Asides in New Comedy and the Palliata - Leeds International ...

ECKARD LEFÈVRE, ASIDES IN NEW COMEDY AND THE PALLIATA
These two statements are both in the A-text of 1604 and the B-Text of 1616. 27
The latter even has a third aside at the end of III 1. There Mephistopheles
exclaims:
So, so, was never devil thus blessed before!
But one has to assume that Segdwick refers to Goethe’s Faust. Goethe only got to
know Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in 1818—more than thirty years after the
composition of Faust I. Therefore the manner of speaking of his Mephistopheles
does not follow the ways of the English drama. In Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe
himself says how he became acquainted with the Faust material, namely via the
puppet theatre: ‘Die bedeutende Puppenspielfabel des andern [sc. Faust] klang
und summte gar vieltönig in mir wider.’ 28 Thus it is the puppet show that Goethe
had in his mind when writing the Faust. Marlowe for his part owes a lot to the
‘low’ kinds of drama. One of the characters in Doctor Faustus is Robin, the fool.
During his first appearance on stage in I 4 he instantly makes use of an effective
aside in his dialogue with Wagner. But on the whole Marlowe employs this
technique very sparingly. In England it is common in the ‘low’ morality plays and
interludes; in these kinds of plays the characters called Vice are designed to
display ‘in parodistischer Weise ihre teuflische Gegenwelt zum Göttlichen’ 29
(Mephistopheles!). 30 These Vices love to get into contact with the audience by
means of asides. They—metatheatrically—hold up ‘dem Publikum einen
Spiegel’. 31 Right up to Shakespeare, ‘low’ characters are dominant on the stage—
for example, Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 32 ‘Oral’ traditions are being
continued here.
It is easy to understand that in the wake of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the
touring theatre companies in Germany incorporated plays on Faust into their
programme in the seventeenth century; the puppet theatres, too, took hold of this
effective subject matter. In composing such a Faust, Goethe places himself in the
tradition of a ‘low’ kind of drama, which also includes improvisation every now
and then. It fits in well with this fact that Mephistopheles is the fool of low social
status in that tragedy. Even in Goethe’s Faust II he is conscious of his literary
27
The lines as quoted follow Bevington / Rasmussen 1995.
28
Part II, book 10.
29
Thomsen 1973, 70.
30
‘In den Interludien entwickelt sich ... der Teufel zum vice und schließlich zum clown und fool.
Komische Szenen werden immer breiter ausgestaltet, beherrschen weite Teile auch der moral
interludes und öffnen schauspielerischer Virtuosität, clownesker Schlagfertigkeit und der Fähigkeit
zu plötzlichem Extemporieren die Bühne’ (Thomsen 1973, 92-3).
31
Thomsen 1973, 70. Cf. Riehle 1964, 33: ‘Als sich das Drama mehr und mehr mit der niederen,
alltäglichen Wirklichkeit ‚auffüllte‘, die ein Gegengewicht zum dargestellten Heilsgeschehen
bildete, begannen auch die Schauspieler in unmittelbaren Kontakt mit dem Publikum zu treten und
oft mit komischen, derb-realistischen zur Seite gesprochenen Kommentaren den
Spielzusammenhang zu unterbrechen. Es ist eine bekannte Tatsache, daß die stock-figure des
seelenverführenden Vice in der Moralität seine besondere Freude daran hatte, die Zuschauer direkt
auf seine schlauen Pläne und seine Verstellungskünste aufmerksam zu machen.’ This is also what
slaves do in Plautus, but not in Menander.
32
Even the protagonist of Shakespeare’s early drama Richard III, who comes up with an especially
large number of asides, must be considered in this context. ‘Er ist verwandt mit dem vice, der
populären diabolischen Clownfigur der Moralitätenspiele des Mittelalters’ (Spinner 1973, 153).
11