Article: The beggar's pantomime: Melanie Gilligan on performance and its appropriations.

FEW APHORISMS ARE MORE FAMOUS than the redoubtable "History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce"--an observation typically attributed to Karl Marx. In fact, however, this assertion is merely a paraphrasing of the political philosopher. Opening his 1852 study of "bourgeois revolution," The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." What is obscured in the popularized adage, then, is the specifically theatrical character of Marx's original formulation (along ...

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