Worlds Elsewhere (11 page)

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 because 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!'

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.