On 20 September 1776, a troupe under the direction of Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, the most acclaimed actor of his day, gave a performance at the Hamburg National Theatre that changed the course of dramatic history. The reports were frenzied: one paper wrote that ‘the numerous audience in the playhouse was so attentive, so transported, that it seemed as if there were only one person present, only one pair of eyes, only one pair of hands, because the stillness was so universal, the silence so numbed’.
Such was the demand that Schröder’s company acted the same show again and again; the following year they gave it an unprecedented fifteen times, and in Vienna a year later it was performed on another seventy-five occasions. Other troupes, big and small, were soon staging the play. According to one dramaturg, ‘royal cities and tiny market towns, splendid halls and wooden booths echo with [the hero’s] name, and men and boys, virtuosi and reading teachers, First Heroes and letter-carriers, struggle over him and flaunt their immortality’. That hero was a prince; the play, yet again, was a version of Hamlet.
I had an idea that one reason for this abrupt flare of interest was Goethe. Two years earlier, back in Frankfurt and by now determined to be a writer, he had published a book that had been even more of a sensation than Schröder’s production. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’), printed in 1774, relates the sensational story of a young artist who has fallen helplessly in love with a woman already committed to someone else. Told in the form of letters shared between Werther and a confidant, knowingly named ‘Wilhelm’, it titillates readers with confession after confession, permitting them to eavesdrop on a world of forbidden passion. Building from Werther’s exuberance as he first begins to fall for Lotte, continuing through desperation as he realises the relationship is impossible, the story culminates in suicide, which Werther enacts via the poetic justice of the pistols owned by his lover’s fiancé. The book’s last line is stark: ‘No priest attended.’
Europe went wild for Werther. The 1774 edition passed through thirty reprints before the century was out and was translated into English, French and Italian. Young men began to wear clothes like him; women dabbed on ‘Eau de Werther’. Napoleon claimed it was a favourite. There was moral panic when a young German woman who drowned herself was found to have a copy in her pocket. The city of Leipzig banned the book entirely. It was partly because of its notoriety that Goethe had been invited by Karl August to Weimar.
Although Werther bore striking resemblances to Goethe’s own triangular romance with a woman called Lotte Buff – which didn’t hurt sales when those facts were revealed – I was more struck by its relationship to the writer he had exalted in ‘Zum Shakespeares Tag’. In October 1771, the very month he had delivered the speech, he had set to work on his first major play, Götz von Berlichingen. A rumbustious account in no fewer than fifty-six scenes of the medieval knight and mercenary Gottfried of Berlichingen (famous for having had his hand shot away and replaced by an iron fist), it was a crazily ambitious undertaking. It was also heavily touched by Shakespeare’s history plays, which Goethe had perhaps only just read. When Herder saw the manuscript, he exclaimed, ‘Shakespeare has quite ruined you.’
Werther, too, was heavily in Shakespeare’s debt – but here the resemblance was to one play alone, the text that had so captivated Schröder and German audiences: Hamlet.
Young Werther was young Hamlet by another name. Over-intelligent, cripplingly sensitive, tragically ill-equipped to face the realities of the world, he drifts through his luckless love affair without ever managing to take hold of it. He, too, lacks a father; contemplating death, he describes the funeral of a female ‘friend’ uncannily like the burial of Ophelia.
For sure, there were differences: it is hard to imagine even Shakespeare’s Prince botching his death as Werther did, shooting himself above the right eye before haemorrhaging slowly. (Being sliced by an envenomed rapier looks positively wholesome by comparison.) But everywhere there are hints of Goethe’s source: in Werther’s frenzied soul-searching, his emotional paralysis, his restless drift towards insanity. Early in the book, one of his letters to Wilhelm reads:
When I consider how narrowly the active and enquiring powers of a human being are confined; when I see that all effective effort has as its end the satisfaction of our needs which themselves have no purpose except to lengthen the duration of our poor existence, and that any contentment on one point or another of our enquiries consists only in a sort of dreaming resignation as we paint the walls within which we sit out our imprisonment … All that, Wilhelm, renders me speechless. I go back into myself and find a whole world.
The lines read like an extrapolated version of Hamlet’s ‘Denmark’s a prison’ (‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’), bolted on to a speech from later in the same scene, ‘this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory’. A marvelling statement that follows in Shakespeare’s text – ‘What a piece of work is a man’ – returns to haunt Werther’s final letter: ‘Who is this thing, the vaunted demigod, a man?’
After Werther’s publication and his move to Weimar, Goethe lived in a cottage given to him by the ever-munificent Karl August, but six years later he moved to much grander accommodation on Am Frauenplan here in Weimar, the house where – barring a journey to Italy from 1786 to 1788 and a stint observing the Battle of Valmy – he would remain until his death in 1832.
Dutifully touristic, the morning after I arrived I toured the Goethehaus, aiming my cameraphone at the plank on the threshold painted with the word ‘Salve’ (‘welcome’) and staying right to the end of an alarmingly thorough 3D video presentation about its architecture. Despite its considerable size – more stately home than Haus, I thought – the place was harried by school groups and coach parties. At least the thirteen-year-olds sniggering next to the poet’s collection of nude classical statuary were having fun; everyone else, drifting around with audio guides clamped to their skulls, looked as if they were waiting on hold. The smell of lilies and furniture polish hung heavy in the air.
Writers’ houses have always struck me as the least visitable of visitor attractions, the act of writing so private and undramatic – the creaking of pen across paper, the shuffle of pages – that it leaves almost no imprint on physical space. The Goethehaus, magnificent though it was, felt no different. It was the morbidly tasteful presentation of a life rather than anything more tangible.
After an hour I gave up the house as a poor piece of detective work and retreated with my books to a glowering, wood-lined bar with tobacco-stained walls, filled prettily with beery bric-a-brac.
T. S. Eliot’s pursed-lip view, aired in 1921, was that Goethe’s borrowings from Hamlet were a form of Freudian projection – a way of making up for the deficiency in the poet’s own creative powers. (Coleridge came in for the same criticism, that he had simply ‘made of Hamlet a Coleridge’.)
I wondered if it were fairer to say that, having encountered Shakespeare at a formative age, Goethe had spent the rest of his life trying to escape his clutches and never quite succeeding. Soon after arriving in Weimar, he had attempted to write a follow-up to Henry IV Part II that reversed Shakespeare’s cold-blooded decision to banish Falstaff at the end of the play, conjuring prison scenes in which Sir John, Bardolph and Poins lament their plight but live in hope that somehow their fate will be reversed. The script was not to be: Goethe never got further than sketches.
He was more successful with Egmont, on which he began working at around the same time. A historical saga on the Dutch struggle for independence against Spanish tyranny, it began as a prequel to Julius Caesar. There were numerous mentions made of the ‘Cäsar’ project in letters and notes, but at some point Goethe seems to have destroyed the material. The crowd scenes that interspersed the action – obvious echoes of the holidaying, restive cobblers and carpenters in Julius Caesar’s opening scenes – were all that remained.
But these early feints with Shakes
peare were as nothing to the creative task that occupied Goethe for over twenty years, from the end of the 1770s until late middle age: the composition of the epic, multi-part project that became known as Wilhelm Meister. It was while writing Egmont that Goethe had first conceived the idea of writing about a young man attempting to find his creative path. In 1777 he began a story he called Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung (‘Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission’).
Its subject was unorthodox, even by the standards of that nascent, wet-behind-the-ears form known as the novel. Wilhelm Meister, the protagonist, a child when we first meet him, is obsessed by the idea of going on stage. After falling in with a troupe of actors, he becomes involved with a married actress (another doomed romance), all the while attempting to write his own scripts. But when an older man called Jarno introduces him to the work of Shakespeare, Wilhelm is seized by an epiphany. After reading Hamlet, he becomes ever more convinced that his purpose in life is to stage the perfect production of that very play.
Goethe had trouble with Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung almost from the off, and only got six books into the projected twelve before abandoning it mid-flow. His ducal responsibilities in Weimar had begun to wear him down, along with an ill-starred relationship a little too close to the fiction he was writing (this time with the wife of Karl August’s equerry). It would not be until 1794, seventeen years later, that he returned to the material.
The novel that eventually emerged, now under the title Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’), was recast: the young Wilhelm becomes infatuated by the world of the theatre only, crucially, to grow up and leave it behind, a decisive move that gives it the shape of a classic Bildungsroman (roughly translatable as ‘coming-of-age story’). Yet even in this revised form, published in 1795–96, the book was saturated by Shakespeare. If Werther is haunted by the spirit of Hamlet, Wilhelm Meister is a full-blown seance – a summoning-up not merely of Shakespeare’s text but of Goethe’s response all those years before in Strasbourg.
Though viewed with delicate irony from a distance of twenty-five years, the headstrong young Wilhelm was, of course, a version of Goethe himself. The gruff, worldly-wise Jarno resembled Herder, and Wilhelm’s revelatory encounter with Shakespeare was tantalisingly like the one Goethe had recorded in ‘Zum Shakespeares Tag’. Having read the plays for the first time, the astonished Wilhelm proclaims:
They seem as if they were performances of some celestial genius, descending among men … They are no fictions! You would think, while reading them, you stood before the unclosed awful Books of Fate, while the whirlwind of most impassioned life was howling through the leaves, and tossing them fiercely to and fro. The strength and tenderness, the power and peacefulness of this man have so astonished and transported me, that I long vehemently for the time when I shall have it in my power to read further.
Books of Fate, a howling wind: the lines were all but stolen from Herder’s ‘Shakespeare’ and Goethe’s own ‘Zum Shakespeares Tag’.
Wilhelm Meister was the only novel I’d come across that attempted to incorporate live literary criticism into the action, which led to some dubiously undramatic passages (not aided by Thomas Carlyle’s puddingy English translation). But there were also moments of brilliance. In Book 4 Wilhelm embarks on an impassioned debate with the actor-manager Serlo (loosely based on the real-life Friedrich Ludwig Schröder) about how Prince Hamlet should properly be played. ‘To me it is clear,’ Wilhelm declares in words that would ring through German literature:
that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed. There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered.
This most romantic interpretation of Hamlet – the unfit soul, the oak sapling straining against the sides of the vessel that contains it – occupies a good portion of the centre of the book.
As I read on in the café that day, Wilhelm Meister struck me as an ungainly hybrid: simultaneously a novelistic reworking and updating of Hamlet, a critical commentary, a treatise on the ethics of theatrical adaptation, and an autobiographical account of what it feels like to encounter, then stage, a writer you revere. It was also, perhaps, a kind of exorcism; an attempt to conjure up, and overmatch, the great ghost of Shakespeare.
As the images of the famous monument outside the Nationaltheater plastered across town were forever reminding me, Goethe was only half the story. To appreciate the explosive impact of Shakespeare on German Romantic culture – and his role in forming what became German national drama – one also needed to factor in the role of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
Born in 1759, the only son of an overbearing military doctor, Schiller was dominated (revealingly, one feels) in his early life by frustrated struggles with authority. Having abandoned a childhood ambition to become a priest, he had been packed off to military college by his father’s equally overbearing patron, Duke Karl Eugen, then instructed to study his father’s own subject, medicine. The young Schiller began to read voraciously: first Rousseau and Kant, then avant-garde Sturm und Drang writers such as Goethe, Lenz, Klinger and Klopstock. One day, his philosophy tutor introduced him to Othello. Despite his hazy English, Schiller was hooked, and filled his medical thesis with lines from Shakespeare. By the time he had taken a job in Stuttgart as a regimental medic in 1780, he had determined what he wanted to be: a playwright.
His debut, Die Räuber (‘The Robbers’) – written at the age of twenty-one while he was ostensibly studying for his finals – made Schiller an overnight sensation. The histrionic story of two sons, the heroic Karl and the calculating Franz, and Franz’s attempts to seize his brother’s inheritance against the wishes of their father, it could have been purpose-designed for the turbulent new mood then sweeping Germany – something astutely realised by the artistic director of the Mannheim theatre, who put it on as soon as he read it. At its premiere in January 1782, according to one eyewitness, the theatre ‘resembled a madhouse: rolling eyes, clenched fists, stamping feet, hoarse screams’.
The echoes of the audience reaction to Schröder’s performance of Hamlet six years before are hardly surprising – even more obviously than Goethe, Schiller was grappling with Shakespeare. Die Räuber’s main theme, brotherly conflict, reprises an abiding Shakespearian motif, drawing from As You Like It (where the virtuous Orlando is, like Karl, forced to flee society and join a band of outlaws) and perhaps The Tempest, with dashes of Robin Hood, Cain and Abel and Christ’s parable of the Prodigal Son lobbed in for good measure.
Some critics detected echoes of King Lear’s machiavellian Edmund, or Richard III, in the character of Franz (who goes mad, thinking he is being pursued by devils), but for me the clearest reverberation came in the scene where Karl, alone in the forest, agonises about his position and his conscience:
Who would be my surety? – All is so dark – labyrinths of confusion – no way out – no star to guide – if it were over with this last-drawn breath, over like a shallow puppet-play – But why this burning hunger for happiness? Why this ideal of unattained perfection? This looking to another world for what we have failed to achieve in this – when one miserable touch of this miserable object [holding his pistol to his forehead] will make a wise man no better than a fool – a brave man no better than a coward – a noble man no better than a rogue?
‘To be, or not to be’ in a slightly different key – and with a pistol, not a bare bodkin.
In 1787 Schiller came to Weimar and met Goethe, ten years older, who took a sharp interest in this brilliant if volatile young writer. In 1790 Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld, a well-connected young woman from Weimar, but he soon began to suffer from ill-health, worsened by overwork. The rest of his mature output – a torrential flood that included seven more plays, poetry, letters, translatio
ns, essays and two novels – was produced in a headlong rush against time. Fifteen years later, aged just forty-five, Schiller would be dead.
As well as their shared creative interests and schoolboyish sense of humour, one thing that brought together the two Dioskuren (twin sons of Zeus), as this inseparable duo were nicknamed, was their love for Shakespeare. It was largely because of Schiller’s encouragement and advice that Wilhelm Meister was finished. Soon after its publication, Schiller wrote to Goethe, ‘I have noticed that the characters in Greek tragedy are more or less ideal masks and not real individuals such as I find in Shakespeare and in your plays.’ Later that year, Schiller commented that he had been working his way through the English histories: ‘It was marvellous the way [Shakespeare] could always make the most unpoetic elements yield poetry, and how nimbly he represents the unpresentable.’
In one of the treatises he composed in Weimar, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’ (‘On Simple and Sentimental Poetry’, 1795–96), Schiller attempted to distinguish between the ‘simple’ or naive poets of antiquity and ‘sentimental’ writers of modern times, alienated from nature. In the former camp he placed Homer and Shakespeare, commencing with arguments that echoed Voltaire:
When I became first acquainted with Shakespeare at a very early age, I was shocked by his coldness, the lack of feeling which allowed him to joke in the midst of the greatest pathos, to break up the heart-rending scenes in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, etc. by the introduction of a Fool, which at times stopped him where my emotions rushed on, at times bore him cold-heartedly on where the heart would gladly have paused. Misled by my acquaintance with more modern poets to look first of all in the work for the author, to encounter his heart, to reflect on his subject matter together with him, in short to look for the subject matter in the person, it was unbearable to me that here the poet could nowhere be grasped, was nowhere answerable to me.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 7
