Hamlet and Poppea: Musicking Benjamin's Trauerspiel

"Every natural occurrence in this world could be the effect or materialization of a cosmic reverberation or sound, even of the movement of the stars." These are words of the seventeenth-century playwright and poetic theorist Sigmund von Birken. Walter Benjamin quotes them, near the end of his Habilitationsschrift of 1923-25, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, to cinch an important argument: for Benjamin they "finally establish...the unity...between the verbal and the visual manifestations of the baroque." Here, Clubb emphasizes that for all this melange of old and new, Birken's words do not lack a confidence also of the seventeenth century characteristic, a certain stability of world conception that cannot be rightly apprehended either as the waning of an earlier view or as the laborious birth of a modern one. He notes that this in-between habitation might be called baroque, as Benjamin called it, following Heinrich Wolfflin, but with an associative catchment for his history richer than his one-time teacher's. Moreover, he highlights here Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the mourning play or Trauerspiel diagnosed by Benjamin.