SOURCE: Burwick, Frederick. “Stage Illusion and the Stage Designs of Goethe and Hugo.” Word & Image 4, nos. 3-4 (July-December 1988): 692-718.

In the following essay, Burwick examines Goethe's stage designs for Faust in order to trace his concern with “poetic imagination” and “mimetic reality.”

The entire history of the drama could be studied in terms of the opposition of two basic elements: spectacle and mime. Certainly there have been periods in history when one or the other held dominance. Shakespeare's Globe, we know, provided only a naked stage with the barest minimum of props. The gimmicks of stagecraft, which began to dominate the theatres in the Baroque age, have continued to exert tremendous influence on the drama, often forcing playwright, player, and the play itself into subservience. The very effort to create stage illusion seems sometimes to have inhibited it. The visual enchantment of stage effects thus becomes an end...