Abstract: Around 1800, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe conducted a series of theatrical experiments involving masks on the Weimar Stage. Such experiments were considered highly innovative at the time and were met with both praise and skepticism. This article examines the eighteenth-century European discourse on theatrical masks to contextualize the largely unprecedented nature of Goethe's use of masks. Thinkers ranging from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Jean-Baptiste Dubos to August Wilhelm Schlegel and Karl August Böttiger considered the unique advantages and disadvantages that masks contribute to staged performances. Each of these thinkers is forced to contend with the fact that masks necessarily conceal an actor's facial affective expressions, thereby appearing to deprive actors of a fundamental means of expressing their art. Such observations are situated in conjunction with Goethe's staging of masked performances at Weimar. Goethe's use of the mask is viewed as a means for him as a director to exert control over the bodies of actors to diminish their artistic agency. The theatrical mask is thus conceptualized as an extension of his Rules for Actors, a series of prescriptions for subjugating an actor's body to the aesthetic of the directorial vision.

Keywords: Masks, Weimar, Theater, Actors, Bodies, Affect

IN WEIMAR AROUND 1800, the date of October 24 would rarely pass by unobserved. The birthday of Anna Amalia was routinely celebrated in a variety of both public and private festivities befitting the dowager duchess’ status as a generous patroness of the arts. Often a theatrical production marked the annual occasion. The tradition dates back at least to her arrival in Weimar in 1756, when Karl Theophilus Döbbelin's acting troupe performed for her seventeenth birthday. This tradition continued during Goethe's tenure at the Weimar Theater with elaborate productions such as Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Goethe’s own Palaeophron und Neoterpe. Yet in 1801 the festivity itself overshadowed its occasion when Goethe staged the Roman dramatist Terence's Adelphi. Terence's drama, appearing in a new translation from Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel as Die Brüder (The Brothers), stole the show by debuting masked actors, a remarkable deviation from standard theatrical practices.