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• Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and Their Reception by George Oppitz-Trotman
• June Schlueter (bio)

It is clear from the preface to Stages of Loss that George Oppitz-Trotman is not satisfied with existing scholarship on the English Comedians. In his estimation, such scholarship, largely empirical, does not present a meaningful assessment of contexts related to performance. At best, reclaiming such matters as name, place, and repertory can provide only an imperfect narrative of the itinerant troupes that travelled through Germany from the 1590s to the 1620s. As he puts it, “As far as the mainstream of English theatre scholarship goes, the travelling players may as well have passed from life in passing across the Channel, so meagre the news of them” (9).

It is easy to quarrel with such an objection, for 200 years of archival research, particularly in Germany, has yielded valuable information on the players’ presence on the Continent, information these same scholars—Ludwig Tieck, Albert Cohn, Wilhelm Creizenach, and Karl Goedeke, for example, and recent researchers such as Willem Schrickx, Jerzy Limon, Ralf Haekel, and Bärbel Rudin—judiciously assembled into the history of the English Comedians that we have today. But, Oppitz-Trotman avers, the ardor of empirical research has kept scholars from evaluating their findings, leaving us with an unconceptualized and uncontextualized theatre history.

Oppitz-Trotman’s attempt to remedy the flaws, dislodge the assumptions, and create an alternative narrative ushers the reader into a series of essays: “In the Air,” “Out of Time,” “Moving Cloth,” “Moving Coin,” and “Out of Laughter.” The titles may seem odd to theatre historians, but they are Oppitz-Trotman’s effort at providing a context for the players, and collectively they begin the process of a theatre history intended to move beyond the facts. It is not long, though, before Oppitz-Trotman begins repeating those facts, which become one of the platforms upon which his arguments stand—the other, as with all scholarship, the body of interpretive work that preceded his own. One necessarily admires Oppitz-Trotman’s currency with the materials particular to both the theatre and its broader contexts. But one cannot stop thinking that he did not have to denigrate the work of others nor pretend that in shaping his own history he is not incorporating earlier scholars’ evaluations.

When Oppitz-Trotman moves to the first of his five chapters, “In the Air,” he seems to be writing a different book. The task at hand, once expansive, is now focused on an unresolved issue with the A-Text of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Now, he not only acknowledges the work of others but incorporates their analyses into his own. His conclusion—that the A-Text may well have been in the repertory of the English Comedians—is well earned, but it necessarily stands on the assemblage of scholarship before his own. [End Page 357] The author’s proposal is that Robert Browne, a former Admiral’s Man, brought the A-Text of Doctor Faustus, once the property of that company, with him when he left for Germany in 1592. In support, he references records indicating performances of Doctor Faustus in the 1590s: in Tübingen (he adopts Leah Marcus’ distinction between Württemberg and Wittenberg), Frankfurt (he cites the “little travel book” that was Elizabeth Mentzel’s source), and Strasbourg (he references Baron Waldstein’s account of ten plays performed there, including de Fausto). He also notes that Heinrich Julius incorporated the Faust legend in several plays he himself wrote, even as the English actors were in residence at his Wolfenbüttel court. And most compelling, he points out that The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus (1594) describes a performance of a Faust play “in the aire,” which speaks of comic routines and “scene-destroying laughter” (71) in an otherwise tragic play. This, he avers, may well explain the seeming incongruity of the protean A-Text of Doctor Faustus, which, in production, would have been a hybrid of presentation and improvisation, a structure that would...

审核人：

• 失落的阶段：乔治·奥皮茨-特罗特曼的英国喜剧演员和他们的接受
• 六月施卢特（生物）

从《失落的阶段》的序言中可以清楚地看出，乔治·奥皮茨-特罗特曼对英国喜剧演员的现有学术研究并不满意。据他估计，这种主要是经验性的学术研究并没有对与绩效相关的背景进行有意义的评估。充其量，回收诸如名称、地点和剧目之类的问题只能提供对从 1590 年代到 1620 年代穿越德国的巡回剧团的不完美叙述。正如他所说，“就英国戏剧学术的主流而言，旅行的演员可能在穿越英吉利海峡时已经过世，所以他们的消息很少”（9）。

很容易与这样的反对意见发生争执，因为 200 年的档案研究，尤其是在德国，已经获得了有关球员在欧洲大陆存在的宝贵信息，这些信息来自同一位学者 - Ludwig Tieck、Albert Cohn、Wilhelm Creizenach 和 Karl例如，Goedeke 和最近的研究人员，如 Willem Schrickx、Jerzy Limon、Ralf Haekel 和 Bärbel Rudin——明智地整合到我们今天拥有的英国喜剧演员的历史中。但是，Oppitz-Trotman 断言，实证研究的热情使学者们无法评估他们的发现，给我们留下了一个没有概念和没有背景的戏剧史。

Oppitz-Trotman 试图弥补缺陷、推翻假设并创造另一种叙事方式，将读者带入了一系列文章：“在空中”、“超时”、“移动的布”、“移动的硬币”和“笑而不语。” 这些标题对戏剧历史学家来说可能看起来很奇怪，但它们是奥皮茨-特罗特曼为玩家提供背景的努力，它们共同开始了一个旨在超越事实的戏剧历史进程。然而，不久之后，奥皮茨-特罗特曼开始重复这些事实，这些事实成为他的论点所立足的平台之一——另一个，与所有学术研究一样，是他之前的解释工作的主体。人们必然会欣赏 Oppitz-Trotman 的通俗易懂，其材料既适用于剧院，也适用于更广泛的背景。

当 Oppitz-Trotman 转到他的五章中的第一章“在空中”时，他似乎在写另一本不同的书。手头的任务曾经很广泛，现在集中在克里斯托弗·马洛的浮士德博士的 A 文本中的一个未解决的问题上。现在，他不仅承认其他人的工作，而且将他们的分析融入自己的分析中。他的结论——A-Text 很可能已经在英国喜剧演员的剧目中——是值得的，但它必然是站在他自己之前的学术集合之上。[完第357页]作者的提议是，前海军上将手下罗伯特·布朗带来了浮士德博士的A-Text，曾经是该公司的财产，他在 1592 年前往德国时与他同在。作为支持，他引用了浮士德博士在 1590 年代表现的记录：在图宾根（他采用了 Leah Marcus 对符腾堡和维滕堡的区分），法兰克福（他引用了伊丽莎白·门策尔（Elizabeth Mentzel）出处的“小旅行书”）和斯特拉斯堡（他引用了瓦尔德斯坦男爵对在那里演出的十部戏剧的描述，包括德福斯托）。他还指出，海因里希·朱利叶斯 (Heinrich Julius) 将浮士德传奇融入了他自己创作的几部戏剧中，即使英国演员住在他的 Wolfenbüttel 宫廷。最引人注目的是，他指出约翰·浮士德博士的第二份报告（1594 年）描述了浮士德戏剧“在空中”的表演，其中谈到了喜剧套路和“破坏场景的笑声”（71），这是一部悲剧性的戏剧。他断言，这可能很好地解释了浮士德博士多变的 A 文本的表面上的不协调，在生产中，这将是呈现和即兴创作的混合体，这种结构将......