Collected Essays on Drama 1889-1900 is the twenty-ninth volume of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, and it holds no lectures at all. It gathers roughly 150 pieces of working journalism written across eleven years: performance reviews, editorial notices, quarrels with other critics, and a smaller core of sustained theoretical essays. The earliest pieces come from his Vienna and Weimar years, when he was editing Goethe's scientific writings at the Goethe and Schiller Archive. The dense later run comes from Berlin, where in 1897 he took over the Magazin für Literatur and founded its theatre supplement, the Dramaturgische Blätter, which the Deutscher Bühnenverein adopted as its official organ. One subject holds the whole volume together: the stage. What a play is, what an actor actually does, and what criticism owes the work standing in front of it.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 29 belongs to the run of volumes that collect Steiner's periodical writing from the years before anthroposophy had a name, sitting alongside the gathered essays on literature, on culture, and on the methodological foundations of his later research. Biographically it overlaps almost exactly with the stretch of life he describes in his autobiography, and it brackets the writing of his central philosophical book of 1894. A reader who arrives here from the esoteric lecture cycles will find the register unfamiliar. There is no spiritual-scientific vocabulary in these pages, no reference to higher worlds, no appeal to supersensible perception. Steiner writes as one Berlin critic among many, arguing about naturalism, about the repertory of the court theatres, about whether a visiting Italian tragedian understood the play he was performing.
The continuity is one of method rather than content. What the later work does with the human being, this earlier work already does with the stage: it refuses to stop at the finished appearance and asks after the activity that produced it. Steiner is not interested in ranking performances. He wants to know what inner process an actor goes through to become someone else, what perceptual habit makes an audience accept one convention and reject another, and why an aesthetic idea that satisfied one generation becomes unintelligible to the next. That is a phenomenological instinct at work long before he had a technical name for it.
The theatrical interest never left him. Two decades on, he wrote and staged four mystery dramas of his own, and near the end of his life he gave an extended course on speech and dramatic art with Marie Steiner. GA 29 is where the preoccupation begins, and it is worth reading as a document of its own moment rather than as a coded anticipation of what came later.
Themes and Structure
The volume is organised by publication rather than by argument, so it does not build toward a conclusion. Broadly it falls into three bands. A first group collects the essays of principle and the editorial pieces, including the inaugural announcement of the Dramaturgische Blätter, which promised steady expert treatment of the artistic, technical, legal and social affairs of the theatre and invited playwrights and stage artists to argue in its pages themselves. A long middle band, close to a hundred items, consists of individual reviews of Berlin premieres and revivals. A final group turns to actors, to lecture evenings, and to the Free Literary Society in Berlin, closing with a short valedictory notice as Steiner gave up the editorship in 1900.
The argument that runs hardest through the theoretical essays concerns naturalism. Steiner accepts the modern turn in drama and defends its practitioners against conservative attack, but he rejects the theory offered on its behalf. Reviewing Friedrich Spielhagen's book on epic and dramatic technique, he endorses a double diagnosis that recurs throughout the volume:
There are thus two errors on which much of modern drama is based: the misjudgment of the boundaries between epic and dramatic art and the superstition that nature can really be imitated.
The first error produces what Steiner repeatedly calls dramatised novellas: plays whose material would have been better served by narrative prose, stuffed with stage directions describing furniture, weather, and the shape of a character's skull. The second produces a false ideal, since art and nature never had the same purpose to begin with. Both charges are aimed at the theorists rather than at the new drama itself.
Ibsen receives the closest technical attention. Steiner notes the odd kinship between Ibsen's construction and Greek tragedy, where the decisive events have already happened before the curtain rises and the play shows only the soul states that follow from them. Ibsen, he argues, cuts a microscopic specimen out of human life and lets everything else be inferred from it, using suggestive devices that make a remembered past as vivid as the present action. Steiner then draws the practical consequence a working critic would draw: this is not merely a question of dramatic technique but of staging, and a genuine Ibsen style on the German stage would have to be built around it. Until directors solve that problem, he warns, the plays will keep landing on audiences as narrated stories rather than as drama.
A second theoretical thread concerns tragedy and moral feeling. Working from the ethical psychology of Herbart, Steiner traces the concept of tragic guilt back to the idea of retribution: suffering shown on stage was long felt to require a preceding wrong that explains it. His claim is that modern consciousness no longer works this way. It asks after the causes of suffering rather than its desert, and it finds the linkage of misfortune to sin an unhealthy habit of mind. From this he draws the formulation the volume is best remembered for, that the concept of tragic guilt is being converted into a concept of tragic innocence.
The essays on acting form a third thread. Steiner takes self-denial to be the actor's defining act. Citing Flavio Andò on building a role from the whole play outward rather than from the text inward, he argues that the actor who cannot set aside his own nature will show us himself in every part he plays, and he criticises performers whose technical mastery serves a stock template instead of the particular character a poet drew. Alongside these sit portraits of Marie Seebach, Adele Sandrock, Gabrielle Réjane and other figures of the period, and a suggestive short study of Maurice Maeterlinck, whom Steiner defends against the charge of morbid fantasy by arguing that his strangeness comes from a new mode of feeling rather than a confused one.
Finally there is Steiner's running criticism of criticism. He accuses reviewers of judging whether a work matches the aesthetic party they belong to instead of attending to it, and in one of the sharpest pieces he dissects the catchword: the phrase everyone repeats meaningfully without thinking anything by it, whose effect has nothing to do with its sense, and whose study would double as a chapter on the thoughtlessness of crowds. Around all of this move the names of the decade, among them Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Halbe and Ernst von Wolzogen, alongside the older repertory of Shakespeare, Kleist, Grillparzer and Hebbel.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Ten entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 29. Each one takes up a single term, image or argument from these essays and treats it in its own right.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts a complete English translation of the volume with the German originals shown beside the essays. The archive is the practical entry point, since the individual pieces are short and the collection rewards browsing more than it rewards a straight read.
For print editions and current availability in English, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Note that the German critical edition carries the title Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Dramaturgie, which is worth using if you are searching a library catalogue rather than a bookseller.
Continue Your Study
- Start with the terms. If the arguments above are unfamiliar, the ten entries listed here are the shortest way in. Each is a self-contained explanation with its source in these essays. Browse the full Thalira glossary for the wider vocabulary.
- Read the theory before the reviews. The essays on tragic guilt, on Ibsen's technique, and on the boundaries of epic and dramatic art carry the thinking. The individual notices make far more sense once you know what Steiner is testing every performance against.
- Follow the thread forward. The concern with speech, gesture and the actor's inner activity returns decades later in Steiner's work on drama and speech formation, and in the mystery plays he wrote himself. Reading GA 29 first makes that later material look less like a sudden departure and more like a long argument resumed.
- Keep the decade in view. These are the years of the Weimar Goethe edition and of Steiner's central philosophical book. Read alongside them, the drama criticism shows the same mind asking how an appearance comes about, only pointed at the stage instead of at knowledge.