Schiller had since come to regard Shakespeare’s elusiveness – that apparently invisible ‘heart’ – as a measure of his greatness: ‘He had already possessed my entire admiration and had been my study for several years before I learned to love his personality.’
Marks of that love were everywhere: in Kabale und Liebe (1784), sometimes rendered in English as Luise Miller, whose virtuous and courageous heroine has more than a tinct of Imogen in Cymbeline and Isabella in Measure for Measure; and in the triple-decker Wallenstein (1798–99), whose panoptic view of the Thirty Years’ War is modelled on the English history plays. The source text for Don Carlos (1787) is even clearer: written in blank verse in direct Shakespearian imitation, it tells the story of a young and idealistic heir to the Spanish throne, railroaded by his autocratic father and disastrously in love with his stepmother. Schiller wrote that it ‘has the soul of Hamlet … and my own pulse’.
There was one surprising thing, however. So excitable about the raw formlessness of Shakespeare on the page, Goethe and Schiller were notably bashful when it came to staging him. In 1796, Goethe invited Schiller to join him as co-director at Weimar’s new court theatre, where the pair worked intimately until Schiller’s death in 1805, after which Goethe continued in the role for another decade. Nervous about how audiences might react, Goethe preferred to mount operas, frothy musical comedies and light plays by popular contemporaries such as August Wilhelm Iffland and August Kotzebue, only later broadening the repertoire with his and Schiller’s own work. Shakespeare barely figured: only nine of his plays in twenty-six years.
The Macbeth they staged in 1800 was a case in point. Goethe directed and designed (his halting, heavy-handed pen sketches are kept in the Goethe-Schiller Archive), while Schiller translated, despite his still-hesitant English. To modern eyes, their version of this darkest and most ethically shady of tragedies is barely recognisable. Anxious that it suffered from a ‘superabundance of content’ – code for a lack of classical rigour – the pair made the Witches less ethically and sexually ambiguous (they were played by male actors wearing veils and Grecian robes), while the Porter entered with a larksome Morgenlied (‘morning song’) instead of a string of punning obscenities. Macbeth himself was likewise subjected to a moral deep-clean, presented as a ‘Heldenmüt’ger Feldherr’ (‘valorous general’) whose noble nature is overwhelmed by the forces of fate. True evil was distilled into the figure of his wife (a ‘superwitch’, as Goethe later described her). To further spare the audience’s feelings, the cold-blooded murder of Lady Macduff and her son by Macbeth’s forces, perhaps the play’s most horrific moment, was cut entirely.
Goethe and Schiller were far from alone in cleaning up Shakespeare: ‘improved’ versions of the plays had been common currency since the 1660s, and were particularly prevalent in England (though Macbeth, unusually, had been played more or less in Shakespeare’s text from the mid-eighteenth century onwards). But I found it revealing that German critics, so thrilled by the galvanising power of Shakespeare in the comfort of their studies, were so timid about what effect he might have in the theatre. In what became known as Weimar classicism, one could glimpse Voltaire’s shadow lingering in the wings.
NEAR THE END OF HERDER’S ESSAY on Shakespeare is a telling section. Addressing his young disciple directly, Herder writes that he has one earnest desire, ‘that one day you will raise a monument to [Shakespeare] here in our degenerate country’, concluding, ‘I envy you that dream.’
Herder’s hope was obvious: that Goethe would himself become a new Shakespeare, a Teutonic one. But as the clock ticked towards the tercentenary date of 23 April 1864, many felt that Germany, for all the effect of the Sturm und Drang and the eagerness for staging Shakespeare’s plays, still lacked an enduring ‘monument’. England had a Shakespeare Club, founded in 1824 in Stratford-upon-Avon by enthusiasts who met at a pub called the Falcon Inn. America got in on the act when a group of lawyers in Philadelphia, seeking distraction from statutes and appellate hearings, formed a literary salon in 1852; refounded ten years later as the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia, its all-male membership still meets regularly for cocktails and gentlemanly chit-chat (and clings quaintly to the antiquated spelling of its name).
Like other nineteenth-century Shakespeare societies, these were amateur affairs – dining and wining clubs with a little light literary appreciation thrown in. With the 1864 anniversary approaching, there were calls for Germany to go further. If Goethe and Herder had been right – that Shakespeare had given birth to a new age in German life and literature – then surely this should be marked. Was it not time for Germany to have a professional society in the name of Shakespeare, made up of the best scholarly minds German-speaking countries could produce?
Yet another Wilhelm, this time a real one, Wilhelm Oechelhäuser – the same man who later dismissed the Stratford-upon-Avon celebrations as ‘miserable’ and ‘pompous’ – was a key agitator. An industrialist from Dessau who had made a fortune in the gas business, Oechelhäuser had revered Shakespeare since childhood and had been plotting a Gesellschaft or society devoted to him since at least 1858. Hearing of English plans to celebrate the tercentenary – though not, one suspects, of their shortcomings – he circulated a memorandum insisting that Germany must not be left behind. After Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach agreed to become the society’s first patron, there was only one place it could be based: right here in Weimar. Placing a Shakespeare society in the spiritual capital of German Kultur might not only be convenient, Oechelhäuser realised; it could also be a symbolic act. Bach, Cranach, Luther, Goethe, Schiller … why not Shakespeare? The man was practically a native.
The statutes decreed that the new society would meet annually, on the ‘Shakespeare-Tag’ of the poet’s birthday. It would encourage philology and scholarship, publishing an academic journal, Shakespeare Jahrbuch. It would work towards an official translation of the complete works. Above all, it would, in the fervent jargon of the day, nostrify Shakespeare: make him Germany’s own. Another founding member, Franz von Dingelstedt, a successor of Goethe and Schiller as director of the Weimar court theatre, wrote, ‘Behold, today, as the third in the sacred trio, the Briton joins Germany’s Dioscuri. He, too, is ours!’
It is doubtful many Britons would have agreed with this, but Germany could indeed boast something genuinely unique. When it came formally into existence at 10 a.m. on 23 April 1864, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft was the first academic Shakespearian society to be founded anywhere in the world.
Only one problem: I’d mislaid them. The modern-day headquarters of the DSG was nowhere near William-Shakespeare-Strasse, as I’d casually assumed. Hastening back to the centre of town after heading in entirely the wrong direction, I asked at the tourist information bureau. All I got was a flurry of furrowed brows. Eventually someone turned up Windischestrasse, a narrow lane less than a hundred metres away.
I sprinted down. There was indeed a large sign reading ‘Shakespeares’, but it was a bar. They hadn’t heard of the society either – I’d tried tourist information? Through gritted teeth, I explained I had.
Eventually, I found it: a modest white nameplate on the wall of an office building, opposite a mobile-phone shop. In neat type, the nameplate read, DEUTSCHE SHAKESPEARE-GESELLSCHAFT, E.V., GESCHäFTSSTELLE. It seemed to share space with a yoga centre.
The door opened, disclosing a woman in early middle age with a mass of curly brown hair: the DSG’s part-time administrator, Birgit Rudolph. She smiled cautiously and welcomed me in.
‘It isn’t much to look at, I am sorry,’ she said as we hauled our way up the steep stairs. ‘It is more of an office space. We use it mainly to keep information.’
The two-room office was functional, with a forlorn touch of the GDR: a couple of desks, a few exhausted-looking pot plants and an elderly fax machine. Along one wall were neat rows of box files. Near the dusty glass of the window, a copy of the ‘Flower’ portrait of Shakespeare – so-called becaus
e it was once owned by the family of Edward Fordham Flower, organiser of the same tercentenary festivities Wilhelm Oechelhäuser had so despised – surveyed the scene. There was a pungent smell of old paper, mixed with wet carpet.
It certainly wasn’t a patch on the offices of the Goethe-Gesellschaft, which I’d popped into briefly the previous day: an imposing suite of rooms encased within the Schloss and offering sumptuous views on to the Park an der Ilm.
Rudolph was attempting to hide her smile. ‘Yes, this is true. But we are older, you know this? They are only founded in 1885. We are 1864. They are a little bit sensitive about that.’
Still, it was a wrench to see the society in such incommodious surroundings. When the DSG had convened its first meetings in the 1860s and 1870s, its ambitions – at least measured by the extravagance of its rhetoric – were almost without bound. The philosopher and scholar Hermann Ulrici wrote, ‘We want to de-Anglicise the English Shakespeare. We want to Germanise him, to Germanise him in the widest and deepest sense of the word; we want to do everything in our power to make him even more and in the truest and fullest sense what he already is: a German poet.’ Another scholar, Karl Fulda, was even more fulsome: ‘We have an undeniable right to regard him as ours, because we have made him ours thanks to German industry, German spirit, and German scholarship.’ Not for nothing had one historian of the society declared that most of these tributes to Shakespeare were ‘far too embarrassing to quote’.
Birgit directed my attention to the wall, where a large bookcase was lined with a row of volumes: a full run of the bilingual Shakespeare Jahrbuch, still published annually and distributed to all members. She carefully pulled out a few early editions, their leather covers softened to toffee-brown but the gold lettering on the spine still bright. We peered at the faded, closely printed pages, Birgit translating as we went.
The very first issue laid out the DSG’s objectives, ‘show[ing] the traces of Shakespeare’s great influence on all areas of intellectual endeavour’, and invited scholars working in the area to help the society ‘pay due attention to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays and give an overview of recent literature’. Membership cost the modest sum of 3 thalers annually.
Interesting as it was that the founders had treated live theatre with the same rigour and seriousness as textual studies and critical editions – scholarly suspicion about the activities of mere thespians would last far longer in Britain and America – the arresting thing was how nakedly political the DSG’s early objectives were. It was not enough to foster German appreciation of Shakespeare; the very first lines of the prospectus referred to the goal of ‘naturalis[ing]’ him. This was not accidental: 1864 was also the year Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany was invaded by Austro-Prussian forces, bringing an end to Danish control of the region and a prelude to the unification of Germany six years later in 1871. Perhaps Oechelhäuser, Ulrici and the others were attempting a similar move: by declaring Shakespeare ‘Germanised’ they were forging a nation of their own. Nor was he the only foreign writer to be co-opted by ardent German nationalists: the Deutsche Dante-Gesellschaft was to follow in 1865, once again the world’s first.
The Shakespeare society made waves far outside Germany; much further, even, than Britain. In 1877, the great American editor Horace Howard Furness, for many years a member of the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia, published the latest volume of his gargantuan variorum edition of Shakespeare – a monument of nineteenth-century scholarship, which aimed to collate every version of every published text in eye-straining, mind-numbing detail. In a mark of academic kudos that must have sent up yells of pride in Weimar, Furness dedicated the book ‘with great respect’ to his cousins in the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. The volume, naturally, was his edition of Hamlet.
Birgit was clutching a gift of her own. In recognition of my visit, the Gesellschaft committee had asked her to present me with a copy of another publication produced in the early years of the society: a life-size facsimile of Shakespeare’s will. The original was now in the British national archives at Kew, but in 1889 the DSG had gained permission to have it photographed using the latest technology and printed with a transcription on the facing page (necessary, if one couldn’t read the lawyer’s cramped Jacobean handwriting).
Das Testament William Shakespeare’s was over a foot wide and nearly two feet tall, beautifully bound in red and dove-grey, printed on thick, creamy paper the texture of velvet. It was a splendid object, and a touching gift. I had not the faintest clue how I would get it home.
O HAMLET … Wherever one looked in the nineteenth century, it loomed. Like Old Hamlet’s Ghost, the play kept materialising in the oddest places, refusing to turn up its toes and die.
It wasn’t just Germany. English Romantics were infatuated with Shakespeare’s Prince (‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so,’ Coleridge declared), and in both Russia and France ‘Hamletism’ became a fashionable malady among a certain breed of fin-de-siècle intellectual. From there it became an unlikely source of nationalistic pride: influenced by a series of popular lithographs of Hamlet by the Romantic artist Delacroix, both Baudelaire and Mallarmé eagerly proclaimed themselves in sympathy with the Prince’s exquisitely artistic refusal to act, while the Russian Turgenev (whose fiction is littered with Shakespearian doppelgängers) asked, ‘Is not the picture of Hamlet closer and more understandable to us than to the French, let us say more – than to the English?’
Yet it was in Germany that Hamletomanie – ‘Hamlet-mania’ – became a national addiction, not simply on stage but politically too. Why, though? Why not Richard II or Antony and Cleopatra, both plays that dwelt just as insistently on the semiotics of poetic inaction?
The popularity of Werther was one reason, behind it the northern-European urges of the Sturm und Drang and Lessing’s admiring description of ‘grand, terrible and melancholic’ emotions. And it surely didn’t hurt that the Prince was, after Martin Luther, Wittenberg’s most famous temporary resident. But it seemed to me that things went deeper than that: there was something about Shakespeare’s depiction of a hero too noble for the world that surrounded him, too fine and pure for the exigencies of existence, that resonated in nineteenth-century Germany, a chaotic jumble of princely states and former empires doing its best to find itself as a nation. In 1844, Ferdinand Freiligrath had written in the famous first lines of a poem that ‘Deutschland ist Hamlet!’ (‘Germany is Hamlet!’) – like Shakespeare’s Prince, the country simply could not pull itself together. The phrase reverberated around German culture, not just in the nineteenth century but well into the twentieth.
Never mind that this is, at best, a deeply one-sided analysis of Shakespeare’s hero. What is interesting – and not often noted – is what Freiligrath goes on to say. ‘Vier Akte sahn wir spielen erst!’ the poet writes, ‘Four acts only have we seen played!’
Hab acht, Held, daß die Ähnlichkeit
Look out, O hero, that the similarities
nicht auch im fünften du bewährst!
Do not continue into the Fifth!
Wir hoffen früh, wir hoffen spät:
We hope early, we hope late:
Oh, raff dich auch, und komm zu Streiche,
O, brace yourself and come to blows,
und hilf entschlossen, weil es geht,
And help decide, because it goes
zu ihrem Recht der flehnden Leiche!
To the rights of the imploring corpse [of Old Hamlet]!
Mach den Moment zunutze dir!
Make the moment of use to you!
Noch ist es Zeit …
Now is the time …
In some ways, this assertive, devil-may-care Hamlet is closer to the action hero of the English Comedians than to the pallid victim so beloved of Coleridge or Mallarmé. At least this Prince is being called upon to do something.
That said, the image of a tender, more feminised Hamlet remained resonant in Germany. One of the interpretations of the play I was keen to
investigate was the silent-film version by Sven Gade, produced in 1921 in Berlin. Long relegated to the sidelines of Shakespearian cinematic history, in Britain it was the stuff of specialist screenings. I’d finally turned up a DVD copy on German eBay. Huddled in bed in the chilly attic room at my guesthouse in Weimar, shadows leaping and flickering across the walls, I watched it.
The film’s major attraction was also its most controversial feature: Hamlet was a woman, played by the great Danish actor Asta Nielsen. In every respect Hamlet: Ein Rachedrama (‘Hamlet: A Revenge Drama’) was one of the most marvellously strange adaptations in existence.
Nielsen had founded her own production company to make the film, basing its script on material drawn from one of the earliest sources of the play, the early-medieval chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus. This she combined with a cranky book from 1881 by the American academic Edward P. Vining – dedicated, it so happened, to Horace Howard Furness – which argued that young Hamlet had been born a woman, a fact which has been hidden from the Danish court by Gertrude because of her fears about leaving the throne without a male heir. Brought up a boy, s/he roughhouses with Laertes in Wittenberg and befriends her/his princely contemporary, Fortinbras. More teasingly, s/he develops complicated feelings for Horatio (far stronger than those s/he develops for Ophelia). Her identity is only revealed on the point of death, when Horatio clutches the hero’s body and realises she is in fact a heroine. (‘Death uncovers your tragic secret!’)
Filmed in modishly expressionist black-and-white, the film was above all a showcase for Nielsen’s acting, underlining her wistful sense of tragedy as well as her mercurial comic timing. This was one of the funniest Hamlets ever committed to film. Ophelia was dispatched with one sardonically elevated, pencil-thin eyebrow (‘Oh, her,’ it seemed to say), Polonius had his beard tugged mercilessly, and during the mad scenes Nielsen loped around, rubber-limbed, like a cat on tranquillisers. It was an electrifying performance, and put me in mind more than once of Der Bestrafte Brudermord. One could see why she’d inspired both Garbo and Katharine Hepburn.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 8