Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson

‘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 emotionsrushed 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.
    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 thatit 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’