Stephen Gosson might treble and intensify his famous antitheatrical malediction could he know what a cliché of theatre history one sentence of it has become:

It is time to take Gosson seriously, to identify Shakespeare as one of the ransackers and to treat his Italian stories as a chapter in the history of ransacking, which also entails treating ransacking itself as a first premise of Renaissance dramaturgy.

Ever since Chaucer’s Clerk and Franklin told tales from the Decameron, English literature has borne traces of Italian stories, though to call them “Italian” is to dismiss their remote origins, in many cases lost in the distance of antiquity and Indo-European folklore. It was the Renaissance versions, however, the “mery bookes of Italie” that delighted sixteenth-century English readers and, according to Roger Ascham, undermined their faith and morals. Playwrights in those times before copyright laws were under no pressure to invent original stories and instead valued new presentation of old material. Italy was the contemporary crucible of dramatic theory and Tasso, foremost among theorists, wrote that originality in dramatic composition should consist in form rather than in matter.

In Shakespeare's day, long after the Reformation, the calendar as established by the Church, with its series of days consecrated to saints and its fixed and movable feasts, still played a role of major importance. It constituted a matrix of time, the effect of which was to subordinate events of secular life to those of the sacred cycle of the year (the movable feasts of the Christian liturgy governed by the Easter cycle and ranging from Shrove Tuesday to Corpus Christi) and to commemorate a host of popular beliefs and folkloric traditions that had developed over centuries. The year was, by and large, divided into two halves: the winter or sacred half, ranging from Christmas to 24 June (which corresponded to Midsummer but also to the latest possible date for the feast of Corpus Christi); and the summer half, with its mainly agrarian feasts and host of local and occasional celebrations, which went from 25 June to Christmas.

Shakespeare, as a playwright, is unique in the place and importance he ascribes to popular festivity and holidays, thus giving what might have been regarded as “airy nothing” a “local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.16–17). He indeed includes all and sundry, court and country, in his festive kaleidoscope firmly set on the fertile ground of the variegated traditions and customs of “Merry England,” and this without nostalgia or satire.

Drama makes a ceremony out of a muddle. Much of the world's theatre originated in seasonal festivals, rites of fertility and initiation, and forms of liturgy. It still retains a ceremonious quality, with performers and audience responsive to conventions of conduct. Yet the subject of drama is confusion: whether evoking horror or hope, drama gives shape to the disarray and precariousness of our lives. Accordingly, the word confusion is one which Shakespeare explores. While he uses it most often in the root meaning of ruin or perdition (OED, sense 1), he also employs most of the other senses then current: putting to shame (sense 2); mental perturbation, embarrassment (3); the 'confusion of tongues' at the tower of Babel (4); the now standard meaning of disorder (5); tumult and commotion (6); and finally conflation, or the 'con-fusion' of intimate mingling and blending (7). He also delights in the possibilities of the word. When Launcelot Gobbo is teasing his old father, he says, “I will try confusions with him” instead of “try conclusions” or make an experiment (The Merchant of Venice, 2.2.37). When out hunting, Theseus and Hippolyta relish “the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction” (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.110-11), an echoing confusion of senses 5, 6, and 7. When Hymen comes to resolve the enigmas of Rosalind with “Peace ho! I bar confusion” (As You Like It, 5.4.125), he gives his statement a comprehensive finality by blending senses 3, 5, and 6. Friar Lawrence insists on the irrelevance of histrionic outpourings of grief at Juliet's apparent death by juxtaposing senses 1 and 6: “Peace ho, for shame! Confusion's [cure] lives not / In these confusions” (Romeo and Juliet, 4.5.65-66).

It is paradoxical that a body of work which begins by being so narrowly preoccupied with problems of the writer's self, and which to the end centres on characters expressing his intimate and unchanged concerns, should also contain so much history. Partly it is a matter of natural growth, the widening range of experience in increasingly turbulent times, which a novelist of all people could hardly ignore; but it also sprang from a remarkable congruence between Thomas Mann's themes and the patterns of twentieth-century German history. His work, with all the traditions, ambitions and temptations that lay behind it, was representative of fundamental German situations and responses before he set out consciously to represent them in fiction. When awareness dawned and representation became deliberate analysis, he was able to represent those phenomena with such depth of insight because he had been so deeply part of them and they of him. We can read him for pleasure, but also for understanding. Crede experto: believe the man who has gone through it himself. He can offer, in a word that is central to both Mann's art and his ethics, Erkenntnis (a complex concept which embraces knowledge, insight, analysis, understanding). Two of Mann's novels in particular are impressive reports - they are a great deal more than that, but they are that too - on crises of modern history: The Magic Mountain of 1924 on pre-1914 Europe and on the conflicts, especially acute in Germany, which were left unresolved by the First World War; and Doctor Faustus of 1947 on the long roots of Nazism in German culture and society.

The punning title of this chapter has a particular rationale. It imitates a marked feature of Mann's own writing practice, where patterns of repetition are used to accentuate strategies of imitation. My argument here will be that this repetitive formulation of acts of imitation has a particular significance for the representation of gender and sexuality, and that these categories of identity, in their turn, have a special importance for Mann's project as a whole.

T. J. Reed has commented on how Mann’s narrative voice in Death in Venice engages in mimicry of Aschenbach’s own discourse. He cites a narratorial judgement of the fallen artist, ‘der in so vorbildlich reiner Form . . . das Verworfene verworfen hatte’ (‘who in such exemplarily pure form had . . . rejected the wayward as wayward’) (viii, 521) and points out that it sounds uncomfortably close to the uninflected vigour of Aschenbach’s own earlier judgements. Specifically, it is an act of ironic citation, taking up the description of Aschenbach’s moral pronouncements, the ‘Wucht des Wortes, mit welcher hier das Verworfene verworfen wurde’ (‘the weight of words, with which the wayward was here rejected as wayward’) (viii, 455). The repetition works on several levels. It is inherent in the original collocation of ‘Verworfene’ and ‘verworfen’, which is in turn ironically framed by a grotesque sequence of repetitive sounds. The narrator is, in other words, performing Aschenbach’s excessive speech act by larding it with further excess, with a too vocal ‘weight of words’. The reiteration later in the text clearly replays this pronounced irony, and it does so all the more tellingly by juxtaposing it with notions of ‘exemplarily pure form’. It is, in other words, a form which is designed to be copied, but not in the parodic style which the narrative voice vocalises. The savage irony of this distorted repetition of the exemplar from the master’s copy-book is that the model form is designed not least as a lesson in the discourse of manhood. The ‘Wucht des Wortes’ is a discursive template of virile ethics for young men to adopt and it rebounds brutally on the master-turned-pederast. That is, an excessively masculine discourse marks the punishment of a man who fails to maintain the exemplary purity of his patriarchal function.

Mann's work on the four novels The Tales of Jacob, The Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt and Joseph the Provider spans a phase in his creative career in which the pressure of historical events obliged him to redefine his political attitude, his cultural identity, and his position as a literary author. While this monumental work was emerging, the Weimar Republic collapsed, the Nazis came to power, and Mann went into exile and emigrated to the USA, where he struggled to find a political attitude towards Germany and finally adopted a firm public stance opposed to Hitler. This anti-Nazi stance assumed increasing urgency for the writer with the outbreak of the Second World War. The remarkable persistence with which Mann pursued the Joseph project, however, also shows that he saw it as the great work of his later years.

At first sight, Mann’s choice of biblical material, which as a poeta doctus he links with the mythologies of the ancient world, must seem surprising. The author himself comments to his publisher, Bermann Fischer, on the ‘almost insane discrepancy between the work and our time’. Hence the Joseph tetralogy has been interpreted as an escape from the historical present. Only very recently have scholars sought to treat Mann’s Egypt as a reflection of his own historical experiences.

Written between parts three and four of the Joseph tetralogy from 11 November 1936 to 26 October 1939 in Switzerland, the United States and the Netherlands as Thomas Mann's first piece of Exilliteratur (literature of exile), Lotte in Weimar is a case study of the intricate relationship between life and art: an attempt 'to vindicate Goethe the artist against the egotism and inhumanity of Goethe the man'. As Mann writes in a letter to Mrs George T. Paterson (29 November 1940), it 'tells the story of the meeting late in life in Weimar of Goethe with the original of the Lotte of . . . The Sorrows of Werther'. Werther (1774) was the first internationally successful work of German literature; its reception has often simplistically equated art with life by identifying Werther's unrequited love for the fictional Lotte with that of Goethe for the real-life Charlotte Kestner, née Buff.

In the same letter to Mrs Paterson, Mann states that he ‘took no liberty with history’. On 25 September 1816 Goethe noted in his diary, amidst many ephemera, only: ‘Lunch the Riedels and Mrs Kästner from Hanover’; and on her part Charlotte Kestner confessed her disappointment with the reunion in a letter to her son.

Thomas Mann began work on Doctor Faustus in May 1943, having just completed Joseph and his Brothers. A year earlier, as he was putting the finishing touches to the biblical tetralogy, he found his thoughts already turning towards this next novel, a daring new artist's tale that might, he believed, be the most bizarre and outlandish he had ever produced. A month before beginning the book Mann disclosed what he had in mind: to take up a project he had conceived as early as 1904, the story of an artist in league with the devil for the sake of creativity, a modern-day Faust who would sell his soul to make wondrous works of art (letters to Agnes E. Meyer, 21 February 1942, and to Klaus Mann, 27 April 1943). Art and artistry were of course familiar concerns for Mann, but why, we might ask, would he choose just now in the middle of the Second World War to devote an ambitious new novel to the tribulations of the artist? Living in exile along with other refugees in the United States, Mann was following the progress of Hitler's war with the distress of a German worried about the guilt and fate of his people. With the popularity of his translated works in America, moreover, he was becoming a prominent spokesperson on the German issue. Surely this was not the moment for him to rework the predicament of Tonio Kröoger, Gustav Aschenbach, and the other frustrated artists who populate his tales, a strangely intellectual topic given the atrocities taking place in Europe. The author would have to make himself clear.

While staying in Venice with his wife and brother between 26 May and 2 June 1911, Thomas Mann, like his fictional Aschenbach, was fascinated by a handsome Polish boy whom he watched playing on the beach. This 'personal and lyrical experience', as Mann later described it in a muchquoted confessional letter, prompted the story Death in Venice. And just as Mann's protagonist Aschenbach is inspired by the sight of Tadzio to write 'a page and a half of exquisite prose' on an unspecified problem of taste and culture (viii, 493), so Mann wrote a short essay on his changing attitude to Wagner. Having idolised Wagner for many years, he confessed, he was now turning away from the composer’s steamy Romanticism and towards a new classicism:

One of the most astute early reviews of Buddenbrooks was written by a young poet who was Thomas Mann's exact contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke. What strikes today's reader is not so much Rilke's positive response to the novel as his perceptive grasp of the inner tensions that give Buddenbrooks its unique and innovative character. Rilke describes Mann as having reconceptualised the traditional role of chronicler in a modern way. At the same time as Mann builds up an increasing sense of material concreteness in what he depicts, he also works over the surface of his presentation with 'a hundred furrows', producing an unusual richness of detail. While avoiding authorial intrusions in which 'a supercilious writer bends down to the ear of a supercilious reader', Mann maintains a narrative objectivity that nonetheless gets us involved, just as if we were reading our own family documents, discovered 'in some secret drawer'. Rilke's review, published in 1902, recognises fundamental aspects of the position of Buddenbrooks in the first year of the twentieth century. Rilke is fully aware of the novel's double character as a record of an actually experienced reality and a carefully constructed and intricately developed work of art. He assesses quite deftly what has since been called Mann's 'irony': his ability to hold sympathy and critical distance in balance.

In his impetuous youth, Gustav Aschenbach 'sent seed corn to the mill' (viii, 454), but such rashness pales in comparison to how Thomas Mann, writing his Venetian novella, cast most of his own store of seed corn to the winds. The enumeration of Aschenbach's achievements (viii, 450) assigns nearly all the projects in Mann's own notebooks and unfinished manuscripts to the accomplished oeuvre on which Aschenbach's fame rests. After that, visibly the same works could hardly appear in the bookstores under another author's name. The novella that depicts an aging writer's failing creativity dealt with its real author's mid-life creative crisis by forcing a clean sweep of plans which had long been engaging, but perhaps also blocking, his imaginative energies. That is the first thing that has to be recognised about the place of The Magic Mountain in Mann's literary biography: its themes and techniques emerged to fill the gap he had bravely, perhaps even desperately, created by letting Aschenbach complete his own previous plans. We, of course, now know that Buddenbrooks was not to be Mann's only work on the grand scale, but in July 1912, when Death in Venice appeared, he himself knew no such thing. What he did know was that the kind of fame he had tasted and longed to extend required more 'big' novels, and highly acclaimed ones at that, for its sustenance. He seems at first not to have anticipated that the 'novella' or 'story' which he first mentions in correspondence in the second half of 1913 as a 'humorous companion-piece' to Death in Venice would grow into one of the classic long novels of the twentieth century and would give a completely new dimension to his reputation, founding that view of him as an artist of encyclopaedic range which for the rest of his life he generally relished, though occasionally lamented.

Thomas Mann is chiefly known as a novelist in the European tradition. The novel is an artistic hybrid of storytelling, immoral behaviour and moral consciousness. This holds true for Thomas Mann's fiction, although in his case it is complicated by specifically German factors.

The first is that the German novel tradition has characteristics of its own. Both Goethe and the Romantics made distinct contributions to the literary genre of the novel, usually in the form of attempts to modify its hybrid constitution in one way or another. The Goethean Bildungsroman concentrates on the moral development of one individual character, and the artistic aspect of the novel’s composition is enhanced not only by this thematic focus, but also by the belief in the meaningful shape of the education process itself. As the protagonist is formed, so is the novel. The Romantics promoted the hybrid heterogeneity of the novel, its mixture of narrative and essayism, to the status of a defining principle of all art. For them it was (at least theoretically) the only art form equal to the task of capturing the metaphysical interpenetration of subjective and objective realities. Thomas Mann was conscious of both these strains in the German literary inheritance, and we shall return to them. But it is from Wagner’s music drama, which was understood by Mann and others to be the last flowering of Romanticism, that Mann most clearly derived aspects of his literary technique, aspects that strained against the novel form’s own pragmatic heterogeneity.

The genesis of this work spans much of Thomas Mann's creative career. His collection of material dates back to 1910. In 1922 the first part of the book appeared under the title Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Buch der Kindheit [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years]. In 1951, after his work on Doctor Faustus had once more delayed the continuation of the Confessions, Mann returned to this novel and to his former thematic trajectory. Hans Wysling, in his authoritative study, unfolds the multitude of literary influences and delineates the essential concepts and traditions which informed the Confessions. According to Wysling, the two creative phases are marked by distinctive shifts of models. The early phase is inspired by three major models: Georges Manolescu's memoirs A Prince of Thieves (1905), Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], which is part of the great eighteenth-century tradition of autobiographical and confessional writing, and the fairy-tale motif of the Glückskind, the fortunate child. All three models are more or less refracted and modified by other concepts. For example, Manolescu's literary memoirs of a self-proclaimed confidence man are problematised by the Protestant ethic of self-examination and the psychoanalytical school of self-interrogation. Whereas Felix Krull's imitation of Goethe's Poetry and Truth lacks the aspects of societal integration and self-realisation so essential to the eighteenth-century ethos of Bildung or self-cultivation, the deployment of the fairy-tale plot of the Glückskind is enriched both by the psychoanalytical complex of primary narcissism, which is symptomatic for the early stage of childhood development, and by the mythological features of collective archetypes. The protagonist's name Felix, signifying the happy one, is onomastic testimony to the felicitous nature and fate of his composite psychomythic character.

In 1921 Samuel Fischer, Thomas Mann's German publisher, and Alfred A. Knopf reached an agreement whereby Knopf would have exclusive rights for Mann's works in the USA. Mann, aware that his works would be known to a great many of his readers not in the German originals but in the English translations - that in effect the latter would constitute the works of Thomas Mann as far as the English-speaking world was concerned - was in no doubt about the importance of their being well translated: in a letter concerning The Magic Mountain he expressed his wish for 'a translation of a high artistic standard' ('eine künstlerisch hochwertige Übersetzung'). (He could not have foreseen that even greater importance would accrue to the English versions with the Nazi suppression of his works in Germany and his eventual exile in the USA.)