Worlds Elsewhere (13 page)

‘Vorsprung durch Kunst!
Ha, ha.' He leaned back in his chair, patting his stomach. ‘
Ja,
there is something about that. I really think so!'

One major obstacle barred the path of the Gesellschaft's founders: until that point, there had not been an agreed translation of the all-important Shakespearian text. Borck's severe alexandrines, Christoph Martin Wieland's cumbrous prose versions, Goethe and Schiller's invasive rewritings: the history of adapting Shakespeare's work in Germany had been chequered, to say the least. An authorised text of the complete works in modern German was a major priority. But how was this to be achieved?

Some recommended commissioning a fresh translation, but to do so would be time-consuming and expensive – and the society was humiliatingly short of money (so much so that it failed to produce a
Jahrbuch
in its second year). Others suggested patching up an old version and issuing it under the aegis of the DSG. Even if the issue were resolved, what sort of translation should this be? Aimed at academics and students, or actors? With expansive critical apparatus, befitting a noble literary institution, or something cheap and portable enough to make Shakespeare a household name in Germany? The businesslike Oechelhäuser insisted it should be the latter. His more high-minded colleagues disagreed.

Fortunately, an answer was at hand – and like so much in German culture, its origins lay in the Romantic period. In the generation
immediately following Herder and Goethe, two of the brightest stars in the critical firmament were August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853). Schlegel, the son of a Hanoverian pastor who had become a professor at the University of Jena, shot to prominence in 1798 when he co-founded the periodical
Athenäum,
a home for Romantic criticism and philosophy. Tieck, a Berliner whose father was a ropemaker, made his name as a popular playwright and novelist at almost exactly the same time.

As might be expected given their age, Shakespeare was a preoccupation for both. Tieck, a man of the theatre whose later experiments in Elizabethan staging would lay groundwork for reconstructions of the Globe and Blackfriars, became fascinated with questions of translation, publishing in 1799 a version of
The Tempest.
Schlegel, schooled in aesthetics and philology, fostered more academic interests, finely represented in his lectures
Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur
(‘On Dramatic Art and Literature', 1808–11), which had foreshadowed Coleridge. They argued forcefully – and controversially – that Shakespeare was not an untutored genius but a supreme craftsman.

In 1798, after reading
Wilhelm Meister,
Schlegel set his sights on a project that had never yet been attempted in Germany: the systematic verse translation of Shakespeare's complete plays. His intention, Schlegel wrote, was to ‘reproduce [the text] faithfully and at the same time poetically, following step by step the literal meaning and yet catching at least a part of the innumerable, indescribable beauties which do not lie in the letters but hang about it like a ghostly bloom'. Tieck acted as intermittent advisor.

For the next three years Schlegel slogged away, translating sixteen plays, mainly comedies and histories, outdoing previous efforts (so much so that rival translators at first avoided working on the same texts) and helping initiate a minor Shakespeare boom. But despite the unstinting support and assistance of his wife, Caroline, he began to lose both patience and steam. After 1801, he completed only one more script,
Richard III
(1810).
Hamlet
was complete, naturally, but Schlegel left twenty plays untranslated, among them some of the heftiest works in the canon:
King Lear, Othello, Macbeth.

Wary of being overtaken by other translations then in progress – at least three – Schlegel's publisher, Georg Reimer, attempted to persuade his disillusioned author back to the grindstone, but without
success. In desperation, he turned to Tieck. The arrangement proved a nightmare. Schlegel, despite being cussedly unwilling to do anything more, was scornful of attempts to tamper with his artistry, while Tieck, an incorrigible over-promiser, focused on the project only fitfully, subcontracting much of the work to his talented daughter Dorothea and a team of other translators.

Nonetheless – largely because of Reimer's doggedness – the work was eventually completed, and in 1833 the nine-volume
Shakespeare's Dramatische Werke
was finally complete. Schlegel-Tieck was rapidly acclaimed as the greatest translation of its time, a cult in its own right. (The poet Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote that ‘it has permeated the marrow and blood of the German people'; one critic described it as being ‘as important as Luther's translation of the Bible'). For all that her name appeared nowhere in the printed text, Dorothea's translations were particularly praised, notably her
Macbeth.

Aware of the valuable links with Goethe and the Romantics and eager to bolster their own Shakespeare cult, the DSG concluded that only one version should have their blessing – Schlegel-Tieck. After a degree of scholarly wrangling, they published an updated version (1867–71), following it in 1891 with the book Oechelhäuser had wanted all along: a cheap single-volume edition. Anointed as the long-awaited urtext, it sold more copies than every other German translation combined.

I had one final appointment before I left Weimar. Given the role the Weimar court theatre had played in the revival of Shakespeare in Germany – not just in Goethe and Schiller's day but much later, with a ground-breaking cycle of the history plays in 1864 – I felt I should at least get past the statue of the two
Dioskuren
and nose around the place itself.

The diary was against me: a new
The Merchant of Venice
wasn't opening for another month, and the theatre was dark every night I was in Weimar save my last. But there was a production of Mozart's
Die Zauberflöte
on 24 April; not a new staging, but well-received. The opera had been performed here in 1794, three years after its premiere in Vienna, and was now considered a local classic. Goethe had laboured on a sequel; like so much else, it had remained incomplete. It was
enough of a connection, and anyway I reasoned that I had earned a restorative evening of Mozart. I booked a ticket.

For all that the theatre had been rebuilt almost entirely since Goethe and Schiller's day, when Susann, the press officer, offered to show me the building, I said yes. As a writer on theatre with a strong aversion ever to get involved in making it, I took a tourist's naive pleasure in sneaking backstage: the clutter of discarded props; the way the stage itself, a piece of glistening doll's-house perfection when seen front of house, was in fact a sordid tangle of duct tape and trailing wires and signs screaming
ACHTUNG!
in exciting colours.

Leaning against the wall of the paint shop there was a huge picture of Goethe, several metres high, a blown-up reproduction of the famous portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler. Completed in 1828, it depicts the poet near the end of his life, in a sleek black silk jacket and expensively embroidered waistcoat: the very model of the artist-courtier in well-fed prosperity. But Goethe's dark eyes – sidelong, distracted, even plaintive – told a different story, more haunted and ambivalent: a man of frustrated ideas and ambitions, tortured by doubts that any of it had been worthwhile.

Goethe's distinctly Hamletish approach to Shakespeare lasted long beyond the publication of the last part of
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
in 1796. He'd stayed on at the court theatre after Schiller's death, but the fizz had gone out of it: yet another tiresome administrative appointment that kept him from his writing.

Although his own dramas drifted away from Shakespearian models – notably
Faust,
the first part of which was drafted by 1806 – Goethe did try every so often to produce the plays. In 1811, he put on a long-desired staging of
Romeo and Juliet,
which though based on Schlegel's translation had lost half of the text and acquired 488 lines of Goethe's own. Goethe regarded it as a mixed success: ‘I have probably never looked more deeply into Shakespeare's talent, but he, like all ultimate things, remains after all unfathomable.' In 1817, shaken by the death of his wife Christiane the year before and sick of backstage bickering – which culminated in Karl August pressuring him to stage a French melodrama with a poodle in a leading role – he resigned.

An essay he began work on during his last years at the theatre,
‘Shakespeare und kein Ende!'
(‘No End to Shakespeare!'), written over a three-year period from 1813 to 1816, rehearsed these agonised questions
once again. Earlier in the day I had spent a few hours in the Goethe-Schiller Archive, a statuesque classical building high on the brow of a hill overlooking Weimar. One of the curators had shown me a scribal copy of the essay: the size of a small pamphlet, in tidy copperplate that gave little hint of its protracted gestation.

Its paradoxes were typically late-Goethean. It argued that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a man of the theatre, but also that the plays were best read aloud rather than acted; he was a modern poet but also ‘naive' as per Schiller's scheme, and simultaneously – somehow – both. Niggling away was the question of whether it was even possible to stage his plays:

Was this ambivalence a hard-won lesson from the experience of staging
Macbeth
and
Romeo and Juliet,
or a demonstration that Goethe was congenitally unsuited to the job of theatre director? It was hard to say.

Wilhelm Meister refused to be banished. In 1821 Goethe published what would be his last major work,
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre
(‘Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years'), which he would continue tinkering with until a few years before his death in 1832. An experimental, proto-Joycean novel built up from many years of jottings, it sends Wilhelm – who has long since abandoned the theatre – on a cascade of adventures featuring magic boxes and hidden caves through territory that more closely resembles the world of medieval quests or magical realism than any realistic European setting.

Critics are still divided as to whether
Wanderjahre
is in a finished state, or even whether it counts as a novel at all. One bitter little line caught my eye, right at the end of the book. It comes amid a collection of aphorisms supposedly composed by Makarie, a mystic seer-like figure whom Wilhelm encounters on his wanderings:

From the great illuminator of
‘Zum Shakespeares Tag'
who had given the young writer the ‘gift of sight' to an
ignis fatuus
or false fire … if these were Goethe's own sentiments too, even a hint of them, it was a bleak conclusion.

Even so, Shakespeare stayed in Goethe's thoughts to the end. According to his first biographer Johann Peter Eckermann, among the poet's final words was a paean to the writer who had meant so much to him over fifty years: ‘Just let someone try, with human desire and human strength, to produce something that one could set alongside the creations that bear the name of Mozart, Raphael or Shakespeare.'

A few days later in March 1832, as Goethe lay dying, language failing him, it was said he had tried to write words in the air. Only one letter was discernible: ‘W'. I had a strong hunch it stood for Wilhelm.

Die Zauberflöte
didn't entirely live up to the excitements of being backstage: saying the production, over a decade old, was past its sell-by date was putting it kindly. But for once it wasn't having Shakespeare on the brain that made me glimpse him in the theatre that night. The wrangles between the Queen of the Night and the magician Sarastro in
Die Zauberflöte
had obvious echoes of Oberon and Titania, but all the intimate resemblances were to
The Tempest,
itself a free extemporisation on themes of magic, illusion, power, love.

Much has been made of the bizarreness of the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder's symbolism-heavy plot, with its love quest, imprisonments, trials of virtue and abstinence – including the well-supported theory that it was based on his and the composer's interest in Freemasonry. Watching it, I wondered if the story made more sense if one saw it through a Shakespearian lens. The virtuous young lovers Tamino and Pamina were plausible stand-ins for Ferdinand and Miranda; Sarastro was a double for Prospero; Monostatos, the ‘blackamoor' and chief of Sarastro's team of slaves, for Caliban.

None of these similarities is surprising, if one accepts the theory that
Zauberflöte
was partly inspired by
The Enchanted Island,
John Dryden and William Davenant's 1667 adaptation of
The Tempest.
And there
are more alluring connections too. According to a single account, a dramatist called Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter had made a ‘marvellous free adaptation' of Shakespeare's
The Tempest
under the title
Die Zauberinsel
(‘The Enchanted Island') and sent it to Mozart soon after
Zauberflöte
's premiere in October 1791. Desperate for money and by then gravely ill, Mozart had agreed to write the music (having, confusingly, already contributed to yet another opera by Schikaneder with a remarkably similar title). Less than three months later, however, he would be dead, the work incomplete.