Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  The Geist of language is one of those foggy concepts that swirls around like dry ice on Wagnerian stage sets. Many people, especially in Germany, have been bewitched by it. The English language has had a less mystical effect on its native speakers. The English find foreigners’ efforts to speak English amusing, or exasperating. But the English language never became the object of a nativist cult. The English do not lay claim to some pure, ineffable, indefinable national spirit, embedded in the language of Shakespeare, which can be understood only by born members of the English race. Even when Shakespeare is used as a patriotic emblem, it is for the meaning of his words (“This sceptered isle …” and so forth), not to worship the ghost in the language itself. Perhaps this is because the English-speaking people had already spread across the world in the age of nationalism. Or perhaps it is because the British had a state, when Germans had only a language.

  Nativists believe that you can be creative only in your native tongue, because there is no other way to speak in an authentic voice. There are of course counter-examples: Beckett in French, Conrad in English. And there are those with more than one native language. When I was born, my mother didn’t speak Dutch. So my baby language was literally my mother tongue. Later we spoke an impure mixture of English and Dutch, like those European Jewish families before the war who switched languages in midsentence. But I was educated in Dutch. In my teenage years, I cultivated English, because I thought it gave me an interesting mark of distinction, like a flamboyant scarf or whatever eccentricity a teenager might affect to bolster his wobbly identity. And now I write in English. Such a background effectively cuts off all routes to linguistic nativism. The remarkable thing about the German Shakespeare cult is how the English playwright was thought by his worshipers to enhance not only the creative possibilities of German but also its authenticity. And that was rooted in a peculiarly romantic idea of England.

  THE FIRST SHAKESPEARE play to be performed in German was Julius Caesar in 1741. But Germans had been aware of Shakespeare long before that. English actors had roamed around the German countryside since the late sixteenth century, as “fiddlers, singers and jumpers.” They performed in town squares, at fairs, but also at the courts of noblemen, who enjoyed entertainments “in the English manner.” These could be elaborate spectacles. In 1611, one Johann Sigismund celebrated his becoming duke of Königsberg by inviting nineteen actors and musicians to put on The Turkish Triumph Comedy. the city of Constantinople was re-created onstage with great panache; clouds behind the paper minarets were represented by yards of blue and black canvas, fringed with white lace, hung against a dawning sky of red silk.

  In the same year, Landgrave Philip von Butzbach attended a banquet at the court of the administrator of Magdeburg, where he saw a performance of The German Comedy of the Jew of Venice in the English Style. The texts of these plays were kept simple. The actors cracked jokes, improvised in German and English, and made up for the problems of verbal communication by miming and staging odd theatrical effects: angels would fly around on ropes, their heavy golden wings flapping all the way to heaven. But some attention was paid to the words. German scribes would make notes of the improvised speeches. These would be cobbled together for new productions. In the 1650s Christoph Blümel produced a blend of Shakespeare’s Merchant and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, in which the Jew appeared both as a soldier and a doctor. The distinguishing feature of the play was the complicated use of masks and disguises.

  The most popular German version of Shakespeare in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was Titus Andronicus, its bloody violence being the main attraction. The scene where Titus slaughters the men who raped his daughter and cut out her tongue was always staged with special relish. But Hamlet was also performed, as a ghostly thriller, with bits of farce thrown in to release the tension. The graveyard scene was seen as particularly comical.

  Even though audiences loved this kind of thing, the spirit of Voltaire still dominated high German criticism. The Francophile critic Johann Christoph Gottsched despised popular German entertainments. In 1737, he had an effigy of Hanswurst, the German Punch, burned in a public square, as though this comic figure were a witch. And Shakespeare, in his view, was rubbish. For he broke all the rules of “sound reason and good theatre”—that is, French classical theater and the rules of time and place. “He [Shakespeare] just throws everything in a jumble. Now you see the ragged appearances of workmen and common riffraff, jumping around with villains and buffoons, cracking a thousand jokes; and then the greatest Roman heroes reappear, discussing the weightiest matters of state.”

  It was of course just this democratic hurly-burly, this urban world bursting with humanity, that attracted the Shakespearomanes in the first place. Shakespeare has endured all over the world, not because of his sublime poetic gift, let alone some mystical spirit in the English language, but because of the universal appeal of his drama, and his characters. Genius cannot be explained. But just as the global appeal of Hollywood movies has something to do with the nature of America, the universal appeal of Shakespeare’s plays tells us something about the society in which they were created.

  Goethe, the greatest worshiper of all, called Shakespeare’s plays “a huge, animated fair.” Their richness of life, he said, was owed to Shakespeare’s native country: “Everywhere is England—surrounded by seas, enveloped in fog and clouds, active in all parts of the world.” A. W. Schlegel wrote that trade and seafaring had made the English familiar with the customs and cultures of other nations. Indeed, he said (in the beginning of the nineteenth century), “They seemed to have been more hospitable to foreign ways than they are now.…” Shakespeare’s England was compared to the city-states of Italy: a cosmopolitan marketplace, open to all nations. A famous German scholar of Shakespearomanie argued that Shakespeare wrote in the free, worldly, cosmopolitan spirit of the Renaissance, while seventeenth-century German theater was religious, introspective, preachy, a typical product of the Reformation.

  Goethe was born at a time of rationalist high-mindedness in distinctly uncosmopolitan Frankfurt. Most respectable people thought like Gottsched, the Francophile critic. The German bourgeoisie solemnly improved itself by mimicking French high culture. Improvement, education, enlightenment was the point of French theater in Germany. And the règles were not just theatrical conventions; they were moral guides, to be strictly followed.

  Goethe’s first theatrical experience was a Christmas gift from his grandmother: a puppet theater with accompanying texts in French. Goethe loved his puppets, and to the distress of his stern father, the imperial councillor, he never stopped playing with them. His particular favorite was the story of David and Goliath, which he naturally performed in French. Aged nine he went to see Racine’s Britannicus with his mother, and this became part of his repertoire too. He would clear the heavy English furniture from his father’s library and stand there, alone or before a family audience, and declaim Racine’s classic words, sawing the air with fine theatrical gestures. His mother adored him. His father was worried about the boy.

  During the Seven Years War (1756–63), when Germany was occupied by French troops, Goethe made friends with the son of French actors, who instructed him on the rules of the theater. By the time Goethe was eleven, he knew everything about the Aristotelian unities and could cite Racine, Corneille, and Diderot by heart. His friend took him backstage, where they walked in and out of dressing rooms, listened to theatrical gossip, and spied on amorous French officers, who were given special seats onstage, when the theater was full, so they could watch their mistresses perform. His friend told him that English theater was vulgar and despicable and German theater not even worth mentioning. But Goethe was not fully convinced. With a guilty sense of pleasure, he would sneak off and see German farces performed during the Frankfurt Fair, when celebrated Hanswursts had the people in the public square slapping their thighs, while the better classes tittered from their windows above.

  In his autobiographical novel Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) Goethe describes his hero’s early love of puppet plays and his subsequent adventures in the theater. Wilhelm meets wandering acrobats, writes plays for a nobleman, and agonizes over the meaning of Hamlet. It is a romantic book because it concentrates on the spiritual education of a sensitive soul. But it is more than a romantic biography of a young artist: it could be read as a romantic story of the German nation, or more precisely, of how the German nation found its soul through the theater—the theater, that is, of Shakespeare. An earlier version of the novel, entitled Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, takes up this theme more emphatically. But before Wilhelm finds the English Master, he must be weaned from the French rules.

  Goethe loathed his native Frankfurt, which was only “good enough for hatching birds.” It was “a wretched hole. God help us out of this misery. Amen.” He left for Leipzig when he was sixteen, by which time he already knew some English. A young man from Leeds called Harry Lupton had taught Goethe and his sister, Cornelia. Lupton was a dreamy youth. Melancholy poses were much in fashion then, and Cornelia fell in love with him because he reminded her of Samuel Richardson’s heroes. Goethe did not (fall in love with him) but had learnt enough English to read Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespeare and write a love poem in English about a girl called Käthchen, who was blessed with a “good heart, not bewildered with too much reading”: “… What volupty! When trembling in my arms, the bosom of my maid my bosom warmeth …” He sent this early effusion to an older friend, called Behrisch, a rakish figure in a periwig who had an “English sense of humour.”

  Goethe was convinced that “Voltaire could do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a greater one.” But Leipzig was not a particularly Anglophile town. On the contrary, it was known as “Little Paris.” Its ton was French. The clothes were French. The smart elite spoke French. And Goethe, who always liked to conform to his surroundings—except perhaps in his detested Frankfurt—quickly took on the French airs of a Leipzig libertine.

  Only in Strasbourg, the Alsatian city, did he become a true Shakespearomane. Still only twenty-one years old, Goethe moved to Strasbourg in 1770, to study law. There, too, the smart people spoke French, but the common people spoke German, and Goethe turned against the French style. His conversion came, by his own account, when he saw the Gothic magnificence of the Strasbourg Cathedral. He would go there at all hours and stare and swoon, sometimes until the “birds greeted the dawn.” He had always liked clean, classic, harmonious forms and abhorred everything Gothic. He had been “like a people that calls the entire outside world barbaric.” But these spires, these buttresses, these arches, they were like “the trees of God.” This, he cried out, “is German architecture, to which no Italian, let alone a Frenchy, could possibly lay claim.”

  In fact the Gothic style was just as French as it was German, and Goethe was later to lose his taste for it. But like other Germans, he yearned for freedom, truth, sincerity, and, above all, a national culture. These were all in evidence, he thought, in the Gothic style, whose “sense of truth” emerged from the “strong, rugged, German soul,” so unlike “the soft doctrine of modern beauty-lisping.” And the Gothic was represented by English or Scottish literature, by Ossian, the legendary third-century poet, by Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, but above all by Shakespeare.

  Wilhelm Meister was told to study Shakespeare by a wise but sinister figure called Jarno. The thrill of Shakespeare’s words was so devastating that Wilhelm could hardly bear to read on: “His entire soul was moved.” He could not “remember a book, a person, or indeed any experience in life that had such an impact on me as these marvellous pieces … They seem to be the work of a heavenly genius … One feels as though the monstrous books of fate have been opened, and the stormwinds of full-blooded life roar through them and violently turn the pages …”

  Goethe was struck by these symptoms of Sturm und Drang when the real Jarno, Johann Gottfried Herder, told him to read Shakespeare’s works in Strasbourg. Herder, the same thinker who had criticized Voltaire for his universalism, had gone there to have his eyes treated. He didn’t personally care for the dandyish Goethe, whom he called a “sparrow,” always hopping from one enthusiasm to another. Nor did Goethe like the irascible Herder particularly. But they agreed on Edward Young’s views about natural genius (namely that genius was a law unto itself) and that Shakespeare was the greatest Gothic genius of all time.

  On October 14, 1771, or “William’s Day,” supposedly the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, Goethe wished to celebrate the great liberating genius in grand style. Herder was invited to Frankfurt to give a laudatory speech, and Goethe himself would speak as well. Herder never made it, but Goethe did. He told the audience gathered in his father’s house that Shakespeare had made him see for the first time. He, Goethe, would renounce the conventional theater forever. The unity of place was like a dungeon, the unities of action and time were like chains on the imagination: “I jumped into the free air, and suddenly felt I had hands and feet … Shakespeare, my friend, if you were with us today, I could live only with you …” Goethe’s own literary inventions were mere “soap-bubbles thrown up by idle novels,” but Shakespeare had created nature itself!

  Shakespeare’s theater had the kind of effect on Germans that rock and roll and “underground” theater would have on young people two hundred years later: artistic license was supposed to bring social and political freedom as well. Shakespeare showed the Germans not just an alternative way to write and act but an alternative way to be. The main thing was not to be French. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the greatest drama critic of his time, a man of the Enlightenment whose sharp quill was ever ready to stab away at some new manifestation of German obscurantism, believed that German culture would have been in far better shape had the Germans discovered Shakespeare before they translated Corneille and Racine. For a “Frenchified” theater, Lessing said, never really suited the Germans. The English style and way of thinking were much more to the German taste. Instead of the simplicity and sweetness of French theater, Germans liked their art to be “greater, more filigreed, more awesome, more melancholic”—in short, more like the Gothic Minster of Strasbourg. Germany needed Shakespeare, because a German genius could be ignited only by another genius, and the best kind of genius is one who “owes everything to nature, and does not repel us by the perfections of art.”

  Nature not art. Or as Goethe put it on William’s Day: “Nature! Nature! Nothing as natural as Shakespeare’s people.” The Germans did not invent this idea of Shakespeare as a natural genius. The English did. The definition of national identity is largely the project of intellectuals and artists who wish to find a role for themselves. The quest for a National Genius in the past is also an effort to promote national geniuses in the present. Voltaire didn’t promote Corneille for nothing. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, English artists and writers (Hogarth, Goldsmith, Smollett) had created the English Character: John Bull, sincere, if a little rough; spontaneous, if a little beery; and, above all, natural. And before them, Voltaire had already compared the “poetic genius of the English” to “a tufted tree, planted by the hand of nature, that throws out a thousand branches at random, and spreads unequally, but with great vigour. It dies if you attempt to force its nature …”

  The organic ideal, as though native genius grows from ancient seed, was beautifully symbolized by Garrick’s adoration of Shakespeare. Two years before Goethe’s Shakespeare celebration in Frankfurt, Garrick was asked to organize a Shakespeare jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon. As a sweetener, to get the actor in the right mood, the mayor of Stratford presented him with the Freedom of the Borough, enclosed in an elegant box of mulberry wood, cut from a tree that, the mayor assured him, “was undoubtedly planted by Shakespeare’s own hand.”

  The actual jubilee was a disaster, but not for lack of preparation: more than a hundred trees were cut down by the river to make room for a wooden rotunda called Shakespeare’s Ha
ll. The fireworks would be magnificent, the costumed ball stupendous, and Garrick’s own ode an event that would draw tears from anyone lucky enough to hear it. Boswell had ordered a Corsican pirate’s costume for the ball, and a beautiful staff with a bird on top. A man from Banbury was going to play the double bass viol at “the resurrection of Shakespeare.” Shakespeare’s native cottage was adorned with transparencies, showing the light struggling through clouds to enlighten the world.

  Alas, when the day came, it rained, then it poured, and it kept pouring. The Avon overflowed. Horses sank to their knees in the swampy meadows. The pageant of Shakespeare’s characters had to be canceled. Only Garrick stood firm, and, soaking wet and hardly audible in the tempest, he declaimed his patriotic verses, one of which went:

  “Sweetest Bard that ever sung

  Nature’s glory, Fancy’s child;

  Never, sure, did witching tongue

  Warble forth such wood-notes wild!

  Nature had a political meaning as well. More and more, especially after the French Revolution, English liberties were described by the English themselves as not only ancient but natural; not the result of skeptical philosophy, increased knowledge, and sound reasoning, as Voltaire thought, but of the nature of the English people. John Bull was an insular fellow, and proud of it, but also democratic, in a populist way. Proud of his Saxon origins and his constitutional liberties, he hated artifice, which was French, and loved spontaneous, unadorned virtue, which was English. The oppressive Gallophile aristocracy was “Norman,” the proud, free authentic people were “Saxon.” This idea of nationhood was so attractive to many young Germans in the 1760s and 1770s that they took it over. It was a double-edged thing, however, this translation from one nationalism into another, for if the promotion of John Bull was part of a struggle to expand political rights, it contained a great deal of racialism too. Shakespeare was one of its main icons, admired in Germany both for the universality of his genius and the authenticity of his roots. The trouble with this was that German enthusiasts tended to take an aesthetic view of politics, stressing feeling and racial kinship while rather neglecting the constitutional liberties.