympathetic party will recover from this latest blow. These are the ‘curtains’ of each act: Act I. Masham has killed his enemy in a duel and is in danger. The Duchess buys up Bolingbroke's debts and has therefore power over him She ascends the ladder. Act II. Bolingbroke forces the Duchess to find a place at court for Abigail, and so his plot advances. He ascends the ladder Act III. Abigail discovers the Queen is in love with Masham, and so she seems to slide down the snake. Act IV. The Duchess discovers the Queen is her rival for Masham and so she discloses he has killed someone in a duel. The sympathetic party slides down the snake. Act V. Triumph of Bolingbroke over the Duchess, and happy love ending for the innocent Abigail and Masham. In all this, not a single serious issue has been raised. The play is full of bustle and intrigue, cleverly signifying nothing.

Later writers, Alexander Dumas fils, and Augier, introduced some safe moralism into their well-made-plays. In Camille (La Dame Aux Camélias) Dumas takes up the theme of the demi-monde, the world of courtesans, and presents Marguerite Gautier with sympathetic sentimentality. However, Dumas kills her off, sentimentally of course, in a deathbed scene before she can prove socially awkward for his hero, Armand, and himself. Augier shows a less sympathetic courtesan in Olympe's Marriage and righteously shoots her for the final curtain. He is no more lethal to his heroine than Dumas, however. In both these plays, ideas that might challenge decent middle-class morality are simply terminated.

The well-made play is created precisely to please the conventionally moral middle-class. The 'moral' or 'message' inserted into the well-made-play was an extra luxury - a good conscience, which Scribe could do without. We are familiar with the formula in Hollywood and T.V. drama where a ‘troubling issue’ is raised as entertainment and its more challenging implications carefully evaded.

History is here an exotic plot device for the fashionable dramatist. What is the cause of the enmity between Bolingbroke and the Duchess of Marlborough? He is the leader of the Tories. The Duchess and her husband, the military Duke, lead the Whigs who are in office. The Duke is conducting wars abroad, which the Tories oppose. What do these wars represent? Are there any large issues involved in them? The play does not say but focuses on the love intrigue between the Queen, the Duchess and young Masham. It is not demonstrated that Bolingbroke is morally or ethically superior to the Duchess of Marlborough - only cleverer. It is true that he more or less protects the innocents, Masham and Abigail, but this is mere sentimentality - the reverse side of cynicism. Masham and Abigail bring nothing to the drama but their own decorative vulnerability. Because they are vulnerable, we side with Bolingbroke, their protector.

Bolingbroke's cynicism is that of a man who finds the world as it is, and his place in it thoroughly acceptable. We have not really met this type before, in all its unflappable complacency; it is a type manufactured by Scribe and polished up by Oscar Wilde (e.g. .Lord Goring in 'An Ideal Husband'; the best of Wilde’s well-made-plays). Bolingbroke has no genuine self to be alienated from. He once could love, he tells Masham, until he married: now, in his cynical later years, he takes to politics for the sheer excitement, (37). It's true he opposes war and wants "peace and industry" - two bourgeois values: but this is only presented to get the plot going. It is not the principle of the dramatic action of the play: nor is it investigated, explored, questioned.

Bolingbroke wants to avert a war with France, but it is nowhere demonstrated that this war would be unjust or that any principles are involved in the conflict between the two countries. We are told that Bolingbroke makes his enemies tremble with his written articles, but we can't really see that he represents anything to tremble at - not in the way in which Karl Marx made capitalist Europe tremble. He mentions that his allies are Swift and Pope; but Swift and Pope, as Tories, were also genuine moralists. Swift, in his writings, defended the Irish against England's policies and, along with Pope, attacked precisely the kind of moral cynicism that Bolingbroke in this play represents.

When Ibsen began his apprenticeship in the theater he had to oversee the production of hundreds of well-made-plays, for that was what the public wanted - he called it performing daily abortions. Ibsen's own early plays show much of the ingenious trickery of Scribe, especially his first attempt at tragedy, 'Lady Inger of Østraat'. Here we have fatal letters, withheld information, people speaking at cross purposes and fatally misunderstanding each other, great co-incidences, up until the denouement when a mother unknowingly murders her own son. We can see that the author of Lady Inger has great talents: but the Scribean formula ends up by strangling them.

But the big difference is that the issues and the characters of 'Lady Inger' compel our interest and sympathy so that we protest at their manipulation by the mechanisms of the well-made plot. The achievement of Scribe was to perfect an exciting theatrical entertainment which others could learn and take up. Scribe's name on a playbill guaranteed an evening of ingenious and clever entertainment, like Alan Aykbourn or Neil Simon today. This was the entertainment of that smart society that Georg Büchner, as much as Ibsen, detested.

GEORG BÜCHNER
Georg Büchner and Scribe would seem to have nothing in common except that they were contemporaries. Georg Büchner is the author of only three plays, written before his early death at the age of 23. Büchner, in Germany, and Scribe in Paris, wrote at a time when the theater was prosperous, popular and entering a phase of cultural insignificance. It was a situation in which Scribe, not Büchner, could thrive. One might say that the difference between Büchner and Scribe is, that while both believed history to be meaningless, in contrast to Schiller; Büchner lamented this situation: Scribe happily exploited it. At his death Büchner was practically unknown to the public and remained so until the early twentieth century when he was rediscovered. So he is more a twentieth-century dramatist than a Romantic one: a force behind the modernist and avant-garde theatre.

A NEW PROSE DRAMA.
1. When a poet conceives a verse drama he/she conceives every element of it in a ‘heightened’ (rhetorical)way. To speak such a heightened rhetorical language characters are created and given actions that sustain this level. If one ‘drops’ the level into prose, all the other elements become absurdly out of place – especially character and action. This is the major reason why prose transslations of verse plays are so unsatisfactory.

For example, Heinrich von Kleist's THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG, like DON CARLOS, was written in ‘elevated’ verse: a dialogue that starts off ‘elevated’, and then intensifies into rhetoric at moments of a level of consciousness raised above that of ‘ordinary’ utterance; in a dimension outside (above) that of everyday experience. It is highly conscious of the precision and fullness of its utterances. The writer of poetic drama sets a high level of controlled utterance where metaphor, imagery, rhythm, alliteration all ‘counterpoint’ the ‘motive-intention’ of the characters, who cannot be separated from this heightened state of existence. We also expect and permit a heightened form of action to accompany this consciousness. The translator must try, in the new language, to capture much of this.

WOYZECK reveals what the new prose dialogue can do. The depiction of a mind fragmenting and breaking down needs the dislocated jerky, disconnected and fragmented speech of prose. (It also has an operatic ‘other life’ in the similarly fragmented, atonal music of Alban Berg). Because of its insistence on rhythmic regularity, verse, in drama, implies structure, order, control which probably is why mad scenes in verse form are less effective in conveying mental breakdown. The mad Ophelia scenes in 'Hamlet' are rarely covincing. In Shakespeare's KING LEAR, when the King’s grasp on reality breaks down into madness, Shakespeare writes a fragmented prose similar to Buechner’s.

The development of a dramatic prose capable of the same intensity as verse is going to change the rules of drama: of scene, character, action, dialogue, props. It is going to take some time: the French tried and failed with the new bourgeois ‘serious’ drama because they simply converted the old verse rhetoric into elevated prose rhetoric: they changed the milieu of the play, but not the rhetorical habits within the new prose method.

Georg Buechner created a new dramatic language for the modern ‘fragmented’ (disconnected) consciousness The centre of his play is the disintegrating mind of Woyzeck, and Buechner manages to create the greatest PSYCHOLOGICAL intensity within this totally ‘localized’ suffering. It is not yet a dramatic prose that can organize an elaborate, multi-dimensional dramatic argument.

Eugene Scribe creates a new efficient theatrical prose. Like Buechner, he discards all idealism, creating a theatrical language that exclusively serves the needs of the technically elaborate plot. This, also, will be useful in the development of a modern dramatic language, though it is drastically reduced in meaning and significance, being narrowly ‘plot driven’.

Ibsen’s EMPEROR AND GALILEAN is another major breakthrough for a modern dramatic language of Realism: one that can find a way of articulating the widest range of ideas through a plausible realistic dialogue and able to locate the drama within the psyche of an intensely suffering individual (Julian). But the large ideas are located in historical drama and are therefore at a remove from the consciousness of the modern bourgeois audience.

The solution for the creation of a MAJOR modern dramatic art, of the same dimensions of implication as the Greek and Elizabethan, would be to get a plausible dramaturgy of modern life to speak the large ideas of which the dramatic characters cannot, plausibly, be wholly conscious while serving the aesthetic needs of the art form.

That is, to bring together the levels of DON CARLOS and EMPEROR AND GALILEAN, through metaphors of modern reality and to contain this wide-ranging argument within a theatrically effective, multidimensional, psychologically plausible plot. This is Ibsen’s achievement in the 12-play Realist Cycle. One of Ibsen’s most profound moves was to invent a non-verbal dramatic poetry of the theater to surround and supplement the dialogue. Ibsen pronounced that the future of drama would not be in verse and he has been proved right. A number of poets have tried to create a major modern verse drama. Jean Cocteau made the famous distinction between ‘poetry in the theater’ and ‘poetry of the theater.’ What modern realist and non-realist drama set out to do was to abandon the verse medium but recreate its equivalent in new theatric terms.

Buechner’s impact upon modern ‘cutting edge’ drama since has been immense. Hauptmann, Wedekind, the German Expressionist playwrights and Bertolt Brecht all acknowledged his influence. Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov did not know about his work. Buechner’s plays are experimental, difficult to interpret, discomfiting to most audiences. His most daring play, Woyzeck, has been made into a superb modernist opera by the composer Alban Berg.

Buechner wrote at a time when the theater in Paris and Germany, was prosperous, popular and entering a phase of complete cultural insignificance. It was a situation in which Scribe, not Buechner, could thrive. One might say that the difference between Buechner and Scribe is, that while both believed history to be meaningless Buechner lamented this situation while Scribe happily exploited it.

DANTON’S DEATH
'Danton's Death' takes up the major theme of Romantic drama in Schiller, Goethe, Kleist: the individual caught in the great historical moment, being shaped by it and himself/herself shaping it.. In Schiller a Posa might fail in his attempt to bring the new ideas of liberty to Philip's Spain, but the effort is not seen as pointless. In hindsight, it has value for Schiller’s audience.

In 'The Prince of Homburg' the Prince's subjective dream of achieving his destined identity of personal glory from the historical circumstances of the thirty years' war, has to be replaced by his submission to the objective realities and requirements of the cause (Brandenburg patriotism) that he serves. In both plays, individuals are seen to have, actually or potentially, influence on historical events.

The French Revolution, above all other events, was the moment when human beings seemed to seize hold of human history and destiny, "the only revolution in the world," wrote Hegel, "that set out to remake mankind." It was so confidently believed that the alienated Past could be cast aside and the Future inaugurated, that the French stopped the clocks in Paris, changed the calendar to start at year one, and changed the names of the months of the year.

In Büchner’s play as in life, Marat, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, seem to have got hold of a historical moment, and shaped human destiny beyond the dreams of Posa, Wallenstein, or Friedrich of Homburg. Yet the play pessimistically denies them any triumph: it dramatizes only the meaningless failure of the project. In less than a decade, Europe was living under a self-proclaimed emperor who had made his family the kings and queens of new monarchies. Frenchmen were dying in the tens of thousands in a series of wars of conquest. (For Buechner's account of this see Hessian Messenger).

Napoleon, however, was a liberating force compared with the powers that followed his defeat and overthrow. In Buechner's time Europe was governed, once again, by tyrannies, by a 'Holy Alliance' of reactionary monarchies guided by Metternich in the service of the Habsburgs of Austria. These had reversed the whole movement towards revolutionary change started by the French Revolution.

"Metternich's ideal was a monarchy that shared power with the traditional privileged classes of society. In efforts to preserve the sort of Europe he valued from future revolutionary irruptions Metternich attempted to make the postwar Quadruple Alliance (Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria) into an instrument for preventing revolution in Europe. He encouraged a Congress System where representatives of the powers were to meet periodically with the view considering if it was necessary to suppress revolutionary movements. He was in favour of close supervision of the universities and an ambitious system of censorship intended to discourage radicalism of any kind. These policies left Metternich open to being depicted as an architect of Reaction and of a suppressor of Liberty." (age-of-the-sage.org)

'Danton's Death' is a glance back by Buechner, at what went wrong with the greatest historical experiment yet seen. He chooses that very short time between the death of Danton at the guillotine, in April, 1794, to the death, three months later, of Robespierre and St. Just. We see only the death of Danton, but we know, from history, that Robespierre and St. Just also are doomed. It is the revolution self-destructing and making way for Napoleon, a definite "man of destiny."

In a letter answering objections to his method in DANTON’s DEATH, Buechner told his parents (275-276) "I can't make a Danton and the bandits of the Revolution into virtuous heroes! To show their dissoluteness, I had to let them be dissolute, to show their godlessness I had to let them speak like atheists.....As far as the so-called idealistic poets are concerned, I find they have produced hardly anything besides marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected pathos, but not human beings of flesh and blood, whose sorrow and joy I share and whose actions fill me with loathing or admiration. In a word, I think much of Goethe or Shakespeare, but very little of Schiller.”

In Buechner and in Scribe, Schiller’s idea of historical drama as ‘locating the great historical forces that made us what we are’ gives way to a far less idealistic view. In Buechner’s last play, Woyzeck, the idea of living in historical times has dwindled down to a view of human life as absurd, animalistic, controlled by sensations and impulses:

And beyond Woyzeck’s individual situation of mental disintegration, society is seen as hopelessly disintegrated and fragmented, none of the fragments communicating to each other - an idea sounded in Danton's Death, also. Buechner detested the idealist dramas of Schiller, in which larger than life characters and passions rhetorically claim to be able to be able to control history and to shape human destiny.

Woyzeck portrays a world where no-one is in control of events or even able to understand them. Instead of giving shape to reality, reality itself disintegrates into fragments. The disorder within Woyzeck’s brain makes him see a world in disorder. This goes even further than Kleist who, in all his plays, had portrayed reality as fundamentally unstable. In Danton’s Death and Woyzeck, it is shown to be totally without meaning. There is no “high intensity order’ for Woyzeck to rise to, as Homburg can – which is why transforming Kleist's text into a series of prosaic, one-level disconnected pieces was so wrong: and why it is so right for Buechner.

The Break with Dramatic Linearity
In its very structure, Woyzeck is a sequence of fragments; and the very order of these fragments is uncertain - and does not matter. For, breaking with historical causality, with the confident interpretation of the forces involved, Buechner also breaks with dramatic linearity. If events cannot be logically linked to reveal some 'higher' pattern, then the most authentic presentation of experience is of its essential disconnectedness. Woyzeck seems an elaboration, in working class terms, of Buechner's account of the mental breakdown of he Stürm und Drang dramatist, Jacob Lenz. Buechner’s own biograhical essay, Lenz is a brilliant piece of imaginative writing, where Buechner enters into the disintegrating mind of Lenz.. The fragmentation of Woyzeck’s reality is even more acute, leading to the protagonist's breakdown into insanity.

This break with dramatic linearity, his episodic method, I believe, is Buechner's most radical innovation (he derived it from Jacob Lenz, the earlier Stürm und Drang dramatist). It was taken up by the Stationsdramen of German Expressionism and by Bertolt Brecht. But, as Buechner's work remained unknown for so long, modern drama took a different path, retaining the narrative linearity of traditional literature, the "Aristotelian” drama' that Brecht was to oppose.

Danton's Death and Woyzeck are less analyses than ‘neutral’ presentations: the plays do not symbolically and dialectically shape the situation, or try to discover its ideological causes as Schiller would, nor internalize it as part of an inner dialectics as Kleist did in THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG: When Prince Frederick goes through the devastation that makes all existence absurd, there is an alternative, perhaps still stable OBJECTIVE order for him to re-enter, transformed. In Buechner’s plays, there never was such an Order in the first place.

Buechner was a serious biologist and a materialist and had no patience with the tradition of idealist thought out of which Schiller and Kleist formed their plays, in which dramatic actions also establish a conflict of IDEAS. The good dramatist, Buechner insisted, must "create human beings of flesh and blood with all their unflattering characteristics included”. Drama had to be neither more nor less moral than history itself.

The disjointed, episodic method of the play, insists there is no logical necessity behind the sequence of scenes and actions in the play: in fact, editors are not sure what the sequence should be - there is on or more version. So, just as Buechner takes logic out of history, so he takes it out of dramatic plotting. Both plays represent what Aristotle thought was the worst of plots for tragedy: - the episodic. It was the worst, he thought, because it did not reveal any tragic necessity behind the action, such as we find in e.g. DON CARLOS

Buechner protested that Schiller’s method is just NOT how we experience reality. Instead, he wanted to bring drama down to the way we experience day to day life where we do not see large patterns behind events. Schiller would have replied (along with most dramatists from AESCHYLUS on) that a drama, especially a tragic drama, dramatizes the causes or meanings behind events, not the abitrary and everyday appearance of things.

In its very structure, then, Woyzeck is a sequence of fragments the order of which is uncertain - and this does not matter. Breaking with historical causality, with the confident interpretation of the ideological forces involved in reality, Buechner also breaks with dramatic linearity. If events cannot be logically linked to reveal some 'higher' pattern, then the most authentic presentation of experience is of its disconnectedness.

In DANTON’S DEATH, Robespierre and St. Just confidently see a pattern of "progress" behind events: but Danton, once a revolutionary hero, now cannot see progressive linearity: the guillotine (DEATH) has reduced existence to absurdity. Woyzeck seems an elaboration, in working class terms, of Buechner's account of the mental breakdown of Lenz - a brilliant piece of imaginative writing. The fragmentation of reality is even more acute, leading to the priotagonist's breakdown into insanity.

Büchner and Modern Drama

Büchner created a new dramatic language: that of a modern ‘fragmented,’ disconnected and displaced consciousness The centre of his play is the disintegrating mind of Woyzeck and Büchner manages to create the greatest psychological intensity within this totally localized suffering. It is not a dramatic prose that can organize an elaborate, multi-dimensional dramatic argument

Büchner’s impact upon modern ‘cutting edge’ drama since has been immense. Hauptmann, Wedekind, the German Expressionist playwrights and Bertolt Brecht all acknowledged him. Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov did not know his work. Büchner’s plays are experimental, difficult to interpret, discomfiting to most audiences. His most daring play, Woyzeck, has been made into a superb modernist opera by the composer Alban Berg. His historical pl;ay, Danton's Death takes up the major theme of Romantic drama in Schiller, Goethe, Kleist: the individual caught in the great historical moment, being shaped by it and himself/herself shaping it.

In Schiller a Posa might fail in his attempt to bring the new ideas of liberty to Philip's Spain, but the effort is not seen as pointless. It has value for Schiller’s audience as a ‘legacy’ for the future. In The Prince of Homburg the Prince's subjective dream of achieving his destined identity of personal glory from the historical circumstances of the thirty years' war, has to be replaced by his submission to the objective realities and requirements of the cause (Brandenburg patriotism) that he serves. In both plays, individuals are seen to have, actually or potentially, influence on historical events.

The French Revolution, above all other events, was the moment when human beings seemed to seize hold of human history and destiny, "the only revolution in the world," wrote Hegel, "that set out to remake mankind." It was so confidently believed that the alienated Past could be cast aside and the Future inaugurated, that the French stopped the clocks in Paris, changed the calendar to start at year one, and changed the names of the months of the year.

In Büchner’s play, as in life, Marat, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, seem to have got hold of a historical moment, and the opportunity to shape human destiny beyond the wildest dreams of Posa, Wallenstein, or Prince Friedrich of Homburg. Yet the play pessimistically denies them any triumphant victory: it dramatizes only the failure of the project. In less than a decade, the French were living under a self-proclaimed emperor who had made his family the kings and queens of new monarchies. Frenchmen were dying in the tens of thousands in a series of wars of conquest. (For Büchner's account of this see Hessian Messenger pp. 47-48)

In Büchner as well as Scribe, Schiller’s idea of historical drama as locating the great historical forces that made us what we are gives way to a more cynical, anti-idealistic view. In Büchner’s last play, Woyzeck, the idea of living in historical times has dwindled down to a view of human life as absurd, animalistic, controlled by sensations and impulses: And beyond Woyzeck’s individual situation of mental disintegration, society, too, is seen as hopelessly disintegrated and fragmented, none of the fragments communicating to each other - an idea sounded in Danton's Death, also.

WOYZECK
Seeming sources for WOYZECK:
a. Buechner's own rewriting of the diaries of Jacob Lenz: one of the Stürm und Drang dramatists just earlier than Schiller. Lenz’sa mental breakdown, in stages, is similar to Woyzeck’s Buechner admired admired Lenz whose plays are also violent, episodic. In one play, The Tutor (later adapted by Brecht) the hero castrates himself - onstage. Lenz's combination of violence, down to earth realism and episodic structure, were the complete opposite of the method. of Schiller and the idealist dramatists.

b. The account of the trial and execution of an actual soldier, Woyzeck who killed his girl friend in circumstances very similar to the play. The original Woyzeck also heard voices telling him to kill.
Buechner, therefore, combines the mental breakdown of Lenz, and the misfortunes and humiliations of Woyzeck to create a kind of nightmare world, seen through the deranged mind of the hero (like the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - and German Expressionist plays and movies). Most of the figures, like the DOCTOR, the CAPTAIN, the DRUM MAJOR are more like frightening puppets, or caricatures, and only WOYZECK, MARIE and ANDRE´ seem at all human.

c. Buechner also utilizes Lenz's theory of art: the need to immerse oneself in the life of the humble people.

d. and the accidental, spontaneous, unplanned nature of beauty: of ordinary things in all their simple truth.
This was a new departure in German writing. And we see the result in the arbitrary succession of scenes in Woyzeck. The total break with Aristotelian form, such as we find, also, in Lenz's The Tutor and The Soldiers.. Dramatic logic, necessity, has been removed. So that the forces working upon Woyzeck, leading to his breakdown into insanity are purely haphazard and it is impossible to say what 'caused' the breakdown.

Overdetermined aggravations of Woyzeck’s insanity:

a. First, Marie's infidelity: then -
The Captain's cruel jokes about Marie and the Drum Major

b. The Doctor's experiment with a diet of only peas.
Woyzeck's own failing grasp upon events.

c. Andre’s revelation of the drum major’s boasting about Marie
c. The humiliations inflicted by the drum major

Only Woyzeck and Marie are seen 3-dimensionally. Everyone else in the play is a caricature, seen through Woyzeck's distorted vision. (Cf. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI)
This jagged, staccato, episodic, succession of scenes 'decentralizes' the drama, creating the idea of a fragmented reality, a smashed up world, without apparent logic. As in DANTON'S DEATH characters talk past each other - cannot communicate and change each other.

The DOCTOR the CAPTAIN and the DRUM MAJOR are brutally indifferent to WOYZECK'S inner self, the suffering they are inflicting on him, so that they don't even attempt to communicate with him.

Even Marie is trapped within her own world, unable to communicate with WOYZECK'S. The result is that the play creates a sense of impenetrable isolation.

The episodic method means that the audience is presented with disconnected pieces of action that it has to piece into an idea of what is going on. In ALBAN BERG'S opera, this fragmentation of the text is very effectively matched by the fragmented style of the dodecaphonic (12 tone) musical system.

The sequence of brief episodes which decides the fate of the characters, WOYZECK and MARIE.

Woyzeck portrays a world where no-one is in control of events or even able to understand them. Instead of giving shape to reality, reality itself disintegrates into fragments. The disorder within Woyzeck’s brain makes him see a world in disorder. This goes even further than Kleist who, in all his plays, had portrayed reality as fundamentally unstable. In Danton’s Death and Woyzeck, it is shown to be totally without meaning.

The Break with Dramatic Linearity

In its very structure, Woyzeck is a sequence of fragments; and the very order of these fragments is uncertain - and it does not matter. For, breaking with historical causality, with the confident interpretation of the forces involved, Büchner also breaks with dramatic linearity. If events cannot be logically linked to reveal some 'higher' pattern, then the most authentic presentation of experience is of its essential disconnectedness.

Woyzeck seems an elaboration, in a working class character, of Büchner's account of the mental breakdown of the Stürm und Drang dramatist, Jacob Lenz Büchner’s biographical essay, Lenz is a brilliant piece of imaginative writing, where Büchner enters into the disintegrating mind of Lenz. Woyzeck’s descent into a chaotic fragmentation of reality is even more acutely portrayed,leading to the protagonist's breakdown into insanity. WOYZECK'S' break with dramatic linearity, its Episodic method, I believe, is Büchner's most radical innovation. It was taken up by the 'Stationsdramen' of German Expressionism and Bertolt Brecht. For a long time Büchner's work remained unknown and modern drama took a different path, retaining the narrative linearity of traditional literature, the "Aristotelian” drama' that Brecht was to oppose.

Danton's Death and Woyzeck are not analyses but ‘presentations: the plays do not symbolically and dialectically shape the situation, or try to discover its ideological causes as Schiller would, nor internalize it as part of an inner dialectics as Kleist did in The Prince of Homburg. When Prince Frederick goes through the devastation that makes all existence absurd, there is an alternative, perhaps still stable objective order for him to re-enter, transformed. In Büchner’s plays, there was never such an order in the first place.

Büchner, as a serious biologist and a materialist, had no patience with the tradition of Idealist thought out of which Schiller, Kleist and, later, Ibsen formed their plays, in which dramatic actions also establish a conflict of Ideas. Büchner insisted the good dramatist, must "create human beings of flesh and blood with all their unflattering characteristics included”. Drama had to be neither more nor less moral than history itself.

The disjointed, episodic method of the play, insists there is no logical necessity behind the sequence of scenes and actions in the play: in fact, editors are not sure what the sequence should be - there is more than one version. So, just as Büchner takes logic out of history, so he seems to take it out of dramatic plotting. His plays represent what Aristotle thought was the worst of plots - the episodic. It was the worst, he thought, because it did not reveal any tragic necessity behind the action, such as we find in e.g. Don Carlos. Büchner, however, did not see any such necessity. He protested that Schiller’s method is just not how we experience reality. Instead, he wanted to bring drama down to the way we experience day to day life where we do not see large patterns behind events.

In its very structure, then, Woyzeck is a sequence of fragments the order of which is uncertain - and this does not matter. Breaking with historical causality, with the confident interpretation of the ideological forces involved in reality, Büchner also breaks with dramatic linearity. If events cannot be logically linked to reveal some 'higher' pattern, then the most authentic presentation of experience is of its disconnectedness. In Danton’s Death, Robespierre and St. Just do confidently see a pattern of "progress" behind events: but Danton, once a revolutionary hero, now cannot see progressive linearity: the guillotine (Death) has reduced existence to absurdity.
Sources for WOYZECK:

1. Büchner's own rewriting of the diaries of Lenz: one of the Stürm und Drang dramatists writing just earlier than Schiller. Woyzek’s inarticulate breakdown follows closely the pattern of Lenz’s mental breakdown that Büchner sympathetically recounted.

2. The account of the trial and execution of an actual soldier, Woyzeck who killed his girl friend in circumstances very similar to the play. The original (real life) Woyzeck also heard voices telling him to kill. Büchner's combines the mental breakdown of Lenz, and the misfortunes and humiliations of Woyzeck to create a kind of nightmare world, seen through the deranged mind of the hero (like the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - an Expressionist movie). Most of the figures, like the Doctor, the Captain, the Drum Major are more like frightening puppets, or caricatures, and only Woyzeck, Marie and André seem human.

3. Büchner also utilizes Lenz's theory of art: the need to immerse oneself in the life of the humble people.and the accidental, spontaneous, unplanned nature of beauty: of ordinary things in all their simple truth. Dramatic logic, necessity, has been removed, so that the forces working upon Woyzeck, leading to his breakdown into insanity are purely haphazard and it is impossible to say what 'caused' the breakdown.

The Aggravations of Woyzeck’s insanity:
First, Marie's infidelity: then -
a. The Captain's cruel jokes about Marie and the Drum Major
b. The Doctor's experiment with a diet of only peas.
c. Woyzeck's own failing grasp upon events.
d. Andre’s revelation of the drum major’s boasting about Marie
e. The humiliations inflicted by the drum major
Dramatic characterization.

Only Woyzeck and Marie - and maybe André - are seen 3-dimensionally. Everyone else in the play is a caricature, seen through Woyzeck's distorted vision. The jagged, staccato, episodic succession of the scenes 'decentralizes' the drama, creating the idea of a fragmented reality, a smashed up world, without apparent logic. As in Danton’s Death characters talk past each other - cannot communicate and affect each other.The Doctor the Captain and the Drum Major are brutally indifferent to Woyzeck’s inner self, the suffering they are inflicting on him, so that they don't even attempt to communicate with him. Even Marie is trapped within her own world, unable to communicate with Woyzeck.’s. The result is that the play creates a sense of impenetrable isolation.

The episodic method means that the audience is presented with disconnected pieces of action that it has to piece into an idea of what is going on. In Alban Berg’s opera, this fragmentation of the text is matched with the fragmented style of the dodecaphonic (12 tone) musical system.
Let's look at the sequence of brief episodes which really decides the fate of the characters, WOYZECK and MARIE. (Remember, this sequence is an editor’s/director’s choice. Another sequence is possibly
THE EPISODIC SCENES OF THE PLAY (One reconstructed sequence)

I. At the Captain’s. The Captain’s indulgent philosophizing and self-centered Romantic ‘angst’ vs. Woyzeck’s own private distress: the two cannot communicate. The CAPTAIN uses WOYZECK as an audience, only, for his own sentimental ruminations: he could as well be talking to himself
.
II Woyzeck and Andre. Woyzeck’s first signs of madness. Woyzeck’s single camaraderie is with Andre, also ‘working class.’
.
III MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR - WOYZECK
Marie catches the eye of the Drum Major. Marie already reputed to be ‘loose’which is one source of Woyzeck’s torment? Again, a gulf between him and another human being.

IV. FAIRGROUND. The Animals (Monkey and Horse) and the animalic actions that
Follow, leading to MARIE’S physical excitement and her seduction by the Drum Major.

V. Inside the circus booth. MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR are intensely aware of each other: the horse, "behaving indecently" arouses their sexual excitement. The DRUM MAJOR makes his move.

VI. MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR have begun their affair. The earrings are the DRUM MAJOR'S gift to her. WOYZECK understands what has happened but neither of them actually communicate this.

VII. THE DOCTOR sees Woyzeck only as some kind of animal object without feelings, to experiment upon (VII. 115) and totally ignores the obvious signs of WOYZECK'S growing insanity.

VIII. DRUM MAJOR and MARIE. She resists then succumbs

IX. The CAPTAIN uses WOYZECK as an audience for his own sentimental ruminations: he could as well be talking to himself. He callously torments WOYZECK with cruel allusions to MARIE'S affair with the DRUM MAJOR, only for his own amusement. He is totally oblivious to the fact he is driving WOYZECK out of his mind and driving him to murder.

X. MARIE and WOYZECK at last confront each other. There will be twelve more brief scenes before the murder, but we already know it is going to take place. From now on, the action of the play is simply that of approaching, episode by episode, the inevitable outcome.

XI. The Guardhouse: ANDRES mocks WOYZECK’S desperation over MARIE.

XII. The Inn. MARIE and the DRUM MAJOR dance in public. WOYZECK/s mental condition worsens.

XIII. The open field. WOYZECK assailed by voices from the landscape.

XIV. The barracks WOYZECK hallucinates stabbing MARIE.

XV. DOCTOR’S courtyard: the DOCTOR treats WOYZECK as the object of an experiment.

XVI (125) Büchner has a fine 'echo' of Othello when WOYZECK learns from the innocent André that the DRUM MAJOR has boasted about MARIE. It is the furthest remove from the Othello- rhetoric but it packs a similar pathos.

XVII (125) Buechner has a fine 'echo' of OTHELLO when WOYZECK learns from the innocent ANDRES (unwittingly playing IAGO) that the DRUM MAJOR has boasted (as Cassio was supposed to have) about MARIE. It is the furthest remove from the OTHELLO rhetroric but it packs a similar pathos.XVIII Woyzeck buys a knife from a Jew.

XVIII Tavern: The humiliation of Woyzeck by the DRUM MAJOR.

XIX Woyzeck buys a knife from a the PAWNBROKER

XX. MARIE and the IDIOT BOY. MARIE’S sense of shame

XXI An Open field. WOYZECK’s one line of speech

XXII The barracks WOYZECK, ANDRES

XXIII :The Street. MARIE, GRANDMOTHER, CHILDREN. The GRANDMOTHER’S desolate story to the children.

XXIV The pond. WOYZECK murders MARIE.

XXV The Inn. WOYZECK is seen stained with MARIE’s blood

XXVI. WOYZECK back at the pond,. alone, searching for the knife.

XXVII. CHILDREN go to look for MARIE’s body.

XXVIII WOYZECK and IDIOT BOY.

XXIX AT THE MORGUE. Everyone survey’s “the beautiful murder.”

(Sequence reconstructed by Carl Ricard Mueller)

The scenes are each a disconnected succession, not a ‘sequence’ concluding in catastrophe. The arbitrary nature of the succession of scenes denies the ‘comfort’ of seeing a significance behind the events: we are confronted with the ‘facts’ that defy ‘interpretation.’
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