SOURCE: Harris, Brian. “The Michelangelo Dramas of Friedrich Hebbel and Hugo Ball: From Historicism toward Expressionism.” In From the Bard to Broadway: The University of Florida Department of Classics Comparative Drama Conference Papers, Vol. VII, edited by Karelisa V. Hartigan, pp. 96-106. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987.

In the following essay, Harris asserts that Ball wrote his tragicomic Michelangelo's Nose in “direct critical response” to Hebbel's Michel Angelo and “to the nineteenth-century traditions from which it emerges.”

Hugo Ball (1886-1927) had left student life at the university in Munich in 1910 to pursue a career in the theatre. Back in Munich in 1912, after a year at the Reinhardt theatre school in Berlin, then a year as stage manager and sometime director with the municipal theatre in Plauen, Ball was drawn into orbit around Vassily Kandinsky and other members of the Blaue Reiter group. But Ball's emergence after late...