The Shame of the Nation: Performing History in Schiller, Manzoni and Byron

This article inquires into what is at stake in A.W. Schlegel's call for Romantic drama that is both “truly historical” and “thoroughly national”. While Schlegel suggests that historical drama should make an audience feel “shame” at the inadequacy of the present in relation to the national past, much Romantic historical drama depicts the past as a time of revolutionary failure in which modern liberal nations might have been born but were not. Using Schiller's Wallenstein, Manzoni's The Count of Carmagnola and Byron's Marino Faliero, This article suggests that Romantic drama represents the “shame” of the past to stage the nation as part of an ongoing historical process rather than as a fixed product. The author suggests that one of the primary ways in which Romantic drama does this is through the meta-theatrical representation of crowd scenes that depict spectators who stand in for the play's audience, and thus force actual audiences to recognize their own places within history. This paper thus reads Romantic drama's cultivation of shame not as a nostalgic desire to return to the past, but as an effort to open the present towards an always uncertain future.