Worlds Elsewhere (10 page)

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:

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:

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:

‘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, translations, 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:

Schiller had since come to regard Shakespeare's elusiveness – that apparently invisible ‘heart' – as a measure of his greatness: ‘He had already possessed my entire admiration and had been my study for several years before I learned to love his personality.'

Marks of that love were everywhere: in
Kabale und Liebe
(1784), sometimes rendered in English as
Luise Miller,
whose virtuous and courageous heroine has more than a tinct of Imogen in
Cymbeline
and Isabella in
Measure for Measure
; and in the triple-decker
Wallenstein
(1798–99), whose panoptic view of the Thirty Years' War is modelled on the English history plays. The source text for
Don Carlos
(1787) is even clearer: written in blank verse in direct Shakespearian imitation, it tells the story of a young and idealistic heir to the Spanish throne, railroaded by his autocratic father and disastrously in love with his stepmother. Schiller wrote that it ‘has the soul of
Hamlet …
and my own pulse'.

There was one surprising thing, however. So excitable about the raw formlessness of Shakespeare on the page, Goethe and Schiller were notably bashful when it came to staging him. In 1796, Goethe invited Schiller to join him as co-director at Weimar's new court theatre, where the pair worked intimately until Schiller's death in 1805, after which Goethe continued in the role for another decade. Nervous about how audiences might react, Goethe preferred to mount operas, frothy musical comedies and light plays by popular contemporaries such as August Wilhelm Iffland and August Kotzebue, only later broadening the repertoire with his and Schiller's own work. Shakespeare barely figured: only nine of his plays in twenty-six years.

The
Macbeth
they staged in 1800 was a case in point. Goethe directed and designed (his halting, heavy-handed pen sketches are kept in the Goethe-Schiller Archive), while Schiller translated, despite his still-hesitant English. To modern eyes, their version of this darkest and most ethically shady of tragedies is barely recognisable. Anxious that
it suffered from a ‘superabundance of content' – code for a lack of classical rigour – the pair made the Witches less ethically and sexually ambiguous (they were played by male actors wearing veils and Grecian robes), while the Porter entered with a larksome
Morgenlied
(‘morning song') instead of a string of punning obscenities. Macbeth himself was likewise subjected to a moral deep-clean, presented as a
‘Heldenmüt'ger Feldherr'
(‘valorous general') whose noble nature is overwhelmed by the forces of fate. True evil was distilled into the figure of his wife (a ‘superwitch', as Goethe later described her). To further spare the audience's feelings, the cold-blooded murder of Lady Macduff and her son by Macbeth's forces, perhaps the play's most horrific moment, was cut entirely.

Goethe and Schiller were far from alone in cleaning up Shakespeare: ‘improved' versions of the plays had been common currency since the 1660s, and were particularly prevalent in England (though
Macbeth,
unusually, had been played more or less in Shakespeare's text from the mid-eighteenth century onwards). But I found it revealing that German critics, so thrilled by the galvanising power of Shakespeare in the comfort of their studies, were so timid about what effect he might have in the theatre. In what became known as Weimar classicism, one could glimpse Voltaire's shadow lingering in the wings.

NEAR THE END OF HERDER'S ESSAY
on Shakespeare is a telling section. Addressing his young disciple directly, Herder writes that he has one earnest desire, ‘that one day you will raise a monument to [Shakespeare] here in our degenerate country', concluding, ‘I envy you that dream.'

Herder's hope was obvious: that Goethe would himself become a new Shakespeare, a Teutonic one. But as the clock ticked towards the tercentenary date of 23 April 1864, many felt that Germany, for all the effect of the
Sturm und Drang
and the eagerness for staging Shakespeare's plays, still lacked an enduring ‘monument'. England had a Shakespeare Club, founded in 1824 in Stratford-upon-Avon by enthusiasts who met at a pub called the Falcon Inn. America got in on the act when a group of lawyers in Philadelphia, seeking distraction from statutes and appellate hearings, formed a literary salon in 1852; refounded ten years later as the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia,
its all-male membership still meets regularly for cocktails and gentlemanly chit-chat (and clings quaintly to the antiquated spelling of its name).