Faust mit Springen: On the English Players Returning Faustus to the German-Speaking Lands

Abstract

in the late 1590s, around the zenith of the Elizabethan theater, a few London players gathered wagonloads of theatrical materials and a handful of plays and began touring northern Europe. The traveling players have long drawn interest—and often opprobrium—as artisans between national traditions, players who fully belong neither to Germany nor England and, therefore, are assumed to lack their own history and theatrical art. Scholars have traced the players’ routes through courts and cities and pieced together details of contemporary reception, but only recently have critics begun formulating theories of the their success and speculating what these marginalized players might reveal of the national and transnational cultures they navigated. For, despite the negative critical attention, these wandering players presenting English plays to largely uncomprehending German-speaking audiences were massively successful. In this article, I will join a number of contemporary critics who have begun to read the early modern theater transnationally, recognizing the striking ways in which the players and their identities remained premodern. Inevitably, this involves a process of recovery, exploring how early inherited nationalistic biases continue to impede our research not only by providing terms imbued with national meaning but even in determining the objects of our study. The lingering influence exerts greatest force, perhaps, in the continued focus on language, geography, and plot and the denigration of action and neglect of episode and emblem—a hierarchy that would not necessarily have been shared by an early modern and one that has recently again been destabilized. The characteristics of the traveling theater that have faced the most critical dismissal, as we will see, are exactly those that were most transnational. I will first survey the repertoires of the traveling players and records of their acting and then attempt to adumbrate the national biases linger-