Staging Justice: Negotiating Legal Reform in German Literature and Theater of the Late 18th Century

Abstract

This study explores the connections between theater and justice in the German territorial states of the late 18th century, focusing on the watershed decade of the 1780s when theater was established as a site of public education and the legal system was in transition between its medieval roots and modern reform. The thesis argues that authors participated in the discourse on legal reform through their literary and dramatic works, and that they promoted the theater as the guiding image of enlightened legal reform. The Theaterstreit (or theater controversy), which drew on the debate on theater reform that had begun decades earlier, culminated in the 1780s, when theater itself became involved in enlightened legal reform discourse. German authors such as Goethe, Schiller, Iffland, Lessing, and others viewed the theater as representative of the qualities – orality, publicness, immediacy, and consideration for human subjectivity – that legal practice lacked during this time. Critical of the widespread legal practice of making decision through non-public written documents, these German authors brought the secretive legal process, its problems, and possible solutions onto the live stage before the public. One such pivotal case was Schiller’s Maria Stuart, which boldly questioned the sovereign’s right to judge in the court of law. Through the analysis of literary and dramatic examples, the thesis argues that the literary engagement with law was not a simple case of law being reflected in literature. Rather, through their plays and writings, literary authors engaged reform ideas within the legal sphere just as legal figures negotiated with and through literature and aesthetics.