Comparative Drama

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...