Authors: Ian Buruma
This seems a long way from Voltaire’s coconuts. German Shakespearomania in fact began as a reaction to Voltaire’s classicist disdain for the English theater. But it ended in a kind of perversion of Voltaire’s universalism. The seed of Shakespeare’s art was planted abroad with great success, in places as far away as India and Japan, but it was only in Germany, so far as I know, that his universal appeal was ascribed to local genius, or the
Geist
of the German language. Shakespearomania was a form of Anglophilia, as much as Voltaire’s worship of English thinking, but it resulted in a nativist view of England, which was far from Voltaire’s universal model.
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.
T
HE FIRST
S
HAKESPEARE
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!