and tomorrow, and tomorrow’—which offers no turning back.
If the tragic hero cannot hold himself back, the space he inhabits is endowed for its part with an extraordinary force of gravity. ‘My decision is taken: I am leaving, dear Théramène’, reads the opening line of Phèdre; but of course no one is allowed to leave Trezene. ‘In Iphigenie’—writes Barthes in Sur Racine—‘a whole people is held captive by tragedy because the wind does not rise.’ In Hamlet, characters scatter between Wittenberg and Paris, Norway and Poland (and the other world); Hamlet himself wants to leave Norway, is sent to England, and kidnapped by pirates. But it is all in vain; Fortinbras and Horatio, Hamlet and Laertes (and the Ghost) all keep their appointment in Elsinore to celebrate the great hecatomb. Rosaura’s horse gets out of control, and ‘therefore’ leads her straight to Sigismundo’s tower; in La Vida es Sueno, after all, jail and court are the only real spaces, and in a sense—as for the ‘prison Denmark’, or the serail in Bajazet—they are the same space. ‘In the last analysis’—Barthes again—‘it is tragic space that generates tragedy . . . every tragedy seems to consist in a trivial there’s no room for two. Tragic conflict is a crisis of space.’ Perhaps, a crisis of space produced by a reorganization of space that has been too successful: that has taken the claims of absolutism too seriously. ‘The theory of sovereignty’, writes Benjamin, ‘positively demands the completion of the image of the sovereign, as tyrant.’11 True, and the same applies to the court; the strengthening of the nation state (with its uncertain boundaries, and lack of internal homogeneity) required first of all an indisputable centre of gravity: small, powerful, undivided, where indeed there should be ‘no room for two’. The space of the court: but, for the same reasons, of tragedy too.
Although many other elements contribute to the formation of baroque tragedy, the two I have discussed are probably the most important ones, and they both convey the same historical message: tragic form is the paradoxical outcome of the violence required by the formation of the nation state. It is the form through which European literature is first touched by Modernity, and in fact torn apart by it: for within a couple of generations, the stable, common features of European drama are replaced by a rapid succession of major formal mutations. By the mid seventeenth century, the tragedy of western Europe has branched out in three or four separate versions, where everything has changed: the relationship between word and action, the number of characters, stylistic register, temporal span, plot conventions, spatial movements, verse forms. In fact, not even the name of ‘tragedy’ is shared any longer.
It’s the ‘speciation’ of evolutionary theory: the genesis of distinct forms where there used to be only one. But what made it possible? The separate national cultures? Yes, and no. Yes, in the obvious sense that each version of baroque tragedy is rooted in a specific national context—one of the three great western nation states, or the German and Italian territories. But if this space is ideal for the existence of one form, it is already too centred and homogeneous, too narrow to allow for the branching out of mutations we have to explain. In the Spain of the siglo de oro there is no room for German Trauerspiel, just as, in the eyes of the tragédie classique, Shakespeare is an absurdity to be avoided (let alone the Jacobeans). Morphological variety needs a broader space than the nation; with more cultural ‘niches’ for mutations to take root, and later contribute to literary evolution.12 ‘It’s a well-known fact’—writes Jacques Monod—‘that the important turning points in evolution have coincided with the invasion of new ecological spaces.’13 And Stephen Jay Gould: ‘Diversity—the number of different species present in a given area—is strongly influenced, if not controlled, by the amount of the habitable area itself.’14
A larger habitat, then: Europe. But which Europe? In an interesting analytical page (to which I shall return), Curtius delineates a sort of literary relay, a secular rotation of the literature that dominates the rest of Europe; in our period, for him, Spanish literature. Yet had Europe been really as united as Curtius would have it—had it been a sort of Spain writ large—then it would present the same limitations of the Spanish nation state: and there would be no room for the French or the English version of tragic form. Once more, the Europe we need is Guizot’s, with the constitutive dis-union of its cultural scene.15 And this means that Europe doesn’t simply offer ‘more’ space than any nation state, but especially a different space: discontinuous, fractured, the European space functions as a sort of archipelago of (national) sub-spaces, each of them specializing in one formal variation.16 If seen ‘from within’, and in isolation, these national spaces may well appear hostile to variations; they ‘fix’ on one form, and don’t tolerate alternatives. But if seen ‘from the outside’, and as parts of a continental system, the same nation states act as the carriers of variations; they allow for the formal galaxy of baroque tragedy which would have been unthinkable in a (still) unified Europe.
Would there be Shakespeare, had England not been an island? Who knows? But that the greatest novelties of tragic form should arise away from the mainland, and from someone with ‘small Latin and less Greek’, is quite a sign of what European literature had to gain from losing its unity, and forgetting its past.
In the spatial model I have begun to outline, geography is no longer the speechless onlooker of the—historical—deeds of the ‘European spirit’. The European space is not a landscape, not a backdrop of history, but a component of it; always important, often decisive, it suggests that literary forms change ‘in’ time, no doubt, but not really ‘because’ of time. The most significant transformations do not occur because a form has a lot of time at its disposal: but because at the right moment—which is as a rule very short—it has a lot of space. Just think again of baroque tragedy; is its formal variety the result of passing time—of history? Little or nothing: English tragedy and Trauerspiel, Spanish drama and tragédie classique all achieve rather quickly a stable structure, which remains unchanged for decades, until it becomes sterile and disappears. A form needs time in order to reproduce itself; but in order to arise it is space that it needs most. Space, spaces, plural, of neighbouring, rival cultures; where the exploration of formal possibilities may be allowed, and in fact encouraged as a sort of patriotic duty. Once more: the space of a divided Europe.17
4. THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
Baroque tragedy is among the first expressions of European polycentrism. For several generations, however, isolation and mutual ignorance are still very strong: the case of Shakespeare—whose influence on the continent must wait till the end of the eighteenth century—is a clear sign of this state of affairs. The continental system is still at a potential stage; the elements are all there, but there’s no switch to connect them yet. And that literary Europe is the sum of its parts, but not much more, is after all the picture offered by its first historian, Henry Hallam, in the four long volumes of his Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries.18 With implacable punctuality, Hallam slices the historical continuum every ten (or thirty, or fifty) years, and subjects each of the five great areas of western Europe to a meticulous investigation. But spatial proximity never turns into functional interaction: Hallam’s Europe is a mechanical sum of its separate parts, and nothing more.19 Bereft of internal links, it is a large, yet structurally fragile construction; an easy prey to the great classicist counter-attack, as a consequence of which the development of the European system comes to a halt for over a century.
To be sure—as suggested by the metaphor of the Republic of Letters, coined precisely in this age—cultivated Europe has never been so united as in the âge classique. But it’s a unity gained at the price of diversity. Think of the semantic destiny of the epoch’s keyword: cosmopolitan. ‘Citizen of the world’ is the definition of Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755. It’s not easy, however, to give a concrete, positive meaning to such citizenship, and a few years later, in 1762, the Académie Française follows the opposite strategy; a negative definition: cosmopolitan is he ‘qui n’adopte point
