From its neo-Aristotelian revival in the 17th century, drama was among the most prestigious literary genres in Europe, and the theatre (be it at court or in cities) one of the most eminent cultural institutions.  Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) mentions the playhouse as one of the exemplary spaces (alongside coffee houses and improving societies)  where something like a public sphere and a public opinion emerges in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Theatres provide a neutral and non-governmental meeting ground for free individuals to mingle in a non-official capacity, to share each other’s company and leisure pursuits, and to engage in a non-private social intercourse, which in turn extended itself from face-to-face encounters towards a print-mediated virtual forum for public opinion-making. Indeed, neo-Aristotelian critics from the mid-17th century already show themselves aware of the audience-targeted role of the drama, even coining phrases like “public opinion” as a description of an audience’s appreciation of a given performance. The public opinion-building function of the 17th-century theatre manifested itself in printed controversies, the so-called querelles, which engage a disparate group of people in a common engagement with a topic of shared concern: the Querelle du Cid and the Querelle de Tartuffe, which foreshadow (and culminate in) the wider, epochal Querelle des anciens et des modernes. Thus the theatre became an engrossing focus uniting individual responses into a collective debate, in the process turning the individual members of the audience into a collective “public”, and extending that “public” beyond the embodied assembly of the actual spectators to a wider virtual interest-community by means of communicative media.

It was in Germany that this public-building capacity first obtained a nationalizing function. Social improvers in Enlightenment Germany attempted to establish such a theatre, not the court theatres catering for the entertainment of the higher nobility, but in cities like those of Hamburg and Mannheim, where civic culture provided a more congenial and responsive basis. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s attempts in Hamburg, in the late 1760s, failed; but his dramas (from the “bourgeois tragedies” like Miss Sara Sampson, 1755, to the canonical Nathan der Weise, 1779) enjoyed great prestige in their printed form, and the drama criticism that he wrote as part of the venture (the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767-69) remained a text of reference. People took note of his complaint, in 1768, that the Germans could not as yet support a theatrical life, “since we Germans are not yet a nation”, and the Hamburg theatre venture came retrospectively to be called a Nationaltheater (as opposed to a court theatre). At the same time, critics like Lessing and Herder were chafing at the hegemonic dominance of French-style neoclassicism, whose dominance was, so they felt, stifling German literature. As an alternative, they extolled the inspring example of Shakespeare, who had, as an “Original Genius” uninhibited by neo-Aristotelian precepts, engendered a great theatrical tradition by drawing on homegrown historical themes and freely mixing sublime grandeur and fanciful romance. As such, it was felt that Shakespeare provided a better lodestar than the derivative imitation of French neoclassicism for an authentically German theatre.

Goethe and Schiller undertook their theatrical mission in the following decades, and their great productivity was to provide Germany with a new literary canon and a fresh national-cultural self-awareness: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), Egmont (1788), and Faust I (1808), and Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), Don Carlos (1787), Wallenstein (1798), and Wilhelm Tell (1804). All of these topics are from post-classical history and pointedly non-French (even Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orléans was written to controvert Voltaire’s cynical debunking of Joan of Arc). Schiller’s heroes in particular were national ones, heroically standing up against tyrannical rule in an Enlightenment-Patriotic defence of their nation’s liberty. It is no surprise that Wilhelm Tell, with its many anti-tyrannical passages and urgings for the Swiss cantons to unite for freedom, would take the function of a nationally German play in the next century; Rossini’s opera version would take its message further afield across Europe. At the same time, the theatre was meant as an instrument for public consciousness-raising, not only in its choice of dramatic subjects, but also in an institutional sense. The urge to create a German national theatre was also an attempt to create something like a German public sphere, a public opinion, a common bonding agent for society apart from the suzerainty of lords and princes. Schiller argued this in his seminal essay on “The stage as a moral institution” (1784), even as the Prague Estates Theatre (1783) was dedicating itself, by the motto on its façade, to “the fatherland and the Muses” (patriae et musis).

In the capitals of Central Europe, theatres were established in the first half of the 19th century with a public outreach that went by the appellation “national” even if, like the Pest theatre in Budapest, they had originally been sponsored by the patrician bourgeoisie and nobility; many combined this public outreach with espousing performances in the national language. Theatrical, operatic, or musical performances in those venues could, in the decades around 1848, take on vehement, nationally mobilizing effects. But in the field of literary production, the repertoire stagnated. The lustre of this national Romanticism in dramatic writing had waned between the death of Schiller and the querelle provoked by Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; heralding, after some Napoleonic delay, the triumphal onset of Romanticism in France). The first half of the 19th century saw the flourishing of Romantic poetry and of the novel, while theatre retrenched largely into commercial entertainment productions with little literary or political shock-value. The one dramatical genre that maintained the public-building, audience-mobilizing function of the theatre, also in a national sense, was the opera (which is covered in a separate article; sur-10).

Nonetheless, theatre was to prove enormously important for the European process of cultural nation-building with a delayed effect during the later 19th century, not in Germany or France, but among the more peripheral nationalities, and not in large metropolitan theatres but in small-scale amateur or avant-garde playhouses. The prototype here was, of course, the Norwegian theatre established in Bergen in 1850 (Den nationale scene). Though funded in a provincial, remote location, without a professional acting troupe and precariously funded, it could draw on the outstanding talent of playwrights like Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen had started his theatrical career with standard historical dramas in the style of Oehlenschläger, who was himself a Danish epigone of the national historicism of the Weimar greats; in adapting his style and outlook to the new Bergen environment he created a sparser, leaner form of theatre, which in turn chimed with a more general trend towards an aesthetics of restraint. Against the lavish productions and facile audience-pleasers of the great boulevard theatres, a new “art theatre” or “literary theatre” sprang up that espoused Naturalist or Symbolist storylines, and more subtle production values. This artistic renewal started with the Parisian Avant-Garde theatres of André Antoine (Théâtre libre, 1887) and A.F. Lugné-Poe (Théâtre de l’œuvre, 1893) and the Symbolist plays of the Flemish-born Maurice Maeterlinck. The combined influences of Ibsen (who had left Norway to pursue his increasingly austere theatrical integrity) and of these literary theatres reached the London literary scene in the early 1890s, where they inspired playwrights like G.B. Shaw and W.B. Yeats. In various cities across Europe (not least in Yeats’s Dublin), this new post-Ibsenite theatre, with a realist rather than historicist repertoire, inspired local amateur companies. Countries as far apart as Catalonia, Finland, and Iceland, experienced the nation-building effect of this cultural sociability: in frugal, amateur productions, a minority nation could bootstrap itself into cultural existence and take its place in Europe’s literary modernization, often alongside or in cooperation with choral societies. A century after Schiller, theatrical associations featured among the most important grassroots mobilizers of the nation as a culturally sentient collective.