Worlds Elsewhere (8 page)

THERE IS ONE WHOLLY STARTLING FACT
about these early versions of Shakespeare in mainland Europe: Shakespeare's name remained unknown. The scripts were altered and adapted in any number of ways, but the identity of the man who had penned them was regarded as blithely inconsequential. In 1682, Daniel Georg Morhof, a renowned polymath, made a brief reference to Shakespeare in an encyclopedia but confessed, ‘I have read nothing,' apparently innocent of the knowledge that versions of the plays were being performed in the German states up to the 1660s, if not later.

The connection would not be made until the 1740s. Curiously, information about Britain's most famous playwright travelled via France and – more curiously still – owed a great deal to the leading Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. Exiled to London in 1726 for daring to quarrel with a nobleman, Voltaire put his two-year banishment to good use, giving himself a crash course in the English language, meeting leading authors such as Pope, Congreve and Swift, and ingratiating himself at court. He also whiled away long hours at the theatre. One of the many playwrights he discovered there was Shakespeare.

It was a fateful encounter. On the one hand, Voltaire was wonderstruck by what he saw on stage, so at odds with rule-bound French drama; on the other, he was appalled. Despite admiring Shakespeare's ‘sublime strokes', the Frenchman seems otherwise to have regarded the English playwright with outright horror. More than once, he called Shakespeare ‘savage', and lambasted him for ignoring the ‘unities' of classical tragedy then de rigueur in France – principles, derived from Aristotle's
Poetics,
which demand that a piece of drama should take place in a single span of action, in a single place, over a single day.

Samuel Johnson's famous appraisal, that Shakespeare's plays exhibited ‘the real state of sublunary nature … in which, at the same time, the reveller is hastening to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend', was for neoclassicists such as Voltaire a demonstration of everything that was wrong with him: tragedy and comedy and everything else clotted together in one undigested, morally questionable lump. In a dissertation on tragedy, Voltaire had particularly stern words for
Hamlet,
a ‘rude and barbarous piece':

‘One might suppose such a work,' Voltaire added testily, ‘to be the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage.' With a précis like that, it is hard to disagree.

Voltaire spent the next few years penning a series of epic imitations that gave Shakespeare's rough edges a deep French polish and made him acceptable to the European Enlightenment.
Zaïre
(1732, a version of
Hamlet
),
Le Mort de César
(1743) and
Sémiramis
(1748, based on
Othello
) were composed in alexandrines, the taut, inelastic twelve-syllable verse form favoured by Racine and Corneille, and noteworthy for the decorous sobriety of their action.

In Britain, fed by the old enmity with France, the position taken by Voltaire and fellow neoclassicists was caricatured as the last word in Continental foppery. But the German intelligentsia took careful note. Voltaire's criticisms were reproduced almost point for point by the aesthetician Johann Christoph Gottsched, who in the 1720s began to call for a revival of German literature along elegant French lines.

Accordingly, when a German version of a whole play by Shakespeare finally appeared – this time with Shakespeare's name attached – it was in zealously politened and over-restored form. In 1741, the Prussian diplomat Caspar Wilhelm von Borck published a translation of
Julius Caesar,
perhaps the coolest and most classical Shakespearian tragedy of all, making sure to do so – once again – in alexandrines.

Yet, though unfelt by Voltaire, Gottsched or Borck, an earthquake was on its way. The first tremors arrived in the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, twenty-nine years younger than Gottsched and from a different intellectual world. In one of a series of essays on literature written in 1759, Lessing insisted that Germany should abandon any notion of imitating France; instead it must look both inwards and northwards, towards its own
Volksdrama,
and to England, whose ‘grand, terrible and melancholic' emotions were akin to those of the Germanic soul. Later in the decade, in an influential collection of writings on modern theatre, 1767–69's
Hamburgische Dramaturgie
(‘Hamburg Dramaturgy'), Lessing went further. Inspired by an adaptation of
Richard III
he had seen, he used Shakespeare to attack everything that was wrong with French drama, Voltaire included: too moralising, too stoical, too prissy, too reluctant to examine the dark things inside all of us.

Intoxicated by the philosophy of Lessing's contemporaries Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann, who urged the primacy of experience and emotion, the young generation growing up in the 1760s and 1770s yearned for something more untamed and Promethean – more
German.
In 1776, the young playwright Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger wrote a play initially called
Der Wirrwarr
(‘Confusion'), about
the gripping events of the American Revolution, unfolding before his eyes. Following the recommendation of a friend, Maximilian came up with an alternative title, tighter and more dramatic:
Sturm und Drang,
‘storm and stress'. The movement at last had a name.

On the Deutsche Bahn express train heading towards Weimar, 500 miles south-west of Gdańsk, it wasn't just the countryside that was flying past rapidly. I had graduated to the German Romantics. Even in the form of a close-printed Penguin anthology, they were a white-knuckle ride.

My first calling point was Johann Gottfried Herder, thinker and critic, whose explorations into the philosophy of language and history made him one of the most influential figures of the
Sturm und Drang.
Herder's essay ‘Shakespeare', published in 1773, places the playwright centre stage, as if in rebuke to the century and a half in which Herder's countrymen had not even bothered to find out his name:

In his talk of craggy hilltops and roaring seas Herder was paraphrasing the English poet Mark Akenside, but this could equally have been Shakespeare as painted by the younger Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich – solitary, unequalled, gazing into untold and possibly undreamed-of distances.

Renouncing the ‘masses who explain him, apologise for him, condemn him', Herder declared that his task was to ‘make [Shakespeare] alive for us in Germany'. This he proceeded to do by claiming him as a ‘northern dramatist', an ‘interpreter of Nature', who drew from the landscape all around him. Ideas about Shakespeare as a child of nature had been circulating in England at least since Milton, warbling native woodnotes wild and the rest; but Herder contrived to give the image a bracing new Alpine tang. He made the humdrum act of opening a book sound like a world-shattering event: ‘When I read him, it seems to me as if theatre, actors, scenery, all vanish! Single
leaves from the book of events, providence, the world, blowing in the storm of history.'

It wasn't hard to work out which ‘masses' Herder was turning against, nor which theatre he was trying to obliterate: that of France. Herder had only scorn for neoclassicism, laughingly condemning the ‘frivolous Frenchman who arrives in time for Shakespeare's fifth act, expecting it will provide him with the quintessence of the play's touching sentiment'. No – one did not so much watch or read Shakespeare as become consumed by him.

If Herder's feelings were fervent, they were nothing compared to the emotions coursing through his young disciples. A few years earlier, in 1770, a shiftless twenty-one-year-old law student called Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had met Herder in Strasbourg. Goethe was meant to be pursuing his studies, but instead spent much of his time mooning over the soaring Gothic architecture of Strasbourg cathedral and the spectacular landscape of the Alsace (not to mention a pastor's daughter called Friederike Brion, perhaps his first serious romantic relationship). Goethe found his way into the company of a young group of intellectuals led by Herder, and spent the long summer evenings of 1771 debating with them everything that mattered: philosophy, politics, literature, life.

Back home in Frankfurt that October, still reeling from his experiences, Goethe summoned a gathering of friends for a celebration. He had prepared a short speech. His subject wasn't Strasbourg or its cathedral, or even the brief entanglement with Friederike; it was a writer and a poet, a man he called a ‘prodigy' and ‘the greatest wanderer', someone who ‘looms so high, few eyes can reach him, and it is difficult to credit anyone could even take in the entirety of him, let alone surpass him'. That writer was Shakespeare. The day Goethe chose for his address was 14 October, the poet's name day.

Goethe's ‘
Zum Shakespeares Tag'
(‘On Shakespeare Day') has become one of the founding texts of German Bardolatry. Even in translation, it is obvious why. Where Herder called Shakespeare ‘godlike', Goethe carried the simile to its conclusion:

The simile could barely be more intense: Shakespeare is Christ, Goethe a halting Saul on the road to Damascus.

After taking a few potshots at neoclassical theatre (‘all French tragedies are parodies of themselves'), Goethe warmed to his theme, the boundlessness of Shakespeare's vision:

‘I call out: Nature! Nature!' he went on. ‘Where is there anything so natural as Shakespeare's people?'

Though Goethe had probably read snippets of Shakespeare as a child, Herder's passion filled him with new depths of awe. While the older man's essay wouldn't be published until 1773, Goethe read an early version of it, and to me the two pieces seemed like facing pages of the same book. They deployed the same arguments, rhyming phrases: Shakespeare as all-powerful creator, chronicler of humanity and history, man of destiny,
Weltseele,
‘world soul'.

It is probable that neither Herder nor Goethe had yet seen Shakespeare performed, and the poet as they imagined him was certainly beyond the constraints of any mere theatre. Their analogues were Romantic philosophy and visual art, not drama; their pictorial equivalent the quixotic pen-and-watercolour extemporisations on Shakespeare done by William Blake, or the semi-imaginary scenes from the plays painted by the German-born Henry Fuseli, done in rushes of ectoplasmic impasto, white on black.

On the cover of my Penguin anthology was a painting by the Northumbrian artist John Martin,
Macbeth, Banquo and the Three Witches,
a version of which is now in the National Gallery of Scotland. It is a tumultuous scene: a churning vortex of blood-clotted cloud and rock surrounded on all sides by beetling peaks. Just visible in the centre of the picture, buffeted and helpless, are Banquo and Macbeth, and in
front of them the Witches, cannoned from the sky by a lightning bolt. This, surely, was what Herder's disciples had been imagining on those torrid nights in Strasbourg.

There was an irony here, however: Blake and Fuseli's work wouldn't be done for decades, and Martin's painting would not be complete in its final form until 1820, nearly half a century after Herder and Goethe. It was the Germans who first made Shakespeare Romantic, not the British. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave his revolutionary lectures on literature at the Royal Institution in 1808, outlining what he described as Shakespeare's ‘organic form' (‘it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form'), they were taken as a clarion call of Romanticism. Yet remarkably similar arguments had already been made twelve years earlier by August Wilhelm Schlegel, perhaps the foremost Romantic critic in Germany.

Even if Coleridge hadn't actually been cribbing – he claimed not – it would set the tone for what happened next. When it came to the study of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, Germany led the world.