Authors: Ian Buruma
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 Hall. 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.
The aesthetic approach was typical of Herder, the man who introduced Goethe to Shakespeare. Art, in his view, grew naturally from the histories, traditions, prejudices, morals, religions, and languages of nations. He was a great gatherer of folk songs and popular tales. His goal was to find the authentic voice of the German
Volk
. The classic text about this subject,
On German Character and Art
, was published in 1773. Goethe wrote a chapter on the Strasbourg Cathedral. Herder’s contribution is one of the great documents of Shakespearomania. It begins with a wonderful image of the bard sitting on a throne of rocks with his head up in the light of heaven and the stormy seas at his feet. Down below, in those churning waters, are crowds of people, explaining, damning, worshiping, translating, excusing, and slandering his works. The great man is of course magnificently above it all, oblivious to the clamor of his critics.
Herder then explains how God’s gift of genius can flourish only in its natural locality, and how Shakespeare caught the
Geist
of his place and time. Since Elizabethan England was a place and time of fantastic diversity, Shakespeare’s
Geist
reflected this luxuriance, this wild growth of spontaneous life. Shakespeare, in Herder’s view, did not find a simple national character but a variety of social classes, ways of life, beliefs, and patterns of speech. Out of these multicolored building blocks he created his own inimitable Gothic edifice, with gargoyles and arches, bell chambers and spires, growing this way and that, as though dictated by nature alone, but encrusted with the ancient markings of history and tradition.
But if genius could flourish only in its native milieu, how could Shakespeare speak to the Germans? Here Herder had to use a broader brush. Just as the Greeks represented, instructed, and moved other Greeks, he said, Shakespeare “instructs, creates and moves the Nordic people.” He was the Nordic genius Germans had been waiting for. Such Nordic plays as
Macbeth
,
Hamlet
, and
King Lear
would inspire the German
Geist
, just as James Macpherson’s dubious compilation of ancient Scottish poems by Ossian had done.
Ossianismus
was the word given to this type of thing: it suggests misty mountain peaks, French horns, and singing peasants. Herder’s translations of Shakespeare have more than a whiff of
Ossianismus
. Shakespeare’s genius was Nordic, but it was universal too. Again Herder finds a suitably organic image: “… the barbaric, Gothic Shakespeare managed to penetrate all the strata and subsoils of the earth to arrive at the clay from which man is bred.”
But Herder was not a political thinker. Poetry, religion, and art were his main interests. Saxon sincerity was, for him, an aesthetic issue, an expression of folkish authenticity. There were others who looked at the same thing from a more political angle. The economist Adam Müller, for example. He was an Anglophile to the point of posing as a rich Englishman in Göttingen, while in fact being an impoverished Prussian. Müller saw Shakespeare’s histories as political lessons about “the decline of English feudalism.” Shakespeare’s plays showed the road from feudalism to the modern state. Shakespeare had mapped the future of Europe. (Müller later changed his mind about this.)
A more famous figure than Müller was Justus Möser. His idea of England was a typically Anglophile combination of liberalism and conservatism, with a strong racial element thrown in. He was a historian
and administrator from Osnabrück, a principality ruled by Frederick, duke of York. When George III acted as the duke’s regent, Moser was the middleman between the Osnabrück aristocracy and the English king. He made several trips to England and was impressed by the status and power of the aristocracy. Möser, and no doubt his noble clients, thought England was ideal: a land of aristocratic, racially inherited Germanic liberties, grown, like sturdy oaks, from ancient soil. England had an “organic” social order, where aristocratic privileges were balanced by political duties. Society was like a natural English garden, with animals darting about freely on sweeping hills and vast swards, so different from France, whose absolute monarchy was like the geometric garden of Versailles, mechanical, artificial, tyrannical, an abomination of nature. The garden imagery is telling. Möser, too, took an aesthetic view of politics. And he was of course a worshiper of Shakespeare, the Nordic genius.
*
But Möser’s Anglomania was more than a desire to mimic the British ideal. His idea, like Herder’s, was to create a German nation, true to its racial roots. Since art and presentation were crucial, Germany would need its own national theater. “Everything,” Möser said in 1774, “that is staged over here is still provincial. Neither Vienna, nor Berlin, nor Leipzig has raised its tone to something truly national.” When Goethe and Schiller both settled in Weimar in the 1770s, the creation of a national theater was one of their chief aims.
Goethe expressed this ambition in his Wilhelm Meister novels. An actress named Aurelie tells Wilhelm how she sees the theater audience as the nation. What, after all, is the public but a mass of people with a variety of interests? It is the task of the theater to give them a common goal. Then you might have a nation, instead of a collection of states.
By the time he came to Weimar, Goethe’s novel
Werther
, about a young man pining for his own death, had made him famous all over Europe. Werther’s English look—blue coat, yellow waistcoat, top boots—was adopted by pale young men everywhere.
Werther
was written very much in the yearning, straining, romantic English mode that
had infected Continental sensibilities—a variation of
Ossianismus
, really. Werther was indeed a keen reader of Ossian’s poems. While working on the book, Goethe had tried to seduce Herder’s wife by sitting her down in the garden and singing her own husband’s translation of Shakespeare’s “Under the Greenwood Tree.” He was also given to singing songs about melancholy ruins and dressing up à la Werther. “Wertherism” made suicide fashionable. But Goethe himself was shocked to hear of a young German woman who had drowned herself while clutching a copy of his book.
Goethe’s patron in Weimar, Karl August, the duke of Weimar, ordered his friends to adopt the Werther look. But that was the only aspect of Wertherism to find its way to Weimar. For it was a hearty court to which Goethe had attached himself as an administrator: the duke’s pleasures were hunting and drinking, practical jokes, and picking up local girls. Goethe conformed as always and took part in the feasting with gusto. For serious conversation about art, science, and philosophy, he turned to Charlotte von Stein, wife of Baron von Stein, master of the horse. The baron, so far as we know, preferred the company of horses to that of his wife, but Goethe was deeply in love. Even though the baroness never allowed her relations with Goethe to be anything but platonic, she was for eleven years the source of his greatest happiness, even as “William” (Shakespeare) remained the “brightest star in Heaven.”
Life with the duke must have been exhausting: every night another party, every day another prank. On occasion, Goethe slept off the effects of nocturnal partying in the duke’s bedroom. He was wild, but there were limits to his wildness. Indeed, self-control was one of his deepest preoccupations. His goal, socially, aesthetically, psychologically, was to master himself, to find the right balance, to harmonize his life. As with his hero, Wilhelm Meister, this was linked to the other aim, of building a national theater. In both cases, Goethe turned more and more to the classical ideal, which had always attracted him, despite his intense Gothic interlude: Germany would be the new Greece, and Goethe and Schiller its main tragedians. Harmony in life would be matched by a harmonious classical theater.
With such thoughts in mind he set off on his Italian journey in 1786. He admired Palladio’s theater in Vicenza. Venice bored him. He spent only three hours in Florence. He loved Rome, but he adored Naples,
where he saw Lady Hamilton rehearsing her Greek postures, and also Pompeii, which prompted his remark that “many calamities have happened to mankind, but few have given so much pleasure to posterity.” Goethe’s taste was now so thoroughly classical that he dismissed the cathedral in Milan as a Gothic gewgaw. And so, back in Weimar, he classicized Shakespeare too. From a liberating Elizabethan, Shakespeare would be turned into a Weimar Greek.
The result was a complete reversal of what had attracted Goethe to Shakespeare in the beginning. The original idea of England, as an exuberant marketplace, a bubbling source of irrepressible truth and freedom, had faded behind the Greco-Roman ideal. “First beauty, then the truth” was Goethe’s motto now. To ennoble Shakespeare, to make him conform to a classical ideal, Goethe drilled his actors and actresses as though they were puppets or dancers. The actor playing Hamlet was told precisely how to stand when declaiming “To be or not to be”: the right hand on his chin, and the left supporting his elbow, with the two middle fingers together, and the thumb and other two fingers kept apart. The witches in
Macbeth
were staged as a Greek chorus, played by beautiful young women in white robes. Minor characters, such as Fortinbras, were cut from
Hamlet
, as was the graveyard scene, which was now seen as vulgar. The ghost scenes and other peripheral scenes, he argued, should really not be shown at all.